My Sixth Sense the Night Before the Space Shuttle Challenger Tragedy

I Was Watching The NASA Space Shuttle Challenger Live on January 28th, 1986

I was living in Daytona Beach, Florida. It was January 28th, 1986, the day before my birthday, January 29th. I was in class in college at 11:30 A.M. I asked the course instructor if we could go outside and watch the Challenger takeoff live.

Daytona Beach isn't far from Cape Canaveral. You could see every shuttle launch from Daytona Beach easily. The night launches always lit the whole sky up. I was working on getting my Commercial Pilot License at the time.

The Challenger was scheduled to depart at 11:38 A.M. It was the coldest winter I had ever spent in Daytona Beach. The temperature was a bone chilling 22° F on January 28TH, 1986 at 11:30 A.M. I say bone chilling, because I lived in Florida. I did not even own sweat pants, just shorts.

So the course instructor said, "Yes, let's all go out and watch the launch." So we did. We were all standing outside jumping around trying to stay warm. The time was 11:37 A.M.

The night before the Challenger launch, me and my roommate were studying and watching the news. NASA had 10 launches of a shuttle from January 1985 until January 1986. The entire year of 1984, there were only five. We were discussing how close together the launches were to each other.

I was actually flying over Sanford, Florida at 6,000 feet when Atlantis launched on November 26TH, 1985 at 7:29 P.M., E.S.T. The launch lit up the whole state. It was incredible to see from the air at night. The launch looked like the sun was coming up from the sea.

So, I and my roommate were discussing how cold it would be for the launch on January 28th of the Challenger. I actually made the comment that if NASA keeps pushing this hard and this fast, with this many launches, there was going to be an accident. Little did I know what I foretold that night.

January 28th, 1986, 11:38 A.M. We were looking up into the tremendous blue and cold sky that morning. The Challenger came roaring up from the ground. It was breath-taking. Seventy-three seconds later, we saw the unthinkable. But we did not know exactly what we saw. We could see the solid rocket boosters separate from the shuttle and start spinning.

My class mate said, "Looks like the crew jettisoned the boosters, and are going to return to Cape Canaveral." I said, "Let's go to the University Center and find a T.V. and see what is going on." So we went and found T.V. and anxiously watched. I did not go back to class the rest of the day.

Later, the determination was made that the O ring seal on the right booster rocket had failed initiating the disaster. Little did I know on that fateful day in 1986, that a little over 11 years later, on a severely cold day (8°F) in March 1997 while flying over Tennessee, my right O ring (on the right brake) would fail while landing the aircraft I was flying, resulting in a very near fatal accident.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families, friends, and all the persons associated with the Challenger, 26 years and 20 days ago. I think about the crew and families often to this day.

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." - Author Unknown.

Original article

What Guides You? These Will Help

Everything in life is a choice.

How do you make your choices? What are they based on?

When we are clear about what is most important to us, we can make choices that are aligned with what we want in our lives. Guiding principles help keep us focused throughout the year and give us a foundation to determine the choices we make every day. It is through those daily choices that we build our lives.

Here's a quick visualization exercise you can try to help you create your guiding principles. Journal about the following:

Imagine yourself one year into the future reading from your journal and reflecting back on how you lived your life. As you are reading your journal, you noticed that everything in your personal and professional lives went exactly as you would have liked. You lived by the values that were important to you, your life was balanced and focused on your highest priorities, and you achieved everything you wanted.

Now, respond to the following questions.
• During that year, what did you value most? What were your top three priorities?
• How did you feel and what were the results when you focused on what was most important to you (e.g., in control, fulfilled, challenged, loved, secure, etc.)?

Now elevate your responses to a thematic level, and create your guiding principles using the format below.

I believe that... and I am committed to... so that I can...

Here are some of my guiding principles.

I believe that family is my most important priority, and I am committed to building a relationship with every immediate family member so that I can grow, share, and experience life with them to the fullest.

I believe that living a balanced life will enable me to be a better person, friend, family member, athlete, and business owner, and I am committed to taking care of myself physically, spiritually, and mentally so that I can live a long and prosperous life fully enjoying every moment, person, and being in it.

I believe that life should be lived with passion, and I am committed to traveling and exploring, climbing, meeting new people, and serving others so that I can experience everything that life has to offer and share in its beauty.

This is a great time of year to reflect and to renew, and guiding principles will help you make choices aligned with what you want to create for your life.

Sal Silvester is the founder and president of 5.12 Solutions http://512solutions.com/ Working with teams is Sal's passion. He has a unique perspective on team development and leadership gained through his experience over the past 17 years as an Army Officer, an executive at Accenture, and founder of 5.12 Solutions. He has led and managed teams in the desert of Kuwait, the mountains of Turkey, and in the offices of many clients on process improvement, organizational change, and training projects.

Original article

The Susan Boyle Example Entices Motivation

Most likely you have heard of Susan Boyle. Today she is a world celebrity after presenting herself in a music reality show in England. Her physical appearance, somehow sloppy, caused a certain underestimation by the jury and audience up until she sung admirably for few minutes. Her presentation caused surprise, tears, laughs, and ultimately claps. It was the birth of a star in the music world.

Maybe, she had to wait the information era, as we live today, full of technologies to see the explosion that her voice became through the internet. In only 2 weeks her videos had been seen for more than 100 million times. She got her own page on Wikipedia; she was invited for many talk shows throughout the world, and she was offered a CD contract.

The lesson learned in this episode is directly related to our capacity to judge other people, businesses, or any instance without knowing the inside of that same instance. It only takes a bad report from someone else, a bad visual impression, and sometimes a possible negative thought for this negative chain of reaction to start. We, humans, have the tendency to be optimistic if we hear one hundred positive comments, but the time we hear only one negative comment, besides the fact of already having one hundred positive comments, we withdraw from that particular instance and sometimes even give up of our dreams.

The society has made us this way. Our families make us be this way, sometimes unconsciously. Going back to Susan Boyle we could notice how transformed was her style few days after her presentation. She cut her hair; she changed her clothes, she was a new woman and much more attractive. Why did that happen? It happened because we live in a world where our external appearance matters. This is no exception, unfortunately.

This pressure that comes from the outside most of time pushes our talents and gifts to a place where we can never reach unless we decide to overcome the world and start to shy. This is a tough task for the timid, fearful, pessimistic, and anybody who do not believe that dreams can be achieved.

The truth is that anything can be achieved if we change our attitude and go for it. I can imagine how hard it was for Susan to be there at first in front of the world and sing, knowing that she was being overlooked by everybody due to her appearance. She still went up there and showed who she really was and her life changed forever.

My advice for all of us is to go ahead and dream. However, do not dream only, but seek to make that come to pass. If you want to lose weight, do something. If you want to buy a house, do something. If you want to be happy, do something. Eliminate your fears and disregard the pressure of the world.

Remember the Susan Boyle example!

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