Author: Kirsten Seeto
I take enormous value from paragliding. Not only because I love to fly. I love it because of the impact it has had on other areas of my life. The things I have learned about myself would have cost me a fortune from a qualified psychologist! I have realised that fear has stopped me achieving many of the things I aspire to achieve in my life. Understanding how I react to fear and how I overcome fear in paragliding, has allowed me to deal with fear outside of flying also. In this article I want to share what I have learned.
Everyone has his or her own fears. Some are common, and some are unique. The collection of things we, as individuals, fear are different for each of us. That’s why when we share our fears, sometimes we connect with others, and sometimes we don’t. Experiencing fear is common. What we fear can be different. In paragliding, some of us fear collapses, some of us fear throwing a reserve, and some of just fear injury. Regardless, most pilots can empathise with these fears. It gets more interesting when fears appear that don’t make sense.
I did an SIV course last year at the end of the 2014/15 season, with around 250 hours under my belt. I decided to sign up and make the hefty financial investment because in the last season I ran into a cranky thermal that left my wing a ball of washing. In the heat of the moment, I looked up and knew I wouldn’t be able to pick it out so I calmly but quickly brought the wing to the point of stall and recovered and the wing popped out and I flew away. Those with more experience with whom I shared my story with told me I really should have tried to pick it out before stalling it. And I was lucky I recovered the stall properly because that could have gone badly. I had learned how to stall from a training video. Maybe it was time to get some professional training.
The SIV course scared the hell out of me. We towed up from a lake and for 5 of the 6 flights, I found the tows excruciating, knowing that my perfectly inflated wing was going to be forced to do ugly stuff pretty soon. The first tow wasn’t so bad because I didn’t know what was coming. On my second flight I experienced an uncontrolled spin which was uncomfortable to say the least and, quite frankly, terrifying. I froze. In every collapse I had dealt with prior to this one I had been pleasantly surprised to find that I would enter this uber-state of flow where I was razor-focused. This time I froze with fear. I could hear the instructor on the radio telling me over and over what to do but I couldn’t react. Eventually I got my act together and did as the instructor was telling me and I recovered. I think I had another uncontrolled spin on the 4th flight. These spins made stalls feel like a walk in the park. Anyway, I was ok, we debriefed and all was good.
The problem was that I was now terrified that my wing would collapse at any moment. That made no sense. I had handled every collapse prior to the SIV course without incident. I should have been even better equipped to handle collapses than I was before. But now I was afraid every flight. I’d look up at my wing and cringe as it bobbed around in turbulent air. In the first trip a few months later after the SIV, I competed in a competition in the US and I did pretty well. But I wasn’t enjoying my flying so much. All that watching the wing was pretty tiring.
So I learned a few things from this experience. Firstly, talking about your fears helps. I actually didn’t find anyone who could say they had been through the same thing. But talking about my fears before they stopped me from wanting to fly helped me start to articulate what it was that I was afraid of. I thought I was afraid of my wing collapsing for a long time. That was really frustrating because I’d never been afraid of this before and I’d handled many collapses just fine. Talking about it helped me work out that I was afraid of freezing and being unable to make decisions when I most needed to. This I could understand — this was a new experience for me and it made sense that this would shake me. Understanding it meant I could work on it.
Secondly, by talking about it I didn’t feel like I had to pretend that I enjoyed every minute of each flight. It’s not a great feeling to be on the ground after a flight, surrounded by excited pilots and having to pretend you had as great a flight as they did. I could say “I really didn’t like the conditions at that second turn-point — that scared the hell out of me”, and other pilot’s reactions would help me gauge how I was progressing with my fear. I might even find a pilot who’d talk it through with me.
I am pleased to say that I have been able to shake this fear and move on to enjoying much more of my flying again. This doesn’t mean that I don’t experience fear, though. I have been lucky enough to spend our winter this year working in San Francisco and flying their summer around California on the weekends. California is a very good place to train for our flying conditions — it can be really active during the height of summer here. I have been scared at some point on just about every flight I have had here. But I have worked out some mechanisms to deal with fear. This includes:
- Determining if the fear is real or imagined.
- Reminding myself how I was rewarded in previous flights with awesome flying by resisting the urge to land early — that conditions can improve.
- Recognising when I have a low reserve of courage and moving into different air BEFORE I use all that courage up.
- Reminding myself that flying away from the rest of the gaggle to find nicer air is better than just landing
This is all great for my flying but the gold in this is that I have been able to use what I have learned outside of flying too. For me, I have learned how to recognise fear and separate it from gut feeling. Once I recognise fear I know how to handle it. I know that I can get through fear by taking my time. I know not to give up on something immediately if I am scared, and that if I take some interim steps often I can find the courage to get to my goal. I know not to ignore fear and throw myself into something quickly because I know the worst is when I use all my courage up and leave myself hanging. I also know not to get frustrated if I feel scared of something that feels illogical. Given time I will work out exactly what I am scared of and be able to deal with it.
The mind is crafty but you can get around it if you learn how it operates. That is an on-going project for sure, but just to know its possible gives me enormous hope that I can achieve so many things I aspire to in life.
Author: Kirsten Seeto