Category: Conquering Fear

Editor’s note: This was originally intended as a response to a question on UK’s version of Yahoo! Answers. You can see the original post here. In it, a user asks about getting over a paralyzing fear of flying. I saw a mention of it on my aviation list on Twitter, though I cannot find the original Tweet now. I started answering, and, well, it got incredibly long. I’m posting it here, as poorly-written as it is, in case it can be of some use to someone, ever.

In this post I share some of the tools I used, the things I focused on and the plans I made to help me get through my fear of flying. The message? It’s not easy, there is no magic answer, but it can be done!

I wrote this on Friday in Vancouver. – I am having a problem with displacement. To leave one city and arrive in the middle of another without preface or enough time lapsed for my softened mind to come to equilibrium–this is displacement. Like a hangover it stays with me longer than I would ever want; [...]

Where there’s not much Merlot anymore and the grapes often grow on trees. Thursday: My mobile phone rang and it was Cloud Four’s retirement-handling investment managers, again, calling to prompt me to continue on the apparently endless task of moving our company’s SimpleIRA plan away from the horror that is ADP. “Can’t talk,” I said, [...]

Subsumed in last week’s flurry of dumb health crap was a hidden gem: the weekend right before my surprise colonoscopy was marked by another victory in my steps toward being a comfortable flyer. A sudden opportunity presented itself on Friday–tickets to the Seattle Sounders/Chelsea FC game that Christie had–so I immediately bought an early-morning commuter [...]

In my previous post, I talked about some online resources that I used when working on overcoming my fear of flying. This post looks at some of the books and audiobooks I read, as well as some I saw reference to (but didn’t read). Flying without Fear by Duane Brown This book, brought to you [...]

This is the first in what I hope to be a short series of posts explaining how I was able to conquer some of my core life fears and anxieties. I am publishing these in the hope that this might be of some assistance to someone else on the same journey as I have been [...]