World Record Mindset For Tech (EP 1007)

[0:18] Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast

[0:22] coming at you from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Yeah, that's where I'm at. If you heard the previous episodes, I explained it all. First time here, it's colder than it should be, but...

[0:34] It's splendid. It suns out. All is good. Now, I did tell you I was going to try and look for one of the speakers that I saw, and she is here. Melanie Curtis, who is a world record professional skydiver.

[0:49] Keynote speaker, coach, all sorts of things. Melanie, thank you for joining. Uncle Marv, I am psyched. Let's do this. ACES Conference 2026. Let's go. Now, let's start with one of the most obvious questions that people are going to say. What does skydiving have to do with tech? I'm so good, yeah. It's one of those things. But apparently you've done this before. Oh, yes. I've spoken at ACES for many years now. I've worked with Justin Esgar for a long time, who is the founder of this conference and worked with his company and his staff and contributed in this form for a long time. But yeah, I say this in my talks about how you don't need to learn about skydiving, right? It's really just a vehicle to talk about how do we access the far reaches of our potential. Because that's something I'm like personally and professionally truly and deeply fascinated by. I'm really interested in human beings and our capacities, our emotional states, what drives us to do things, deeper healing. Like I talk about a lot at a big array of things, but the skydiving is just a door opener, to be honest. It's one of the most powerful examples in my life and my professional life and personal life that speaks to fear.

[2:16] Discomfort, trusting our intuition, building a support system or a support team, all kinds of things that I expand into. All the things that a business owner should be focused on and doing.

[2:27] So, okay, let's kind of go back. I want to get to your presentation because I did sit in on that. Oh, yeah. And I can't believe you referenced me like three times. That wasn't good at all. I'm always appreciative when people engage. Okay. You know, when someone, you know, laughs at one of my jokes and like, or just nods. Or non-jokes. Yes, or non-jokes, totally. But just like is there in the room with me as being a part of the experience, you know, especially when it's a one-sided kind of thing where I'm talking at a group but trying to get some engagement. It's always really great when you know something is hitting and you can kind of have a moment with someone in the crowd. So I appreciated your participation in the way that you did. All right. Enough of that.

[3:16] Now, let's kind of we're not going to be able to get into everything, but I want to kind of get a little bit of a start from the beginning. Sure. Because when you got presented and you talked in the very beginning, you talked about over 30 years of skydiving. And I'm like, okay, first of all And, you know, you don't look old enough To have skydived for 30 years First of all, but.

[3:37] I looked up some of your history. You didn't start out skydiving.

[3:41] You were doing the business thing and all of that. So how did that come about? Yeah, I took the very traditional path at first. I was very much, if you look at me as a young person, I was an uber high achiever. I did every single club in high school. I had a goal of wanting to have the longest paragraph in the yearbook. I'm not joking. So that means I was in all the clubs and I was doing all the things, but I was also like an athlete, MVP in multiple sports. I was in a singing group. I did everything. Oh, I was in a singing group. Totally. I mean, let's not go there. But my point is I have this veracity, this life force, this energy that has been very consistent throughout my just whole life. I bring in intensity and an interest, a high level of interest and engagement and immersion and what I get interested in. And so you see that as an early person. But I also was conditioned to take the traditional path. Right. I was I was checking all the boxes. I was, yes, pushing myself.

[4:52] Pushing those boundaries. But I was also, I have to go to college, I have to get a job, I have to da-da-da-da-da-da, all the pre-prescribed ideas, right? So I did all those things, and I did them very well.

[5:08] Fast forward, I'm working at an investment bank and I start to realize I'm snapping at my boss. I'm dreading going in. I'm doing a good job. I was always a good employee, but I was not the person I knew even at like 24 years old. This is something's wrong here. OK, like something's wrong here. This is not the kind of person I am or want to be. And so I just started to reflect, you know, and I was already skydiving at this point in my life as a recreation. I was starting to compete and do teams and all kinds of stuff. Well, that's interesting. So let me ask, who gets interested in skydiving before the age of 24? Yeah. People whose father are a pilot and So literally, my dad is a pilot. I was around aviation for my entire life. My first flight was when I was three months old.

[6:07] And his best friend was a skydiver. We had a grass strip behind our house in Airport Curtis Airfield at our home on a dead end road. And so they, when I was a kid, opened a skydiving center there.

[6:20] So I was exposed to skydiving as just a possibility of something a person could do. Wow. Okay. And so I'm very grateful for that because for me, and I say this kind of in my talk in a different way, but I did one skydive. I finally like got the courage up to do my first jump at 18 years old.

