Ageless Passions by Karen Putz

Tag: fear

  • Choosing Passion Over Fear

    Choosing Passion Over Fear

    “Are there any alligators in this lake?”

    I was down in Florida, about to take a barefoot water ski lesson from a two-time World Barefoot Champion. The thought of alligators didn’t cross my mind until that moment. I was about to get into a lake that averaged 600 alligators per square mile…

    And I was scared.

    “Alligators don’t come near the boat because the engine scares them away,” my instructor reassured me.

    My passion for the sport of barefoot water skiing was about to outweigh fear. I put my feet on the water, stood up, and felt a joy that had been buried for too many years.

    When you do something you’re passionate about, you are willing to challenge yourself to do more than you ever thought you could do — you step way, way, way out of your comfort zone when you live on the edge.

    I was hooked, but there was just one problem — the more lessons I took, the more the fear escalated. When I floated in the water while waiting for the boat to pick me up, I imagined hungry 13-foot alligators slithering underneath.

    Then the nightmares began.

    At three in the morning, I was jolted awake by the image of an alligator with a wide-open mouth about to snap down on me.

    I contemplated giving up the lessons and skiing in lakes that were alligator free — but that would mean giving up passion over fear.

    “You need to face your fears,” the World Barefoot Champion told me. “You need to see them for the magnificent creatures they are.”

    “Are you crazy! I can’t do that!”

    I shuddered at the very thought.

    All fear stems from the imagined and the unknown. The human mind is very powerful in dreaming up scenarios that feed on fear. Yet, the only way around fear is smack dab through it.

    And here’s the thing: You attract what you fear. How do I know this? Because alligators started showing up in my life left and right.

    A few years later, I started barefooting with Ken Cowles — who is known as The Gator Guy. He’s a state licensed alligator trapping agent. He’s the guy you call when a wayward gator gets stuck in your pool.

    “We need to conquer that fear you harbor,” he told me one day. Then he hauled out a ten-foot gator and made me sit on it.

    I was shaking for a long, long time afterwards.

    The act of getting upfront close to the very thing that I feared most was cathartic. I discovered I had the courage to do the very thing I was extremely frightened of.

    There’s a part of you that comes alive when you do something that you think you cannot do and you get to the other side of it.

    If you’re holding back in life because of fears that you harbor within you, it’s time to get clear on what you WANT in your life, not what you fear.

    Choose passion over fear.

     

    Karen Putz is known as The Passion Mentor. For a daily dose of passion, follow her on Instagram at The Passion Academy.  To unwrap your own passion, grab the book, Unwrapping Your Passion.

  • Facing a Fear of Alligators

    At five o’clock this morning I woke up drenched in sweat. The open jaws of a very large alligator startled me awake.

    It’s not the first time I’ve had that kind of dream. Here’s how they started:

    Alligator Dreams

    You’ll note that this was written back in November of 2010. For awhile there I was doing great. Then one morning last year, Joann O’Connor and I were walking from the guest house to the ski school and we encountered an alligator lounging in the grass. My heart pretty much leapt out of my chest. I was just glad I wasn’t alone.  My first instinct was to run, but then I remembered a little tidbit I had read somewhere on the web– that alligators can run as fast as 35 mph (not true as I later found out, it’s more like 8 or 9 mph–huge difference!).

    To top it off, last fall, I barefoot water skied right by what I can only assume was a very large alligator, judging by the ripples left on the water as I skied by. The boat crew confirmed it.

    So for all the bravado I declared back in 2010, I’ve discovered that the fear of alligators is not something I can merely outrun in my mind. There’s no way to control the dreams except after they’ve occurred, and by then, I wake up in a cold sweat and can’t go back to sleep for a long while, even after mentally changing the end of the dream.

    Several people have suggested that I face the fears head on by petting an alligator or even wrestling one under supervision. I don’t think that will do anything to alleviate the fears, because the fear stems from the idea of being attacked in the water, and that’s beyond my control.

    So unless someone has a solution for me, I’m going to invest stock in a company that develops alligator repellent.

  • Decide That You Want It More Than You Fear It

    How many times have you held back because you feared something?

    I’ve been pondering “fears” lately.  Recently, I received a comment from a reader who is hard of hearing and struggling with anxiety– “Social groups are almost impossible at times,” she relates.   She has agreed to teach a weaving class in her community and is scared that she will have trouble getting through it with the communication challenges ahead of her.

