Emma Henderson shares her inspiring journey from a childhood fascination with flight to becoming one of fewer than 500 female airline captains worldwide. She recounts her path into aviation, flying celebrities and royalty, and founding the global charity Project Wingman to support NHS staff during the pandemic. Now an in-demand speaker and author, Emma advocates for “grounded leadership” – a powerful blend of humanity, humility and humor that she believes is essential for today’s leaders. Her story is a testament to resilience, purpose and the transformative power of following your passions.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:02
Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m joined today by Emma Henderson, M D E, who is the co founder and CEO of project wingman. So Emma Henderson’s m d e’s journey in aviation began at 10 when watching the Space Shuttle Enterprise land sparked a lifelong passion for flight. She went on to become one of fewer than 500 female airline captains worldwide, piloting jets for over a decade across Europe, even flying royal alien celebrities, balancing her high pressure career with military family life and raising three children, Emma’s resilience only grew when the pandemic grounded flights. She channeled her dedication into founding project, wingman, a global charity support, supporting NHS staff, earning her an MD In recognition. Today, Emma shares her story of courage, leadership and purpose, inspiring others to reach their full, inspiring others to reach their full potential. In her book, grounded, she reflects on a career of soaring highs, new challenges and the drive to make a difference. Emma’s message is powerful. Flying is not something you do, flying is something you are. Emma, welcome. Thank
Emma Henderson 1:27
you. What a lovely introduction.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:32
Leave myself goose pimples there, reading that last sentence
Emma Henderson 1:37
never leaves you. It never leaves.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:40
So this is actually our first time meeting as well. You know, I like keeping it really organic. We haven’t done any like rehearsed. We’re going to talk about this, we’re going to talk about that, and we’ll mention that, we’ll mention this. So, yeah, this, this is me getting to know you as well.
Emma Henderson 1:56
That’s great as I think it’s often the best way, actually, that’s how you get to know people better
Mark McBride-Wright 2:01
it is, isn’t it? It’s like when, when you meet someone for a coffee for the first time, or you have a virtual chat, which LinkedIn is brilliant for I absolutely love that sometimes it’s the things that you share in those first initial sessions together that really builds the scaffold in between, between the two people so, yeah, I mean, I love, I love the what you’ve done and the sound to your career. It’s, certainly, it’s absolutely fascinating. And obviously aviation is one of the sectors that you know engineering. It underpins, you know, it couldn’t happen without engineering. And so you you have over 30 years of experience in the aviation sector, and being one of fewer than 500 female airline captains in the world, what inspired your passion for flying, and how did your career
Emma Henderson 2:56
evolve? Well, I think it was that. I mean, I know the initial sort of big moment was when I saw Space Shuttle land at Stansted. I was 10 years old. It was 1983 and 200,000 people turned up to see this aircraft that, you know, was going into space, and gone into space, sort of tour the world. It was a really big deal. And when you think about the fact that in the you know, the 1980s everything we knew about the world fitted into a book that was about that thick, and it was called the Encyclopedia of the world. You know, we didn’t have the internet and we didn’t have other ways of finding information out. So when something like that lands at your local airport, you go and look at it, and it was impressive. And it was, I know I was a bit obsessed with flight anyway, because, you know, I joined the young ornithologist club on holiday up at coiling bridge when I still, yeah, with the Ospreys, and I am, I just was fascinated. I did projects at school. I’ve got, I’ve still got this primary school. I think it must have been project on flight, where I’ve cut out pictures of montgovia balloons and stuck them onto pages that say the things that fly. It’s definitely a primary school project, because it’s done on that colored sugar paper that you get at primary school.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:13
So it’s not just been a that, you know, the mechanical side of flying and planes. It’s been flight in general, and being up in the air that caught your imagination Absolutely
Emma Henderson 4:25
because, you know, the mongolfier balloon was fascinating to me when, you know, I was that kid that would go to the Science Museum and come back with insist on buying a cardboard book that I could make a cardboard balloon out of. So, and I don’t really know, I’m
Mark McBride-Wright 4:43
going to be naive, and is that the balloon that the Wright Brothers designed, or I don’t actually know,
Emma Henderson 4:47
the Wright the Wright brothers were the first people to fly a fixed wing aircraft. Well, it’s, it’s contested whether they really were, but know that the mongolfier brothers were in. About 17 or 1800s and they were the first people to, well, they weren’t the first people because Leonardo da Vinci designed things like balloons and helicopters, but and the Chinese have been flying hot air balloons for 1000s of years. But it was the first passenger carrying hot air balloon, I think. And it was a beautiful blue, sort of tiny, blue and gold balloon, very highly decorated, and it launched with much fanfare in a square in the middle of Paris, and was greatly applauded. And it was just for me, that was fascinating, the fact that you could challenge, I suppose, that you could challenge the expectations of what life is like and say, well, actually, we’re not going to stick to the ground. We’re going to go up in the air as well. Birds do it so we can do it.
Mark McBride-Wright 5:48
Do you know it’s fascinating that you say that, because at Roslyn Primary School in primary two, I remember doing a project on flight in Miss Brunt class. And I have, you’ve just given me a flashback to that balloon. Yeah, must have had it on display. And I’m, you know, and we must have learned about the Wright brothers at the time, and that’s why I thought it was them who, you know, created that. And that year, we also did a project with the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. And I think I joined the Y, O, C, the young ornithology, yeah, mythology,
Emma Henderson 6:24
yeah. Young ornithologist club I joined. I joined, is it Nether bridge or boat of garden? There you go. Boat of garden. RSPB, sort of bird sanctuary where Ospreys are protected. And we were up here on holiday one year, and I was fascinated with them, and my parents allowed us to join the young ornithologist class. I think we got a yellow book and some stickers,
Mark McBride-Wright 6:48
yeah, but did you also get the free bird feeder? I remember getting a bird table with it. It was or maybe I asked my dad to buy one. I don’t really know, but I remember putting bird seeds outside and then making we lived
Emma Henderson 7:01
in a geek, yeah, no, we lived in the country. I grew up in the countryside, and we had a bird table in the garden, and, you know, it was just, I don’t know. I just used to watch birds and think, how cool would that be to just go where you want? Yeah, yeah. Really good anymore. I’m gonna fly over there. How cool must that be?
Mark McBride-Wright 7:28
Yeah, when you put it like that, yeah,
Emma Henderson 7:31
obvious kind of hazards of birds of prey coming to get you and cats and wind farms and all sorts of other cars and stuff. But generally, I think being a bird is probably alright.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:47
So if you were to ever come back reincarnation, if that is a thing, you’d be a bird. Is that no did that be around? Actually,
Emma Henderson 7:53
I’d be something really cool, like a or something or dolphin. I think I might be a dolphin, because they’re really cool.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:03
They are cool. My son’s obsessed with them, actually. I mean, yeah, sonar, sonar, or radar, oh, I don’t know, echo location. I feel like, yeah, I watched Finding Nemo recently again, or Finding Dory, it’s Dory where they have the wheel in the the beluga wheel, I think in
Emma Henderson 8:28
I’ve escaped all of that adults and they work in the city, so I’ve escaped all of that, fortunately. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 8:35
that’s my life right now. Well, that and along with, you know, do it, getting to interview fun people like this yourself. So so how tell us a bit about your life in the cockpit or the well, the journey to moving into aviation so you were inspired by things that fly in general. How did you then get to be in one of the fewer than 500 female captains worldwide.
Emma Henderson 9:06
Well, it was not a straightforward journey by any means, because despite my seeming obsession with things that fly, I actually spent a lot of time sailing when I was a teenager down on the river Blackwater in Essex, but if you think about it, that’s still wind making things move. So, you know, still air flow, and so that gave me probably a better grounding, really, than I thought. But I loved sailing. Didn’t really know how to get into flying. Didn’t know there was an Air Cadets in my hometown. Didn’t know anyone who flew. I had an eight for my 18th birthday. I had a flying lesson. Loved it. And Dad said, Well, you know, I can’t afford to pay for lessons for you to get a license, and I couldn’t afford to pay for lessons. So I thought, well, I’ll go off to university and become a corporate lawyer then, because that was the other thing I kind of thought I might like to do. I mean, I don’t know how you’re supposed to choose at 18. What you’re going to do for the rest of your life anyway. But
Mark McBride-Wright 10:03
to your point as well, like flying, it’s a very well. It’s quite elitist. It’s got a high entry bar. You know that you have to have money to like, do the lessons probably
Emma Henderson 10:13
do. I mean, there are sponsored schemes now, but they’re very few and far between. But actually, remember, at the time, most flying training into Airlines was actually through sponsored schemes with VA and so that wasn’t I think doing it privately would have been, well, it was too restrictive. I just didn’t really know how to do it. And everybody was going off to university, and I thought, well, I’ll go do I don’t went to do a history degree at Leeds, and my plan was to do a law conversion when I finished. But when I was at Leeds, I found out that I could learn to fly for free if I joined the University Air Squadron. So that’s what I did. I went and signed up to become an officer cadet reservist in the Royal Air Force. So I went down to RAF finningley and spent the next couple of years flying around North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, North everywhere around Yorkshire. And that would have been the end of the story, if it hadn’t been for the fact that on the first night I was down at RF fillingly for these lectures we had to go to on a Friday night, I walked into the bar and met a guy, and 18 months later we got married. Yeah. So literally, met the guy I’ve still managed. Yeah, he’s still my current husband 30 years on, so as long as he plays his cards, right? That could keep going
Mark McBride-Wright 11:51
congratulations on 30 years
Emma Henderson 11:55
later. Yeah, so, so that kind of again, yeah, I was gonna be a Harry pilot because I had Harry pilot boots, and I went and did aptitude tests for the Air Force. So I married my husband 11 days after I graduated in a huge move of female emancipation, and we moved up to the north coast of Scotland to RAF Kinloss, and he’s in the Air Force still. And we decided to put roots down here and settle and that again, as far as I was concerned, was the end of the story. I didn’t think I’d fly again. I kind of thought, Well, that was a fun thing to have done, but that’s not what I’m going to do now. I’m going to be a wife and I’m going to arrange flowers in the mess, and I’m going to go to ladies lunches, because that’s what you do at 23 isn’t it? And then we had our children and built our house, and in a firm move of we are settling here. And a year after we moved into our house, we moved into a new house, which was in Auckland, New Zealand, on a posting, an exchange posting that we weren’t expecting to get. So it’s a military exchange. And while I was in New Zealand for three and a half years, we were there, and I came back as a fully qualified commercial pilot, because my husband said to me, if you stop smoking, which I did at the time, you can pay for your private pilot’s license in the money you stayed by not smoking. And I said, Well, that’s great, but if I start flying again, I probably won’t stop, because, you know, it will be in my blood again. And he accepted that activity. Yeah, it did. Totally regenerated this passion and and I came back as a fully qualified commercial pilot, having done, you know, private pilot’s license, commercial license, twin license, instrument rating, night rating, something like 14 exams or something, and came back to the UK, and then had to convert all my licenses to what was then Joint Aviation Authority rules. So that was another 16 exams, and another flight test, commercial flight test, and a twin flight test to an instrument rating. And then I got a scholarship from the guild of air pilots, near navigators, which is now the honorable company of air pilots, to become an instructor. And I got the only scholarship that was ever issued for the Diamond Jubilee. It was a diamond jubilee scholarship, and that was mine, so I was given that, and I became an instructor for three years at teaching people to fly their private pilot’s licenses, initially at High Wycombe, and then up here at RF Kinloss, and then Inverness. And then I literally was, but I always wanted to fly for an airline that was always the end game. It wasn’t. It was never, I never got into flying to teach other people to fly. That was always a means to an end. Although I enjoyed it, I’d always wanted to fly for EasyJet, because when they launched in 1995 which was the year we got. Married. Their first route was Luton to Glasgow, and their second route was Luton to Aberdeen. And suddenly, all of us living up in the North East of Scotland had access to London for 60 pounds, which was a lot of money then, but it was nothing compared to what you had to pay to go with KLM a UK to Stansted, which was the only other flying route at the time, and I’d always said to my husband, if I ever fly again, I want to fly for this outfit. And so when the opportunity came along, I was literally in the right place at the right time. They took 12 of us onto a type rating for people who already had licenses and were already working in the industry, and I was one of them.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:40
Wow, fantastic. So how did it feel getting behind the plane of getting behind the steering wheel? What the What do you call the bit of funny stick?
