How Facing An Old Fear Changed Her Life
October 18th, 2006Where I grew up in Australia was the ideal location to enjoy all types of water sports. I was lucky enough to live on an endless coastline of beautiful beaches and along the edge of Australia’s largest inland lake, Lake Macquarie. Australia is the world’s biggest island and most of the population lives along the coastline. Only a small percentage of the population lives inland. Since this is the case, many people enjoy free access to beaches, lakes, rivers and other waterways as a regular part of the Aussie lifestyle.
Most parents send their kids for swimming lessons at a young age in Australia for two reasons. Firstly, so they can actively enjoy the many opportunities to play and swim in the water and secondly, for reasons of safety. Since there are so many opportunities to get in the water, not just at the beach or the lake but also in backyard swimming pools, it’s important to know how to swim, just in case there is no supervision. My friend Lisa was no exception. Her parents sent her for swimming lessons at a young age and she did eventually learn to swim but it caused her considerable distress, so much so she became so fearful of the water she would never go in any deeper than where she could easily touch the bottom.
Ok, so you’re thinking to yourself, big deal, plenty of people are scared of the water. Yes, you are right but after years watching her friends swimming and surfing at the beach, water skiing on the lake and generally frolicking and having fun in the water (the deep water), Lisa decided to face her fears.
Throughout the colder months of the year, telling no one, Lisa formulated a plan to tackle her fear of the water during the coming summer. Although it is hot in Australia for more than half of the year, the summer season is from December through February. Lisa’s grand plan was to spend those 3 months facing her fear and hopefully, once and for all, release her phobia of deep water. She told her brother, who was a friend of mine, her idea just before the start of summer. Just as she had hoped, he was 100% behind her and had long been quietly upset that his sister could not enjoy all the water sports the way he and their friends did.
Since the beach was the most common destination Lisa and her friends would hang out, this is where she began her plan to face her fear. She had a few failed attempts at the beach by trying to go further out than she normally would but ultimately her fear pushed her back to the shoreline. This was disheartening for her but she was committed to not giving up. I wasn’t at the beach with her when she went on those first few attempts to move out into the deeper water but I remember what happened when she decided she would come out in a friends speed boat on the lake one day.
I really hadn’t given a lot of thought to Lisa’s fear of the water personally at the time, I just remember thinking back then that it was brave of her to face her lifelong fear of the water. However, what happened on that day a while back affected me so much that it prompted me to write this article on facing your fears from someone else’s experience that I happened to witness.
Lisa, her brother, two other friends and I went out on the lake in a speedboat as we often would to go water skiing. We had a couple of runs and were all enjoying ourselves when Lisa decided she wanted to take the plunge in the middle of the lake. She would often come out in the boat with us but would never get in the water. There was absolutely no touching the bottom out there. We were literally in the middle of one wide section of the lake and the nearest shoreline was over a kilometer away. Lisa was adamant she wanted to get in the water alone, she didn’t want anyone else in the water with her. She figured to face her fear of deep water she needed to do it alone without the security of anyone along side her. Of course the boat was still next to her. She wasn’t a good swimmer but she did know how to stay above water so she didn’t wear a safety vest. Lisa made her way to the back of the boat where there was a small platform to easily enter the water and gave us explicit instructions to not jump in after her no matter what. I remember she was breathing heavily but was putting on a brave face, she paused for a while just staring at the water and then in an instant she jumped in.
At first, only for an instant, she was completely submerged but quickly her head broke the surface and her arms began flailing around as she tried to keep herself afloat. It was plain to see from the look on her face she was in a state of absolute terror. My first reaction and I’m assuming the others on the boat felt the same way was to pull her back into the boat but we knew that was not what she wanted us to do. Although her face was wet from being in the water it was obvious she was crying and in an emotionally bad way. As she continued to tread water and look back at us in the boat with that look of fear in her eyes I felt physically sick just watching what she was going through. I think it was at this moment I got my first real introduction to what true fear is all about. Of course I had and still have my own fears but watching someone face their fears with this much courage gave me a new perspective I had never appreciated before. Eventually after about 5 minutes, although it seemed like a lifetime, Lisa waded to the back of the boat and climbed back in. She was shaking and crying but those tears of pain soon changed to tears of happiness as she took her first real step towards facing her lifelong and debilitating fear of deep water. This was only the beginning of a long climb up the mountain of fear for Lisa and she knew it but she also knew she had taken the first few steps towards the summit. She confessed after she got back in the boat that she was terrified every moment she spent in the water but felt so happy inside once she got back in the boat. She didn’t get back in the water again that day but she did continue to spend more time in the deep water at both the lake and the beach over the coming months and by the end of summer her fear had subsided to the point she was not only confident in spending time in the deep water alone, she became a proficient swimmer and by the following summer was competing in beach club swimming events.
Not only did Lisa conquer her fear of deep water, her new found confidence transformed almost her entire life. She had battled a minor weight problem throughout most of her life and was previously very shy but by overcoming this one particular fear she came right out of her shell. She began waterskiing with the rest of us and became involved in other sports, within months she was looking trim and fit and very self confident. Her whole outlook on life changed and she did it all on her own. She has always been a positive example to me and to this day she remains happy, fit and runs her own successful business.
Although avoiding your fears might seem like the easy way out, you may find when you muster up the courage and discipline to face your fear, no matter what it is, that you may even find your fear was nothing but an illusion and the fear itself wasn’t even the thing that scared you. What it is that scares you is the thought of facing it, not the fear itself. When I was young I had a poster on my bedroom wall that read “face your fears, live your dreams”, I think that’s pretty good advice. When you’re ready it might be a good idea to start out facing a minor fear to begin with and as you gain the confidence from overcoming it, move onto the next fear. Or you could do as Lisa did and jump straight into the deep end so to speak and face the fear that bothers you the most and you might find many of your other fears simply disappear. Good luck.
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