If You’re Scared, Say You’re Scared, And Move On!

Posted on October 25, 2017 by Jack Perry Jr, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

Early one morning, while serving as a Blackhawk pilot in Central America, I was woken up by the loud sound of the alert bells sounding off. We had a mission; a zero dark thirty mission, which meant two things: we wouldn’t be getting a full night’s sleep and we would be going into the vast jungle’s darkness with only our night vision goggles to help us with navigation. I was part of a crew of four, the co-pilot, medic, and the always-necessary crew chief. As we wiped our tired eyes, we immediately got suited up into our flight suites and then ran into the ready room to strap on our survival gear.

My job as an Aircraft Commander was to get the initial briefing from the operations team about the, who, what and where we were going and why. Sometimes we didn’t always know the “whom,” as we just had a mission to perform; details came in later over the radio while we were enroute to the target. On this particular night we were to fly out over the jungle and then over the ocean for some distance. These missions always made the crew a little nervous. If you have ever flown low level over the ocean at night there are very few visual queues other than your instruments to differentiate between the blackness of the ocean and the blackness of the sky.

As we finished our final checks of the aircraft and started prepping for take off, I detected that the mood of the team was changing; voices were more intense, sentences became shorter, and the usual sense of lightness of conversation had disappeared. This was not unusual by any means. We were professionals and the focus was on completing a mission safely. Personally, I would get tenser on these types of missions as there was very little room for error, flying through mountains and then out over the ocean.

It was going to be a long night, and the details indicated we would not be back until sunrise. I decided to do something different on this mission with the crew to lighten up the tenseness. I keyed the aircraft intercom and with authority said, “Men if you’re scared, say you’re scared and get over it. We have a job to do.” Amazingly, everyone had a comment about what I said. Yea they were scared, but we were all scared. The thing is, this is what we all had signed up for. We had agreed and committed ourselves to serve, as soldiers.

The lesson of my story is that there is no dishonor in admitting fear or being scared of anything as long as it doesn’t paralyze you in life. Similar to that mission, we took ownership and then control of what we feared. When you have these moments in life, which we all will have at some point or another, stop for a moment and examine the reality of the fear that may seam overwhelming at the time. When we face our fears in our lives head on, we take the power of that weakness away from the event and we keep our own self-power and control.