Emma Henderson 15:57
Well, it depends what you’re flying. It’s either a side stick or a center stick, or a yoke, but most people are familiar with something that looks a little bit like a steering wheel that’s been cut in half, and that’s called a yoke. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 16:08
so when you got it, how did it feel getting into the cockpit for the first time, when you had a few 100 people behind you to fly the first route that you were doing? Well,
Emma Henderson 16:19
it was a mixture, really, because it was a little bit surreal in some ways, but it was also it felt quite comfortable. And I think because I was older when I went to EasyJet, you know, I was already in my 30s with three children and a mortgage when I started flying for EasyJet. So although it was in some ways a little bit a little bit surreal, because I was like, I’m actually flying people. You’re actually there to do a job, so you have to sort of switch off from that and go, actually, I’m here to fly the plane. And you actually disassociate yourself, really, from the people in the back of the aircraft most of the time, because if you got too involved emotionally with with them, you wouldn’t be able to respond in an emergency, so you have to be a little bit clinical about it. But yeah, absolutely, it was a massive deal. Yeah, my first landing with passengers on board. The crew knew it was my first time, but we didn’t tell any of the passengers, because they can’t. They’ve got to think that they’ve got an experienced crew member at the front. I’m not going to let on to them, but let on to them, but fortunately, it was a great landing. And so the captain actually went out after that first flight and said to the passengers, this is actually Emma’s first trip with passengers on board. And they all clapped and well done, you know, which
Mark McBride-Wright 17:37
was really lovely, brilliant. So you mentioned in your back, in your biography, that you’d flown some celebrities and royalty. Can you, can you share any, any names or any, any standout trips that you did? There
Emma Henderson 17:54
are a couple of quite funny ones, because my husband was deployed to the Gulf for four months, and he was coming back on like a Thursday for the sake of argument, and I was flying James Blunt back from Ibiza on the Tuesday night, a couple of days before Jim was coming home. And I was a bit of a fan, and I was too scared to actually go and ask him for his autograph, but I asked of the cabin crew if they I said to them, Look, can you tell him that my husband’s in the Gulf at the moment with the Air Force, and would he mind signing something for me, which he did, and I carried it round in my flight bag. I’ve still got it, actually on the back of a permission to remove steps form. So that was quite that was quite lovely. And we had
Mark McBride-Wright 18:39
blunt from my beat up to wherever he was going, he was in the back, and you never even went up and
Emma Henderson 18:45
scared. I was like, Oh God, this is really embarrassing. It’s so not cool to go and approach this. Now I just brazenly go up and go, Hi, do you want to buy my book? But on
Speaker 1 19:01
your channel, so I’d be doing, yeah, exactly.
Emma Henderson 19:04
I was too scared. But then we flew, so I remember also flying prof green, who’s a DJ, and the captain was saying, I’ll go and ask him, What is a professor of? You know, there’s a bit of Mickey taking going on there, but I think the funniest one was after I had been in inside the cockpit, which is the ITV documentary I starred in. Said list star, I became captain Emma, and lots of people knew who I was as a result. And it was really funny, because I had this I always used to do my welcome on board pas from the front of the cabin, so I’d hold the phone and ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board this EasyJet flight to Gatwick, whatever. And there was this couple in the front row. And after I’d finished, the guy did look quite familiar, to be fair. But after I had finished, the lady leaned across to the man and said, Do you know who that is? And he said, No. He says, Captain Emma Off the Telly. Oh, right, that’s cool. Put the thing down. Went back in the flight deck, and the senior came in and said, Do you know who that was? That was on the front row. And I said, No. And she said, That’s Norman cook. That’s that boy, slim. No. Literally no idea. I didn’t get his autograph either. I was just so like, Oh no, I’m gonna play it really cool. So funny that his traveling companion was saying to him, Do you know who that is? It’s like, this really sort of very low key, sort of TV personality
Mark McBride-Wright 20:43
that sort of then, I guess, set the course for, well, maybe it was like the early seeds then of helping build the career you’re doing now with public speaking and being an author and a thought leader. But before we come on to that, I’d love to hear a bit about Project wingman. And you know, when the pandemic started, what tell us a bit about what it is and what motivated you to set up?
Emma Henderson 21:10
Well, the first, there’s a couple of back stories to that, really within the airline, because I applied to be a fear of flying presenter, and that taught me stage presence, because basically easy jet run, a fear of flying course, and I was one of the presenters. And in order to do that, you have to learn a 45 minute script that you’re interacting with the other presenter all the time. So that taught me how to be on the stage, how to own the stage, move around on it, and also how to answer Q and A that you haven’t prepared for. So that was really good. And then, and I didn’t know that I was going to need that, obviously. But then the other thing was that I’d, I’d been on the TV, and I knew people knew who I was. And then obviously, COVID came along, and I was also a peer support mentor. So that was something that came in the is that was a mandatory thing that came in after the Euro wings, murder suicide in the Alps, in the French Alps. Oh, yeah, and German wings, wasn’t it? And after that, all airlines had to have a peer support system put in place, and I was one of the first peer support mentors at EasyJet. So I had access to this guy called Rob bore who he and his colleague, Adrian, oversaw the peer support system at EasyJet, and when I flew home in March 2020 having operated, you know, I operated a flight to Luxembourg on March the 16th, 2020, and we were operating at about 1/3 loads. So we only had about 50 passengers on board. And when we landed in Gatwick that night, all the passengers got off and said, Good luck instead of goodbye. And we knew you just I just knew something big was coming. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew that this wasn’t going to be a small deal. And I felt like I felt like this wave of darkness was sort of crossing the car. Felt like the world was going into shadow. Yeah, and I flew home the next day, you know, empty, empty train to Luton, empty aircraft back up to Inverness. The streets were empty everywhere. Got Back Up into Inverness. It’s like nothing had happened. It’s like the highlands were this big barrier, and everybody was like, Oh, what’s this virus then? And, you know, all the shops were full and people were out and about, and it hadn’t reached the highlands yet, or at least it hadn’t been acknowledged yet. But of course, it was coming up here, because people were flying up and down all the time. And I sat, I remember sitting in the car park, actually, of this shop, on a on a call for all the peer support mentors, which I just happened to be able to dial into. And we were sort of talking about what might be coming. And I said to the this guy, Rob, I said, Look, I think I think there might be something that we could step in and do to help. And he said, Well, hold that thought. And he introduced me to a guy at ba who was thinking along the same lines. And we literally had one conversation where we both said basically the same thing, and we agreed that he would put the manuals together so that NHS staff, or NHS Trusts, would understand what we were trying to do. Volunteers would understand what we wanted from them, and we would did a risk assessment, and I would rally the troops, basically because I had the platform, he had the into the NHS. We had the oversight of this clinical psychologist. So I put a call out to air crew across the country, starting with my intranet at EasyJet, and said, We want to go in and provide team empathy. To NHS staff who wants to join us, if you want to, if you want to sign up to this, here’s an email address. And we just set up a Gmail account or Hotmail account or something like that, and we just said, here’s an email address. Just let us know. And in the first three days, I had 750 responses, and I couldn’t manage them all. You know, there was literally my phone was just bing, bing, bing, bing, with email responses all the time. And I had to bring a friend in to help me, a friend who’d actually be made redundant when flyby had collapsed a couple of months earlier. And I texted her and said, I know that you’re looking for stuff to do at the moment. Are you any good with spreadsheets? And she said, Yeah, I’m great with spreadsheets. I was like, great. You want to come and help. And she was the first volunteer to come and sign up for what became project wingman, and three weeks later, we opened our first lounge in the Whittington Hospital in North London, having gone from the edge of an idea, literally back of a fag packet planning edge of an idea, to implementing our first lounge where we had uniformed air crew going into a space that the hospital provided that was large enough for us to provide social distancing. We didn’t have any masks on, I think, because that wasn’t required at the time. It was just go in, provide tea and a listening ear, and let’s see what happens. And on the back of that, pretty much every day for about five weeks, we opened a new, at least one new lounge somewhere, and it just kind of, it was like this mushroom effect. It just, it just grew and grew and grew and more and more people signed up to help. And it spread among the airlines, and then social media got involved. And you know, there’d be, oh, this is the BA lounge, and this is the Virgin lounge, and I would have to be fighting fires and saying, No, it’s the project wingman lounge, and we own that brand, and we are delighted that you are supporting it. Ba, EasyJet, Norwegian virgin, whoever you are. Thank you so much for supporting it. But it is the project wingman lounge, and you can’t take ownership of that, because we knew what was coming. We knew that if aircraft were grounded, we knew there would be redundancies and possibly airline collapses, which there were, because we lost Norwegian UK, obviously, right. So we wanted to make sure that we provided a safe space for people to land, as well as the overall mission, which was to go in and provide tea and empathy and look up wrap an extra warm blanket of care around NHS staff. But actually we created our own community of air crew, and we actually made sure we included the technically disenfranchised as well. Because if you were a cadet pilot going through your training at the beginning of 2020, suddenly the bottom fell out of your world, and there was no safety net. So we provided the safety net, and we said to the flight training schools, if you have cadets who are looking to do something, can’t pay them. But if they’re looking to do something, send them our way and we will accept them, even though they haven’t got an airside pass. And we did, and we grew to six and a half 1000 people by the summer of 2020 and we had 104 lounges stretching from up here in Elgin all the way down through Aberdeen and Glasgow, all the way down the country, as far as Barnstable and Devon, and all the way across from East Anglia to all the way through Wales to Northern Ireland, and we had two lounges in New York. Wow, the two medical centers that serve La Guardia Airport. And I can’t remember the name of the other air but I can’t remember which other
Mark McBride-Wright 28:39
airport, JFK or New York.
