Mental Toughness

I work with athletes a lot on fear. The problem is this: most athletes think feeling fear is a weakness. It’s not. Our bodies are designed to feel fear- the problem lies only in the lack of tools to deal with fear, letting fear run your life, being scared of fear. Fear is often just about being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is a GOOD thing, only then can one learn how to deal with being uncomfortable.

I’ve had a few experiences lately that have made me think about fear in a very personal way: two were in the ocean, one was on a flying trapeze. (yes that’s me in the photo flying through the air).

I went snorkeling in Hawaii over the holidays, which normally wouldn’t be that significant except for this time in particular. It was a terrible idea. Once my boyfriend and I finally walked over the rocky shore and got in the water, the tide shifted and we were caught in a washing machine of currents. The strength of the ocean was throwing us around while the tsunami warning siren went off from shore. One second we were thrown up against lava rock, the next we were dragged out to sea with the tide, we were getting tossed around with the waves and swallowing water. We couldn’t swim in, and we couldn’t hold on to the rocks. It was terrifying.

We did eventually find a rock that we held on to as the ocean tried to break us free. We waited and then swam to the next rock bloody and bruised, finally making our way to each rock closer to shore.

The experience was scary of course, but it really made me think about fear in a new way. When I felt the tide shift, when I felt that powerlessness in the strength of the ocean, when I heard the tsunami warning system go off, I wanted to panic. My mind started thinking, ‘this is the end, we are caught in a tsunami, we are screwed.”

But I didn’t panic. I started thinking of options- which rock to swim to, when to let go, what angles would work best. My boyfriend did the same and we made it safely to shore, with a little less skin on our knees and a lot more respect/fear of the power of the ocean.

A few days later we were in the water again on boogie boards and we heard someone yelling “HELP, HELP”. Turning around we saw two snorkelers waving their hands in the air and screaming 100 feet from us. My boyfriend and I started swimming towards them as they tried to stay afloat in the strong current. When we got there, the man was white as a ghost, trembling and gasping for air. He was completely panicked. We gave him a board to lean on and reassuring words that he wasn’t in fact going to die today. He immediately relaxed, coughed up some water and started breathing normally.

We got back to shore and the young man came up to us, still in shock and not entirely sure what had just happened.  He said thanks and told us as soon as he saw us that he knew it was going to be okay. That’s all he needed. Fear had over took him and he wasn’t being rational.

I had never really completely understood the correlation between panic and drowning. It made sense to me that it wouldn’t help the situation but I hadn’t seen it in action until this trip. And even more than that, the correlation between panicking and breathing and drowning. Because that is the key here- panicking leads to uneven breathing, which leads to swallowing water, which leads to more panicking.

As if that weren’t enough excitement in my life, when I got back to Seattle, I took a trapeze class with my sister in law. It was awesome. But talk about an opportunity to panic! I got strapped in to a harness and dropped myself off of a moving trapeze bar, did a back flip off the swinging bar and did a catch with a man swinging on the opposite bar. I am not a gymnast, these things do not come second nature to me. In fact, every single part of my body was screaming, ‘what are you DOING?’ Jumping from high platforms, thrusting your head back into the air and holding on with just your legs 30 feet in the air is against most of our instincts.

Again it was a rational fear, but it was applied in an irrational way. I was harnessed in, with someone literally holding a rope that could suspend me in air if need be. The fear I experienced was not helpful- it makes you tight in breathing, cramps up muscles or makes them shake. It affects your body moving easily through the air-one can’t backflip with a hesitant mindset or muscles that aren’t firing. In fact, a hesitant, scared mindset is the one thing that can make the trapeze dangerous, just like panicking in the ocean and breathing in water.

The lessons in all this is that fear is a not a good or bad thing, it’s entirely how it is applied. There are places that fear is helpful and it can certainly keep us safer, but it’s also not something we should try to avoid. Fear is our bodies response to something new, not necessarily something dangerous, and only by facing our fears, recognizing the rational and irrational ones and then working through them, can we grow outside of our comfort zones.

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