I spend a lot of time talking about fear, other people’s fear, mostly. It comes with my occupation and it is often our greatest motivator and our greatest barrier.
If you ask people why they feel fear in the absence of actual danger, their answers are usually related to past experiences, rejection, failure, judgement, and a whole list of negative emotions and thoughts. I call these the easy answers, they are used so often they have almost become cliches. I was recently in a professional setting and another therapist commented on how a client was not growing because of fear of change. The tone of the therapist was just shy of condecending which angered me as much as his comment. No kidding the client is afraid of change, welcome to the human race. Anyone who says they are not is either not being fully honest, or numb. Good or bad, change provokes fear. However we live in a therapy culture where statements like this have become cliched and when they are spoken, people nod their head knowingly. I think our fear is more than the tired statements which are easy to accept.
When I feel fear, after I am done reacting with the full intensity of my personality, I try to figure out what it is that I am afraid of. It sounds like a healthy trait and it is, however if I am being completely honest, I despise something else having control over me. Which is the basic truth behind my tendency to tackle fear head on. I can also be guilty of coming up with the easy answers at times, but when I challenge myself to dig through the deeper and real layers, the common demoninator is almost always about me. I find myself innately worried and afraid that that I am not good enough, or perhaps I don't belong anywhere or somehow someone will see who I really am and that part of me will be exposed. Keep in mind this is not a rational process, it has the emotional intensity of a tropical storm although this is not visible from the outside.
The center stage for my fear these days has
been consistent in giving IronMan as the main act. The registration process and training has been a two year cycle of fear, failure, pain. Despite registering twice I have yet to make it to the starting line, and in my mind there is still a marquee size question mark in that area. Most people feel fear when they commit to an event of this magnitude, however my fear has been elevated by my lack of swimming ability when I signed up. I am not talking about knowing how to swim but downplaying it, I am serious when I say I didn't know how to swim. With my first registration, I figured I had a year and I could learn a lot and make huge gains in a year. Fast forward three months and an unexpected spine surgery delayed my super charged plan. A longer than expected recovery further delayed any attempts and found me registering for IronMan a second time, again not knowing how to swim. Ok, I thought another year right? Eight months later I had been in the pool exactly four times. Thanks to my spinal surgery history and my tendency to head into full blown panic when face down in the water, I was not really on track.
At the end of April I spent a week working in Mexico and while there I decided to challenge myself with a commitment to swim every day. With those four times under my belt in the last two years, and with IM WI fast approaching I was afraid that my fear had already cost me too much time.
I swam every day. With 8 pools and a ocean there were few excuses. Well ok, a beach full of lounge chairs could have been but once commited I rarely back down unless it is impossible not to.
Day one in the pool, was brutal. I hated every moment of it, I checked my watch no less than 50 times in the 30 minutes I had decided on. On top of that, the downside of swimming in the lap pool at a resort is the family of Italians, none that spoke English who decided to play a game of water polo during my swim. They kept saying something to me and I couldn't understand them anymore than they could understand me. I wanted to be polite but I am sure they thought my tone and smile meant "please do play water polo right here and now, all 19 of you". After the fifth time of having to suddenly change directions to avoid a face plant into Uncle Vinnie's speedo covered behind, I was done. Four minutes shy of the set time and I was exhausted. Day two in the pool, thankfully no water polo and I actually swam faster the second time in! The swim up bar just to the other side of the pool was a bit distracting and I tried not to think about the hundreds of people who had been in the pool all day. My faith in chlorine was verging on desperate. I felt as though I should be bleached and disinfected but I was pretty happy about the almost immediate improvment. Day three was better yet and I decided I could head into open water swimming. I grew up in Houston with most weekends spent on the Gulf so I don't have an aversion to swimming in the ocean. The fear is reserved solely for swimming.
Day one I dove in and was a bit nervous with all of the fish I could see swimming around me. I wasn't afraid of the little fish, but what they meant. not the fish themselves. Growing up near an ocean I know what schools of small fish means. Usually the bigger fish are looking for dinner! I was doing good and with less than five minutes to go in my swim, I saw a shadow and it was huge! My brain kicked into crisis mode. You will recognize it as the mode when your thoughts are coming so fast that later you don't quite believe you are capable of thinking that quickly. You are also not sure how you managed to put together that many sentences while thinking you are going to die. It went something like "wow, that is big, wow it's still under me, wait it's under my freaking belly, where the hell is the end of it, Dear God it's huge, I am going to die". This all took about three seconds to race through my brain and during this time I managed to pop my head up and claw the water fast enough to have won Olympic gold.
Once safe, I related my story to several people who gave me the look. The look that conveys a tolerant attempt at humoring you but also cleary conveying disbelief. My irritation lasted until the next day when the giant fish showed up again, this time visible to many of the peope on the beach! My swimming buddy was a barracuda.
This all leads to my perfect excuse to avoid open water swimming for the rest of my life! Except that I had promised myself and it is not always my greatest asset but when I commit to something I rarely back down.
The next day was a day long mental tug of war which lasted for hours. My winning argument was that no one else had been attacked by a barracuda this week...that I knew of.
Just before the lifegaurds would be done for the day, I talked myself into again swimming open water. I was more than nervous, I was pretty sure that the sound of my heart beating alone would attract my buddy back in my area. If there were a way I could have stayed in shallow enough to have the safety of others around me I would have. With the waves fairly decent in size I had to venture all the way to the buoy line, otherwise as the waves crested each time I would have been belly crawling the sand. So in the water I went, and in all honesty I had my best swim ever! For some reason I felt like I knew how to swim, my breathing was decent and I was smoother than I had ever been.
It is by far one of my most proud moments of training, and for sure of swimming. Because I would have given anything to find a reason to stay out of the water at all, and then the ocean each swim was a personal victory. It will be a swim I will remember forever and for me my Olympic gold in swimming. It will hold that time until I finish the swim in Madison anyway.
On the flight home I thought a lot about that swim, and the others too. Swimming daily had given me a jump start with results that shocked me. I often think that what stands between resolution of fear is simply ourselves. We have the ability to set standards which is the easy part. We simply say them, write them, post them or blog them. When the conditions around you and in your life change though, that is the moment when you get to decide if you will really set your standard. How much you value what it is you intend to do or to stand for often is a factor. I challenge my clients often with the "if I offered you a million dollars to change_____________" . We face fear based on how much we value what is on the other side of it.
If you read this and think I value swimming I don't. It is uncomfortable and painful for me and I don't see myself ever loving it. What I do value more than the chance of drowning or a barracuda however is the courage to be stronger than my fear, to choose my moments and to define my conditions rather than waiting for them to define me.
It is not about IronMan or any other event we have in front of us, rather it is about knowing there are times we are not going to belong, we will be rejected, we will fail, we will judged and we will exposed. If we allow this to determine who we are and how we respond then we will live in fear of most things, because at the end of the day we can't control any of the world around us. I know when I jump in and decide to live my standard despite fear, it is painful and uncomfortable. But only for a while and on the other side the victory and pride is stronger than any fear I have ever been faced with.
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