137. Kirsten Seeto and Making the Jump - Kirsten Seeto

Hi there, everybody. Welcome to Cloudbase Mayhem and happy 2021. The bar has moved yet again on insurance, so got a few things here at the top of the show to go through. First is insurance. Geos is not offering a lot of their packages, like their Extreme Pack that we were recommending for a while since the Garmin buyout. We went into this last week with Bianca, a whole bunch of stuff on insurance at the top of that show, but I've just gotten some new information that is important. So, they do still offer their high-risk benefit. That is when you press your SOS, GEOS is activated to come find you, do the search and rescue. If you have just standard SAR, which is what you get when you get an inReach just automatically, or you can get the SAR 50 or 100, that doesn't cover paragliding and hang gliding and other quote-unquote extreme sports.

So, we've always needed this high-risk benefit. They still offer that. We were under the assumption that they didn't after the buyout, but they still do. So it's $179 a year. You'll find the link to that on my website. Just go to cloudbasemayhem.com and put the search term in for insurance. You'll find that article under Are You Covered? And it explains all of this in detail. So I won't go into it too much right now, but you want that high-risk benefit for sure. The other thing that has changed is Global Rescue has removed their 100-mile rule that used to only activate if you were more than 100 miles from home. Now it's activated. You can use it anywhere. So that's a no-brainer. Get the Global Rescue. It's $329 a year, and you can breathe easy. And again, the links for that are on the website, cloudbasemaham.com.

Just put in the search term insurance. Next, we continue to get awesome responses to the survey. And that's also on the website cloudbasemayhem.com forward slash survey, and as a thank you to some of you who filled that in and keep doing it, if you haven't, I'm really paying attention to those; they're giving me great ideas for improving the show and asking better questions and all kinds of things, but we did a little drawing yesterday with my daughter, put it up on facebook, if you want to go check it out for a couple of bastion's beginners books that we had her on the show a while back. So she has that great book, Beginner's Paragliding, and then also some Cloudbase Mayhem swag. So congratulations to Simon Gubelli, Richard Ackerman, Dominique Peltz, and Cal Breed.

I've already reached out to all of you and that stuff is in the mail. So thank you all for contributing to that survey. I really appreciate it. The book, Advanced Paragliding, My book that I've been been talking about now for last couple years is finally well out. It's in; it's being printed right now. It will be shipped in early April, and we're, we're taking pre-orders of that through, uh, Cross Country Magazine, so go to the, go to the their website xcmag.com forward slash shop, and you can pre-order it now if you use the code just for you all, uh, cb mayhem 10. That's all capitalized, CB Mayhem 10. You will get 10% off the book and free shipping, so go check it out.

This has been a massive work in progress. Tons of effort. I got a whole bunch of help from the entire team over at Cross Country Magazine. You guys are awesome, thank you so much, and it was a lot of fun. And this is basically the best of the best from over the first 100 shows, so there's kind of deep dives with 18 of the guests that we've had on the show—Will Gadd and Russ Ogden—and we went back to all of them and got more information, so that a lot of the stuff that was not actually in the show. And then there's a whole bunch of chapters on risk and safety and recovering from fear injuries and how to thermal better and how to glide better. There's 14 of those, so there's a ton there. It's kind of the best of the best, like an encyclopedia of the of the mayhem.

So I think you're, I think you're gonna enjoy it. I certainly have, of course, read through it over and over and over again, editing and tweaking and making it better and better. And each time I do, I learn something new. So I think you'll enjoy that. That discount deal expires when we get to 750 books sold and we're already over 500. And I'm recording this a few days before it's going to be out. So if you want that discount and the free shipping, get on it pretty quick. This week's top of the show tip comes from Rico Chandra, who's a show that we're going to be putting out here in a few weeks, recorded a while ago. But Jason Loritzen reached out a while back and he was kind of making the jump from a low-end B three-liner to kind of one of these hybrid Cs, two three-liners, and was having some trouble with that jump and wanted some advice.

So here's some advice for moving up to a little bit spicier wing and less line plan form. So from Rico, and then we will get back into this show. What would be your advice to someone like that for, you know, for when they move up to the wing, what should they be focusing on? What do they want to be thinking about? How can you kind of get up to speed on this new animal wow

I, I, I definitely ground handle as much as possible. Um, I, I, I also really enjoy ground handling. There is, there is days when I'll be up on launching and, and you can, you know, in soaring conditions, but, but finding it more entertaining to just be ground handling on launch, that's definitely one. Then I

Think, I think, I think awareness and observation, um, be aware of what you're doing. Try to be aware of what you're doing. It's super difficult, but it, it's so helpful for flying. Maybe others can help point out stuff that you can't see yourself, um, but, but work on, on, on your awareness. I need to tell myself always to be more aware. Where, you know, if it's, for me at the moment, it's not that I'm too tied up with the glider as that pilot might be. For me, the glider is sort of second nature. But for me, awareness is, hey, I should, when I'm thermaling, always be, you know, aware of, is there a cloud developing above me?

Is the cloud falling apart above me? Where are the other pilots? Where are birds all around me? Is there debris flying around? That sort of awareness, that's what I should be more aware of, feeling very comfortable under my wing. And if you're not yet, if you have a new wing, it's being aware about, trying to be aware about what's going on, being aware about what you're doing. And and maybe others telling you that helps. Maybe, um, trying to observe closer helps. Maybe even journaling; I have a strong feeling that journaling helps a lot. Most of us don't do it, but I think journaling probably would help.

Cool.

Hope you enjoyed that. My guest today is Kirsten Sito from, from, uh, from Australia. She's down in Bright now. She's just built a little tiny home, and she has been guiding or operating these kind of cool women's fly-ins for the last couple years, and I've had her on my list to have on the show for a long time. Last time I saw her was down there at the World Cup a few years back, and she's just doing awesome things in free flight. She's been, and really inspirational in the show. We talk about how to get mentors and what they mean, and how important they are, and how to make this sport just a lot more inclusive and safe and approachable for a lot more people, and more and more and more.

We talk about all kinds of things, but I think you're going to enjoy this talk with a good friend of mine, Kirsten Seto. Enjoy.

Kirsten, it's great to have you on the show. Joe, it's been a while since I've seen you. I think it was the World Cup down in Oz going on three years ago or something like that, down in Bright. I understand you're living in Bright now. And you're sitting in your tiny home. This is cool. The listeners can't see this, of course, because this is audio, but you've built your tiny home. You were just getting into that project when I was down there, as I remember, last time. And you've done some fun things. You're now the safety officer, and you've got this cool. I was just enjoying your website, Altitude with Attitude. So we're going to talk about flying and what you've been up to, but welcome to the show.

Thanks, Gavin. I'm really excited to be on your podcast. I'm a huge fan and I'm honored to join the list of literally hundreds of people now that you've interviewed.

I know. It just keeps adding up, isn't it? It's crazy. We're just finishing up this book. I know I keep talking about it and Cross Country keeps telling me not to, but it's been a work work in progress over the last kind of a couple of years now, but yeah, they keep adding up the, you know, the books on the first hundred. And I think we're almost up to one 40 now.

It's awesome.

Oh, cool. Well, thank you. So tell me, give, give the folks that don't know what's your, what's your history. Give us the brief history with flying, how you got into this absurdity and what led you to altitude with attitude.

Right. Well, I've, I've been thinking about flying all my life. I got my general aviation pilot's license when I was 16. I wanted to be a fighter pilot because, as a 13-year-old, I had watched Top Gun and could not, could not think of anything else I'd rather do. How

Could you not? I mean, you watch that volleyball game, right? You're like, "I'm in," right, right?