    Boy, oh boy, can I relate.  Social situations, parties, group discussions– they used to strike fear inside of me and sometimes, they still do.   Communication in those situations becomes a rapid-fire ping-pong game– sometimes so fast that the ball is just a blur and you get nothing out of the game.

    I emailed the reader and this is what I shared with her:

    I can understand being scared about teaching the weaving class but let me tell you– you can do this!  At the beginning of the first class, be honest about your hearing loss and explain to the class what you need to make communication happen– that everyone has to face you when talking, to speak a bit slower and that if they need to get your attention– to raise their hand before they speak, etc.  It takes a tremendous amount of courage to do this but the rewards are great– students will adjust and you’ll have better access to communication and be able to share your skills with less anxiety about trying to follow everyone.  Communication is a two-way street but you have to teach others what you need to make that happen.

    In another email I shared:

    It’s ok to be nervous, just don’t let it prevent you from moving forward.  Face your fear head on.  My daughter sent me this picture at a time when I was dealing with some fears so I’m passing it on to you:

    Lauren sent me that photo during Women’s Barefoot Week at the World Barefoot Center.  She had no idea how timely that photo was.  I’ll have to back up a bit to explain.  In March, when I first went down to Lake Conine to learn how to barefoot again, one of the questions that I asked Keith St. Onge was, “Are there alligators in this lake?”

    Yup, that’s right.  I’m not too fond of alligators.  In fact, they downright scare the daylights out of me.  As long as they’re far away with a fence between me and their sharp teeth, I’m good.  When Lauren was in Girl Scouts, she came home with a picture of her holding a baby alligator.  I was very glad that I wasn’t there, or I would have had visions of the taped mouth coming undone and my little girl devored on the spot.   One year, Joe and I took the kids to an alligator attraction and I was happy when we finally left.

    Keith’s response to my question was simply, “Yes, but they don’t bother us.  The boat engine scares them away.”  I wanted to barefoot more than I was scared of the marine life, so off I went into the water.

    Then in the middle of Women’s week, I was sitting in the water after a barefoot run, waiting for the boat to come back and pick me up.   The boat was taking forever to idle back to me.  I turned around and stared into the open jaws of an alligator coming to attack me in the water…

    And then I woke up.

    That’s right, I had a nice little alligator nightmare.  I couldn’t fall back asleep for a long time after that.  The next morning, we did a photo shoot on the water.  I was sitting in the second boat, waiting for my turn on the water.  One of the gals pointed out an alligator swimming by.   The other boat began coming closer and the alligator disappeared.   I tried to put the image out of my mind, because I knew I had to get in the water.

    Come on, Karen, nothing’s going to happen.

    Well, what if I’m the first person to get attacked on this lake?

    Don’t be silly, the alligators are scared of boats, they’ll stay away.

    All too soon, it was my turn to get in the water and my legs were shaky.   I fell on my first attempt to get up and I tried to tumble around to get back up and finally let go.   David Small was driving and he asked me if I was nervous about the photo shoot.  I could only shrug– I wasn’t about to explain my silly alligator fears at that moment.

    Later that morning, I told Keith about the alligator nightmare and he grinned at me.  “Face your fears!” he told me.

    “I face my fears every time I get in the water,” I grumbled at him.  But he was right–when you face your fears, you move beyond them.

    But that night, I had another alligator nightmare.  This time, I was watching the alligator swimming closer to me and I tried to yell at everyone in the boat.  They were talking and laughing and too far away by the time the alligator chomped on me.   And then I woke up.

    Good grief.

    Lauren’s photo came that day.  “Decide That You Want It More Than You Fear It.”  I laughed when I saw the photo– laughed at how uncanny the universe is in delivering nuggets of wisdom into our lives.   She had no idea about the fears I was juggling that week– she simply saw the quote on someone’s Facebook status and decided to turn it into an inspirational picture.

    So the next time you face something that scares you or fears that hold you back from something you want to do, decide that you want it more than you fear it.   The next time I jump into Lake Conine, I’m not going to give alligators a second thought.

