My heart was beating so fast as I watched the clouds around me drifting by, why did I put this on my to do list?
This thought and many more were racing through my head as the little plane got up to its required 10,000 feet destination. With my knees huddled up next to my chest I started some deep breaths to calm myself down. I started consciously thinking of women during wars that had jumped from a much higher distance than this, without the knowledge of what conditions they were going to jump into and what enemies might be lying in wait. In particular my mind revered to Nancy Wake a brave New Zealand woman, known as “The White Mouse.”
After reading her autobiography of the same title about five years ago I was mesmerised by her outstanding courage and remembered an exert from the book when she was working for the resistance during WW2. She parachuted into a forest in France and become entangled in a tree, with the enemy, nearby she simply brushed herself off, laughed and continued fighting. I wondered how it must have felt to have such courage and determination in fighting for such a cause. Her strength and nobility placed a stake in my heart forever and I have honoured her since.
https://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Nancy_Wake
I jumped! (it was a tandem jump, I was so high up, but plummeting to the ground so fast. With more deep breaths I was eventually floating through the air, far more relaxed than my anticipated fear had led me to believe I would be. I had written my living list in 2011 of 101 things that I wanted to get ticked off within a five-year plan. I had succeeded, with the final item on the list, the tandem jump done and ticked. What a feeling of elation, pushing through fear and pushing through excuses, now in the moment in mid- air…floating!
The effect on my wellbeing would change my life for the better, pushing through anticipated fear has made me want to push more into the unknown, sometimes cautiously, sometimes not. But getting through the other side has grown me as a person and enables me to coach from a higher perspective understanding fear and how to question its false evidence appearing real (fear). I believe as a coach that I should try and push through my own fears to enable me to tell my own story to those that find it really difficult to push into the unknown. Having stories to tell helps those around me understand how they might approach a difficult situation enabling them also to push through fears.