[6:42] And I was one of those people that when I landed from that first jump and I had done this thing that I was just so afraid to do, it changed my psyche in a really fundamental way that I didn't realize until later in my life. But I, from that first jump moment for 20 years, made every decision about how

[7:03] to have skydiving in my life, which is why I have such an expansive career 30 years later. Okay now we're not going to have time for any of my questions i know i know i know but let me just we'll just skip those 20 years and try to come back to it at another time how did you end up getting to the point where you're doing these speaking engagements and stuff and you get asked to come to a mac conference it's so true so true so it is obviously a much longer story and i look forward to having a longer discussion when we can dive into all kinds of different things. But.

[7:41] I am a growth minded person. I am very interested, like I said, into in expanding. When you say growth, when you talked earlier, you kind of made it sound as though personal growth. Yes. Personal growth, deeper healing. Again, this is over decades of life, but skydiving is just like everything else where there's so much that you can do inside the lane of that sport, right? Entrepreneurship, great example. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. I am not a tech entrepreneur, but I've had to do wear all the hats. And that's a deep immersion in that thing, learning business, learning how to be marketing, learning how to be an Instagram person, learning how to talk to clients and clothes and sales and da, da, da, da, da. But also the talent of being an actual coach holding space for people who want to grow. Like that's what I actually do as a coach.

[8:42] Fast forward, keynote speaking, I've always been positioned to be a speaker. The first keynote I did was in 2009, where I did a stunt for some like Canadian insurance brokerage. And they were like, hey, come be our keynote speaker. So I was like, cool. I think they paid me like $9,000 or something. And even then- Did you even know what you were going to speak on? I mean, I just was like, I had no idea what I was doing. I just jumped out of a plane. I had no idea. Let me teach you how to run your business. I just told them about the stunt and talked about risk. So I did talk about risk and this and that. I have no memory really of how. I mean, I did not know what I was doing. But I also didn't learn back then in 2009 that speaking is a, you know, billion dollar industry. Where like there are a lot of people that that is their sole job. So fast forward these decades later, I've been speaking as an entrepreneur for a long time, business development, getting in front of spaces and folks that are maybe my potential customers, sharing about what I do, sharing my stories, yada, yada, yada.

[9:46] And then in recent years, like the last, say, four, four, three, three, three, three, four, four, four years, I have made the conscious, deliberate choice that now is the time because we set a world record in 2022. And intuitively I knew that it was a next chapter for me to use that story, talking about the world record and the, again, the peak performance elements, but the teamwork, the humanity, all of the stuff that goes into performing in those incredibly high stakes scenarios, but also from a very mission driven place, which we didn't even touch on in this morning session. That was just, I knew that was what was coming next for me. And so that's the very short version of how I now am a full-time keynote speaker. I certainly still coach. I have clients, but that's not what I'm promoting publicly. I only talk about in my public presence outside of the ridiculous comedy that I do, which I highly encourage people to go follow me for that. But yeah, that's how I got to the keynote, like focus and stage. Yeah.

[10:54] Before I transition, your comedy. Yeah.

[10:58] What's the percentage of cat comedy in your comedy? Well, so I tend to force my cat, Matilda. Her name is Matilda, and we call her Matil. And by the way, that is a reference to Zoolander and how they're like, hey, Matil, do you mind if I call you Matil? It's like the best. That's her name. No. Her namesake. But anyway, she is included in a lot of my dumb videos, but it's not necessarily cat comedy. Right. She's just like I'm basically playing on the like crazy cat lady. She's a prop. Yeah. Where I'm like basically giving a like double middle finger to the world about like people who make fun of women with cats. And I like I love it. It makes because there's nothing anyone can say about how much I've done with my life. I've done so many insane, badass things that I don't need to prove that. There's a part of me that really feels quite strongly that being a big dork and being sort of this nonsensical, comedic figure gives people who think we have to be serious to achieve at high levels. And we just don't. We can play. We can have fun. We can laugh. And that doesn't change any bit of how serious I am about my goals and what I'm willing to do to get there. OK.

[12:24] All right. Now we'll transition. Yeah. The types of questions that you get when you finish a conversation at an event like this.

[12:35] I imagine that they're not always technical, but I have a couple of technical ones I'm going to ask you. But what are the most typical questions that you get? It really varies. It varies on the audience, right? So if a person hears something that's very relevant to a challenge that they are experiencing in their industry field, because I'm a very non-industry speaker, right? So you're like, how do you end up in a tech conference? Because that's the whole thing. Good question, because I'm not a tech person. Right. But what I talk about are themes that are universally applied in basically any area of business or team and professional development, such that when a person has something ring true for them, then they usually will ask a question about that. Does that make sense? So that's kind of hard to describe. So, I mean, here's where I was going. Yeah. Because I always try to find a way to bring it back to my audience. For sure. And the thing that popped out to me, I was trying to go through stuff and I was like, okay.

