Life Lessons From The Cockpit

Life/Redefined shines a spotlight on inspirational Redefiners who prove that, as you enter your 50s and beyond, anything is possible.

Nushin Elahi had reached the point where her kids were leaving home and her work as a freelance journalist was ebbing. Although she had continued to work after having children, she had done so around family life. She wondered whether this was it and whether it was all downhill from there. She needed to find a new sense of purpose. She recalls reading Martha Beck’s bestseller Finding Your Own North Star with tears rolling down her face. She felt it was speaking directly to her.

Fast forward a few years and she has reinvented herself by daring to try something new - becoming a qualified pilot and a coach - and has also written a book, Find your wings and fly: Life lessons from the cockpit based on how she got to this point.

It’s a completely new direction for Nushin who spent most of her working life in the arts industry, working first as a stage manager in a tiny experimental theatre in South Africa before moving into arts journalism. Before she moved to the UK in the early 2000s, she had been drama critic at one national paper in South Africa and arts editor at another as well as working as the press officer of a tv studio.

In the UK, she worked at the British Museum and Camden’s Roundhouse theatre as a volunteer coordinator and was a freelance writer for numerous art and culture publications here and abroad. She has also spent over 25 years curating annual exhibitions for her mother, South African landscape artist Alice Elahi, including a major retrospective at Pretoria Art Museum in 2015, publishing a book on her mother’s art and managing a national touring exhibition at five different venues.

Becoming a Pilot

Her journalism, however, came to a grinding halt when everything moved online. “All the roads I knew were saying no entry,” she says. “I felt like I had to reinvent myself.”

Her husband, who is an engineer, had a pilot’s licence and encouraged her to fly. He had rebuilt a single seater plane and later went on to build a two-seater. Nushin wasn’t particularly interested in flying and admits to being fairly terrified by the prospect of being a pilot, but she went for it. She acknowledges that the world of flying is very different from that of the arts, which is more based on intuition and collaboration and tends to be more female-dominated.

But the experience of being up in the sky, having what she calls ‘the view of angels’, seeing the world unfurl below, was magical. She was hooked. She began flying in 2016, acquiring her National Private Pilot’s Licence for both microlights and General Aviation aircraft. “It was a big step. I was saying yes to new opportunities, but I could never have dreamt that it would open up a whole new career and book and start a new journey,” she says.

She adds that each flight is a learning experience and offers something different, from flying in a windy atmosphere to landing at a different airstrip. Nushin’s experiences in the air led her to set up a blog with the aim of demystifying flying and sharing the images she loves to capture from the air.

Being a pilot is a hobby for Nushin, but it taught her that all the things she was learning were not just to do with flying. “It was all about life lessons,” she says. “It taught me that you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone and embrace the uncomfortable.” For Nushin, getting older doesn’t have to mean losing the kind of curiosity that children are born with or not putting yourself in circumstances where you don’t know everything. She has a friend who is 103 and he has encouraged her by remaining curious about the world. “As adults we often don’t allow ourselves that, but it’s important that we don’t shut down our sense of curiosity,” she says.

Coaching

That philosophy is at the heart of her coaching business, which seeks to understand who people are and what motivates them. She set it up in 2020. Nushin has an ICF-accredited coaching qualification and her coaching work is aimed at women like her. “Most coaches coach who they once were,” she says. She states that the women who come to her feeling they have lost their sense of direction are getting younger. She adds that many tend to play down the creativity and flexibility that they have drawn on as working mums.

Nushin has used that flexibility herself throughout her life, and even recently. Nushin wrote the foreword to her book in 2019 and was on the last draft before Covid hit. Her son, who was very active and had been a scout leader, got long Covid. It was shocking to see him struggle to do anything. He is now working in the civil service. He still has to take naps if he gets tired, but he is managing. Nushin felt the book needed rewriting to acknowledge that life isn’t just an upwards arc. There are storms and setbacks along the way. “I took inspiration from my son,” she says. The book was finally published in early 2023. It caused a bit of a stir among people at the airfield where she trained as she was very honest about her training experience, but many loved it for that very honesty.

As a coach, Nushin offers one-to-one online coaching tailored to individual needs as well as a group programme based on her book. She also hosts a monthly call which gives women the chance to connect with others in a compassionate environment.

Earlier this year Nushin started a course based on her book and is aimed at those struggling with a sense of becoming invisible and irrelevant as life moves on. She says the flying imagery helps people visualise the journey they are taking.

She says: “I saw many women struggling to tap into a joyful sense of vitality after a lifetime of helping others, feeling invisible and irrelevant. My own journey to becoming a pilot helped me rediscover my own youthful confidence and the adventure of life again. I’ve since helped other women do the same. None of them has yet taken up flying though!”

*Connect with Nushin at www.re-frame.coach or on Facebook and Instagram. Her book is available on Amazon.

55/Redefined acquired the assets of workingwise.co.uk, where this article was first published, in 2024.

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