In this high-impact episode of Epic Begins With 1 Step Forward, Zander Sprague sits down with former fighter pilot Christian “Boo” Boucousis, who now helps leaders navigate overwhelm and thrive in the AI-driven world. Boo shares how the fighter pilot mindset—built on clarity, discipline, and constant reflection—translates directly into business and life. From operating at high speed in the cockpit to leading in today’s fast-moving digital landscape, he explains why comfort can limit growth and how small, intentional actions create massive results over time. Together, they explore decision-making under pressure, the power of “not yet,” and why leaders must learn to think differently to stay relevant. This episode is a powerful reminder that epic lives are built one focused step at a time—especially in uncertain environments.
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Think Like A Fighter Pilot: The Secret To Staying Ahead In Life And Business With Christian “Boo” Boucousis
This is going to be an epic conversation. I have call sign Boo with me. Boo, tell us who you are and what you do.
I’m a curious human being who wants to help leaders get out of the muck, overwhelm, and burnout that is the byproduct of the digital world. I also want to help them survive the AI revolution. My job is to learn and share as much as I’ve learned to help leaders on that journey. I call it the journey from overwhelm to impact.
There you go. We got to start off with Boo. That’s a call sign because you were a fighter jet pilot. Is that correct?
That’s right. We all get branded with these call signs. I joined the Air Force when I turned nineteen, and I was given that call sign. It has stuck with me for 32 years to the point where I don’t think anyone knows my real name apart from that. Maybe the 30 people I started in the Air Force with. That career, I didn’t realize at the time, but as I was pushed out with a medical condition and made a transition into business years ago. It’s such a great conditioning in terms of a mental model and an operating model to do anything in life.
The word epic is an important one. Even as a kid, I always wanted an epic life. I wanted a full adventurous life. One of the rules I made for myself as a kid was that I’m never going to work in an office. That’s one thing I’m never going to do. I’ve been fortunate in that it has been my life. I have had such a fun, expansive, exciting, and adventurous life, both in the Air Force and also in business. To me, having an enormous aspiration is so important. Where we get a little bit lost, though, is that we don’t understand that the culmination of thousands of small steps is what delivers the epic storyline.
I certainly talk about how it is that first step forward. It is that next step. We’ll take an example of when you join the Air Force. You start off, you have to go through basic training and all of that. You are like, “I got accepted to flight school.” At that point, you don’t even know what you’re going to fly. You figure that if you finish, you get to fly an airplane. Each day, you’re learning something new. You’re perfecting skills. That’s great. A quick question. Were you in the US Air Force, Australian Air Force, or some other country’s Air Force?
I was initially in the Royal Australian Air Force. I spent four years in the United Kingdom, in the Air Force, as well before coming back to Australia. The thing about fighter pilots is we’re all the same. When you look from the outside in, we’re all the same. On the inside, we’re all different, obviously. The reason we’re all the same is that’s what you need to be successful in a team. You need a common way of thinking, a common way of working, and a common way of communicating.
What you’re trained for as a fighter pilot is operating in high-speed environments where you’re constantly overwhelmed with information. The decision you make between what you focus on and what you don’t is a life-and-death decision. That parlays very effortlessly into where we are in the digital evolution and intelligence era, where everything is faster. You can be completely overwhelmed within minutes with information to make a decision.
Therefore, because you’re moving so fast and there’s so much to consume, you don’t know what to focus on, and you struggle with prioritization. Many years ago, we built a mental model to deal with that environment. The fundamental basis of it is iterative thinking. Effectively, what you do is in your thinking and doing, you always incorporate reflection. That’s the key. In the world of fighter pilots, we call that practice or debriefing, but all it is, is you’re saying, “What did I set out to achieve on that mission? What was the objective? What were our results? Why was there a gap between the two? What’s something I can take away in the action I can take tomorrow?” Where you use the word steps, I call it action. It’s exactly the same thing.
The key is that the actions or the steps have to be taken. The steps that you take at the start of flight training, where you’ve got no skills or no knowledge, are by a quantum of thousands of percent different once you go through the sausage-making machine and fly your 400 training missions, and you pop out as a fighter pilot. Unlike college, where you get a qualification and a job, and that’s it.
