Does fear show up when you would have ideally loved to do it? Does fear show up each time you want and attempt it? Is it a set boundary? Who set it up? Does it film your thoughts each time you want to release and dissolve that boundary set in your head…Well, these were the questions thrown at me sometime back and cheerz to that moment, I decided it was high time and more than time up to confront one of my biggest fears.
Felt often, that in some cases, it’s more easily said than done and it occurred to me each time I wanted to break open from this fear, which I realized I was actually holding on closely to. Each time someone convinced me to try it out and I thought I should and get off this mind block of fear, there was something drastic that pulled me back and I trusted this freaky instinct or rather it monopolized my thought process. Don’t know how it took birth…there was no specific instance though…
Not a fear of being judged nor a fear of saying the truth…Its something I had tracked long back, accepted it, but never managed to confront head on...Its about the fear of heights, referred to as 'Acrophobia' in real terms. Played a rather nasty role in my life…nasty in the sense I never could enjoy heights even though I loved the beauty in it, it was this fear that curbed me most of all. Felt horribly sick and uneasy being in shackles of this feeling but it requires lots more than that to overcome it .. When I visited lovely locales on heights and refused to look down the edge to enjoy that beautiful feeling of standing there experiencing the carefree breeze hitting and admiring that view…enjoy that exhuberent feeling of being on top of the world! Cliffs scare me to death…while others enjoyed it, much as I would have also loved to! For the love of doing it, I would hold on to someone for my dear life and stand there for a few minutes and give up with a dizzied feeling left behind…motivated by Fear!
Looking down from heights while in aircrafts, glass cube elevators or looking down from the 17th floor of a room that is secured with glass panes from top to bottom - I enjoy but when it comes to looking down from top of heights where it is open ended, boundary less with nothing to secure you, that's where it creeps in…for e.g. Those various peaks at Mahabaleshwar referred to as 'Points' …that is the scary part, where the phobia kicks in…looking down from there creates a weird feeling in my stomach, a huge vaccum…it’s a horrible feeling in the head is all I can say and the role it played was crucial... To a certain extend it drained out the passion in my life. It's not that fear is a terrible thing but somewhere it started controlling me on this bit !
It all happened on the last day of a 2 days ‘Leadership Forum’ I attended. These Forums bring in quite a lot of excitement in our organizational set-up. To start with you have the opportunity of interacting various people spread over countries lots of knowledge sharing and of course you gather useful chips that immediately gets into head and you absorb it like a sponge and the rest of it of course to throw off the window as soon as you are out of the session. Well, there were great ones on a loved feeling "Success"..very interesting pieces actually, group discussions, presenting your ideas etc. During one of the exercises we were made to list down Fear Factors..well people had different fear factors, which prevented them from opening up ideas, coming out with out of the box thinking, being bold to express novel ideas, fear of being rubbished, fear of failing, fear of being judged and so on and so forth…and I listed mine too, honestly..
Any ways fear factors discussed…debates et al happened. In that group of all of 35 members, I was the only one with this typical fear factor…neways I thought it ended there..knowing little what was going to hit me later…
Bottom line..none of my tricks seemed to click!
34th member of the team done with his adventure on rappling…the last one left HAS TO do it too…since there was a fear factor involved there was lot of sensitivity too…either it was holding on to it and living with a unreasonably sick feeling or conquering this one time and getting over it once and for all... Finally, I made up my mind. You can imagine the scene with people coaxing, convincing and cheering and the lump in my throat and my eyes almost heavy, butterflies nowhere around but rambling in my stomach…didn’t leave back an iota of strength and guts I possessively held...booted and got belted to strings…made up my mind actually (did that once more)…that moment helped me go one step beyond my fear factor…I looked down from there and I could only see colleagues who had encouraging looks down those 7 floors…the first move was to let go off that support of the terrace walls and hold on to the string and get my hands off the wall, I was so close that I didn’t want to look back now…it took me about 15 minutes to get over that meta-anxiety…that feeling of being scared…the conviction to embrace fear…deep breaths…keeping calm and a moment to cling on to the rope………….….….