Emma Henderson 28:43
I think it was JFK, but the two medical centers that serve those two airports were supported by new Norwegian USA, a guy there. He actually the guy who set that up for under our umbrella. He actually works for hurty Brewton now, but he was working for Norwegian and he said, I want to do this in America. And it was absolutely brilliant. I found myself in meetings with Vice Presidents of US medical centers, and it was absolutely fantastic. I’ve always when I eventually come to New York, which I will do, I really want to go and see them and just say thank you for doing that. It never took off in America in quite the same way as it did in the UK. Because America didn’t stop flying in quite the same way that we did. There were still flights operating. So, you know, it ran for a little while. It was great. The people that got involved with it were fantastic. And I would love to, you know, I’d love to come to New York sometime and thank them for that, and if I make that trip, I will make that a priority. But it was just an amazing thing to witness, and it was all being run, not from exactly this room, because I’ve moved offices now I’ve moved from upstairs to downstairs, but it was all being run from the landing outside the bar. Our family bathroom in my house. And
Mark McBride-Wright 30:03
did you find that with the cadets, you were able to essentially keep people like in terms because, you know, aviation has rebounded, and we’re at numbers now, I think that, or pre pandemic, so highs. Did your involvement with this, like these people who might have just left, do you think you helped mitigate a significant loss of talent that then would have taken longer to recover?
Emma Henderson 30:33
I’ve never thought of that actually, but yes, I think so, because we I’ve met people since who have told me that they’ve gone back into aviation, and I’ve met people who’ve told me quite emotionally, thank you for saving my life. And I said, Well, I didn’t save your life. I provided you with a safe place to fall. And they said, No, you saved my life. I was going to kill myself. Literally, that graphic, I was going to kill myself, and project wingman saved me. And because you founded it, I want to thank you. And I’ve had several conversations with people like that, which is really moving, because you realize what a dark time it was for everyone, and that we basically lit a candle in the darkness. That’s exactly what we did,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:21
and it’s, and I love that you did more than just, you know, coming out on your doorstep on a Thursday night and giving claps, you know, you were actually, like, involved in supporting not just your sector, but also the frontline staff and frontline workers as well.
Emma Henderson 31:36
100% Absolutely. And in fact, we got, we got some sort of special dispensation from somewhere. I can’t remember it was we got some sort of permission thing, maybe from the NHS that our volunteers carried so they could prove they were allowed to be out of their houses. Because, remember, we had that restriction where we were only allowed to be out for an hour at a time. Yeah. So, so air crew in uniform had to carry this permission with them to say that they were allowed to go out of the houses and that they were allowed to go into hospitals and all the rest of it. I look back, it was a bizarre time, and what we did was, what we did was it was rebellious, really, because we were like, Oh, we didn’t think anything of it. We just went, yeah, we’ll send six and a half 1000 people into hospitals. How hard can it be? And then when, when rules came in, yeah, you’ve got to now wear PPE. We were like, Well, where are we going to get six and a half 1000 of them from then? But we just found a way around it, you know, and
Mark McBride-Wright 32:38
especially when there was a shortage at the time. I think, I think it’s fascinating, where there
Emma Henderson 32:46
were problems, we found solutions. But, I
Mark McBride-Wright 32:50
mean, that’s really treating it like an engineering problem as well. You know, it’s, it’s, you know, the different, the difference between something being complex and complicated, there are two words that we often use interchangeably, but actually they’re different. You know, they have different things. And sometimes we shy away from the challenge because we think it’s too difficult, but actually we just need to think it through. There is, there are solutions, and so by working collaboratively, that’s, that’s what’s key, definitely. So what do you what do you do? What do you find yourself doing now? Then, obviously, you know you’ve you’ve taken us through your career and the building blocks that have got you to where you’re at. Now you’ve mentioned that you’ve written a book called grounded. What keeps you busy now being a speaker, an entrepreneur, an author, you know, what’s your portfolio career like?
Emma Henderson 33:40
Well, I took redundancy for me as yet in 2020 I left on good terms. It was nothing to do with the airline. It was simply that, you know, menopause and lockdown coincided, and it was perfect storm of, I quite like sleeping. Thank you very much. So I’m not going to go back to that, which isn’t to say I would never go back, but my life is different now and then I got the MBE, which there was a lot of press attention around that, so I did a lot of news shows and a lot of podcasts, and people said, You got to tell your story. So initially it was about just sharing the inspiring story of going into through and out of aviation and what I did next. But actually, the more I went down that path, the more I realized, firstly, businesses don’t want to pay to hear inspiring stories, as inspiring as they are, businesses want return on investment. Businesses are also shockingly short of leadership skills in a lot of in lot of cases, because quite often, people rise to leadership positions with no formal leadership training, because they’ve just been there for long enough.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:48
Tell me Yes,
Emma Henderson 34:49
we all know those people, don’t we? We all know the people. And it turns out that I’m an expert in leadership, because for 12 years of my life, not only. Was I putting into practice the leadership qualities that I had and I was being taught, I was actually assessed on them every six months. When you go into a simulator as a pilot, you’re not just assessed on your ability to fly the plane, you’re assessed on your leadership skills as well. You know, decision making, leadership, teamwork, communication, all of these things. It turns out I’m an expert on by default, which is fantastic, because there’s a gap in the market, and I have the skill to be able to fill the knowledge, be able to fill it. So I set up my business in january 21 so I basically went when I took redundancy, I was entitled to Job Seekers Allowance. I thought, That’s ridiculous. My husband’s a wing commander in the Air Force. I don’t need Job Seekers Allowance. And they said, No, you must take it, because it contributes towards your National Insurance credits. Yeah. I said, All right, then I can live with that and but it also opened up the possibility for me to have something called New Enterprise Allowance. So I was allowed me to set up my business. So I set the business up Captain Emma Henderson, MBE, not very originally named. I perhaps should have thought of some more punchy name, and maybe I’ll rebrand to that. But the bits that people are interested in are the captain and the MBE, although actually increasingly, people are even more interested in who is Emma Henderson, and what drives you to go and join a male dominated industry, kind of against everything that you’ve ever known, what drives you to respond to a scary pandemic by reaching out and helping hundreds of 1000s of people across the country, by Having an idea that you take to fruition, so that it’s really interesting to see the shift from the shift towards the human being that is Emma Henderson, as well as the captain and the MBE bit.
Mark McBride-Wright 36:53
I would suggest keep it as is, you know, I, you know, I’ve built a business around equality called equal engineers, and I’ve been doing investment in myself for thought leadership and keynote speeches and everything. And, you know, I had to have a speaking coach, and she’s very well known EDI consultant, and she’s like, Mark, stop hiding behind the brand and come more front and forward to the center. And it’s even something that I’ve deliberated on with this work that I’m doing now, like the safe leader. Oh, is it now the safe leader? And should it be the safe leader.com? And should it be the Mark McBride Wright podcast, the safe leader? You know, it’s like, ah. And so I’m leading with Mark McBride, wright.com, but then the safe leader is, like, it’s a new project within my little ecosystem of stuff that I’m and I
Emma Henderson 37:49
think that’s great, you know, because actually, Emma hen captain, Emma Henson, MBE, is always going to be my brand, because it’s me. But actually within that, there are various things. So, you know, that’s my business,
Mark McBride-Wright 38:03
you know. Sorry, Project wingman is one of your your Yeah,
Emma Henderson 38:07
Project wingman is, but, you know, so project wingman we set up to serve a specific purpose at a specific time, and that time has passed. So project wingman has been a fantastic part of my life, and it’s something I’m extremely proud of, but it’s something that’s moving more towards a legacy project now, rather than, yeah, we don’t have any static lounges open anymore. We still have our two busses which are mobile well being lounges. But actually, the need for them, specifically the need, the well being need in the NHS, will never go away. But the long term solution for that can’t be volunteer air crew in uniform. So actually, what we’re looking at more now is documenting what we did so that we can celebrate the people who did it. And so, yeah, Project wingman is a project that sits under the Emma Henderson umbrella. Another project is, you know, the work I’ve done with fear fearful flyers. So I have a business partner in Salt Lake City, and between us, we’ve made something called flight deck, which is a deck of cards that you can take flying with you that explain to you why all those noises you hear on an aircraft are normal, why you’re not going to fall out of the sky, why it’s safe to travel by plane. So we have flight deck, and we have a it’s a blue deck of cards, but we have a pride version, which is gorgeous because it’s really colorful and lovely.