As a fighter pilot, whether you’re a fighter pilot that has 6 months experience or 30 years. We’re conditioned to understand that every day is different. No matter what you know and what your experience level is, the world’s going to throw you a curveball. You need to be prepared for that. We build this great cognitive model that allows you to be thoughtful before you act, to revisit the actions and say, “Were they right?” Reframe that tomorrow. What happens is you end up with this deep-level programming.
If you’re a student of James Clear and Atomic Habits, he talks about identity. The thing about identity is, as a fighter pilot, that’s your identity. You get that very early. You’re not there yet. You will be, but you’re not yet. Therefore, through the system, you develop the atomic habits, or what I call the contextualized habits, the habits that you need to fulfill your epic journey. They become a program. You reprogram your biases and your beliefs, particularly the belief around what you’re capable of.
Your behaviors, actions, or steps change the result of that. Unfortunately, for humanity, the subconscious reprogramming is being run by the digital world. Which is why we’re seeing the separation of people along racial lines, belief lines, and religion. We’re losing that ability to find the middle ground. As a fighter pilot, everything comes together. That’s the missing link. I want myself and everyone I’m with to live a fruitful, fulfilling life and make a difference in the world.
You were talking about how every time you strap into the jet, no matter how much you’re experienced, every single flight is new, unique, and unexpected. To the best of your ability, you hope that you have the skills to deal with whatever challenge might come up. That’s true in business. I get up every morning, and there’s stuff I want to achieve, but stuff doesn’t go right. How am I going to adapt to what isn’t going exactly the way I thought it was?
Sometimes, that’s immediate. Sometimes, it’s a long-term thing. We’ll take something that’s happened to all of us. All of a sudden, your laptop isn’t booting up. What are you going to do? Most of us are stuck. Although we can be highly effective, if our computer isn’t working there’s not a whole heck of a lot of work that we can do.
The decision of what you focus on — and what you don’t — is kind of a life-or-death decision.
You’re talking about the digital age, specifically talking about AI and stuff. Although AI is a great tool, you have to understand how to use it. It’s so powerful, like the jets that you were flying. They’re incredibly fast when you’re flying Mach 1 or Mach 1.5. Stuff happens a lot quicker because you’re doing 1000 miles an hour.
It does happen quickly. That’s why you always need to be thinking. You have to be five seconds ahead of the jet. There’s no point being in the jet where you are now. That’s reactive. If you’re five seconds ahead, you can adapt a little bit more. It’s almost like when you’re flying, and you start to feel relaxed and comfortable. We’re trained that that’s a red flag. Comfort is not what you want to be successful. You have to be uncomfortable and think, “What could happen next? What’s the next thing I can control to move me five seconds further down the future?”
In business, we spread that out to the quarter, to the month. Most of the week is full of noise because we only have one check-in. I call it missionization. A great idea to take in life is this idea of what a fighter pilot does, which is 2 or 3 missions a day. Every one of those has some planning, and the planning is to build collective consciousness. It’s to bring everyone in the room who you need help from to get it done. Then, we transition into what we call a briefing. Briefing is counterintuitive.
It’s not telling people what to do. It’s asking questions and making sure they understand. There are no distractions. When you’re on the mission, you aren’t worried about all the other jobs you have to do as an officer in the Air Force. That’s all parked. When you do a mission, you debrief the mission, like, “Was it what we thought or what we didn’t think?” Then, you go back and do all the other work. You have to do all the busy work.
The second mission of the day is to jump in that bubble again. I call it the mission bubble. That’s important in the digital world because that’s how you preserve the critical thinking and the problem-solving skills that we were gifted with humanity, and we’re outsourcing to AI. You’ll never understand how to solve a problem if you don’t step away from it and look at it from a distance.
Before we talked, I was talking about how excited I am. I’m utilizing some AI to help me evolve the epic idea. What I’m doing is taking what information is being presented, and I’m walking away. I’m not sitting there, going, “This is great. I’m going to solve this whole thing.” I’m like, “This is important.” I need to take in that information. I need to synthesize it. I have to think about what AI might be suggesting for the direction I want to go.
I’m going to have a discussion with my AI model about some suggestions. I thought about it. I’m like, “I don’t want to do that. How do I fix this?” It’s not that AI is right. It’s making some good suggestions. It’s like having a super smart friend or group of friends that goes, “We know a little more than you. Here’s some information.” As individuals, we have to make our own decisions. I’m sure as a fighter pilot, there were people who said, “When you get into this, do this maneuver.” Maybe you’re like, “That maneuver is good, but it’s not the one that I feel comfortable with. I’d rather do it this way.