But, uh, the realities of being short struck when I applied to the, uh, Air Force, and they informed me that I was too short to fly their fighter planes. Uh, so I, um, I kind of left flying for a while. It's general aviation's not a sport for a university student, so I actually let flying, uh, off the hook for quite a while. And about 15 years later, I was, uh, backpacking in Europe and came across a couple of guys who, uh, told me that I had to come parapente with them. And I had no idea what this was about. I think they were telling me that I was going to go tandem with them, uh, their English, which wasn't the best. Unfortunately, it was too windy, and I never kind of got to do it with them, which might have been a good thing, I'm not sure. But it kind of, you know, it stuck with me. So I was living in London for a while and was looking for an adventure, so I looked up what this parapente was, found what we call paragliding, and got my license in the French Alps whilst I was living there

and haven't looked back. That was in 2007, so yeah, 13 years ago. Wow.

And then when did you move back to Oz? Oz?

I moved back to Oz in 2009. Sadly, immediately after getting my license, I had an incident that resulted in a broken elbow. And it's the most stupid thing that I've done. And I guess I learned that lesson early. I wasn't yet licensed. I hadn't quite got signed off. I hadn't been able to get reverse launches signed off. And of course, I tried to forward launch and win. That was way way too strong and got blown backwards and hit a dry stone wall and got drawn across barbed wire. It was pretty ugly. But, yeah, anyway, the result was I broke myself, I healed, and then I decided that it was time to go home after that. So I never actually got to fly Europe as a competent pilot and I haven't been back since.

Oh, no, you've got to go. Yeah, I know, I know. Just as I was getting my finances to go, right now I'm going to do my big Europe trip, COVID struck. So, um, anyway, we'll... I'll... I will get there. But, but anyway, I moved back to Australia and I've been doing a lot of flying around. I caught the cross-country bug and flew Manila and Bright, and then, uh, you know, actually, I did an XC clinic with Brian Webb, and he's the one who introduced me to flying the states, and, uh, for a few years there, I was coming out to the states every year and you were doing his program.

When he was Oregon and Washington and, yeah.

That, that's right, exactly, exactly, yeah. And then I did that.

A couple times, yeah.

Yeah, I just, uh, I just fell in love with the flying community in the States and the, the diverse places that you can fly, just mind-blowing, which kind of distracted me from, from going to the Europe. Actually, a lot of people here in Australia will go to Europe every year, uh, not so many go to the States, and it's, I just think it's an underrated area to, to explore to fly from an Australian, even

anticipated asking you about that, but it'd be great to hear your perspectives on that. Because obviously we've had plenty of people on the show that are from my area. You're talking about my zone and what do you love about it?

It's just very different. I mean, I've been fortunate enough to get some work in the States and I spent six months in San Francisco and got to know the Bay Area pilots there.

And I got to fly in Bishop. Cheers. Yeah, yeah. And the people there were so accommodating to ensure that I got out there. They looked after me. They made sure that I was retrieved at the end of the day. And also, here's the thing that I love about traveling with paragliding. It puts you in places you really have no business to be in. One of my favorite memories is landing in some town, some hick town out in the middle of nowhere. where it had a saloon-like with the swinging doors type thing, and a bunch of us walked in, and you know, there's that—that moment that you get anywhere in the world where it feels like everything stops and everyone turns to look at you, and they know that you don't belong here, but they're like, "Whatever." And you sit down at the bar and you talk to the barman. You just—you wouldn't be there under any other circumstances, but you landed there and you want a beer.

I—that's what I—that sounds like

Nevada to me, although that's not that unusual. There's a lot of those all over, all over the west, but that's—that sounds like Nevada. I bet that was a bishop flight.

yeah yeah yeah

All those little mining towns, still, you know, I've spent quite a bit of time flying in Nevada, east of the Sierras, in the last few years. You know, of course we had this kiwi search out there this year, but yes, uh, spent a lot of time with with revison. I mean, it is just, it's vacant. There's not much going on out there. These tiny little towns, and these are not boom boomtowns anymore. You know, they were gold towns at the last at the turn of the last century, and so they're, you know, most of them were kind of dilapidated and falling apart, and most of them don't even have concrete, you know, just dirt roads. And yeah, it's, it's a, it's a wild part of the world. It

Is a wild part. And then you, you compare that, then I am a couple about a year or two later. I, I think it was the year after I got some work in, uh, Boulder in Colorado and spent some time out there. Cedar Wright was out there; he was much more junior back then, and he's, he's a cack, um, and but then their, their flying is completely different. They fly in the lee of the Rocky Mountains, and you need to learn a lot about differential pressures on either side of the Rocky Mountains. That was just a whole other type of flying. And this is the great thing about paragliding, too; there's not, it's not just paragliding, it's you've got coastal, you've got inland, you've got mountain flying, you've got flatlands flying, and every, every site you go to, if you can, if you can spend enough time there, you get to, to, to unlock this whole other area of flying that tells you about the meteorology and, and also what's possible.

You might go to one site and, and people are flying on winds you'd never fly in, and that's just what they've got, so they learn how to fly those winds. Or you go to another site and you'd be like, well, it's not on because there's no wind, and then you learn, no, no, there's a way to fly this site, too. So it, it really broadens your, your toolkit if you, you can get out and fly a lot of different sites. And I find that the U.S. has a lot to offer there.

Yeah, and you have a little bit of that there in Bright too, don't you? I mean, it's a funny pocket. I think of all, you know, like Passy and, you know, just down the road from Chamonix, you can fly in a crazy strong North Fern there. But if you went to Chamonix Valley, you're dead. But it's right there. It's just right next door. I like that about this sport that it's very often we are working, we're operating. I mean, when you talk to the meteorologists like Nick Nainans and Hans and stuff, they're always saying, well, yeah, you know, having all this knowledge helps, but we're not really operating in that part of the world. We're in the micro part where models can only show so much. And then you have the sun and the thermals and the valley winds and all the things that they don't do a very good job of picking up.

Which is the other great thing about the sport. Like if you're going to fly safely, you have to contact your locals. So you need to have a conversation with them and understand all those nuances about the microclimatic side of it. And as a bit of an introvert myself, that forces me to connect with other people. And then I discover a whole other side to this sport, which is the people that you meet.

And so let's fast forward a little bit. When did you get into – I couldn't tell really from the west side. Is it really guiding? Is it instructor courses? is how to describe what altitude with attitude is it's

Essentially a fly-in, uh, and it, it, it aims to bring women together to fly with other women. And it's, it's at the beginning, I found it quite hard to articulate what, why would someone want to sign up to one of these? And somehow, I managed to convince a large number of women to, to sign up. They're quite small, so normally I have between six to, to eight women on, on the tours. The idea is to expose them to new sites, um, but in a kind of a more supportive environment that they might be used to. And that's not to say that it's for people who are looking for support; it's for women pilots who just looking to fly with other like-minded women pilots and maybe like a safe

place, safe place to get kicked out of the nest, in a sense. Is that a good analogy? Yep, yep, okay.

Exactly, the type of comments that I've had back, and that's kind of shaped how I'm trying to describe them, is that there are so few women in this sport that they don't even know what female flying looks like, and it is a little bit different. It's—it's the opportunity. Like, women—I don't want to generalize, but what I've observed on, on many of my, um, fly-ins, is that when you get a bunch of women who fly together, they have the ability to laugh at themselves. We—I mean, it's such a humbling sport, the number of mistakes you make, whether, whether you've just rolled down the hill in front of a huge crowd of tourists and hot comp pilots, and you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and find your dignity and courage to just try again, or whether it's just admitting that you get scared and not feeling like you're pulling the whole group down by admitting that.