Speaker 1 39:30
And get
Emma Henderson 39:32
some of that. There’s some projects I’m working on on the side that will add to what I mostly do now is I either do keynote speeches or workshops working with so I delivered a closing keynote on Tuesday to 200 private healthcare workers at their annual conference. And then next week, I’ve got a couple of smaller you know, I’m working with a big energy company and working with a head teachers conference. So sometimes it’s a smaller setup, sometimes it’s a big. Tuesday was lovely because it was a stage and it had a Madonna mic, and, yeah, it was an amazing but actually, this the events I’ve got coming up will also be amazing, because that’s where you make the much more personal connections and and what I talk about specifically now, based really on the title of my book, grounded, which, oh, look, I have a copy here. How handy is that? Because my book is called grounded. I focus on grounded leadership, because now, more than ever before, I believe that we need a healthy dose of humanity, humility and humor in leadership, and that is not a political statement, actually, it is a statement about the fact that we are all working remotely. We’re all all hybrid working we’re all relying much more on automation, and we’re all relying much more on AI, and that’s great, but actually what we need to make sure we are prioritizing is that human connection. You know, what makes Mark McBride Wright tick? What makes Emma Henderson tick? What’s that connection I have with you? Because we don’t want to do business with machines. We’re human beings, not human doings, absolutely. And I think, you know, there will be people who will not have been happy with election results, not just in the US, but in the UK. Recently, people are not happy with the state of the world. It might not be election results that have made people unhappy. It might be just the state of politics in the Middle East, for example, or Russia and UK was sitting on the edge of a very turbulent period of time in history. And I’m a historian, you know, I did a history degree. I studied political history in the early nine in the early 20th century. So I’m sitting here looking at what I think is a repetition of the early 1900s and I’m, I’m not comfortable, you know? I’m, I’m hopeful that humanity will will play out. And the more we bring humanity into the workplace, the more that then spreads to people’s homes, and the more we treat people with humanity. Humanity, the more humble we are in our approach to things. And let’s face it, the more humor we have in the workplace. Because you know what going to work should be fun, right? It shouldn’t just be heads down all the time total,
Mark McBride-Wright 42:22
totally, you have to have fun in life. Life’s too short to to not to not have fun. You know, I always sometimes if I feel like I’m getting too like a lack of fun in my life, you know, trying to have a bit of a rebalance or a reset, you know, or think about, I mean, maybe we’ve all had moments where we’ve had a health scare, or we’ve had a result, or a test, blood test has come back, and you’ve thought, oh my goodness, what is that? And then you start thinking the worst. And then you totally, in that moment, start recalibrating all your priorities and everything that had been stressed up into that moment, you’re like, oh my gosh, that gives
Emma Henderson 43:04
you a bigger picture, doesn’t it? And I think that the ability to zoom out and have that bigger picture is what makes you more resilient. And I’ve had the health scare. I nearly died, you know. So I didn’t crash a plane and nearly died. I got sick and nearly died, so, you know, and then I came back from that and rushed into my command process too quickly, and then I failed. And each of those moments I could have, you know, I could have really drilled down and focused on the on the negative. But actually, when I got well again after nearly dying, my heart was full of gratitude. I felt like I’d been given another chance at life, and I think that’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about being able to spread this message of humanity, humility and humor, really, because that’s my way of saying, You know what, we’ve always got to love each other a bit more. But you can’t go into a business and say, everybody’s got to peace out and love each other. You’ve got to go in and say, right, here are some actionable takeaways that you can put into place in your everyday, home life and business life, and you can take that away now, and by the way, this is the story that backs them up. Brilliant,
Mark McBride-Wright 44:13
brilliant. So what? Well, then looking ahead, then with your career being the course that it’s going now. What advice would you have to any aspiring speakers or authors that you know want to set their set themselves up or feel like they’ve got a message to share with the world? How like is it something they should embrace and go out and do, or are there some caveats that it’s a bit risky?
Emma Henderson 44:49
I think everything in life is risky. It’s definitely risky writing down your thoughts and feelings in a book and putting it out there, because you’re opening yourself up to criticism, and you’ve got to be. Willing to take that because I’ve been very lucky that nobody has said anything bad about my book, or at least not to my face or somewhere I can see it. So everybody’s loved the book, which is fantastic, but yeah, the advice I’d give to you is lots of people say that they’d like to write a book, and they say there’s a book in everyone, but actually very few people do it. And despite that, there are so many publications that come on the market every single day. So if you’re going to write a book, just get on and write it. Don’t think about it. Just get on and do it. And the best way to write a book is just to outline what it is you want to say, break it down into small chunks, and then Wright effectively, like an essay or a story for each of those subjects. So that’s what I did with my book. I There were 10 areas that that I had an agent, actually, who wasn’t the agent that published the book, but I had an agent who said, right, these are the 10 things that I think the most interesting about you go away and give me 3000 words on each he said, just write it down. Just get it all down on paper. He got 7000 words on my command failure, and he got 8000 words on my illness. And actually, that was really cathartic for me. So if it had never become a book, it was still a great process to go through. Yeah, and then with speaking again, you know, you need to have a very clear message. What is your purpose? What do you want to speak because you think you’ve got a valuable voice? Or do you want to speak because you have a valuable message that other people can benefit from? Because, if, actually, if you want to speak because you think it’s glamorous being on stage, and you’re going to earn lots of money and be Barack Obama and get paid $100,000 every time you appear, go and find a different dream, because that’s not what it’s like. You know, it’s hard work. You have to make sure that you are serving your clients in the same way as you do in any self employed business, and if people don’t want to hear your message, you haven’t got a job. So, so if your message is very important to you but nobody else cares about it, then actually it’s not a message that’s sellable. So make sure you’ve got something that you can that you can speak with authority on that is valuable to other people, that adds value to other people’s lives. The biggest thing is, get on and do it.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:27
Yeah, yeah. Low procrastination. Get on and do it. Great advice, okay? Quick Fire questions. Love what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever achieved? Sorry, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Emma Henderson 47:41
The best piece of advice I’ve ever received, and I’ve it was actually when I was pregnant with my first child, but I’ve applied it to everything I’ve done since, and it’s this, everybody will tell you the best way that you should do things. In this case, it was the best way you should raise your child, the best way should go through pregnancy. Everybody will give you their advice, listen to all of it, take the bits that work for you and discard the rest, because the only way for you to raise a child and be pregnant is the way that works best for you.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:15
What’s your proudest professional achievement?
Emma Henderson 48:18
Achieving command, having failed 100% i What’s
Speaker 1 48:21
the
Mark McBride-Wright 48:23
one skill you think every leader should have?
Emma Henderson 48:26
The ability to listen, because we’ve got two ears and one mouth. And when I say listen, I mean, hear what’s being said as well
Mark McBride-Wright 48:33
tea or coffee. Tea,
Emma Henderson 48:35
but not caffeinated, red bush tea, specifically,
Mark McBride-Wright 48:41
what’s your go to? Productivity? Hack,
Emma Henderson 48:46
putting all the knives in the same bit of the dishwasher. Draw, and all the forks in the same bit of the dishwasher. Draw, so that when you answer the dishwasher, you just unload them in one go.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:57
You could have dinner with any leader past or present. Who would it be?
Emma Henderson 49:03
Oh, gosh, that’s a hard one. I’d love to have dinner with Barack Obama. I think he’s interesting. I’d love to have dinner with Margaret Thatcher. I just want to get behind her psyche and Jesus,
Mark McBride-Wright 49:20
all right, well, that’s a big one. What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long day? I
Emma Henderson 49:26
have a famous hot tub that appeared more in my in the documentary that I was in than any of my family members, as they all pointed out to me. So I go and sit I’ve got a hot tub on the deck. It fade that it faces south. I go and sit in the hot tub and listen to the geese in the field and watch the sunset.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:45
Love it. I love the circularity here, coming back to the bird connection. And what’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now?
Emma Henderson 49:57
I think it’s. Is possibly that a secret project I haven’t told anyone about yet. Much, really, it’s Captain Emma in your pocket, so people who are scared of flying will be able to have me in their pocket telling them why they’re not going to die on a
Mark McBride-Wright 50:16
plane. Sounds good. What’s the one book or resource you’d recommend to someone interested in leadership,
Emma Henderson 50:24
grounded by Captain Emma Henderson. MB,
Mark McBride-Wright 50:29
what’s the one piece of advice finally you’d give to your younger self,
Emma Henderson 50:35
stop taking yourself so seriously, because actually, you don’t know anything about anything at 22 and you just think you do. So just open your mind to the fact that somebody else might have an opinion that is more right than yours.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:54
Amazing. Well, thank you very much, Emma. I really enjoyed our chat. Can you tell some of our listeners who may want to get in touch with you how they do so,
Emma Henderson 51:05
yeah, for sure. So if you want to buy my book, it’s available on Amazon. You can just search it up grounded by Captain Hemington MBE. I’m sure if you just put grounded Emma Henderson into a search engine, it will fill it fill up Amazon for you. You can also buy a signed copy from my website, which is www dot Emma henderson.com, and a pop up will appear for the book. You can contact me via a contact form on that website if you are interested in me speaking with your business or group, and I am on LinkedIn. So if you’re on LinkedIn, you can find me@www.linkedin.com forward slash, I N. Forward slash speak, Emma dash Henderson, dash speaker. But if you just look Emma Henderson LinkedIn, you’ll find me. I’m quite easy to find. I don’t hide away, and I answer every message I ever get. I’m also hilariously prolific on Tiktok at Captain Emma dot 61 and I’ve got something like seven half 1000 followers on Tiktok. So that’s quite amusing to me. Well,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:15
we’ll put all these links in the show notes when we publish the podcast. And love that you’ve actually done the work to sort your LinkedIn URL out the number of people that don’t, and then it’s just a bunch of numbers or letters. Yeah, that’s another hint tip for people. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed getting to know you today. Emma,
Emma Henderson 52:42
likewise, it’s been lovely to chat to you or talk at you.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:47
I’ve enjoyed the experience. I’m sure there’s many areas in which we can pick up offline and collaborate further. Love
Emma Henderson 52:56
to do that absolutely and if you’re listening and you want to know more about grounded leadership. You know humanity, humility and humor, get in touch. We need more of it
Mark McBride-Wright 53:07
completely, especially in the engineering and stem sectors. Definitely.
Speaker 1 53:11
Thanks, Emma gorgeous, to see you. Take care. Thanks. You.