[13:37] The way that you talked about preparing for the world record. Yeah. That, you know, everybody just focuses on the world record. Yeah. But it's not just one jump. It's days and days and it's jumps and jumps. The process of planning and making sure that you've got backups in place. Because, let's face it, you mentioned it at the end. And everybody talks about, you know, all the fears. Yeah. Well, we always joke about when stuff happens is like, well, did you die? Well, in your case, that's a real possibility. But what are all the things that go into what you do to prepare and have those backups and all those, you know, plan B, plan C type things? That's a much too long of an answer to fully answer. Just to just to say that as a caveat, because I will say I will I will answer it in a at least in part. OK, but I knew this was going to be. Yeah, it's so there's so much here that's so applicable. And entrepreneurship is such a beautiful parallel because it is this big, beautiful beast of being a business owner and being someone who has to learn how to.

[15:03] Talk to their staff, how to build systems, how to document, how to actually take tickets, how to, you know what I mean? There's so many, so many, I mean, yeah, I've been, I've been a coach for, you know, techies for a long time, which is cool. So I've learned a lot just by osmosis, but for skydiving, what goes into it is it's years and years of learning skills. So I have to first learn how to fly my body in free fall. I need to learn how to land a parachute. I need the very basic skills that a skydiver needs to save their own life. So that's one. I got to learn how to do that on my own. And then over time, I get coaching.

[15:48] I get into the wind tunnel and I fly for thousands of hours figuring out how to fly on my belly in this orientation and then learn how to fly vertically upside down on my head going much faster. I need to learn those skills in order to even consider being invited on a world record, right? I need to learn how to work in a team. I need to learn how to express around what I did right on a team jump, what I then would like to improve. I need to have humility to be in that process knowing I'm going to screw up. You know, It's just like all kinds of mental, emotional skills. I need to learn how to be detached from the outcome. What if I get cut and I don't end up on the world record? That is a huge mental hurdle that if we're talking just world records, that people...

[16:41] If they don't know how to manage that emotional attachment to outcome, they perform more poorly. And so entrepreneurship, it can be maybe likened to feeling scarcity, which is totally understandable. If you're like, I got to get this client, this client has to solve or has to sign, has to whatever, has to convert. And you're bringing all this intense attached energy. You're tighter. You're not, they're not going to like you as much. They're not going to feel safe around you. They're going to feel pressured. That's a skill a person in business needs to learn. So it's very, there's a lot that can go into it. But yeah, I mentioned about how I eat the same food, you know, like there's a lot of peak performance stuff too. That was good. I like the answer. I was thinking in those very terms of the same things that you go through, you know, but you're focused on one single thing most of the time. We're kind of that way as well, but it may be landing a client, it may be getting a client to choose a product and a client saying no. Yeah. And how to deal with that rejection. Totally.

[17:48] Totally. What happens when a server blows up? Those sorts of things. All the things. All right. Okay. So, wow. There's a lot there. I know. I know. There's so much. I'm grateful. I'm grateful. I'm grateful that I get to do this work. I really am. Like, it's wonderful to

[18:05] get to work with people who want to learn and grow. Okay. Anyone listening to this show is interested in growing. You wouldn't listen to a show like this if you didn't want to learn more and grow. Well, tell me this, because obviously, first time I've seen you, first time I've been to this event, most people probably wouldn't see you unless they went to an event. Yeah. I'm going to have listeners that are going to want to say, how do I find out about Melanie? Yeah, thank you. So where would you tell people to go to hear or see more about you? Thank you so much. Yeah, my website is MelanieCurtis.com, M-E-L-A-N-I-E, Curtis, like Jamie Lee, like Tony, MelanieCurtis.com. And yeah, find me on LinkedIn. That's a channel that I use for sure for work. And my Instagram channel is 100% a fun place. I invite you there. That's Melanie Curtis 11. And that is, by the way, a joke from Spinal Tap. People who go to 11, if you get that joke, you will love it. Oh. Yeah. Okay.

[19:02] We are not chasing that rabbit. It's a whole nonsensical thing. But anyway, I am so grateful. Thanks for having me so much. You're also an author. You wrote some books. That's right. So I'm going to find all that stuff and we'll get it listed. And we will definitely set up a time where we can talk longer and flesh out some of these things. Thank you so much. Melanie, thank you for stopping by. Love it. All right, folks, that's going to do it. We'll be back with more from ACES 2026 here in Minneapolis. See you soon. Holla.