I found that the conversations that we have about fear and what tools we use to get over that fear or anxiety or even getting past an incident that you've had, it's just a little bit different. And I actually don't think that men couldn't have those conversations. I think those types of conversations in that kind of environment is beneficial for everyone. It's just that when you have a bunch of women together, they're more likely to bring those conversations to the table and be brave enough to talk about that stuff. And I have to always push that these events are not about segregation; it's actually about integration. I try to get women together; they find other role models, too. I have women who are novice pilots, intermediate pilots, advanced pilots, and we all gain inspiration from each other, and we realize that we've all got something to offer to this sport.

And they go back to their home clubs, and then they—you know, my goal is that they feel more confident to integrate, and they'll reach out to other people in their club that they can see are struggling a little bit, whether they're women or men, whatever it's—it's, it's the starting point of inclusivity, yeah.

Because I mean, it's, it's super important, isn't it, for us to take our ego a lot? I mean, we need it at times, but we also got to set it aside, don't we? And it's, if you're in this just, uh, testosterone free-for-all, which we normally are at any kind of launch in the world, it's just, it's so male dominant that I mean, I would think that's also... So I was going to say, it must be incredibly intimidating for women, but it's also in a sense, it's, you know, we have to learn, we as in men have to learn to be able to let that go as well and be vulnerable. That's important in this sport. Man, you don't have it every day.

Yes, exactly. I could talk for hours about this topic, but when we, for a start, having all women on a launch is fun and there's a lot less pressure. pressure. I think, I think you, the the type of people who really excel at this sport are the type of people who, for whom courage and pushing yourself out there come naturally. They're the type of people who are, who are more comfortable walking up to a launch and saying, "Hey, I'm new here. I don't know what I'm doing. Can someone give me a hand?" There are a lot of people who really struggle with walking up to a group of people that they don't know and saying that, particularly, particularly if you're a woman who's maybe not that forthcoming and there's a bunch of men standing around looking a little bit intimidating. Now, in my experience, when you make the effort, all of that bravado falls away and you generally find a very encouraging bunch of people who are more than happy to help you, but it's just breaking that ice.

And again, some of the stories that we share are how we get around those things. What strategies do we employ to break that ice and to find people at a new site that can help us.

I'm glad you said that. It seems to me, I'm just glad to hear that because that's always what I've felt in this community. I mean, even at the extreme end, you know, so to say the ex-Alps end and that week before the race, there's no competitiveness going on at all. I mean, everybody there is a mentor, including the best of the best with Chrigel. I mean, he wants to share and teach everything because we all know what we're going into. We're going flying. We could die and we could get really hurt and we're all looking out for one another. And I, I have always found at least that that exists at every level of the sport. I mean, I don't think there's anybody ever standing on launch that doesn't have some pretty intimate knowledge with the dark side of it.

And so maybe that maybe it's, they need to be approached in the right way, or maybe they They could offer advice in a better way than we often do. But I've always found that kind of everybody's okay with being a mentor to the extent of their ability.

Right, right. Because we've all been there. It's such a humble sport. We've all spent the hours on the bunny hill wondering why the hell we signed up for this course. And it just seems to be a lot of hard work. And then battling our way through the invisible forces in the sky. We've all been there.

So these are fly-ins. And I noticed on your website you've done a bunch of them. I mean, you got started in this 2018 and you've been doing, you've been on a bunch.

Yeah, and it's interesting how this got started. I'm going to like, my journey through being one of very few women in a sport that is totally male dominated and trying to find my place in this sport has not been linear at all. And I also see other women in various parts of this journey. So I started out pretty much saying, I'm not going to acknowledge that I'm a minority in this sport. There is absolutely no reason why I can't do as well as any other man in this sport. And to some extent, that was true. And the only reason that I got involved in women's fly-ins is because a great leader in our sport who, and just on this point, I find that certainly in the community in Australia, We're a little bit reluctant to call out leaders in our community who offer offer something else other than amazing flying expertise.

We're not all, uh, creagles, but we have a lot of people in our community who offer lead great leadership and and vision for our sport. And in Australia, one of those people is John Brassell. He's been highly involved in the New South Wales Paragliding Association and is now president of the Sydney Club. He applied for a a grant, a government grant for, to develop women in, in sport. And he asked, he approached me if I would lead these. He did all the organization. He got all the money. All he wanted me to do was lead them. And I was at a point in time when some other women had been running some flyers that just didn't really get the momentum that they needed. And I must admit, I didn't even want to go to them because I felt that it would be a bunch of women sitting around talking about how scary it it was to fly, which is interesting given what I just said before.

So

you thought it would potentially kind of even hold you back, or just

kind of create your own ground suck deal? Yeah, I thought it was going to feed my fears and give me more excuses. And anyway, so I didn't want to be involved. And then, you know, to be perfectly honest, John said, I've got some grant money. I can actually pay you to do it. Does that make a difference? And I am going to be completely honest and said, oh, actually, yes. Now, it wasn't a lot of money, but you know what? I think it was saying to me, I actually value what you've got enough to want to pay you to do this. So I did the first one and was totally gobsmacked by how much I enjoyed it, by the fact that it wasn't just me telling women how to, you know, sorry, giving them advice on how to fly. I was getting out of it as much as they were getting out of it.

To see somebody be brave enough to step onto a tow line, uh, out western New South Wales, when they've got not a lot of experience under their belt and it's hot and you've been towing out, you know that they're intimidating conditions. When I see women who with less experience than me who are willing to do that as well, I get inspired as well. Um, so anyway, that first one I got a lot out of, uh, and then John taught me how to, uh, apply for those grants. And I just picked it up from there and rolled it out to be a national program. I approached our national association. I approached the other state associations and got enough money together to put together a program that, look, to be honest, the Altitude with Attitude program I've been running to date, I don't know where I got the energy to do it.

I sat down to write the last report that I do at the end of every year as a reconciliation on the funds that I get. And over COVID, there was a part of me that was just like, "Oh man, these reports are a lot of work, and I didn't—it kind of feels like the world's going to end, so why should I like put the time and effort into this report?" So I let it go for a while. The other day, I picked it up again like, "Okay, I think the world's going to be fine, and people are going to want to know where that money went." And I don't know where I got the energy to write these reports. They use—I write—I basically get at all my attendees to complete a questionnaire. So I asked them what they're expecting, what they got out of it, where they thought there might be opportunities for improvement. So I just ended up with an enormous amount of information from the attendees that I would use year on year to improve and tweak.

And to be honest, I'm at the point in time now where I don't think I need all that funding anymore. I use the funding to make it easy for women to make the decision to come along. In In other words, I had the accommodation all sorted. I had food included. All they had to do was turn up because there's that kind of momentum that you need to overcome to just get started. And in the end, I've just decided that's just a lot of work for the organiser. And I'm also at the point where I kind of want to hand this project over to some – I want to mentor the next female leaders of this sport. But I just set such a high bar. I need, I need, I need to be more pragmatic and and and make it easier for others to to step up to date.

It's been an absolute joy, and the women that I have met and also the women who've been inspired to step up now are everything was worth it just to see that happening. It's such a joy, it's

got to be so rewarding I've always said the best job I ever had paid the least amount of money I was an instructor for Outward Bound, which you have in Australia and New Zealand, but I was an instructor for them when I came out of college for, you know, and I made 50 bucks a day and I would take, it was mostly 15 to 18 year olds out into the wilderness for a month. And we'd teach river skills and mountain skills and rock skills. And, and, you know, basically they ended up running the program at the end, you know, you're teaching them all the navigation and how to cook and all that. And eventually they kind of take it over and you're just observing. Serving, and I always just felt like, man, I can't believe they're paying me for this. It was just so rewarding. I always felt like I was learning more than I was teaching. You get what you give, right? Right. That's, I guess, what I'm trying to say.