E005: Grounded Leadership, Resilience, and the Power of Flight
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:02
Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride Wright, and I’m joined today by Emma Henderson, M D E, who is the co founder and CEO of project wingman. So Emma Henderson’s m d e’s journey in aviation began at 10 when watching the Space Shuttle Enterprise land sparked a lifelong passion for flight. She went on to become one of fewer than 500 female airline captains worldwide, piloting jets for over a decade across Europe, even flying royal alien celebrities, balancing her high pressure career with military family life and raising three children, Emma’s resilience only grew when the pandemic grounded flights. She channeled her dedication into founding project, wingman, a global charity support, supporting NHS staff, earning her an MD In recognition. Today, Emma shares her story of courage, leadership and purpose, inspiring others to reach their full, inspiring others to reach their full potential. In her book, grounded, she reflects on a career of soaring highs, new challenges and the drive to make a difference. Emma’s message is powerful. Flying is not something you do, flying is something you are. Emma, welcome. Thank
Emma Henderson 1:27
you. What a lovely introduction.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:32
Leave myself goose pimples there, reading that last sentence
Emma Henderson 1:37
never leaves you. It never leaves.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:40
So this is actually our first time meeting as well. You know, I like keeping it really organic. We haven’t done any like rehearsed. We’re going to talk about this, we’re going to talk about that, and we’ll mention that, we’ll mention this. So, yeah, this, this is me getting to know you as well.
Emma Henderson 1:56
That’s great as I think it’s often the best way, actually, that’s how you get to know people better
Mark McBride-Wright 2:01
it is, isn’t it? It’s like when, when you meet someone for a coffee for the first time, or you have a virtual chat, which LinkedIn is brilliant for I absolutely love that sometimes it’s the things that you share in those first initial sessions together that really builds the scaffold in between, between the two people so, yeah, I mean, I love, I love the what you’ve done and the sound to your career. It’s, certainly, it’s absolutely fascinating. And obviously aviation is one of the sectors that you know engineering. It underpins, you know, it couldn’t happen without engineering. And so you you have over 30 years of experience in the aviation sector, and being one of fewer than 500 female airline captains in the world, what inspired your passion for flying, and how did your career
Emma Henderson 2:56
evolve? Well, I think it was that. I mean, I know the initial sort of big moment was when I saw Space Shuttle land at Stansted. I was 10 years old. It was 1983 and 200,000 people turned up to see this aircraft that, you know, was going into space, and gone into space, sort of tour the world. It was a really big deal. And when you think about the fact that in the you know, the 1980s everything we knew about the world fitted into a book that was about that thick, and it was called the Encyclopedia of the world. You know, we didn’t have the internet and we didn’t have other ways of finding information out. So when something like that lands at your local airport, you go and look at it, and it was impressive. And it was, I know I was a bit obsessed with flight anyway, because, you know, I joined the young ornithologist club on holiday up at coiling bridge when I still, yeah, with the Ospreys, and I am, I just was fascinated. I did projects at school. I’ve got, I’ve still got this primary school. I think it must have been project on flight, where I’ve cut out pictures of montgovia balloons and stuck them onto pages that say the things that fly. It’s definitely a primary school project, because it’s done on that colored sugar paper that you get at primary school.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:13
So it’s not just been a that, you know, the mechanical side of flying and planes. It’s been flight in general, and being up in the air that caught your imagination Absolutely
Emma Henderson 4:25
because, you know, the mongolfier balloon was fascinating to me when, you know, I was that kid that would go to the Science Museum and come back with insist on buying a cardboard book that I could make a cardboard balloon out of. So, and I don’t really know, I’m
Mark McBride-Wright 4:43
going to be naive, and is that the balloon that the Wright Brothers designed, or I don’t actually know,
Emma Henderson 4:47
the Wright the Wright brothers were the first people to fly a fixed wing aircraft. Well, it’s, it’s contested whether they really were, but know that the mongolfier brothers were in. About 17 or 1800s and they were the first people to, well, they weren’t the first people because Leonardo da Vinci designed things like balloons and helicopters, but and the Chinese have been flying hot air balloons for 1000s of years. But it was the first passenger carrying hot air balloon, I think. And it was a beautiful blue, sort of tiny, blue and gold balloon, very highly decorated, and it launched with much fanfare in a square in the middle of Paris, and was greatly applauded. And it was just for me, that was fascinating, the fact that you could challenge, I suppose, that you could challenge the expectations of what life is like and say, well, actually, we’re not going to stick to the ground. We’re going to go up in the air as well. Birds do it so we can do it.
Mark McBride-Wright 5:48
Do you know it’s fascinating that you say that, because at Roslyn Primary School in primary two, I remember doing a project on flight in Miss Brunt class. And I have, you’ve just given me a flashback to that balloon. Yeah, must have had it on display. And I’m, you know, and we must have learned about the Wright brothers at the time, and that’s why I thought it was them who, you know, created that. And that year, we also did a project with the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. And I think I joined the Y, O, C, the young ornithology, yeah, mythology,
Emma Henderson 6:24
yeah. Young ornithologist club I joined. I joined, is it Nether bridge or boat of garden? There you go. Boat of garden. RSPB, sort of bird sanctuary where Ospreys are protected. And we were up here on holiday one year, and I was fascinated with them, and my parents allowed us to join the young ornithologist class. I think we got a yellow book and some stickers,
Mark McBride-Wright 6:48
yeah, but did you also get the free bird feeder? I remember getting a bird table with it. It was or maybe I asked my dad to buy one. I don’t really know, but I remember putting bird seeds outside and then making we lived
Emma Henderson 7:01
in a geek, yeah, no, we lived in the country. I grew up in the countryside, and we had a bird table in the garden, and, you know, it was just, I don’t know. I just used to watch birds and think, how cool would that be to just go where you want? Yeah, yeah. Really good anymore. I’m gonna fly over there. How cool must that be?
Mark McBride-Wright 7:28
Yeah, when you put it like that, yeah,
Emma Henderson 7:31
obvious kind of hazards of birds of prey coming to get you and cats and wind farms and all sorts of other cars and stuff. But generally, I think being a bird is probably alright.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:47
So if you were to ever come back reincarnation, if that is a thing, you’d be a bird. Is that no did that be around? Actually,
Emma Henderson 7:53
I’d be something really cool, like a or something or dolphin. I think I might be a dolphin, because they’re really cool.
Mark McBride-Wright 8:03
They are cool. My son’s obsessed with them, actually. I mean, yeah, sonar, sonar, or radar, oh, I don’t know, echo location. I feel like, yeah, I watched Finding Nemo recently again, or Finding Dory, it’s Dory where they have the wheel in the the beluga wheel, I think in
Emma Henderson 8:28
I’ve escaped all of that adults and they work in the city, so I’ve escaped all of that, fortunately. Oh,
Mark McBride-Wright 8:35
that’s my life right now. Well, that and along with, you know, do it, getting to interview fun people like this yourself. So so how tell us a bit about your life in the cockpit or the well, the journey to moving into aviation so you were inspired by things that fly in general. How did you then get to be in one of the fewer than 500 female captains worldwide.
Emma Henderson 9:06
Well, it was not a straightforward journey by any means, because despite my seeming obsession with things that fly, I actually spent a lot of time sailing when I was a teenager down on the river Blackwater in Essex, but if you think about it, that’s still wind making things move. So, you know, still air flow, and so that gave me probably a better grounding, really, than I thought. But I loved sailing. Didn’t really know how to get into flying. Didn’t know there was an Air Cadets in my hometown. Didn’t know anyone who flew. I had an eight for my 18th birthday. I had a flying lesson. Loved it. And Dad said, Well, you know, I can’t afford to pay for lessons for you to get a license, and I couldn’t afford to pay for lessons. So I thought, well, I’ll go off to university and become a corporate lawyer then, because that was the other thing I kind of thought I might like to do. I mean, I don’t know how you’re supposed to choose at 18. What you’re going to do for the rest of your life anyway. But
Mark McBride-Wright 10:03
to your point as well, like flying, it’s a very well. It’s quite elitist. It’s got a high entry bar. You know that you have to have money to like, do the lessons probably
Emma Henderson 10:13
do. I mean, there are sponsored schemes now, but they’re very few and far between. But actually, remember, at the time, most flying training into Airlines was actually through sponsored schemes with VA and so that wasn’t I think doing it privately would have been, well, it was too restrictive. I just didn’t really know how to do it. And everybody was going off to university, and I thought, well, I’ll go do I don’t went to do a history degree at Leeds, and my plan was to do a law conversion when I finished. But when I was at Leeds, I found out that I could learn to fly for free if I joined the University Air Squadron. So that’s what I did. I went and signed up to become an officer cadet reservist in the Royal Air Force. So I went down to RAF finningley and spent the next couple of years flying around North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, North everywhere around Yorkshire. And that would have been the end of the story, if it hadn’t been for the fact that on the first night I was down at RF fillingly for these lectures we had to go to on a Friday night, I walked into the bar and met a guy, and 18 months later we got married. Yeah. So literally, met the guy I’ve still managed. Yeah, he’s still my current husband 30 years on, so as long as he plays his cards, right? That could keep going
Mark McBride-Wright 11:51
congratulations on 30 years
Emma Henderson 11:55
later. Yeah, so, so that kind of again, yeah, I was gonna be a Harry pilot because I had Harry pilot boots, and I went and did aptitude tests for the Air Force. So I married my husband 11 days after I graduated in a huge move of female emancipation, and we moved up to the north coast of Scotland to RAF Kinloss, and he’s in the Air Force still. And we decided to put roots down here and settle and that again, as far as I was concerned, was the end of the story. I didn’t think I’d fly again. I kind of thought, Well, that was a fun thing to have done, but that’s not what I’m going to do now. I’m going to be a wife and I’m going to arrange flowers in the mess, and I’m going to go to ladies lunches, because that’s what you do at 23 isn’t it? And then we had our children and built our house, and in a firm move of we are settling here. And a year after we moved into our house, we moved into a new house, which was in Auckland, New Zealand, on a posting, an exchange posting that we weren’t expecting to get. So it’s a military exchange. And while I was in New Zealand for three and a half years, we were there, and I came back as a fully qualified commercial pilot, because my husband said to me, if you stop smoking, which I did at the time, you can pay for your private pilot’s license in the money you stayed by not smoking. And I said, Well, that’s great, but if I start flying again, I probably won’t stop, because, you know, it will be in my blood again. And he accepted that activity. Yeah, it did. Totally regenerated this passion and and I came back as a fully qualified commercial pilot, having done, you know, private pilot’s license, commercial license, twin license, instrument rating, night rating, something like 14 exams or something, and came back to the UK, and then had to convert all my licenses to what was then Joint Aviation Authority rules. So that was another 16 exams, and another flight test, commercial flight test, and a twin flight test to an instrument rating. And then I got a scholarship from the guild of air pilots, near navigators, which is now the honorable company of air pilots, to become an instructor. And I got the only scholarship that was ever issued for the Diamond Jubilee. It was a diamond jubilee scholarship, and that was mine, so I was given that, and I became an instructor for three years at teaching people to fly their private pilot’s licenses, initially at High Wycombe, and then up here at RF Kinloss, and then Inverness. And then I literally was, but I always wanted to fly for an airline that was always the end game. It wasn’t. It was never, I never got into flying to teach other people to fly. That was always a means to an end. Although I enjoyed it, I’d always wanted to fly for EasyJet, because when they launched in 1995 which was the year we got. Married. Their first route was Luton to Glasgow, and their second route was Luton to Aberdeen. And suddenly, all of us living up in the North East of Scotland had access to London for 60 pounds, which was a lot of money then, but it was nothing compared to what you had to pay to go with KLM a UK to Stansted, which was the only other flying route at the time, and I’d always said to my husband, if I ever fly again, I want to fly for this outfit. And so when the opportunity came along, I was literally in the right place at the right time. They took 12 of us onto a type rating for people who already had licenses and were already working in the industry, and I was one of them.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:40
Wow, fantastic. So how did it feel getting behind the plane of getting behind the steering wheel? What the What do you call the bit of funny stick?
