Put Your Fear in Check and Overcome It!
My biggest fear, is fear itself. Fear can cripple you, it can paralyze you. Fear can keep you glued to one spot fearful to take a step forward in any direction. Fear can also be a good thing though! How can something so paralyzing be good for me, especially when you have butterflies in your stomach, and your anxiety is so overwhelming it makes your heart palpitate and your forehead bead with sweat? Fear gives you your edge, gives you your competitive advantage, and makes you sharp. Have you ever been forced to do something that there was no way out of, and you were afraid of it the whole time you are doing it? Did you notice how focused you got on what it is you were doing? You become a little more cautious, you take your time, your senses are more tuned and heightened. Someone once told me that it’s normal to have butterflies in your stomach when you are afraid of something, but the secret is making those butterflies fly in formation, forging order from the chaos.
Fear has a smell but so does success, and trust me when I tell you the smell is success is a whole lot sweeter. Fear can also be a great motivator; in fact, I’ve used it for motivation my whole life. I learned how to make my butterflies fly like Top Gun pilots, graceful but powerful, a fine-tuned precision instrument, all going in the same direction focused on that one point ahead of me. I used to hate that I was afraid of certain things. Fear is one of those things some people don’t like to admit or even talk about and when they do they often considered a weakness.
My fear of certain things has driven me to want to face those fears head on. I used to be afraid of heights. It was so bad that even the thought of it made my palms sweat. If I ever found myself in a situation high off of the ground and looking at the distance that separated me from the ground, I would get dizzy. Whenever I had to climb a ladder my knees buckled. I didn’t understand how there were some people in the world that seemed to be unaffected by something that bothered me so much. My mother has always said to me my whole life, “What one man can do, so can another”. I thought about those words for a long time and wondered how I could ever make that apply to me. How could I gather the courage to take action on those very simple but powerful words? So I decided to take up skydiving, and not just once or twice with an instructor strapped to my back. I’m talking superhero style where I would take that great jump solo into the big blue.
One day I woke up and said, today is the day that I will embrace my fear! I called the local skydiving drop zone and signed up for my eight-hour safety course which allowed me to do a solo jump. And now here I am 36 jumps later, still alive perfectly intact and with no fear at all of heights! A lot of people think I’m a little crazy for eliminating my fear by going to such an extreme. The first question they ask is how on earth, being so afraid of heights as you were, could you have found the courage to do that, and not just once but over and over again? My answer has always been the same, it was just something I had to do. I hated what that fear felt like, I felt like it was holding me back and giving me unnecessary anxiety. Fear had limited my belief and made me think it was something I would never be able to do! I felt unstoppable on the ground, I was pushing the limits left and right, but the sky was my limit. Push through your fear, break through your glass ceiling, take one step farther than you’ve ever gone before. You can do anything you want to, and don’t let the sky be your limit!