Is it just when you give like that, it's, it seems like you get back so much more? That's got to be really inspiring to see that. And just, I would imagine these, these women are incredibly grateful, and thankful, and happy, and they are

I but the one one thing I continue to struggle with, you know, I'm always blown away by the reaction of the attendees, even people who weren't sure who turn up, they, they, they say, I didn't realize what I was missing in this community until I got to fly with just a bunch of women. It's super hard to articulate it. And I even think that if, if Kirsten from five years ago, who was refusing to attend these women's events that were being run when I was a novice pilot, you know, could, What would I say to her to get her to get on board? I don't know that I could because that journey to understand that sometimes spending time with a bunch of women is just re-energizing enough to then push you further when you're in a different environment.

Yeah, I struggle to articulate the benefit that it brings. It

almost seems like, you know, when all those years when I ran a boat, we, it became really important and really obvious that we needed females involved on the crew side because of energy and crew is three people, you know, but if it was three guys, it didn't work. It wasn't, it wasn't really right. We wouldn't, we weren't really nailing it with the, with the clients I'm talking about is a commercial operation, and it would just, everything went better energy-wise if there's a balance, balance.

And that's—this is, this is the other thing that I am trying to, to, to shift, is that some people are, are thinking that this is all about women and you're getting, you're getting government grants for women. What about the men? It's like, it's just—it's actually just about rebalancing the gender representation, because an all-women group will not do better than an all-men group. It's just rebalancing that so that we get a good balance of what women bring to a group and what men bring to a group. And sometimes it's even the act of it being explicit that you and I are different and therefore we bring different attributes to the table, whereas if you're in a homogenous group, sometimes it's you don't take the time to consider that but yeah gender balance is is the goal here

Kirsten, I've asked this of a few other female pilots that we've had on the show, and we've gotten some great answers, and also I, but I'm still confused by it, and I'm hoping you can help clear it up for me. Why do we not have the demographic representation in the sport that we do in life, in the world? I, I, that's still to an extent that still kind of baffles me, yeah.

And and you've had some some really interesting other guests on your show who, um, have have been able to to answer a lot of this. Isabella and Adele Honte, um, have have had very valid answers to this. Adele, Adele was talking more about the, you know, what doesn't contribute to that. So it's not a gender thing. Women can fly. They've got all the technical skills. They are lighter pilots. We represent more light pilots than men do. But I think there's two main issues that have yet to be really tackled. I'm going to talk about the easy one first, which I think is the point of our world championship, Or I should say, the format of our world championship competitions are focused on speed, and the way that our wings are built, they're built for speed.

So all of the R&D goes into faster wings. Now, the—the bigger you are, the faster you are. Faster you—the bigger, the heavier you are, the faster your wing is going to be because you can fly a big wing. Women just can never, are never going to be able to compete at the level that men can because they—they are not that heavy, and I am personally concerned about the the change in rules that that that is encouraging um pilots to to ballast up in order to fly the bigger wings because it is dangerous. I've I've broken my ankle when I was flying a small xeno just in order to to get my my weight up to fly. Now, I might add that flying the Zeno was the single best flying experience of my life, and it's very interesting to to consider how a pilot who has been restricted to flying very small wings, how she then performed on a wing that was more average size, because I'm telling you, it was chalk and cheese.

Small wings are twitchy and more prone to to little tucks and and and it feels, you can feel all the top, all the turbulence in the the air. Flying a big wing is just another beast altogether. It is magic. But I made the decision after breaking my ankle with 30 kilos that I was not going to put my health at risk anymore like that. And I've stepped back, I'll fly an M7, an extra small M7 now. For me, that's the right balance. But the problem that I'm getting at is that whilst our competition formats are focused on speed, we're not going to be... our manufacturers have no incentive to to develop wings that are that are that are made for smaller pilots, for example.

I would really like to see more focus on a row gaining format of of of competition, because when you think about it, I mean, unless your goal is to be a world champion pilot, why are you flying competitions? 100 % I agree with everybody who says that competitions teach you a set of skills that would take you a year to learn free flying. But inversely, shouldn't competitions also then be training? They should be the training for your bucket list flights, right? They should be training you how to have the best flights that that you've ever had. Now, your best flight, if you've got a bucket list flight, it's not all about speed. It's about picking your weather.

It's about picking your launch. It's about picking when you're going to launch. It's about picking your route, given either the forecast or what you're observing in the sky, strategic decision-making. I think that we're going to end up with much more rounded pilots if we have a competition format that encourages a whole lot lot of skill sets, and then the person who who wins that competition is going to be an amazing all-rounded pilot. They're not just, to be honest, they probably are going to be a larger pilot, but they have to be; they have to have all those other skills as well. So, in my mind, you know, if we we need to change things from the top in order to be more inclusive of not just our big heavy pilots throughout the entire community, so

And would, and would that would that bring more women to the the sport, or is that just something that needs a fix? Because I agree with you that needs a fix, but I wonder if that would bring more women to it. I

think it would because, um, the type of form like in my mind, I've been talking to people about my my uh golf uh competition format for quite a while, and I'm starting to see um some uh little competitions um pop up that are using waypoints points and leaving it up to the pilot to decide how they're going to string those way points together. And then they get points based on how many, how many way points they picked up along the way. In my mind, you know, the way that you could have an all-inclusive competition that doesn't take away the thrill of racing. So, cause I, I understand, to be honest, I don't race very much because I don't have enough pilots that are at my speed, but I hear competition pilots get get hooked on racing.

We don't want to take that away, but we just want to create events that all the rest of us can have fun at as well. If you had an event where everyone launches from the same launch, They take off whenever they want, because one of the most stressful parts of the current format is having to take off in that short period of time, and then possibly being in in the super gaggle, uh, with 120, 30 pilots in the air. That's super stressful. If, if you could remove some of that stress and give pilots the freedom to take off whenever they wanted, start their flight whenever they wanted, if they want to race with a with a bunch of pilots, then they can, they can do that. But it just means all the other pilots get to... it's, it's about the, how do you get your, how do you get into competitions without, without that stress of being on launch, when all those pilots who are looking really serious and looking down at their instruments and they're struggling to get all their waypoints in before the – and then they've got to get into the gear.

You know, they've got everything set up so that they – it's just – it's highly stressful. I think that turns a lot of people off. And when that scene is all male and you're one of few women, that's even more intimidating. Sure, yeah. So the idea of like just taking off and getting points for however many waypoints you got, and maybe— in my mind, the goal would be you get a bonus if you all land at the designated landing zone, which means you get that party atmosphere as well, and everybody's high-fiving each other because maybe you just got two waypoints, but you landed at the LZ, and someone else who's like done a tour of the whole area and has collected a hundred waypoints and is the absolute hero of the day, they're having the same party. You know, to me, that's about inclusivity, and that's going to get more women into it. You

know Marco's been doing this thing down in Valle that I think he calls it the XC Sky Race, that's kind of along those lines. I went down the last couple years and participated in it before the Monarca, and it's really fun, you see? So there's all the wings are handicapped, so there's—there's he doesn't have the formula totally right yet, but it's in a perfect world it wouldn't matter what wing you're on, you know? So in other words, a B could could very easily beat a CCC wing because it's because of the handicap, and the handicap is very fair, and you're—you really have to get home. You're penalized massive amounts if you don't—if if you don't close the triangle, which just makes it because he doesn't have the, the personnel to deal with retrieve, you know? So, um, so you're, you're basically, if once the algorithm is perfect, how it should work is the best XC pilot.