Emma Henderson 15:57
Well, it depends what you’re flying. It’s either a side stick or a center stick, or a yoke, but most people are familiar with something that looks a little bit like a steering wheel that’s been cut in half, and that’s called a yoke. Yeah,
Mark McBride-Wright 16:08
so when you got it, how did it feel getting into the cockpit for the first time, when you had a few 100 people behind you to fly the first route that you were doing? Well,
Emma Henderson 16:19
it was a mixture, really, because it was a little bit surreal in some ways, but it was also it felt quite comfortable. And I think because I was older when I went to EasyJet, you know, I was already in my 30s with three children and a mortgage when I started flying for EasyJet. So although it was in some ways a little bit a little bit surreal, because I was like, I’m actually flying people. You’re actually there to do a job, so you have to sort of switch off from that and go, actually, I’m here to fly the plane. And you actually disassociate yourself, really, from the people in the back of the aircraft most of the time, because if you got too involved emotionally with with them, you wouldn’t be able to respond in an emergency, so you have to be a little bit clinical about it. But yeah, absolutely, it was a massive deal. Yeah, my first landing with passengers on board. The crew knew it was my first time, but we didn’t tell any of the passengers, because they can’t. They’ve got to think that they’ve got an experienced crew member at the front. I’m not going to let on to them, but let on to them, but fortunately, it was a great landing. And so the captain actually went out after that first flight and said to the passengers, this is actually Emma’s first trip with passengers on board. And they all clapped and well done, you know, which
Mark McBride-Wright 17:37
was really lovely, brilliant. So you mentioned in your back, in your biography, that you’d flown some celebrities and royalty. Can you, can you share any, any names or any, any standout trips that you did? There
Emma Henderson 17:54
are a couple of quite funny ones, because my husband was deployed to the Gulf for four months, and he was coming back on like a Thursday for the sake of argument, and I was flying James Blunt back from Ibiza on the Tuesday night, a couple of days before Jim was coming home. And I was a bit of a fan, and I was too scared to actually go and ask him for his autograph, but I asked of the cabin crew if they I said to them, Look, can you tell him that my husband’s in the Gulf at the moment with the Air Force, and would he mind signing something for me, which he did, and I carried it round in my flight bag. I’ve still got it, actually on the back of a permission to remove steps form. So that was quite that was quite lovely. And we had
Mark McBride-Wright 18:39
blunt from my beat up to wherever he was going, he was in the back, and you never even went up and
Emma Henderson 18:45
scared. I was like, Oh God, this is really embarrassing. It’s so not cool to go and approach this. Now I just brazenly go up and go, Hi, do you want to buy my book? But on
Speaker 1 19:01
your channel, so I’d be doing, yeah, exactly.
Emma Henderson 19:04
I was too scared. But then we flew, so I remember also flying prof green, who’s a DJ, and the captain was saying, I’ll go and ask him, What is a professor of? You know, there’s a bit of Mickey taking going on there, but I think the funniest one was after I had been in inside the cockpit, which is the ITV documentary I starred in. Said list star, I became captain Emma, and lots of people knew who I was as a result. And it was really funny, because I had this I always used to do my welcome on board pas from the front of the cabin, so I’d hold the phone and ladies and gentlemen, welcome on board this EasyJet flight to Gatwick, whatever. And there was this couple in the front row. And after I’d finished, the guy did look quite familiar, to be fair. But after I had finished, the lady leaned across to the man and said, Do you know who that is? And he said, No. He says, Captain Emma Off the Telly. Oh, right, that’s cool. Put the thing down. Went back in the flight deck, and the senior came in and said, Do you know who that was? That was on the front row. And I said, No. And she said, That’s Norman cook. That’s that boy, slim. No. Literally no idea. I didn’t get his autograph either. I was just so like, Oh no, I’m gonna play it really cool. So funny that his traveling companion was saying to him, Do you know who that is? It’s like, this really sort of very low key, sort of TV personality
Mark McBride-Wright 20:43
that sort of then, I guess, set the course for, well, maybe it was like the early seeds then of helping build the career you’re doing now with public speaking and being an author and a thought leader. But before we come on to that, I’d love to hear a bit about Project wingman. And you know, when the pandemic started, what tell us a bit about what it is and what motivated you to set up?
Emma Henderson 21:10
Well, the first, there’s a couple of back stories to that, really within the airline, because I applied to be a fear of flying presenter, and that taught me stage presence, because basically easy jet run, a fear of flying course, and I was one of the presenters. And in order to do that, you have to learn a 45 minute script that you’re interacting with the other presenter all the time. So that taught me how to be on the stage, how to own the stage, move around on it, and also how to answer Q and A that you haven’t prepared for. So that was really good. And then, and I didn’t know that I was going to need that, obviously. But then the other thing was that I’d, I’d been on the TV, and I knew people knew who I was. And then obviously, COVID came along, and I was also a peer support mentor. So that was something that came in the is that was a mandatory thing that came in after the Euro wings, murder suicide in the Alps, in the French Alps. Oh, yeah, and German wings, wasn’t it? And after that, all airlines had to have a peer support system put in place, and I was one of the first peer support mentors at EasyJet. So I had access to this guy called Rob bore who he and his colleague, Adrian, oversaw the peer support system at EasyJet, and when I flew home in March 2020 having operated, you know, I operated a flight to Luxembourg on March the 16th, 2020, and we were operating at about 1/3 loads. So we only had about 50 passengers on board. And when we landed in Gatwick that night, all the passengers got off and said, Good luck instead of goodbye. And we knew you just I just knew something big was coming. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew that this wasn’t going to be a small deal. And I felt like I felt like this wave of darkness was sort of crossing the car. Felt like the world was going into shadow. Yeah, and I flew home the next day, you know, empty, empty train to Luton, empty aircraft back up to Inverness. The streets were empty everywhere. Got Back Up into Inverness. It’s like nothing had happened. It’s like the highlands were this big barrier, and everybody was like, Oh, what’s this virus then? And, you know, all the shops were full and people were out and about, and it hadn’t reached the highlands yet, or at least it hadn’t been acknowledged yet. But of course, it was coming up here, because people were flying up and down all the time. And I sat, I remember sitting in the car park, actually, of this shop, on a on a call for all the peer support mentors, which I just happened to be able to dial into. And we were sort of talking about what might be coming. And I said to the this guy, Rob, I said, Look, I think I think there might be something that we could step in and do to help. And he said, Well, hold that thought. And he introduced me to a guy at ba who was thinking along the same lines. And we literally had one conversation where we both said basically the same thing, and we agreed that he would put the manuals together so that NHS staff, or NHS Trusts, would understand what we were trying to do. Volunteers would understand what we wanted from them, and we would did a risk assessment, and I would rally the troops, basically because I had the platform, he had the into the NHS. We had the oversight of this clinical psychologist. So I put a call out to air crew across the country, starting with my intranet at EasyJet, and said, We want to go in and provide team empathy. To NHS staff who wants to join us, if you want to, if you want to sign up to this, here’s an email address. And we just set up a Gmail account or Hotmail account or something like that, and we just said, here’s an email address. Just let us know. And in the first three days, I had 750 responses, and I couldn’t manage them all. You know, there was literally my phone was just bing, bing, bing, bing, with email responses all the time. And I had to bring a friend in to help me, a friend who’d actually be made redundant when flyby had collapsed a couple of months earlier. And I texted her and said, I know that you’re looking for stuff to do at the moment. Are you any good with spreadsheets? And she said, Yeah, I’m great with spreadsheets. I was like, great. You want to come and help. And she was the first volunteer to come and sign up for what became project wingman, and three weeks later, we opened our first lounge in the Whittington Hospital in North London, having gone from the edge of an idea, literally back of a fag packet planning edge of an idea, to implementing our first lounge where we had uniformed air crew going into a space that the hospital provided that was large enough for us to provide social distancing. We didn’t have any masks on, I think, because that wasn’t required at the time. It was just go in, provide tea and a listening ear, and let’s see what happens. And on the back of that, pretty much every day for about five weeks, we opened a new, at least one new lounge somewhere, and it just kind of, it was like this mushroom effect. It just, it just grew and grew and grew and more and more people signed up to help. And it spread among the airlines, and then social media got involved. And you know, there’d be, oh, this is the BA lounge, and this is the Virgin lounge, and I would have to be fighting fires and saying, No, it’s the project wingman lounge, and we own that brand, and we are delighted that you are supporting it. Ba, EasyJet, Norwegian virgin, whoever you are. Thank you so much for supporting it. But it is the project wingman lounge, and you can’t take ownership of that, because we knew what was coming. We knew that if aircraft were grounded, we knew there would be redundancies and possibly airline collapses, which there were, because we lost Norwegian UK, obviously, right. So we wanted to make sure that we provided a safe space for people to land, as well as the overall mission, which was to go in and provide tea and empathy and look up wrap an extra warm blanket of care around NHS staff. But actually we created our own community of air crew, and we actually made sure we included the technically disenfranchised as well. Because if you were a cadet pilot going through your training at the beginning of 2020, suddenly the bottom fell out of your world, and there was no safety net. So we provided the safety net, and we said to the flight training schools, if you have cadets who are looking to do something, can’t pay them. But if they’re looking to do something, send them our way and we will accept them, even though they haven’t got an airside pass. And we did, and we grew to six and a half 1000 people by the summer of 2020 and we had 104 lounges stretching from up here in Elgin all the way down through Aberdeen and Glasgow, all the way down the country, as far as Barnstable and Devon, and all the way across from East Anglia to all the way through Wales to Northern Ireland, and we had two lounges in New York. Wow, the two medical centers that serve La Guardia Airport. And I can’t remember the name of the other air but I can’t remember which other
Mark McBride-Wright 28:39
airport, JFK or New York.
