Aviation for Women is the flagship member publication of Women in Aviation International. Articles feature women who have made aviation history, professional development ideas, and current-topic articles.
Issue link: https://afwdigital.epubxp.com/i/715635
S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 6 Aviation forWomen 27 helping people," she said. From her experiences, she created a seven-step pro- cess called the Zero to Breakthrough Success Model and wrote a book called Zero to Breakthrough. She travels extensively sharing this message through keynotes, coaching, and seminars. She has spoken to corporate entities, such as Bank of America and Comcast, government agencies such as NASA, De- partment of Defense, U.S. Naval Academy, and the Secret Service, and technol- ogy firms like Boeing and IBM. FlyGirl has also been featured on Oprah, Tavis Smiley, CNN, and NPR. She is doing what she loves. "What I do now is to help people on a different battlefield," she said. "I get to help women in male-dominated fields make gutsy moves and live the life they really want to live. As a cop, marine, and now as an entrepreneur, I'm still in a male-dominated field. At first, I didn't want to work with just women. Af- ter spending my whole life being kept in a box because I'm a woman, the last thing I wanted to do was to work with just women! It soon became clear that through my experiences in male-dominated fields and the lessons I learned, women wanted to know how I did it. How did I overcome the barrier, how did I create the breakthrough? It was very natural. My gifts and talents are abso- lutely for the women who are just like me." In her coaching work with women in senior lead executive positions in STEM, Vernice has discovered the number one characteristic that leads them to success: giving themselves permission to go for what they want. This is hard to do, she said. "A big part of it is fear. What if you go for your dream, the thing you want more than anything else in life, and you fail and lose everything? Also, just the fear of failure, period," she said. "People want to get it right, right out of the box, when the truth is, most of the time we don't get it right, right out of the box. When we took our first steps, we fell on our butt before we started walking. Driving, you don't get that right out of the box. Flying, I didn't get that right out of the box. I had an instructor show me how to do it. We feel like we should already know what we need to know and that's just not the truth. No one is born qualified. So, if there's something you want to do but don't know how to do it, or you do know how to do it, but need to hone your skills, you've got to give yourself the room to get good, to get great. Take golf. I would have loved to be a scratch golfer when I first started. But it just doesn't happen that way. Failure is part of the process of elimination. It's like searching for the cure for cancer. Thank goodness we didn't give up after the first experiment failed. It's a process of elimination, getting to the right answer." New Babies "Success is not a single destination. The responsibility is to build on past achievements by establishing fresh goals and meeting new challenges." FlyGirl recently embarked on her greatest adventure. She gave birth to her daughter, FlyBaby, in September 2015. "She is just absolutely amazing and magnificent," Vernice said. She's also in the process of working on the manu - script of her new book, The Gutsy Move. She explains that the "u" in gutsy stands for uncomfortable. "In order to be successful, you have to be willing to get uncomfortable," she said. "Once your figure out what you really, really want to do, put your stake in the ground and go for it, you make your gutsy move. I call it gutsy because in your gut, you can feel it and know it's right, and also it takes guts to do it." She believes this is the missing link with a lot of young girls. "It takes guts to go for something when other people say you can't do something, to go against the grain, it's only for guys," Vernice said. In the realm of aviation, she believes one of the keys to getting more women involved in both military Combat activity was serious business, but during her downtime, FlyGirl cotinues to cherish time with family. Here, from second photo down: Enjoying family time at the beach; with her father and stepmother; and with her biggest fan, FlyMom.