So that's not the best competition pilot, but the best XC pilot will win this competition. You get four, you get four scores instead of, you know, if it's, I think it's a six six or seven day comp, but only four scores count. So a couple of days you can really push it, or if you've blown it, you can kind of dial it back. And, you know, so there's a lot, there's still all the strategy and there's still all the competition, but there's a lot less stress because you decide when you launch, you decide how you're going to fly. You're going to set, you decide where you want to go. And then you get to see, oh man, I blew that day, you know, so-and-so did this kind of triangle and, you know, cause you have to decide the weather. I don't know about you, but I've never, I don't pay any attention to the weather if it's a comp or if it's a world cup or that kind of thing, because it doesn't matter.

You've got to fly the task. I mean, you can't wait for the day to get a little bit better on launch. You're launching when everybody else is launching. And so you're not paying attention to a lot of the things that you really need to pay attention to, to be a good XC pilot. And a lot of it's kind of follow the leader, you know, and a lot of it's just, you know, you got to get the good, good enough technical skills to follow, you know, to stay in the gaggle. Really well, and then be able to break late in the game, so everybody knows the same things. And whereas this other format is, it's really quite fun, it's quite a bit more relaxing, and it's, but you're still learning a lot, you're still pressing a lot of bar, you're still racing fast because you know you've got a limited amount of time to go as big as you can possibly go.

So that doesn't take away, like, speed is a valuable skill to learn if you want to get the most out of of your day, you have to be fast. So I'm not, I'm not at all saying that we don't need that; I just think that it's one of a a gamut of skills that, um, a good XC pilot, um, needs, um, like you say, I like that, the idea of of that, um, it sounds like some kind of a

mix maybe between like Bruce's weightless comps that they've been doing, and there's—there's a few formats of those—and maybe kind of what Marco's doing, like the one I was just talking about where we, we kind of put the pieces together in a, in a style that's going to reward the best pilot, because the best pilot, yeah, isn't the—doesn't necessarily mean you're the, you're the biggest guy, and then you know, the best, the best pilot makes, uh, makes the most sense of the day, right?

A hundred percent. The the other, the other aspect that I, I think probably needs a bit more discussion if we want to understand why we don't have that many, many women in this sport, is is the the subtle subtleties of, well-meaning sexism, uh, which um, might be rushing to help a female, a novice female pilot on launch, which pretty much sends her the message that I, I need help. I'm not, I'm not good enough to do this by myself. We all know what a head game, uh, flying is, and it's the most subtle things that can make a difference. I was helping, helping a friend out with a, a, a licensed course and observed the same type of behavior, not from the instructors.

Actually, there was a couple of other people they're helping, but when, when the female students are being helped more than the male students, they're being robbed of opportunities to build confidence, even though those helping think they're actually doing a good thing, they're, they're not helping at all. They're

trying to do the right thing, aren't they? Right.

But, but actually, you know, we just need to, to, to, I mean, we just need to be thinking about making small mistakes as opportunity as learning opportunities, uh, and opportunities to build confidence. So

give it, give us something, give us something exacting here that, you know, that, uh, the males listening to the, what, what should be the overriding? What should we be thinking about on launch? Give us some concrete advice that, you know, Cause there's a lot of nuance there, isn't it? You know, so it sounds to me like, if you know, if it's just, if this is a, if this is an inexpensive mistake, let them make the mistake. You know, only really get involved if it's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're not clipped in, right? You're not?" Yeah, something major.

It's also about like letting anybody, uh, know that if they need help, you're there. You're there to help, um, you know, and also something that happens, uh, quite often—less so these days, but so certainly more when I was a novice pilot, is instead of – if you see a pilot, and this applies to any pilot, getting ready to launch and you can see that it might be helpful if you fluff for them, don't just go up and start pulling the wing out. Ask them. Just ask. Would you like a hand? Yeah, I like that for me. Yeah, totally. Some people hate their wing being touched. So in any case, you should always ask. But also, you know, this is my, my, my style on my fly-ins is to just reassure, right?

So I know you know how to do this, but let me know if you want any tips, but if you're happy to give it a go yourself, go for it. It's just empowering them to ask for help, letting them know that you're free, you're available to give the help, but kind of at the same time, reassure them that, you know, they're a licensed pilot. You've done this before. So something like, clearly you've got

this, you know, clearly you're doing it right. If you need any help, I'm here.

Exactly. Okay.

All right. So do you, in your experience, has this behavior, as well-meaning as it is, driven women away from the sport? In other words, if we just fixed that? Because again, these are people you're talking about that are already there. Is there anything we could do to just get them there?

Yes. So, sorry, you reminded me of the other point, role models. The more visibility you can provide of other people like them, whoever your minority is that you're trying to encourage more of, they need to see that this is totally a sport for them. And they need to see that by seeing other people of that minority. So we're talking about women right now. So they need to see other women interest. Here's an interesting statistic, so our look our state average, uh, for women, uh, participating in paragliding is eight percent, and in my local club, and then any VHGC, we have double that. We have, um, 16 women. So, what are we doing differently? We've got a large number of women in our club; we've got a large number of, uh, women who are locals, who are on launch every day, and and when you have novice pilots turning up and they turn around, they see that there are other women in this sport, that it's not unusual for a woman to be in this sport, then they put, they think it's worth it.

They think it's worth the effort. Also, they've got people to reach out to if they're feeling a little bit intimidated by asking some of the guys. There are people there, there are women pilots there who are more than happy to help. But when I say help, really, it's just like asking for some tips. Like, you know, I—you know, I—a common, um, complaint is, "I just don't feel strong enough to control my wing." I've—there are techniques that you can use as a smaller person to, to, to improve, um, your control over the wing, or even just advice about small wings. But the point is, role models are so important, and I didn't understand that until I ran the, the women's, um, fly-ins. That is what's going to make a huge difference, and it just requires getting some momentum into that critical volume.

But that will also have a huge impact.

Yeah. Momentum. You need momentum there. Get the snowball rolling and it'll grow. You mentioned Cedar, who's like an extreme extrovert, you know, so for him with his connections and media presence and all the things he's done in that world, it was incredibly easy for him to get top-notch mentors right off the bat because he he just walked right up and was like, you got to teach me how to do this. Otherwise I'm going to kill myself. So you got to save my life. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't, that wasn't his wording, but that's what all we, we were all hearing that like, Jesus, this guy needs a mentor. He's going to kill himself. And, but I would, you know, but there's also a lot of introverts in everything, not just our sport. And I would think, you know, one of the, one of the questions I get all the time is, Hey, how do I find a mentor?

And I would imagine this is great because cause you're, you're providing a platform. Oh, here they are. I got to sign up for this week long fly in and I get to ask questions. I think a lot of people have trouble with that. It's not, you know, and I, I think back to my own learning and my own progression and just, God, I was lucky, but I grew up in sports. And so I was, I was comfortable with asking these pilots who were so much better than I was to help me out. But if I hadn't been, you know, You get kicked out of the the nest in this sport way too early, right? I mean, we just—we get our little whatever, P2 or whatever the equivalent is in Australia, okay? There you go, you don't know shit, oh.

Exactly, and and that that area is so out of all these uh fly-ins, I I I write up a summary for the season of all the lessons I learned, and the lesson one of the big pieces that I think is relevant across all genders, across all countries, is that transition from school to club. It's super hard; it's super hard to do it safely, and it's super hard to just just to be able to turn up at a club meeting or or an LZ and and be brave enough to say, "I know nothing, I really need some help." And and the thing is that these are a bunch of people who are pretty excited about the day ahead and kind of have their own plans as well, so you've got to ask for time. And one thing that I think has has kind of altered this for a a lot of us. When I started flying in 2007,

the quality of weather forecasting was nowhere near it is today. So we spent a lot of time turning up to sites and not flying because the forecast didn't work out and then spending a lot of time talking to people. And that's where I got to meet a lot of senior pilots who shared a lot of knowledge about flying, or the site, or even, even progression, because we had time to sit there and chew the fat. Today, the forecasting is so good, people just turn up when they fly. Well, this is the case in Bright anyway. Uh, Skysight is so accurate for us, you—you can—you just—you turn up and you fly. That's the way it goes. And I think that our PG2s kind of miss out on what I got the benefit of; they're not getting to the fat on launch as much. Yeah.

