Today I spent the day at Camp Whip Poor Will for our annual challenge course recertification testing. This year it was pretty laid back and the weather was beautiful. We used to test in March and it was always horribly cold and snowy. I never mind climbing trees, but its an added bonus when I can feel my fingers and toes for the whole day!
I have taken the challenge course certification test 12 times... TWELVE... yep... you can add that up in your head pretty easily to see that that equals 12 years... wow, I'm old! It's funny because today our instructor changed two things that I learned every year from my first year as a facilitator... #1. When we spot we shouldn't be focused on protecting heads and necks, we should be focused on the "splat and smear" technique, which creates friction... yup, that makes no sense to you, but it TOTALLY does to me! #2. The last instructor on the course is now allowed to zip off the course. WHAT??? After 12 years of thinking... hey, it would be easier to just lower gear and then zip myself but thinking that was an absolute NO NO... now we can... what the heck!!
After 12 years of training they changed the rules on me. Not in a bad way, but a change none the less.
Its funny to me when things change. I am not the most sentimental person. I don't hold onto stuff and I don't hold to too many traditions... but something about rules... well, that's different! I am a "rule breaker" a lot of the time, I like to push the boundaries a bit... but when you tell me repeatedly that it is a "rule" I will usually follow it... I'm a bit of a dork like that. Then when the rule changes, it throws me off a bit.
Today Paul (our instructor) told us that "Failure isn't always fatal, failure can often be functional. The more chances we have to fail, the more likely we are to succeed." In the midst of struggling through some things in the last week or so, I have realized how often my fear isn't that I will get hurt or that I will die... but that I will fail... or worse yet, someone will think I have failed. As I think about some important things, I wonder what I could "succeed" at if I was a bit more willing to risk failure.
When the rules change, sometimes you get to do
something amazing that you couldn't do before.
When we overcome fear, sometimes we get to do
something that is way bigger than the risk.
Thinking.... about things that stand in the way....
Failure is a really big one for me too. I too, picked up on what he kept saying about failure as well and that really struck me - even as I zipped myself, there was still something inherently wrong, and it had nothing to do with the high course.
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