Fear isn't something to be eliminated. It's something to be managed. In my line of work, skydiving, fear is what keeps you from getting careless. A healthy amount of apprehension has helped me to stay safe over a 20-year career. I am cautious enough to plan each one of my jumps carefully and to reject ideas when the risks were unacceptably high. Fear gets problematic when it becomes your focal point, dominating your thoughts and distracting you from the task at hand. IF Training for my Red Bull Stratos jump, I went through a period where I hated wearing the spacesuit. It's something a lot of high-altitude pilots deal with. The suit creates a sort of sensory deprivation, and in my case its rigidity made it impossible to use techniques I'd worked my whole life to develop. Subconsciously, I think maybe the suit came to represent everything that could defeat me. It became a trigger for what was fear. As soon as I put it on, I was itching to take it off. That fear itself wasn't irrational: It pointed out some significant operational challenges we had to address. What I needed was to get out of the endless loop of negative thinking.
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