It’s also important, and this is what fighter pilots are good at, to explain. We always start, as Simon Sinek says, with why. If someone said, “You need to do this.” The first question a fighter pilot would ask is, “Why? I don’t understand.” It’ll say, “You do this because you preserve energy. You’ve got a few extra knots at the bottom there. That allows you to get 50 degrees nose up, which means that you can get a weapon solution because they’re inside the weapon engagement zone.” You’re like, “That’s a great idea.”
This is what’s ironic. People think that when you’re a fighter pilot in the Military, you do what you’re told and follow orders. That’s BS. That’s not what you do. You are given something to achieve, as well as all of the standards, equipment, and everything you need to get it done. You have to figure out how to get off the ground, through the air, to the target, hit the target, get back safely, and make sure that the 4 airplanes that took off are the same 4 airplanes that land. It’s freedom within a framework.
What we do, which is important, is if the airplane gets turned on a certain way, like hopping in your car, hitting the button start, and away you go, for us in the F-18 Hornet. There are about 218 specific checklist actions you have to do to start and turn it off. It’s quite different. Why have an environment where every pilot has the freedom to start it however they want? The problem you have is that it might take one pilot 30 minutes to do it their way, and another pilot, 5 minutes. Every day, we start the airplane, so let’s do that the same way.
That’s true of even general aviation. You have a checklist. The reason you have a checklist is that you don’t want to miss a critical step. Even though I’m sure, very soon, after you were flying the F/A-18 Hornets and you knew you knew that checklist. Every single time, you still went down the checklist. You were like, “I’ve flipped the master switch. I’ve turned this on. I’ve checked this.” There’s a reason for that. Unlike a car, if something isn’t right, you can pull over to the side of the road.
You can’t pull over to the side of the sky and go, “Hold on. Let me reset it.” There is something to be said. I talk in the book about the importance of structure when we’re on our epic journeys. I’m not a pilot myself, but I’m very fascinated with aviation in general. I’ve done a lot of reading and research, and have watched a ton of aviation videos. I’m aware of the importance of the checklist. You go around and check to make sure that your plane looks like it’s airworthy.
You sit down in the cockpit and do that checklist. There’s a startup checklist. There’s a takeoff checklist. When you land, there’s a checklist. You see people all the time. You see the fighter pilots. They have the laminated card where they’re like, “Let me go through and make sure that all of that is done.” That’s creating structure, which means you don’t make a mistake. In our own lives, structure is our friend.
It makes us feel comfortable. You talked about how you shouldn’t be comfortable on the plane. I do get that, but I also think, from a psychological standpoint. When things are more predictable, we feel more relaxed and are more able to deal with the unexpected. You’re like, “Up to this point, I’ve seen everything. I know what that’s like. I know how to do this.” In business, if you have structure, it helps you figure out when the unexpected happens and how to deal with it. If you’re constantly all over the place. When something comes up, you have overwhelmed.
This is the irony. Structure gives you freedom. This is something that we generally don’t understand. I have extreme ADHD. Ironically, I didn’t apply my fighter pilot mindset to my life. One day, I’m like, “Why don’t I just have a system?” Now, my keys always go on the same hook. My wallet always goes in the same drawer. I have the same jeans, belt, shirt, and socks. They’re in different colors. This brand makes 40 different flannel tops. It streamlines my life. Everything is one click.
What’s also important for people to understand is that with structure, what we’re saying is it’s habits. Everyone knows that good habits equal success. To be capable of starting and turning off the Hornet consistently without thinking, that’s a six-week full-commitment effort to learn those checklists. We don’t have a card. You’ve got to do it all by memory.
I’m sorry. I thought you had a card.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a card or not a card. The reason we do it by memory is that there’s just one seat. It’s another barrier. If someone couldn’t be bothered to learn it by memory, they’re washed out of the program. My new book is called Flawless Leadership. The core thesis of the book is that you can’t be perfect because perfect requires you to control the known and the unknown. It’s impossible. Flawless is being fully in control of what you own.
Things like checklists, habits, and all of these things that frustrate people day-to-day, like, “I’ve lost my wallet. I’ve lost my keys.” You can remove that from your life. It takes a commitment to a process. When you fail in the process, you debrief it and say, “The keys are meant to be on this hook. It took me 30 minutes to find them. They’re stuck behind the couch.” Why was that? That’s because I didn’t think when I got out of the car. My action tomorrow is to exit the car, open the door, put my keys on the hook, and then come upstairs.
