I first discovered the importance of a good headwind in the early 1990s.  Out of my office window in Costa Mesa, CA, my peripheral vision was drawn to something out of the ordinary…. airplanes landing and taking off at John Wayne airport going the wrong way!  They typically took off and landed flying into the breeze coming off of Newport Beach…. left to right in my office window. On these days, the hot Santa Ana winds were blowing in from the desert in the opposite direction so the air traffic controllers reversed all of the flight patterns to fly from right to left in my window. Some simple research taught me that for planes and their pilots, a headwind is a good thing. This was counter to my instincts as a frequent flyer… and as a leader. I had always valued a good tailwind to speed things up.  I always listened to the pilot’s preflight assessment of how a headwind or tailwind was going to impact how quickly I was going to get to my destination.  As a leader I loved those seasons when everything was clicking with the right people and resources in place and we were growing at a faster rate than anticipated.  Conversely, as a young leader, I was always frustrated by the times when unexpected organizational challenges slowed progress.  Today I am no less motivated to find this seasons of exponential advancement, but I have learned to value and leverage the power of the headwind.  One of the principles of the Paterson process is that we slow down and gather perspective in order to land on the best and most sustainable plans.

In our fast-paced culture we don’t naturally like to do that, but the reality is a headwind helps us to lift our heads (like the nose of a plane taking off into a headwind) and gain perspective that we need. Another key reality I have discovered as a leadership coach, is that people or organizations find themselves asking for this kind of help when they are experiencing resistance that feels to them like a headwind that is slowing them down.  I have learned, this is the best time to embrace the resistance and gain perspective so we can see things more clearly and later, with greater clarity, accelerate our pace.