Day 320 - Face Your Fear

 by  Kevin B 3 

Recently I presented a module from the Toastmasters International Better Speaker Series to my club in San Diego. The title was Controlling Your Fear. In these modules, Toastmasters International provides a general outline of the material to cover, but each presenter is encouraged to provide specific examples from personal experience, or even better, from the experiences of club members generally.

The Controlling Your Fear module began by describing triggers for anxiety, followed by describing symptoms of anxiety, and concluded with tips for how to control the symptoms in order to get through what has triggered the anxiety.

Triggers for anxiety include being confronted by new and unknown situations, facing the risk of failure or of looking foolish, and for budding public speakers, the possibility of boring the audience. The module outline goes on to identify the physiological responses our brain and body kick in when facing an anxiety-filled or fearful situation. The body releases adrenaline which is the source of all those stories I recall hearing as a child of people being able to do super-human feats such as a mother being able to lift the front end of a car so that someone could pull her child trapped under a wheel to safety.

What makes it possible for humans to do the near impossible, for a few seconds at least, is adrenaline causing the heart to beat faster which leads to extra blood and oxygen rushing to the brain, providing the boost in energy. But that blood rushing to the brain when there isn't some super-human feat to accomplish causes other physical responses: butterflies in the stomach, uncontrollable shakes, lightheadedness, and dizziness.

As I read through all the outline material for the presentation, I kept thinking about a January day in 2001 in Sanaa when I experienced nearly all those symptoms in response to being confronted by a new and unknown situation that had very great risk of failure.

It happened one day around lunchtime when the assistant regional security officer, Chance, came into the lunchroom and asked me to come out into the hall with him. The look on his face was very serious so there was no doubt that I had to follow him. But when we got into the hallway, he didn't stop. He kept walking in front of me. And I noticed that the back of his neck was red. I mean really red. It looked like he had fallen asleep under a heat lamp. And still he kept leading the way as we headed upstairs to the Community Liaison Officer's office. When Chance and I arrived in Kay's office, I saw that the regional security officer, the regional medical officer, and the regional psychiatrist were also there.

And that is when one of them - the RSO or A/RSO - said that they had just learned that the plane the ambassador, the deputy chief of mission, the defense attache (Kay's husband), the public affairs officer, the political section chief, and three members of General Tommy Franks' security advance team were on had been hijacked. The ambassador and the rest of the team were heading to Taiz where President Saleh was at the time. They had planned to meet General Franks in Taiz for meetings with the president who couldn't come back to Sanaa in time for the meetings.

I felt my knees buckle. I leaned my back against the wall and pressed my hands against it to keep from falling over. For the first time I realized that swooning wasn't just something women in Victorian times did. My knees nearly gave way and if I had become more lightheaded than I already was, I would have been in a heap on the floor.

Several of us then headed up to the DCM's office where the guy who had been filling in until the DCM who was on the hijacked plane arrived was watching CNN. The hijacking was on the news, so I thought I had better make sure I let my parents know I was OK. It was the middle of the night in Minnesota, so I settled for sending them an e-mail message - a very short one saying I was fine.

Then the crisis ended. Almost as soon as everyone who needed to know had heard the news of the hijacking, the news came that the plane had landed in Djibouti and all the passengers were fine. I sent another short message to my parents to tell them everyone at the embassy was fine.

The ambassador and her team never made it to Taiz. Once the hijacker was removed from the plane, it was refueled and headed right back to Sanaa. General Franks came straight to Sanaa and the ambassador hosted dinner at her home that evening.

During dinner, the phone rang and a member of the ambassador's staff came to tell her the call was for her. Initially she admitted she was annoyed that the call interrupted the meal. But on the other end of the phone was Secretary Colin Powell calling to let her know how pleased he was the everything had turned out all right. It was his first day on the job as Secretary of State. His call was so unlike anything we had experienced from the occupant of the seventh floor's most important office. It set the tone for the relationship between the Secretary and those of us who worked for him for the rest of his four years.

The next morning I got my mom's reply to my messages, "What happened?" was all it said. CNN stopped covering the event once it was resolved. I could have pretended it never happened.

But it did.