  • When Fear Holds You Back

    “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

    This quote by Eleanor Roosevelt is something that I remind myself of every now and then.  Fear is often the emotion behind the reason we hold back.  “What if…”

    One of the hardest things for me to do with my boys was to let them play football.  It wasn’t that I detested the sport (slamming others to the ground, ugh!), it was the idea that they could lose more hearing by butting their heads into someone else’s.  We have a family history of people losing their hearing from knocking around our heads:

    For many years, my family was unique when it came to stories about hearing loss. Everyone in my family, for five generations, was born with hearing in the normal range. My Mom started losing her hearing as a teen. She became deaf at the age of 27.

    “I was at a family BBQ and all of a sudden, I realized I couldn’t hear anything,” Mom shared. “I could see that lips were moving, but no sound was coming out.” Just like that, my Mom became deaf. Her five siblings also were deaf or hard of hearing.

    I have four older siblings. My sister, Linda, was almost three years old when she fell off of a chair and hit her head on the corner of a baseboard. Later that week, my Mom noticed that she wasn’t responding to people. She began to stop talking. She was diagnosed with a profound hearing loss. My brother, Dennis, grew up with normal hearing and at the age of 36, he was hit on the head by a wooden beam at work and woke up in the hospital with severe hearing loss. My sister, Jeanie, grew up with a unilateral hearing loss and around the same age as my mom, began losing more hearing. In her mid-forties, she slipped on a rug and became profoundly deaf. My brother, Kenny, developed a moderate hearing loss in his late 30’s.

    I became very sick with a high fever as a child and my parents believe it was that illness which triggered my hearing loss when I was in elementary school. My first hearing aid was given to me when I was nine– but I only wore when at school. I found that it caused headaches and tinnitus and I often took it off after school and never touched it during the summer. When I was 19, I was water skiing on my bare feet at a high speed and fell sideways into the water. For weeks, I thought I just couldn’t get the water out of my ear. I had become profoundly deaf. From that point on, hearing aids were a constant thing in my life. Years later, my brother Kenny also lost some hearing from barefooting.

    Whenever I would share my family’s story about how we all became deaf and hard of hearing, people would be incredulous at the events that lead to hearing loss. “Y’all need to stop banging your heads,” one person remarked.

    Joe and I had long, deep discussions about whether or not to let the boys play football.   We both agreed that we didn’t want this gene to hold our family back– after all, my Mom went deaf in the middle of a conversation–she had done nothing to provoke the hearing loss.   My sister did not agree with our decision, she felt we were taking too much of a risk in allowing the boys to play a contact sport.  The kids have always known they could lose more hearing at any time, but I didn’t want them tiptoeing through life.

    Last week, I found myself facing a little bit of fear that surprised the heck out of me.  I was up in Wisconsin spending three days barefooting with Joann O’Connor. We were kicking back after a great day of footin and had just finished dinner.  Joann casually suggested that I try some wake crossing the next day.  All of a sudden, I felt like the wind was knocked out of me.  “I don’t know about that,” I said.  “After all, that’s how I ended up falling and going deaf.”

    Like I said, it surprised the heck out of me.  I had long ago accepted the transition from hard of hearing to deaf and was quite comfortable with my life.  There was a little tiny piece inside of me that wanted to hang on to the little bit of hearing that I had left with hearing aids.  I already knew what it was like to be stone deaf once the hearing aids hit the nightstand.  Was I ok with being stone deaf if I whacked my head again and all of it went poof?

    Joann and I discussed it and I told her if I lost the bit of hearing that was left, I’d be ok with it.  I still wasn’t sure if I was going to tackle any wake crossing though.  Heck, I spent the entire summer trying to conquer a deep water start and I just wanted to learn to get back up on the water.  I had spent the afternoon trying one deep water start after another with no success.

    It was 6:30 a.m. when Joann and I reached for the wetsuits and headed for the boat.  “Here, try the shoe skis,” Joann suggested.   No sooner did I stand up on the shoe skis then my feet went off in two different directions and I face planted.

    “Hey, you stood up too fast!” Joann explained.  I gritted my teeth and leaned back in the water for a second try.  This time, I patiently planted my feet and got up slowly.  I could see Joann grinning from the boat.

    I looked at the wake and all of a sudden I said to myself, “What the heck!”  I went for it.  I crossed over once, crossed over twice and by the third time… I was grinning back at Joann.

    “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

    Good ole Eleanor was right.