Emma Henderson 28:43
I think it was JFK, but the two medical centers that serve those two airports were supported by new Norwegian USA, a guy there. He actually the guy who set that up for under our umbrella. He actually works for hurty Brewton now, but he was working for Norwegian and he said, I want to do this in America. And it was absolutely brilliant. I found myself in meetings with Vice Presidents of US medical centers, and it was absolutely fantastic. I’ve always when I eventually come to New York, which I will do, I really want to go and see them and just say thank you for doing that. It never took off in America in quite the same way as it did in the UK. Because America didn’t stop flying in quite the same way that we did. There were still flights operating. So, you know, it ran for a little while. It was great. The people that got involved with it were fantastic. And I would love to, you know, I’d love to come to New York sometime and thank them for that, and if I make that trip, I will make that a priority. But it was just an amazing thing to witness, and it was all being run, not from exactly this room, because I’ve moved offices now I’ve moved from upstairs to downstairs, but it was all being run from the landing outside the bar. Our family bathroom in my house. And
Mark McBride-Wright 30:03
did you find that with the cadets, you were able to essentially keep people like in terms because, you know, aviation has rebounded, and we’re at numbers now, I think that, or pre pandemic, so highs. Did your involvement with this, like these people who might have just left, do you think you helped mitigate a significant loss of talent that then would have taken longer to recover?
Emma Henderson 30:33
I’ve never thought of that actually, but yes, I think so, because we I’ve met people since who have told me that they’ve gone back into aviation, and I’ve met people who’ve told me quite emotionally, thank you for saving my life. And I said, Well, I didn’t save your life. I provided you with a safe place to fall. And they said, No, you saved my life. I was going to kill myself. Literally, that graphic, I was going to kill myself, and project wingman saved me. And because you founded it, I want to thank you. And I’ve had several conversations with people like that, which is really moving, because you realize what a dark time it was for everyone, and that we basically lit a candle in the darkness. That’s exactly what we did,
Mark McBride-Wright 31:21
and it’s, and I love that you did more than just, you know, coming out on your doorstep on a Thursday night and giving claps, you know, you were actually, like, involved in supporting not just your sector, but also the frontline staff and frontline workers as well.
Emma Henderson 31:36
100% Absolutely. And in fact, we got, we got some sort of special dispensation from somewhere. I can’t remember it was we got some sort of permission thing, maybe from the NHS that our volunteers carried so they could prove they were allowed to be out of their houses. Because, remember, we had that restriction where we were only allowed to be out for an hour at a time. Yeah. So, so air crew in uniform had to carry this permission with them to say that they were allowed to go out of the houses and that they were allowed to go into hospitals and all the rest of it. I look back, it was a bizarre time, and what we did was, what we did was it was rebellious, really, because we were like, Oh, we didn’t think anything of it. We just went, yeah, we’ll send six and a half 1000 people into hospitals. How hard can it be? And then when, when rules came in, yeah, you’ve got to now wear PPE. We were like, Well, where are we going to get six and a half 1000 of them from then? But we just found a way around it, you know, and
Mark McBride-Wright 32:38
especially when there was a shortage at the time. I think, I think it’s fascinating, where there
Emma Henderson 32:46
were problems, we found solutions. But, I
Mark McBride-Wright 32:50
mean, that’s really treating it like an engineering problem as well. You know, it’s, it’s, you know, the different, the difference between something being complex and complicated, there are two words that we often use interchangeably, but actually they’re different. You know, they have different things. And sometimes we shy away from the challenge because we think it’s too difficult, but actually we just need to think it through. There is, there are solutions, and so by working collaboratively, that’s, that’s what’s key, definitely. So what do you what do you do? What do you find yourself doing now? Then, obviously, you know you’ve you’ve taken us through your career and the building blocks that have got you to where you’re at. Now you’ve mentioned that you’ve written a book called grounded. What keeps you busy now being a speaker, an entrepreneur, an author, you know, what’s your portfolio career like?
Emma Henderson 33:40
Well, I took redundancy for me as yet in 2020 I left on good terms. It was nothing to do with the airline. It was simply that, you know, menopause and lockdown coincided, and it was perfect storm of, I quite like sleeping. Thank you very much. So I’m not going to go back to that, which isn’t to say I would never go back, but my life is different now and then I got the MBE, which there was a lot of press attention around that, so I did a lot of news shows and a lot of podcasts, and people said, You got to tell your story. So initially it was about just sharing the inspiring story of going into through and out of aviation and what I did next. But actually, the more I went down that path, the more I realized, firstly, businesses don’t want to pay to hear inspiring stories, as inspiring as they are, businesses want return on investment. Businesses are also shockingly short of leadership skills in a lot of in lot of cases, because quite often, people rise to leadership positions with no formal leadership training, because they’ve just been there for long enough.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:48
Tell me Yes,
Emma Henderson 34:49
we all know those people, don’t we? We all know the people. And it turns out that I’m an expert in leadership, because for 12 years of my life, not only. Was I putting into practice the leadership qualities that I had and I was being taught, I was actually assessed on them every six months. When you go into a simulator as a pilot, you’re not just assessed on your ability to fly the plane, you’re assessed on your leadership skills as well. You know, decision making, leadership, teamwork, communication, all of these things. It turns out I’m an expert on by default, which is fantastic, because there’s a gap in the market, and I have the skill to be able to fill the knowledge, be able to fill it. So I set up my business in january 21 so I basically went when I took redundancy, I was entitled to Job Seekers Allowance. I thought, That’s ridiculous. My husband’s a wing commander in the Air Force. I don’t need Job Seekers Allowance. And they said, No, you must take it, because it contributes towards your National Insurance credits. Yeah. I said, All right, then I can live with that and but it also opened up the possibility for me to have something called New Enterprise Allowance. So I was allowed me to set up my business. So I set the business up Captain Emma Henderson, MBE, not very originally named. I perhaps should have thought of some more punchy name, and maybe I’ll rebrand to that. But the bits that people are interested in are the captain and the MBE, although actually increasingly, people are even more interested in who is Emma Henderson, and what drives you to go and join a male dominated industry, kind of against everything that you’ve ever known, what drives you to respond to a scary pandemic by reaching out and helping hundreds of 1000s of people across the country, by Having an idea that you take to fruition, so that it’s really interesting to see the shift from the shift towards the human being that is Emma Henderson, as well as the captain and the MBE bit.
Mark McBride-Wright 36:53
I would suggest keep it as is, you know, I, you know, I’ve built a business around equality called equal engineers, and I’ve been doing investment in myself for thought leadership and keynote speeches and everything. And, you know, I had to have a speaking coach, and she’s very well known EDI consultant, and she’s like, Mark, stop hiding behind the brand and come more front and forward to the center. And it’s even something that I’ve deliberated on with this work that I’m doing now, like the safe leader. Oh, is it now the safe leader? And should it be the safe leader.com? And should it be the Mark McBride Wright podcast, the safe leader? You know, it’s like, ah. And so I’m leading with Mark McBride, wright.com, but then the safe leader is, like, it’s a new project within my little ecosystem of stuff that I’m and I
Emma Henderson 37:49
think that’s great, you know, because actually, Emma hen captain, Emma Henson, MBE, is always going to be my brand, because it’s me. But actually within that, there are various things. So, you know, that’s my business,
Mark McBride-Wright 38:03
you know. Sorry, Project wingman is one of your your Yeah,
Emma Henderson 38:07
Project wingman is, but, you know, so project wingman we set up to serve a specific purpose at a specific time, and that time has passed. So project wingman has been a fantastic part of my life, and it’s something I’m extremely proud of, but it’s something that’s moving more towards a legacy project now, rather than, yeah, we don’t have any static lounges open anymore. We still have our two busses which are mobile well being lounges. But actually, the need for them, specifically the need, the well being need in the NHS, will never go away. But the long term solution for that can’t be volunteer air crew in uniform. So actually, what we’re looking at more now is documenting what we did so that we can celebrate the people who did it. And so, yeah, Project wingman is a project that sits under the Emma Henderson umbrella. Another project is, you know, the work I’ve done with fear fearful flyers. So I have a business partner in Salt Lake City, and between us, we’ve made something called flight deck, which is a deck of cards that you can take flying with you that explain to you why all those noises you hear on an aircraft are normal, why you’re not going to fall out of the sky, why it’s safe to travel by plane. So we have flight deck, and we have a it’s a blue deck of cards, but we have a pride version, which is gorgeous because it’s really colorful and lovely.