Right.

That's important. Yeah. You, I read it on your about page. It all hasn't, it all hasn't been roses. Uh, you, you talked about when you first got into this, you had thoughts and beliefs on how to encourage women and you, you got some blowback for that. Can you explain that?

Uh, yeah. Uh, so what I'm referring to there is what some people are referring to as was bikini gate so oh this was a

thing the

Back in, I think it was 2015, uh, or '14, I can't remember. There was a—I can't remember, it was a PWC or a championship, I think it was a PWC in, uh, maybe Bulgaria or, um, Macedonia, somewhere, somewhere, uh, in Eastern Europe, and I was following it as a very, very keen pilot to see what was going on. And, and I noticed a photo that had been published by the competition and it was of a woman bending over in a bikini, fluffing a comp pilot's wing. And I was just really disappointed because I'd been really excited to see the women that they were covering on this competition and feeling like, you know, this was something that I should aspire to.

But this, this photograph, you know, The focus was clearly on this woman's crotch, and I just felt super disappointed. And so I, whether naively or not, posted something to say, "Hey, I think we can do better than this, you know? How about we cover some of the female parts instead?" It's just, it's not great. And and and what I was exposed to, because that was a public post and I don't generally write public posts anymore, was the number of people in the community who who really objected to me calling that out. And, you know, also this is kind of back in the earlier days of social media where I didn't understand what I was opening myself up to and I just got hammered. And Ed Ewing from XEMag, he actually came out in my defence and he got blowback too, which kind of reflected on Cross Country Magazine well.

So I don't think he expected that kind of blowback either. Though it was, you know, a few years later, now I understand that if I got that level of emotion out of people, then clearly I was picking on a nerve there. And and I've, you know, from that experience, I guess, you know what else has happened since then is we've kind of understood this, this theory of of filter bubbles, where on social media you tend to connect with people who think very much like you, and you can be lulled into this feeling that the world is completely aligned with your belief systems and things like that.

right exactly

Uh, so that was a a lesson for me, but also I think a valuable lesson in in, you know, not everybody comes from a culture where we aim for gender parity, or we we value everybody equally. Uh, I'm not saying at all that, you know, in Australia we are there, but I think most people agree that, you know, that's something we want to aim for. And there are just, there are people out, you know, cultures out there that just don't see that at all. So, but that, that's kind of driven me to, to, I guess, stand up and say these things and, and, and I guess stand up for pilots who might be feeling intimidated or disadvantaged by those comments and just calling it out. Maybe not everyone will agree with me, but there's going to be a whole lot of people who are going to go, oh, shit, I didn't realize that would be so offensive.

That's not my intention at all. I will think more carefully about the things I say.

Yeah, you can stick your finger, feet into some places. Sometimes it gets a lot of blowback, but sometimes they still need to be said.

Yes, and this is what I have learned a lot lately. Sometimes you don't, you don't raise things to, to, well, you, you might start out thinking that you're making a point to change people's minds. I think that's a dangerous intention to have because you, you know, if it's an emotive topic, people are going to, to bite back, and that can be soul-destroying. And, and, and, and I can't really overstate how stressful personally it was, that, that first incident on social media that I had. I, you know, that I, I felt brave. I felt brave, and then there was just one comment too many on social media that set me over the edge, and I was a balling mess at work because I've read one too many bad comment comments.

But I think if you, if you can step back and understand that we need brave people in our communities to, to say some uncomfortable things, and when people bark with emotion, it just means you've hit a nerve, which probably means you know, you've, you've got them thinking about the right things. It can be tough to, to receive some of that, but we need brave people to, to talk about uncomfortable topics, and

Now they, what they call the silent majority, we're

all we're

all in the silent majority everybody in here you know it's it's everybody on the on the fringes that are that are barking so loud but yeah well tell Tell me about lifestyle. Let's switch topics completely here. The last time I spoke to you, you were just moving to Bright and you were setting up in this cute little tiny home that I see in your background. You've really oriented your life around flying and lifestyle. Tell me about that a little bit. uh

Yeah, so my departure from, uh, what I would say a pretty stock standard life started when I decided to to to step out of full-time permanent work and into contract work. So I've been working as a business analyst in in tech for probably the last five, maybe must be like 10 years now, uh, working for big blue chip corporates, getting paid a lot of money, getting sick and tired of being told that I couldn't take six weeks leave to go travel the States, which is what I was doing at the time. So I just got to a point where my boss had actually said to me, Kirsten, I can't keep giving you this amount of leave. You're a permanent employee. This is not the deal. And I went, you're right.

It's not the Denali should be a contractor. I'm going to quit and become a contractor. So I did that and then got my six weeks leave and then came back and said, so do do you want to employ me as a contractor? They said yes. So I got exactly what I wanted with more money because I was a contractor, not having to do all those horrible personal development reviews. And it just seemed like the universe was telling me you're going in the right direction. And then I started to realize that if I, you know, took different contracts with different companies, I could take bigger breaks. I could take a few months off. And it was, you know, during one of those stints I also managed, as I mentioned before, I got to do some work in the States. It was whilst I was over there in the States, the tiny house movement originated in the States, that I got the opportunity to spend a couple of nights in an Airbnb, a tiny house, and I just knew, knew that that was what I wanted to do.

So interestingly, at the same point in my career where I feel like I reached the highest accolade where I got offered a job in San Francisco with a company that was going to sponsor me there, I turned around and said to him, no, I want to go home and build a tiny house. and I think he thought I was insane. Wait a minute. That's not

right. You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to take the paycheck. I just offered you

a job, yeah, with a visa. Anyway, so that's what I did. I quit that contract and I went back home and I started to build a tiny house. Actually, whilst I was in San Francisco, I was doing a lot of planning and designing and talking to an architect, The architect of my tiny house lives in Ohio, in um, in California as well. And I, so by the time I got home, I had ordered my trailer, uh, the the chassis, and I'd found somewhere to build. Actually, this is pretty interesting, so my parents don't have a property that I can build on. My sister, I didn't, didn't have anybody who had a property that was suitable to build on. So at that point in time, again, tiny houses were, were only just becoming to come to get bigger.

And there was a tiny house Facebook group in Australia, and I just reached out to that group and just said, look, I don't know if this is possible, but if anybody has a property they'd be willing to let me build on, you'll get to watch a tiny house get built. It'd be really great if it was within 20 minutes of where I was living. I had to move back in with mum and dad to make this happen. And maybe within 10 minutes of a hardware store in Australia, the big chain here is Bunnings. That would be great. And this man appeared and he He had an acreage within 20 minutes' drive of my parents' home. I could see Bunnings from the property. Meant to be. Yeah, he had a family who were all super excited about it. He was an ex-builder, so he not only gave me space and some expertise,

oh, he was a hoarder, so he had five of every tool. Tool, so at the beginning of my day, he'd come out to me before he started work and he'd say, "So, what are you going to do today?" And I'd tell him, and he'd go, "Right, how are you going to do that?" And I'd tell him what I just YouTubed, and he'd go, "Right, yes, you could do it that way, or you could do it this way." And he proceeded to tell me exactly how to do it, and he's like, "So, you're going to need these tools. Do you have those tools?" And I'd be like, "No." It's like, "I can lend you one." He'd come back, give me a five-minute lesson, and he worked on site, and then he'd come back at lunchtime and and go, "So, how'd you go?" And I'd have all my questions saved up. Uh, it was just honestly You couldn't, you couldn't make that happen again. So I got, I learned to build on the job. I don't know how it would have worked out if I hadn't met Wayne and and, but the thing was that he, he taught me exactly the way I needed to, to learn, which was not being shown for hours on end, just a quick five minute lesson and then leave me to try and sort out some of those problems do

This shelf, run this wire, put this sink in piece by piece, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So you built it, you...

