It’s embar­rass­ing to admit that my biggest fear before I did a sky-dive was that I would have an acci­dent. I’m not talk­ing here of person-meets-ground-at-speed type acci­dent but that of the bod­ily func­tion kind. I have wanted to sky-dive as long as I can remem­ber but have been some­what inhib­ited by the cow­ardly streak that runs through me like lead through a pen­cil. All my life I have had a recur­ring night­mare where I am stand­ing at the door of a plane, about to real­ise my sky-diving dream but find­ing my over­whelm­ing ter­ror pre­vents me from jump­ing and I return to the ground in shame. So I allowed the dream to stay just that, a dream; if I didn’t place myself in that pos­i­tion then I would never have to learn whether or not I truly had the guts to do it. But that’s no way to live your life. Here I am, trav­el­ling round the world and, if I am not going to take excep­tional oppor­tun­it­ies when they are offered, I may as well have stayed at home. I finally needed to know the answer. My ques­tion was not ‘do I have the cour­age to jump out of a plane?’ but ‘do I have the cour­age to over­come my fear of fail­ing?’ Con­tinue read­ing →