Speaker 1 39:30
And get
Emma Henderson 39:32
some of that. There’s some projects I’m working on on the side that will add to what I mostly do now is I either do keynote speeches or workshops working with so I delivered a closing keynote on Tuesday to 200 private healthcare workers at their annual conference. And then next week, I’ve got a couple of smaller you know, I’m working with a big energy company and working with a head teachers conference. So sometimes it’s a smaller setup, sometimes it’s a big. Tuesday was lovely because it was a stage and it had a Madonna mic, and, yeah, it was an amazing but actually, this the events I’ve got coming up will also be amazing, because that’s where you make the much more personal connections and and what I talk about specifically now, based really on the title of my book, grounded, which, oh, look, I have a copy here. How handy is that? Because my book is called grounded. I focus on grounded leadership, because now, more than ever before, I believe that we need a healthy dose of humanity, humility and humor in leadership, and that is not a political statement, actually, it is a statement about the fact that we are all working remotely. We’re all all hybrid working we’re all relying much more on automation, and we’re all relying much more on AI, and that’s great, but actually what we need to make sure we are prioritizing is that human connection. You know, what makes Mark McBride Wright tick? What makes Emma Henderson tick? What’s that connection I have with you? Because we don’t want to do business with machines. We’re human beings, not human doings, absolutely. And I think, you know, there will be people who will not have been happy with election results, not just in the US, but in the UK. Recently, people are not happy with the state of the world. It might not be election results that have made people unhappy. It might be just the state of politics in the Middle East, for example, or Russia and UK was sitting on the edge of a very turbulent period of time in history. And I’m a historian, you know, I did a history degree. I studied political history in the early nine in the early 20th century. So I’m sitting here looking at what I think is a repetition of the early 1900s and I’m, I’m not comfortable, you know? I’m, I’m hopeful that humanity will will play out. And the more we bring humanity into the workplace, the more that then spreads to people’s homes, and the more we treat people with humanity. Humanity, the more humble we are in our approach to things. And let’s face it, the more humor we have in the workplace. Because you know what going to work should be fun, right? It shouldn’t just be heads down all the time total,
Mark McBride-Wright 42:22
totally, you have to have fun in life. Life’s too short to to not to not have fun. You know, I always sometimes if I feel like I’m getting too like a lack of fun in my life, you know, trying to have a bit of a rebalance or a reset, you know, or think about, I mean, maybe we’ve all had moments where we’ve had a health scare, or we’ve had a result, or a test, blood test has come back, and you’ve thought, oh my goodness, what is that? And then you start thinking the worst. And then you totally, in that moment, start recalibrating all your priorities and everything that had been stressed up into that moment, you’re like, oh my gosh, that gives
Emma Henderson 43:04
you a bigger picture, doesn’t it? And I think that the ability to zoom out and have that bigger picture is what makes you more resilient. And I’ve had the health scare. I nearly died, you know. So I didn’t crash a plane and nearly died. I got sick and nearly died, so, you know, and then I came back from that and rushed into my command process too quickly, and then I failed. And each of those moments I could have, you know, I could have really drilled down and focused on the on the negative. But actually, when I got well again after nearly dying, my heart was full of gratitude. I felt like I’d been given another chance at life, and I think that’s one of the reasons I feel so strongly about being able to spread this message of humanity, humility and humor, really, because that’s my way of saying, You know what, we’ve always got to love each other a bit more. But you can’t go into a business and say, everybody’s got to peace out and love each other. You’ve got to go in and say, right, here are some actionable takeaways that you can put into place in your everyday, home life and business life, and you can take that away now, and by the way, this is the story that backs them up. Brilliant,
Mark McBride-Wright 44:13
brilliant. So what? Well, then looking ahead, then with your career being the course that it’s going now. What advice would you have to any aspiring speakers or authors that you know want to set their set themselves up or feel like they’ve got a message to share with the world? How like is it something they should embrace and go out and do, or are there some caveats that it’s a bit risky?
Emma Henderson 44:49
I think everything in life is risky. It’s definitely risky writing down your thoughts and feelings in a book and putting it out there, because you’re opening yourself up to criticism, and you’ve got to be. Willing to take that because I’ve been very lucky that nobody has said anything bad about my book, or at least not to my face or somewhere I can see it. So everybody’s loved the book, which is fantastic, but yeah, the advice I’d give to you is lots of people say that they’d like to write a book, and they say there’s a book in everyone, but actually very few people do it. And despite that, there are so many publications that come on the market every single day. So if you’re going to write a book, just get on and write it. Don’t think about it. Just get on and do it. And the best way to write a book is just to outline what it is you want to say, break it down into small chunks, and then Wright effectively, like an essay or a story for each of those subjects. So that’s what I did with my book. I There were 10 areas that that I had an agent, actually, who wasn’t the agent that published the book, but I had an agent who said, right, these are the 10 things that I think the most interesting about you go away and give me 3000 words on each he said, just write it down. Just get it all down on paper. He got 7000 words on my command failure, and he got 8000 words on my illness. And actually, that was really cathartic for me. So if it had never become a book, it was still a great process to go through. Yeah, and then with speaking again, you know, you need to have a very clear message. What is your purpose? What do you want to speak because you think you’ve got a valuable voice? Or do you want to speak because you have a valuable message that other people can benefit from? Because, if, actually, if you want to speak because you think it’s glamorous being on stage, and you’re going to earn lots of money and be Barack Obama and get paid $100,000 every time you appear, go and find a different dream, because that’s not what it’s like. You know, it’s hard work. You have to make sure that you are serving your clients in the same way as you do in any self employed business, and if people don’t want to hear your message, you haven’t got a job. So, so if your message is very important to you but nobody else cares about it, then actually it’s not a message that’s sellable. So make sure you’ve got something that you can that you can speak with authority on that is valuable to other people, that adds value to other people’s lives. The biggest thing is, get on and do it.
Mark McBride-Wright 47:27
Yeah, yeah. Low procrastination. Get on and do it. Great advice, okay? Quick Fire questions. Love what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever achieved? Sorry, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Emma Henderson 47:41
The best piece of advice I’ve ever received, and I’ve it was actually when I was pregnant with my first child, but I’ve applied it to everything I’ve done since, and it’s this, everybody will tell you the best way that you should do things. In this case, it was the best way you should raise your child, the best way should go through pregnancy. Everybody will give you their advice, listen to all of it, take the bits that work for you and discard the rest, because the only way for you to raise a child and be pregnant is the way that works best for you.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:15
What’s your proudest professional achievement?
Emma Henderson 48:18
Achieving command, having failed 100% i What’s
Speaker 1 48:21
the
Mark McBride-Wright 48:23
one skill you think every leader should have?
Emma Henderson 48:26
The ability to listen, because we’ve got two ears and one mouth. And when I say listen, I mean, hear what’s being said as well
Mark McBride-Wright 48:33
tea or coffee. Tea,
Emma Henderson 48:35
but not caffeinated, red bush tea, specifically,
Mark McBride-Wright 48:41
what’s your go to? Productivity? Hack,
Emma Henderson 48:46
putting all the knives in the same bit of the dishwasher. Draw, and all the forks in the same bit of the dishwasher. Draw, so that when you answer the dishwasher, you just unload them in one go.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:57
You could have dinner with any leader past or present. Who would it be?
Emma Henderson 49:03
Oh, gosh, that’s a hard one. I’d love to have dinner with Barack Obama. I think he’s interesting. I’d love to have dinner with Margaret Thatcher. I just want to get behind her psyche and Jesus,
Mark McBride-Wright 49:20
all right, well, that’s a big one. What’s the one thing you do to unwind after a long day? I
Emma Henderson 49:26
have a famous hot tub that appeared more in my in the documentary that I was in than any of my family members, as they all pointed out to me. So I go and sit I’ve got a hot tub on the deck. It fade that it faces south. I go and sit in the hot tub and listen to the geese in the field and watch the sunset.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:45
Love it. I love the circularity here, coming back to the bird connection. And what’s the most exciting project you’re working on right now?
Emma Henderson 49:57
I think it’s. Is possibly that a secret project I haven’t told anyone about yet. Much, really, it’s Captain Emma in your pocket, so people who are scared of flying will be able to have me in their pocket telling them why they’re not going to die on a
Mark McBride-Wright 50:16
plane. Sounds good. What’s the one book or resource you’d recommend to someone interested in leadership,
Emma Henderson 50:24
grounded by Captain Emma Henderson. MB,
Mark McBride-Wright 50:29
what’s the one piece of advice finally you’d give to your younger self,
Emma Henderson 50:35
stop taking yourself so seriously, because actually, you don’t know anything about anything at 22 and you just think you do. So just open your mind to the fact that somebody else might have an opinion that is more right than yours.
Mark McBride-Wright 50:54
Amazing. Well, thank you very much, Emma. I really enjoyed our chat. Can you tell some of our listeners who may want to get in touch with you how they do so,
Emma Henderson 51:05
yeah, for sure. So if you want to buy my book, it’s available on Amazon. You can just search it up grounded by Captain Hemington MBE. I’m sure if you just put grounded Emma Henderson into a search engine, it will fill it fill up Amazon for you. You can also buy a signed copy from my website, which is www dot Emma henderson.com, and a pop up will appear for the book. You can contact me via a contact form on that website if you are interested in me speaking with your business or group, and I am on LinkedIn. So if you’re on LinkedIn, you can find me@www.linkedin.com forward slash, I N. Forward slash speak, Emma dash Henderson, dash speaker. But if you just look Emma Henderson LinkedIn, you’ll find me. I’m quite easy to find. I don’t hide away, and I answer every message I ever get. I’m also hilariously prolific on Tiktok at Captain Emma dot 61 and I’ve got something like seven half 1000 followers on Tiktok. So that’s quite amusing to me. Well,
Mark McBride-Wright 52:15
we’ll put all these links in the show notes when we publish the podcast. And love that you’ve actually done the work to sort your LinkedIn URL out the number of people that don’t, and then it’s just a bunch of numbers or letters. Yeah, that’s another hint tip for people. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed getting to know you today. Emma,
Emma Henderson 52:42
likewise, it’s been lovely to chat to you or talk at you.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:47
I’ve enjoyed the experience. I’m sure there’s many areas in which we can pick up offline and collaborate further. Love
Emma Henderson 52:56
to do that absolutely and if you’re listening and you want to know more about grounded leadership. You know humanity, humility and humor, get in touch. We need more of it
Mark McBride-Wright 53:07
completely, especially in the engineering and stem sectors. Definitely.
Speaker 1 53:11
Thanks, Emma gorgeous, to see you. Take care. Thanks. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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