Structure gives you freedom — being fully in control of what you own.
That intentionality is not conditioned into a human being. A human being is engineered to exist and survive. Unfortunately, anything epic, meaningful, or big requires commitment to the small things. We call them this in the Australian Air Force. I have pilots at work with me. I’m like, “You don’t have this over here?” We call it the SLJ, the Shitty Little Job. Excuse the language, but it is what it is.
That’s where you grow. It is by doing the small things that you don’t want to do. When you walk to the airplane, and you make sure all the bungs and all of the covers are taken off. It’s boring. If you leave one covering on one mission and it gets sucked into the engine, that’s it. You’ve destroyed a $500,000 engine. You’ve failed the mission. You’ve let your team down. That basic thing needs to be done.
When we talk about comfort and discomfort, we’ve created a society that expects comfort. Unfortunately, comfort is the opposite of growth. I flew for eleven years, and I have about 2,000 hours. That’s nearly 2,000 missions. In every one of those, I was nervous. When you walk up to a Hornet, it’s a big airplane. You strap it on and turn it on. You’re nervous.
As I reflect on that career at the time, I’m like, “I wish I wasn’t nervous. I should have this.” What I realized is that’s what you should have to boot your human operating system to the optimum level. It’s like your laptop, where you can go, “I want full processing power. I want to burn all the battery. I want it to be half the processor.” That’s called the peak stress curve.
That’s important. You should get into the peak stress curve in business. The fine balance between pressure and pressure being a privilege tips over into stress, which is where you release the cortisol. You experience anxiety that’s pushing you too far over the limit. You can’t have that peak stress curve if you don’t define the mission.
Comfort is the opposite of growth.
A mission delivers focus. The accountability to deliver it brings that anxious feeling about what you want to perform. You do it, and then when you’re done, you decompress and take a breath. You wrap it all up in a bundle and move on to the next thing without bringing any baggage from what happened this morning into the next day. It will fall into the next mission.
We are creatures of habit. We feel comfortable when we know. For example, the way that you get ready for bed probably doesn’t change. You do the same thing in the same order, in part because you know it. It’s a routine. It makes it easier for you to execute. Let’s say you wash your face, brush your teeth, and floss your teeth. You do that in the same order. That’s basic human psychology. We feel comfortable when we’re like, “I know what I need to do.”
When you get in the car to go to the store, you’re not particularly stressed about that. Why? That’s because you know how you need to get to the store. Imagine getting into the car and going, “I need to go to the supermarket. I’ll make a bunch of random lefts and rights and hope that I get to the store.” That doesn’t work. You might make it to the store, but you might end up in a different state, which isn’t where you want to be.
I do agree that we have to step out of our comfort zone. We have to push ourselves. We have to be uncomfortable. That is where growth happens. With what you said about putting the keys in the same place and your wallet in the same place, I’m right there with you. I put my stuff in the same place. I know where it is. I never have to wonder. I’ve been doing it since I was little. I’m like, “Let me put it in the same place.”
If someone comes and moves something, I get upset. Why? That’s because with this nice structure I built, all of a sudden, I’m like, “That threw me off.” Morning routines are important to us. I see you drinking coffee. You get up, and you’re like, “I can’t wait for my first cup of coffee.” You discover that you don’t have any more coffee, so you’re like, “Oh my god.” That can temporarily derail your day. You’re like, “I don’t have my coffee. Now what do I do?”
I have some nuance to this whole conversation. The habits are grounded in our biases and our beliefs. It is subliminal programming. To shift them to the right habits to lead to success requires intention. Here’s why. Even when driving to the store, people have accidents. Even though we floss our teeth, people still get cavities. We think we’ve got these habits, but when we dial in, those habits are prone to points of failure. If we don’t revisit them and test them, we get stuck in a pattern. It’s a pattern of behavior.
Patterns can be helpful, but they can also blind us to being open to different, alternative ways to do it. I worked in the corporate world for 22 years. I drove to work the same way every single day. It wasn’t until I couldn’t do that. One time, I was going to work down in Silicon Valley, and there was a huge accident. I’m like, “I cannot take the freeway I normally take.” I had to take another one, and I’m like, “Now here’s another way for me to get to work. That’s great.” I do marvel at, oftentimes, how we get in a pattern and don’t entertain the fact that there may be other ways to do something.