Were the contractor, yeah?

I built 95 of it myself. The only things I employed someone to do is the roof, and that's really because, you know, you can't ask friends to help you with the roof. It's up there with asking them to help you move; nobody really wants to do it. So I paid someone to help me with the roof, I paid an electrician to do the wiring, and a plumber to do the gas plumbing, and that's it. That's smart.

yeah that's smart you don't really want to touch some of that stuff You don't want to burn your house down or you don't want to flood it or you don't want the rain to bring your roof in. But you're not – in the future, are you moving this thing around or do you – No.

No. It's not built for moving very often. So at the moment, I am on my friend's property who – Wally Kiriokono. He owns Bright Flight. So it's paragliding school right next door to me. And he actually just, his property has this vacant paddock next door, which the previous owners, who were also paragliders, had leveled. It's on a bit of a slope, but they'd leveled it thinking they were going to put cabins on it and never got around to it. So I got this beautiful spot that I can see Mystic, which is the main paragliding launch here, and all I need to do is look out my window and see if they're flying. And I know if it's time to get to get out there or not. Um, so I'm very privileged as to where I am. I'm pretty happy where I am, uh, but I guess I love it so much now that I'm hoping to to get my own little parcel of land.

But as we were just discussing before, anywhere that, uh, is, uh, enjoyable to live in that has access to internet, uh, a lot of city folks after COVID are, um, are looking to to make that transition now, also because remote working is now so much more accessible. And that's, that's pretty much how, what, um, what I've settled on here. I because I live, uh, very cheaply, uh, my rent, all I'm renting is land, so that's not very expensive. I have solar, so I'm off-grid. I do take town water. That's, that's all I do. But I've got a composting toilet. I don't need sewage or anything like that. My living costs are very low, so I only work 20 hours a week remotely for a disability tech startup in Sydney, because I'm still kind of earning a professional salary, but I don't have the costs.

I don't have to work as many hours. So beautiful, yeah. Also, they're very flexible, so then they know how much I love to fly, so I can one day say, "You know, tomorrow looks like an amazing flying day. I'm going to take the day off," just so you know. And they go, "Great, send us photos." Try

to try to give me, you know, rather than, "oh, just do it," give me some, you know, for those that are listening, they're like, "man, I need to cut the cord, I need to do that." Give us some brass tacks of advice on how people can do that, like Like, for example, how much did you spend building your tiny home and what would it cost, what would it take for someone to be able to, you know, cut their corporate job or leave whatever, you know, their nine to five and do something like you've done?

So paragliding has taught me a lot about myself. And one thing I've come to know is that I take a long time to come to a decision and I need the space to be comfortable to do that. And then sometimes I need to be able to take big steps slowly, so for me that was about how I was explaining before; I didn't just turn up one day and go, "I'm quitting my job and I'm moving to to bright." I, that, that's what I actually thought about a lot—that I wanted to quit my job and move to bright, but it always got stuck on the, "Oh, but what work am I going to do down there?" Because it's a, it's a, it's a little, it's a hospitality town, it's a tourist town, right? There's no tech, no tech work here. And then how was I going to afford a mortgage? And the solution I settled on has overcome those in a very different way.

So I started by going, well, I think contracting provides me with more flexibility. So I moved from permanent work to contracting and I worked out that that was fine. I didn't actually require the security of a full-time job, but some people do. For some people that's important. It wasn't for me. So you can take baby steps along the way, you know, and then moving from contracting, you know, long term to taking smaller contracting jobs and and then that, I mean, what that allowed me to do was to actually create a bit of a name for myself. The type of work I do in tech is is quite niche, and if you can kind of get a network of people who will recommend you to other workplaces and other organizations, then that makes it a little bit easier to uh to get that job. Now, I must admit, like this wasn't all smooth sailing.

I I went through this period where I was just getting contract job after contract job; it's just like the stars were aligning for me, uh, and that actually allowed me, like I was getting paid so much that I could save enough to then afford to take, because I I was building, I kind of went back and forth between building full-time and taking up contract jobs when I ran out of money, uh, but I was I probably took about 12 months off altogether to build. Obviously, that's not the most efficient way to get a tiny house, but the process of learning to build was nonetheless a valuable life skill. I did that because I got those high-paying contract jobs beforehand. So I guess the other thing is that if you start, and I've observed this with a lot of other people too, once you start to follow your passions, The stars tend to align, and the universe tends to deliver things that will keep you going down that path.

So don't get too upset, don't get too focused on having to have it all planned out before you step onto that path. Just take baby steps and see how it feels. Does it feel right? Is, you know, are our opportunities being presented to you that are pretty much the universe's way of saying, "Keep going, you're on the right path here." And that's exactly what happened to me. However, at the point where I moved to contract work, I built my tiny house. I moved the house down to to bright. I gave myself the summer off because I'd been working really hard. And then I was just like, well, so far the universe has delivered work to me. So it's just going to happen. And started to run out of money. I started trying, I had to make more of an effort to try and find work. And at the point where I was just like, oh my God, I've made such a mistake. I can't get any work down here.

You know, I, I, I, I linked in post, which again, I did this, I did something quite unusual. Most people use LinkedIn. And if you're a professional, you know, this site, And if you're not, then you have no idea what I'm talking about. It's basically social media for professionals; mostly people post job descriptions on LinkedIn, and I flipped that on its head and I wrote a big post about who I was and all the things that I'd done, both personal and professional, and the fact that I was looking for some remote work. And somebody turned up and said, "Actually, I've got a startup that I can't really guarantee you a full-time job out of, but if you want to be be flexible, we can make this work." And we have, and that I've been there for three years, and that's it's that's what gives me my flexible lifestyle. At the same time, one of the one of the the benefits of COVID is now working remotely is becoming a lot more acceptable.

I don't feel the same pressure that I have to stay with that company more any, you know, as much. I still love working for there, but I feel like I'm now set up well to take advantage of remote working anywhere I

like how Yeah. You say the stars align. I mean, you know, a ship and harbor safe, but that's not what they're built for. Is it? That's right. And I mean, I, I, for some reason, when you were telling that story, I was thinking about, I think a lot about the, you know, the two little people we have on our shoulders. When we fly, you've got the one barking at you that you're going to die. And you've got the one barking at you that you're going to be fine. And a lot of flying for me seem it's the same with life. You have to, you know, there are times when you should listen to the other one. There are times when you've got to listen to both. There are times when one of them is just absurd and you've got to set them aside and listen to the other for that period of time. But it seems like when you're doing the right thing, it does seem like resistance kind of peels away, doesn't it?

It just feels right. Right. And we have to I think we can incorporate that into our flying. It's often not obvious, you know, which if you should be listening to the devil or the the angel, which which one's which. But it's it sounds like your experience is a lot like what we deal with just when we go for a flight. It's, you know, when you're doing the right thing, it lines up.

