I went to Munich this week for Salesforce's Industry Summit, and when I arrived at the welcome reception I did a genuine double-take at the venue: the European Southern Observatory. For anyone who's been following along here for a while, you'll know that was already a gift.
Then the evening got better.
The speaker was Dr Mindy Howard, and her topic was 'Train Like an Astronaut for Success on Earth.' What followed was one of the most unexpectedly moving talks I've sat in for a long time.
Mindy has wanted to be an astronaut for as long as she can remember. The pursuit of that goal has shaped almost every significant decision she's made - years of study, international relocations, and even a change of citizenship to position herself as a potential candidate. And it worked. She was named on a flight list as the first woman from the Netherlands to go to space.
Then Covid struck, and the mission was cancelled.
If that had happened to me, I'm genuinely not sure I would have handled it with anything like her grace. But Mindy's response was to redirect, not retreat. She founded the Cosmic Girls Foundation, aimed at inspiring more women and girls toward space and space careers, and developed a mental preparedness program originally designed for commercial astronauts that has since evolved into a broader peak performance methodology for high-performing individuals.
The framework she's built is derived from a concept around maximising the overview effect. For those who haven't come across the term, the overview effect is what astronauts consistently describe when they return from space: a profound and often irreversible shift in how they see everything, from having viewed the Earth whole, from the outside, from a vantage point that reveals how interconnected and fragile it all actually is. It changes people. Deeply, and permanently.
Those who caught a recent edition of The Uprising will know the countdown has started for me too - and I'll come back to that in a moment - but what Mindy has done is take the psychological architecture behind that perspective shift and reverse-engineer it into something you don't need to leave the atmosphere to access. Her methodology links three things: situational awareness, behavioural modification, and physical anchor triggers.
It sounds technical, but the idea underneath it is elegant. Most of us operate in a kind of tunnel vision - focused on what's directly in front of us, reacting to the immediate, missing the pattern. Situational awareness is the deliberate practice of pulling back and reading the whole landscape. Behavioural modification is deciding in advance how you want to respond, rather than defaulting to habit. And the physical anchor is a tangible cue - a breath, a pause, a deliberate gesture - that interrupts the automatic response and gives you a beat of genuine choice.
As a leadership tool, that sequence is powerful. Think about the last time you were in a high-pressure moment - a difficult conversation, an unexpected challenge from the board, a team in open conflict. What most of us do in that moment is react from muscle memory. What Mindy is describing is training yourself to pause first, read the room, and choose deliberately. Not suppressing the reaction, just not being at its mercy.
For me, the thread running through all of it connects back to something I've believed for a long time: that one of the most important things you can do as a leader is actively seek out new ways of seeing your world. Not just your industry or your business, but the bigger picture, the wider view. Because when your perspective genuinely shifts, so does everything that follows - how you read a situation, how you make decisions, how you show up for the people around you.
That's why I want to go to space.
And then Mindy mentioned her flight plan.
It's with Virgin Galactic. She's been waiting years for this, longer than most people's patience would hold, and it's looking increasingly real. I asked her when. She told me the window. And I laughed out loud, because it is almost exactly the same as mine.
There are moments where the universe seems to be making a point.
Two women, in a room in Munich, at an observatory, having both spent years aiming toward the same wildly specific goal, discovering they're likely to fly in the same window, with the same company, seeing the same whole picture from the outside for the first time. If that's not a collision of planets, I don't know what is.
I don't quite know what to do with that, except feel genuinely grateful for it, and share it with you.
Mindy's Cosmic Girls Foundation is worth knowing about if the intersection of space and gender equity interests you. And her peak performance work is genuinely worth exploring if you lead people and you're looking for a framework that's a bit more interesting than the usual high-performance toolkit.
More to come as the window narrows.
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