Fear

As an Adventure Professional®, you will spend a significant amount of time leading a teaching people in environments that can often prompt feelings of fear. Understanding fear will better equip you to predict its appearance, understand your clients when they are experiencing this and to handle it better when they do. 

Fear is a primal emotion and one of our strongest. It exists for a purpose and is there to protect us from potential danger in order to ensure our survival. Of course, there are evolutionary fears that are hard-wired into us but we also pick up new fears throughout our lives. We can pick up fears by learning and emulating others, especially as children and we can develop new fears as a result of negative experiences. Recent studies suggest that some phobia can be inherited genetically as well. 

As mentioned above, some of our fears have developed across a species as a evolutionary response to known danger. These can include a fear of darkness, heights and creatures that can harm us. 

Now, many of our are capable of choosing to ignore our fears when we can rationalise that we are not actually in immediate danger. This could be walking outside in the dark, standing on a tall viewpoint or holding a large spider. Lots of people, however, have developed phobias. Phobias are characterised by an excessive fear response that causes physical and mental stress. We can all name specific phobias, but as an Adventure Professional you may not have considered two that could present and cause real issues for your clients: 

Agoraphobia is the fear of open spaces, but more generally refers to the fear of any situation where help may not be close enough if something went wrong. 

Social Phobia is an intense and powerful fear of interacting with its other people. 

It’s all well and good talking about a fear of heights, or water or the dark and these have been discussed at length amongst Adventure Professionals for years, but it is imperative that we understand our client’s inner processing to help us get the best from them and teach or lead in an optimal way. 

What happens when we are afraid?

Wide-Eyed: Your pupils dilate to let in more light, so you may take in more of your surroundings and identify any threat. 

Goosebumps: The hairs on your skin are forced upright as your muscles tense up. This is likely an evolutionary reflex that made our hairier ancestors look bigger.

Breathing Rate Increases: Sends more oxygen to your muscles to prepare them for action. 

Blood Runs Cold: Your blood vessel in your skin constrict. This helps divert blood to your muscles  and can make you feel cold. 

Shaking Muscles: As more blood is pumped to your muscles , it can male your limbs feel twitchy.

Hormone: Dozens of hormones are released into the bloodstream to cause changes in your body.

Energy Boost: The liver breaks down glycogen, ready to supply with immediate energy. 

Cold Sweat: As your body anticipates action it starts to seat pre-emptively to keep you cool. 

Heart Rate Up: Sending more blood to muscles and brain.

Butterflies: As blood flow is diverted away for non-essential things such as digestion, this causes the nervous feeling in your stomach. 

Living without Fear?

The gurus, self help books and motivational quotes would tell us that we should live without fear that we should be afraid of nothing. But this would be unbelievably dangerous! People with damage to the amygdala, are considerably more likely to take risks. People with this issue have been shown to place themselves in some very serious situations and do not react appropriately, even when their life is in danger. 

Fear is important to our survival and the absence of it could shorten our life significantly. The ability to rationalise however, to risk assess and to consider what warrants fear and what does not is a very useful skill to master. 

What do to with it?

There are treatments that have been shown to be effective in overcoming phobias. Exposure therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy etc. But these are not very helpful to an Adventure Professional, trying to manage a client in a very fearful state in the moment!

As Adventure Professionals, it advisable to first understand fear, where it comes from and why it has such an effect on us. Thus is important to enable us to be empathetic with our clients. Often, our clients have a different measure between perceived risk and actual risk, which results in a fear response. 

Educating our clients on the difference between perceived risk and actual risk (and how to tell the difference) is a strong step in teaching our clients how to manage their own fear in the adventure environment. Once they have an understanding go this, our next step must be to teach our clients what to do in the moment when they feel fear creeping in.

I have found that the best strategy for clients entering a fearful state is the disengage / re-engage strategy. Simply put, we teach our clients to stop what they are doing, to “zoom in” and focus hard on something physical in from of them (a piece of rock, their own hand, a piece of equipment, the flowing river) and slowly count to 10. This amounts to them “disengaging” from the scenario causing them fear. Once they can feel the swelling of fear, the raising heart rate etc subside, we then have them slowly re-engage by slowly widening (“zooming out”) their viewpoint, but only to what they need to see for their next few movements. This could be the next number of steps, the next couple of handholds, the next obstacle to be negotiated. As they re-engage, the viewpoints continues to widen. This allows the client to settle and attain some control of the physical symptoms of fear, thus allowing them to feel more in control. 

Clearly there is a lot more to fear that what can be discussed in a quick article such as this, but hopefully this will give you some motivation to explore this subject in more detail to further your ability as a high-performing Adventure Professional®.