That goes back to my story about how we sit in the jet and wait until something happens, rather than live five seconds ahead of it. Most habits change in reaction. Someone will get a healthier habit because they have a heart attack. They’ll get some stance, like, “I need to exercise and eat better.” You could have made that decision years ago and gotten ahead of it.
When we look at the whole way that humans manage health and the whole system in a trillion-dollar industry. It is based on dealing with the fact that it has already happened. It’s not a human failing. It’s the human condition. That’s why the fighter pilot community many years ago changed it. It was like, “Hang on a minute. This is not working,” in the ‘60s. It was like, “We’re spending a lot of money. A lot of things are happening here. The same number of airplanes aren’t coming back from the mission.”
Kudos to Colonel Boyd for inventing the OODA loop. It’s the foundation of iterative thinking. That is an iterative intelligence tool, which means to get the most out of it. As a leader, you need to create an iterative mindset. All you’re going to do is tell it what to do. You’re not going to tell it where to go. If you don’t know where to go, because that’s not how a human is engineered, and this is part of our practice in 26 and 27. We forecast that that type of leader is going to lose their job in the next 3 to 5 years.
One thing I love to ask my guests is in the book I have. I talk about two important words, which are not yet. Those things that we want to achieve, but we haven’t done yet. Sometimes, they are works in progress. You’ve written a book, so you know that it’s not like, “Let me sit down, bang out a book, and then it’s done.” There’s a lot of not-yets.
Someone’s like, “Boo, has your book come out?” You’re like, “Not yet.” They’re like, “Why?” You’re like, “It’s because I’m still in the editing process or the printer is going to release it on this date or whatever.” What are 1 or 2 of your not-yets? Those things that you want to achieve but haven’t gotten to or are working on.
I use not yet all the time. It’s a powerful idea. Someone’s like, “I can’t surf yet or I go surfing and don’t do it well. It’s my first time. I’m bad at surfing.” You’re not good at surfing yet. I’m on board. I haven’t helped two million leaders be fit for the AI revolution yet. I have a plan. I have done it myself. I run a fully AI native business. I know how to do everything that I need with AI. I can build a website. I can build an automation to deal with inbound sales calls. I can build an onboarding process and automate it for a new employee.
The reason I did that was, in my mind, I’m like, “AI is a thing. I’d better learn about the thing and make it work for me.” The great thing about being a fighter pilot is that you’re always like, “What’s the target?” The learning happens backwards. The great thing about what I love about AI is I’m like, “This is my destination. Help me. What can you do?”
I haven’t done that yet. I haven’t reached the best version of me yet. There’s more work I need to do. There’s always more that I can give. There’s always help I can give. I don’t think I found a good foundation in turn. I want to know how to show up as the best father, how to show up as the best husband, or how to be spiritually the best version of myself. That’s always a constant iteration.
I haven’t reached the best version of myself yet — there’s still more work to do.
That’s great. I love how you are already leaning into your not-yets. To me, it’s such an optimistic word. It makes me excited. The possibilities are there. There may be some things that I want to achieve, and maybe I’ll never do it, but I still leave open the option that I could do that.
There’s plenty of time. Life is very long. There are oodles of time to do a whole bunch of stuff. You can do a career change. You can build a car. You can run a marathon. It’s the ability to take the epic story and turn it into bite-sized chunks that makes a difference.
Boo, thank you so much for coming in. How can people get a hold of you and find you if they’re inspired to jump into the jet with you and take off?
Search for Flawless Leadership. Spell my last name. There are only four of us in the world. My two sons, my dad, and I. We’re pretty easy to find. CallMeBoo.com is my website. Any of those channels to talk to anyone who’s interested and create a future that we’re rapidly moving into.
Thank you so much. I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. Remember that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
- Christian “Boo” Boucousis
- Christian Boucousis on LinkedIn
- Christian Boucousis on Instagram
- Christian Boucousis on Facebook
- Afterburner
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
About Christian “Boo” Boucousis
Boo Boucousis is the CEO of Afterburner, a leadership and performance company that has spent over 30 years translating fighter pilot execution into business results.
A former fighter pilot, Boo now works with leaders and organizations around the world to help them perform under pressure with clarity, alignment, and accountability.
He is the author of The Afterburner Advantage, an Amazon best seller in leadership, and has helped over 3,500 organizations and more than 2 million leaders elevate their performance.