I’ve been teaching women to swim for about 7 months now.
Occasionally I encountered women that had unpleasant experience with water. Often they shared that they had a drowning experience.
I get it that it’s scary for them to be in water even in the swimming pool after they had that kind of experience.
Some experienced one drowning incident and that is enough for them to steer clear of water, others two or more similar incidents.
I personally have never experienced drowning first hand, but what made me afraid of going into water was one of my cousins died of drowning while he saved someone else’s from drowning.
I was a teenager at that time. Seeing my cousin’s dead body was enough to scare me. I didn’t want to end up like that.
Funny thing was I loved water since I was very young because my father had exposed me to the beach early in my life. Not to swim but to watch him and my late mother fishing using nets in the sea.
Because of my fear, it didn’t cross my mind to even want to learn to swim.
Eventually I did learn to swim in 2002.
Despite my fears, I got into the pool.
From there, my first lesson had begun.
We all have fears. And most often than not, that fear seems daunting especially when we confront it. It’s normal. It’s part of our instinct. Fears are there to keep us safe.
But when it comes to wanting to experience something new, fears often get activated and they may feel like huge obstacles that seem to block us from getting to that new experience.
Fears will never go away. As long as we’re alive and kicking, it’s going to be there.
Only by conquering our fears then we’re able to move pass it and that open us up to experience something new.
The sooner we move pass the fear, the sooner we get over it and the sooner we get to enjoy the new experience. And we will become a newly transformed person.
And we will be glad that we conquer our own fear.
Hayatti Rahgeni The Effortless Swim Team