Sometimes walking down a hallway to a boardroom can cause fear. In this case, I’m talking about real, physical fear and what I learned from it.
In April of 2003 I found myself precariously suspended between two peaks in a small platform. I was about to bungy jump 440’ (134m). At the time, the Nevis Bungy Jump in New Zealand was the second highest bungy jump in the world.
I can assure you that this is nothing but terrifying. As the image below shows, you ride to the platform in a small wire pod designed to scare you to death. The whole time you are looking down 400’+ to a ravine.
All you can think about is falling.
Then, once you get to the platform, the real fear begins. In their kind effort to scare tourists, the A.J. Hackett bungy company has kindly given half of the platform a glass floor. This is unbelievably terrifying!
On each person’s wrist, in black marker, is your weight in kilograms (mine was 67kg). The convention in bungy jumping is to go from heaviest jumper to lightest, which meant that I was among the last to jump.
This means that for a long, long time you need to wait in fear with a dozen or so other people, while one by one they call a name and they bring you to a gated off section with a chair, where you sit while being connected to the bungy cord.
Each of us sort of milled around a tiny area while waiting for our name (and weight) to be called. I wish I could claim that I was some stoic, cool, indifferent individual, but far from it. I kept thinking about falling.
I’ve never been to a slaughterhouse, but I imagined that this was what the cows must feel like in the moments before their death. It was miserable.
When the first name was called, that individual took it like a man. He walked to the edge of the diving board like metal plate (see below), looked down, and jumped. He only hesitated for a moment or two.
Then each successive person went, all with reluctance, some requiring multiple verbal countdowns, but all jumped.
This is what I had in my mind. I also had to jump.
The tricky thing about the Nevis Bungy jump is that it is so high that they actually put you in a special harness. The harness is designed so that you can be pulled up in an upright position rather than hanging upside down for 5 minutes while they haul you back up after the jump.
The scary thing about that is that after you have been successfully pulled back from a gory death by the bungy attached to your feet, you are supposed to pull a pin which then disconnects the bungy from your feet so it can pull you up by the waist.
…Yeah, right.
Anyway, my moment came. And any thoughts I had about a James Bond style proud dive left. I literally could not stand up straight at the edge of the diving board. My knees were weekly bent because I couldn’t stand up straight.
I guess mentally I was trying to save myself 3 more inches of height (see the top photo).
And then I jumped. I can tell you that I have never been so scared. There were no cries of “Yahoo!” like there had been on my earlier 150’ jump off a bridge. I was straight scared. Teeth clenched tightly together as I rushed towards the rocks.
But I survived. And I actually did make the dive look decent… And I managed to pull the pin and be hoisted up properly after the jump as well. Here is a picture of my jump:
I’m never doing that again though.
But I did learn two things: First, after we were all done and I was back on the ground, I asked a staff member if everyone always jumps. –In our group, 12 of 12 had jumped.
The answer: It all depends on what the first person does. Literally, if the first person jumps everyone else will almost always jump. If the first person chickens out, some people will jump, others won’t.
I find this incredibly interesting. We are like lemmings!
In the face of literally one of the scariest things someone is ever likely to pay to do, we allow someone else’s decision to override what our brain is telling many of us not to do.
I couldn’t help but wonder: how often in our lives and careers do we do something because a single individual or a series of individuals did something?
If you are thinking of leaving a company you don’t like, do you wait until someone you respect leaves?
Do you pursue a career you don’t enjoy because someone you respect tremendously (parent, mentor, etc) is in it? Is this why so many doctors have kids that are doctors and lawyers have kids that are lawyers, etc?
As I look back on this from a career coaching lens, I see so many clients who are following careers that they never really wanted to follow. Perhaps this helps explain why.
The second thing I learned that day was that there are a lot of things I don’t need to be afraid of. I remember telling someone I was traveling with something to the effect of, “Can you believe I used to be afraid to strike up conversations with people I don’t know? What a joke! That’s not scary… that bungy jump is scary!”
Yes, most things in life are a lot less scary than that bungy jump. When I left management consulting to start an adventure summer camp and when I left the corporate world to be a career coach, for example.
These things are scary in the low anxiety for a long time kind of way. The Nevis Bungy Jump is scary in an extreme anxiety for a short period of time kind of way.
Regardless, after that trip those feelings did slowly dull. I don’t strike up conversations with random people anymore and I really don’t pursue thrill seeking physical activities. (Maybe part of that is age and wisdom?)
And in that is an important point for why working with a career coach works while reading that next book from a self-help guru is unlikely to: Attitudes and behaviors need to align so that they can reinforce each other.
Reading a book can create an attitudinal change, but it will only stick if you take action through behavioral change. In other words, you can read the 4-Hour Workweek a dozen times, but until you start to act like an entrepreneur on a regular basis, it isn’t going to matter.
That bungy jump changed my attitude about fear, but because I didn’t start striking up conversations everyday, eventually that became scary again (to an introvert like me).
Working with a career coach can help you succeed because you are suddenly taking action to make a change and having someone hold you accountable to it over a prolonged period. The action aligns with your beliefs. It is an amazing difference.
So in conclusion, don’t be like a lemming and do what everyone else around you is doing. Think independently, take action, and have an amazing career… and if you are looking to go bungy jumping with someone, I’m not interested.
For details on how to select a career coach, whether in San Diego or anywhere in the world, watch my free webinar: Stop! Before you hire a career coach…