I went to a couple leadership challenge courses when I was a kid. It seems the concept is to build confidence by doing hard or scary things, and by putting groups in situations that require leaders to step up. The one I attended when I was in the sixth grade didn’t increase my confidence and may have hurt more than helped; in one challenge, I convinced everyone to do the wrong thing, and in another, everyone ignored my correct advice. In the end, I felt less inclined to step up and lead, so I can see why some would balk at these events.

There was one that was helpful, though—the Army Airborne school that I went to when I was nineteen and in the Navy. The course was three weeks long; the first two trained us to fall safely from increasingly higher starting points, and the final week had us walk out of a perfectly good airplane five times from about twelve hundred feet up. This course was so pivotal for me that I felt like a different person, so I legally changed my name afterward (name changes are another story entirely).

There were two factors that made this challenge life-changing. The first was that I was afraid of heights. At one point, while in line to walk off the airplane, the instructor stopped me at the door to do a quick safety check. This left me with a clear view of what I was about to do, forcing me to overcome that fear of heights in a dramatic way before willfully plummeting myself into the air.

The other factor involves a little story. After the third “jump” off an airplane, I was sitting on a table listening to two soldiers chatting when I heard one say, “Man, it’s just a thing, it’s just walking off the plane.” I thought about it, and he was right. We were not supposed to run or jump, but walk calmly yet quickly off the airplane—anything else was unnecessary and risked death or serious injury. And I had already done it correctly and successfully three times! This was a revelation for me. Up until then, I had experienced moments where I was paralyzed by fear or stress, my whole body would lock up, and I was unable to speak. This was embarrassing and incompatible with life in the military, although I had concealed it up to that point. After propelling myself off airplanes five times, I had a whole new perspective on fear and stress: despite fear, I could still perform. This conviction gave me a tremendous confidence boost.

Although I’m certain most others going through Airborne do not experience this level of transformation, it did for me due to the burden of my depression, fear, anxiety, and stress at the time. In considering the efficacy of other leadership challenges and courses, I imagine results depend on whether the course addresses a need present within the individual at the time they attend; if I went through the Airborne course today, it would of course have a much different impact than it did thirty years ago.

This is a response to my friend Lori McKinney’s Substack post on the topic.