Life & Interest’s of a Wife, Mother & Over-Comitter

“You must do the thing that you fear until the fear of that thing becomes no more.”
- Brian Tracy

This weekend I have started the process of overcoming two of my fears.  I am not over either one of them yet, as the above quote references I have to continue to do these things until the fear no longer exists, but I have made the first and biggest step to overcoming two of my fears.  Below is a picture of me outside the JAX airport, I flew there for a conference from BWI, this is the first time I have ever flown which is needless to say a fear of mine.  There are so many fears wrapped up into this one fear. There is the fear of death, there is the fear of feeling like I have no control, because at the end of the day you really never had control anyway, but at least I have my false sense of control which has always worked pretty well for me.  It is a good thing there are so many fears wrapped up into one though, because flying on a plane has now put me steps closer to getting over all of my above fears.

My face looks kind of stretched, doesn’t it?  Anyway, what have I learned – Southwest Airlines Rock, I love window seats, and you have to check your luggage in a hour before departure, because if you don’t those big scary words will come up – “Your Luggage is Late, and it may not be on the plane” Not those exact words, but something like that.  That just added to how stressted I was, not to mention there was bad weather and our flight was delayed by 30 minutes.  Thankfully my bags were with me the whole time in the plane and I was really focusing on every noise, tilt and bump so I did not think about them too much on the way there.  So what do I now think of flying….?

Well it is still scary , let’s face it – the lack of control thing is still very much there and that still scares me, we are thousand upon thousands of feet in the air and something going wrong, well I rather not think about it.  Now the being above the clouds was really cool, that was such a neat experience for me, really, I was in amazement for the first 20 minutes; I even tried to take a picture of them with my web cam…

Although I think all I got was the sun glaring in the window, not sure.  Takeoff was a lot better than I expected, you can tell we are going fast, but it does not feel as fast as what we actually must be going to be able to ascend into the sky.  I felt a little push back and thought maybe we lifted a bit, I looked out the window and we were already really high, my ears popped a little but not much.  A scary part for me was the plan tilting from side to side, I guess it has to do that to make turns, huh?  But I do not like the feeling.  Descending was fine, it seemed that the bumpiest part on the way there and back was when we were descending and this is also when my ears where screaming in pain despite chewing gum.  All in all it was a mix of scary and exciting and I would do it again, in fact I want to keep doing it till I get to the point where it is no longer a fear.  The fact is, is that I could walk outside, be driving to the store or anything else and have a chance of something horrible happening, so while it makes sense to take precaution in all that you do, I do not want to live my life being scared of everything, because for one that would just suck, and for another this simply is not a trait that I care to instill in my children.  If I am scared they could very well grow up to be the same, and someone one wise once told me “What you will show to your kids by them seeing you face your fears reaps far greater rewards than the small, small percentage that exists that something will happen to you.” And this leads to the ‘Thank you’ I want to give to those that have helped me, this could be as small as  a tip, or really reaching out to me to help me deal with my fear.  To some it may have looked like me overreacting, but to me this fear was very real.  Sorry if I leave anyone out.

First I want to thank SouthWest Airlines for being so friendly and for embracing social media so I could stalk their Facebook page often and see all the great things that people continue to say about them. Also, me flying for my first time on their birthday and because of this them giving out free drinks really worked for the fears of a ‘first time flyer’ even at 8:30 in the morning

Wanted to thank my Aunt who just flew for her first time a few months earlier, she gave me a fresh perspective on what the feelings and thoughts are for a first time flyer.  Aunt Renee sorry this is the only picture I could find She also is the one that told me that I would have to take my shoes off, so with that heads up I wore sandals.

One of my best lifetime long friends – Ky who talked me through my fears more then once, and she checked in after the flight to make sure I was okay.

Farashta who is another one of my lifetime long friends, when I say lifetime, I mean 13 years to this point. She was actually going to fly down with me, she winded up having to go to a wedding which in retrospect was a good thing.  I had to face this fear all by myself and that is the way it should have been.  Just in the fact that she was going to go with me knowing that I was going to be in seminars all day long speaks volumes to me, the fact that I was asking her to do that probably does not speak to highly of me, but nonetheless she was planning on being by my side.

Danielle AKA Extraordinary Mommy is awesome and I really could not expect anything less from her, she talked to me before hand about my fear of flying and my nervousness about going to a conference by myself and really made me feel a lot better and she was the first one to DM me asking me how it went.

Sarah Gilbert Fox AKA @styleave, we have tweeted online before, but besides that we have never talked before. She reached out to me and called me and talked to me about the fear of flying that she use to have and what helped her deal with her fear, we talked for a bit, and I felt a lot better after talking with her. These are the type of people that make a difference, there are the people that ‘talk a lot’ and then there are the people that ‘do’ and her reaching out to me really meant a lot and I felt better after speaking with her.

There quite a few others that gave me flying tips such as Lynn Miller AKA @4GreenPs, @CouponPrincess, Holly Fulger AKA @holmolpip, Aaron Brazell AKA @technosailor, and Betty AKA @its_me_betty

Everyone’s tips whether they were: stay distracted, drink a lot, take some drugs, or you are going to be okay, they all made a difference. Oh and I should thank HARO by Peter Shankman (@skydiver) as well, not only because his daily HARO is where I saw the info about Prville but  if you read his free media queries that come through then you would know that he seems to live on a plane, which as odd as it sounds helped me put the odds in perspective, hey if this guy lives on a plane and he is still kicking then the odds of anything going wrong on one round trip are minuscule at best.

My other fear was just going to a bigger PR conference by myself which I will talk a little bit more on in my post talking about PRville which will be at my other site PR-Mom.com (I will put the exact link once I am done the post.) The fear was pretty unnecessary, everyone was great.