Everything we do in life that’s deeply important to us is driven by one of only two things: love or fear.
Fear is triggered when we sense that our life, livelihood, status or reputation is on the line. During my time as a military pilot and senior officer in the Royal Air Force, I experienced moments where all four of these triggers were in play. For much of my service I flew large unarmed, undefended aircraft – about the size of the plane that might take you on your holiday or vacation. Rather than carrying passengers, our role was to be air refuellers carrying extra fuel to act as ‘gas stations in the sky’, refuelling fighter jets who depended on us to increase their range or endurance. During times of conflict, we would be a highly valuable target for anti-aircraft artillery on the ground. For me and my fellow aircrew, not to perform well would have indeed risked our lives, our career, and how we were perceived by our peers, commanding officers and even history.
On another occasion, at the age of just twenty-five, I was faced with having to crash-land a plane with 140 people on board when, once again, fear could have so easily been triggered and driven my actions. Spoiler alert: I’m here writing this now so it all turned out well.
When I look back on these moments and recall how I felt at the time, I can tell you that I did indeed feel a flash of fear. The important thing is what I chose to do with that feeling. If I had let fear take hold it’s likely I would have reacted with one of the primaeval options: freeze, fight or flight. Freezing, being ‘paralysed by fear’, would certainly not have helped since action needed to be taken and I was the one who needed to act. Fighting was not valid since I was unarmed and the ‘threat’ was not in a physical form immediately in front of me. As for flight or running away, that wasn’t an option either – and in the second example I’m sure the passengers would not have been thrilled if I’d grabbed a parachute and left them to it.
What I did instead was to see fear as a warning flag – a prompt not to be acted upon but rather as a catalyst for courage. That courage helped me to respond instead sourced from love.
Love is the most powerful, generative force in the universe. While fear has us close down and start to focus on our own survival, love opens up and has us think of others. Fear is against something – often about stopping whatever it is from happening. Love, on the other hand, is for something and about embracing what’s in front of us. In my two examples, fear would have had me focus only on myself – be it protecting my own life, my livelihood, status or reputation. That focus might have been revealed as anger, timidity, or (perhaps worst of all), ego. To allow myself to have been led by any of these reactions would have likely caused me to make poor choices and the outcome could have been disastrous. Instead, I focused very much on those who were looking towards me for support in these situations: my fellow crew members who needed me to do my job; the pilots of the jets who depended on me for the fuel they desperately needed; or the passengers sat nervously behind me, entrusting me to get them back on the ground safely. While I may not have used the word at the time, it was my love for these people, many of whom I had never met, that fuelled me. What I noticed was that the more I focused on others, the greater my courage became and the clearer my choices seemed to be. While courage comes from fear, it can only be sustained by love.
For most of you reading this, it is unlikely you’ll find yourself in the kind of situations I’ve described. However, life can feel equally challenging when fear is triggered through a perceived threat to our livelihood, status or reputation. In these moments we always have a choice: we can allow fear to hijack us or, we can choose to find the courage to be led by our love for what is deeply important to us. When that love is focused on others, it can carry us forward beyond the predictable to reach extraordinary outcomes.
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