I refer to my experiences in the air when I am being challenged on the ground all the time, all the time. I think about, you know, the times when I listened to my gut feeling or I, or else I listened to people telling me that I couldn't do something, you know, that it, this is what I mean, like paragliding teaches you a lot about yourself. You, When you're in the air and you're working hard just to keep the wing open, and you're two kilometers above the earth, and you're sitting there wondering what the hell prompted you to to put yourself in such a precarious position, you really get to understand your psyche. You have to challenge yourself, you have to find ways to work through that type of fear and and for you know that the the challenging yourself, you know, for me, what I do when I'm in those types of situations is I go through the right.

Do you see anybody else falling out of the sky? No. Are you the least qualified, you know, at least experienced pilot in the air? No. Do you even and see anybody taking a collapse? No. I think you're going to be fine, right?

Right, right. There's a—there's a lot going on between our two ears, isn't it? That we often have to just kind of set aside—it's just attitude. It's a lot of—it's irrational all the time. Yes, there's a lot of irrational fear there. You have, uh, I don't know, I don't know your history with this, but you—you mentioned on your website, uh, fear. How do you deal with fear? How do you teach this to your students and the—the women that join you for the fly-ins? How do you—what do you think about—with what do you think about fear? I

Think fear is, is complex and it, you can't really tell somebody how to deal with fear. You can encourage them to unpack it and I, I went through um a period, uh, of, of, of allowing fear to dominate my flying and I, I think if you've been flying for more than a few years, most people, people have been through such a period. Mine was triggered by doing an SIV at a point in time when I was probably in intermediate syndrome. And the amusing thing is that your dear friend, Bruce Marks, was my mentor at this time at the Bright Open. And he was very patient and took everything quite lightly. But I remember after one task, I had found myself over Apex on my my brand new Delta 2, which was the the next wing I'd had after the Delta.

Once I was feeling very confident on this wing, and I'd been excited because I told him that I had um suffered uh an enormous collapse where I looked up, my wing was just a ball of washing. And after watching uh Jocky Sanderson SIV videos, somehow I'd magically been able to refer back to the stall part and and execute a stall, and I'd flown away and I was safe, and I was pretty much going, "Aren't I good?" with Bruce, and he just looked at me and laughed and went, "Yeah, let's let's just like rewind a bit on that, shall we? Because you know, it might have worked it well, but it could have gone really bad. Have you done an SIV yet?" And I was like, "No, no, I wouldn't like..." Yeah, you should probably go do an SIV. So I I did, I did go. I followed his advice and went and did an SIV, and um and and actually had some issues.

I so my the the lesson I didn't know then that I've learned since is that you shouldn't, it's not really advisable to do your first SIV on an ENC. And even today when I do um SIV, I take along an EMB just to warm up on, because I I screwed up spins and big big ears, for god's sake, uh into uncontrolled spins. That that what what happened was I found um a situation where I froze. The the incident that I was excited to tell Mark uh Bruce about was I didn't freeze and I sorted ordered it out and I'm going to be fine, doing the SIV and finding a situation where I froze then made me think that I now had discovered situations where I might not be okay because I might freeze to my death type thing.

And after that, I was just really afraid of every single wing tic-tac, any kind of turbulence, which I couldn't work it out why. And I kept talking to to people about it. I kept talking to people about what I was afraid of, what had changed, and so it—it wasn't until Gaynor Skoman actually, she—she said to me, she was the one that released me by just picking up the right thing, which was, "Kirsten, you—you may freeze again, but I guarantee you will not freeze as badly. Next time that happens, you will deal with it better." And that's what unlocked locked me. So I don't have an answer to to everyone about their fear. I—I would most—my advice is just keep talking to people about it.

Eventually, you'll find somebody who just says something, and they're not going to even realize how profound it's going to be, that is going to unlock it for you. And—and that's what I hear from lots of other people, like they—they eventually find the—the thing that unlocks it for them, and then they can move forward. It still took me quite a long time to get back into it, but that released me and I could move on with my flying.

Kristen, I've got a bunch of questions here and I'm just going to pick out a few. We just did this survey and by the time you're, and I did, by the time this show goes live, we'll have done the survey weeks and weeks and weeks ago, but this just came out and I asked for new questions and I'd love to fire some of them at you. Is that okay? Sure. Does free flight make aspects, make other aspects of your life better or worse? so work relationships etc better why do

You know what? No, why? Um, because it puts things into perspective.

That's, uh, that's the holy grail, isn't it? Perspective.

Yeah, things that we get bogged down into, bring it up a level in the big scheme of things, that's often not that important, important.

Why do you fly, uh?

the release, I, the release and just the freedom I find in nature, it is, it is being released from the shackles of all of our worries on the ground and occupying a space that is, it truly a privilege to be in. And the best flights are when you get to share the air with eagles and, and, and touch the clouds and, and see, and see the earth like, you, you end up with a connection for the area that you're flying over that you would never get on the ground. It's not, I mean, that's just an additional connection. Hiking is another additional connection, but it's just such a privilege.

If you had no restrictions on your life right now—financial or pandemic, pandemic or otherwise—where would you go? Fly, if you just... you pack your bags, you can go tomorrow, you can go anywhere in the world. Where would you fly, and why? Either...

Slovenia or France? Um, Slovenia, because a friend of mine was showing me a flight he did on Avery, and I was, oh god, it was—it looked, just looked amazing. And to have his commentary at the same time, I was like, "Man, I've got to go there." But France, because I learned to fly there. I never returned there as a competent pilot, and I feel like I've robbed myself of such an opportunity. And, and I have friends there now who are pretty much saying, "Come, you know, we'll take you flying, we'll give you a place to stay." And I, yeah, I just, I haven't taken up those opportunities. And I guess also, there's—there was one video that I watched as a novice. I don't remember exactly who was in it, but somebody was flying in France, France, uh, over Mont Blanc, and I just thought that was the best thing ever.

And I mean, it There are still, it's probably for many pilots who have managed to do that, it probably is still the best thing ever. But that's what's inspired me to keep pushing through. A lot of the fear is this, this idea that one day I might be able to fly the face of these rock cliffs. And oh yeah, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't achieved that dream yet.

You'll have to, uh, it's only, it's only a flight away once this pandemic gets under control. I think there's gonna be a lot of us itching to go do these kind of things. Final one, Kirsten, what skill or thing have you learned from life or any other sport that has helped you become a better pilot? Oh,

That's a good one. Normally, it's the other way around. I, I spent a lot of time thinking what paragliding teaches me, but what, what has life taught?

Me, let's do both.

Paragliding has taught me to listen to my gut feeling. Feeling the number of times when just because you don't understand what it's telling you, you don't—again, you don't need to know everything, you just need to listen to your intuition and make. You can analyze it later, but in the heat of the moment, just listen to your gut feeling. Sometimes your gut is saying, "Go for it, you can do it," and your head's saying, "This is dangerous, don't do it." Sometimes it's the other way around, where your head's going, "Everyone else is doing it, you should totally do it," and your gut's going, "This is not your day." Uh, yeah.

I like listening to the gut.

Yeah, I think sometimes also, um, uh, it, your gut might be telling you things that your, your head just doesn't want to hear, yeah? So, but anyway, probably what life has taught me is that I can do hard things. Building a tiny house is really, really, really hard, uh, and I, and I did it. And I, I think like if, if there's something that I want to achieve in paragliding, um, yeah, some things are really hard. Uh, but if you stick to it and, and you are determined, you can do anything you want.

Excellent. Kirsten, what a delight. It's awesome to sit here and see you. Uh, it's been, like I said, it's been a while and congratulations on your tiny home and these wonderful courses, fly-ins that you're doing. Those sound awesome. I'm I'm hoping somebody listening on this end of the, you know, in other parts of the world will be inspired by your story and set up similar things because that needs to happen more. We need more women in the sport and we need more people like you. Thanks so much. That was a blast. Cool.

It was fun. Thanks very much, Gabe.

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