Words and images by José Carlos Pedó Júnior, The Skydiving Therapist
When you first start skydiving, it’s easy to come in with sky-high expectations. You imagine acing every level, nailing every task and progressing through your AFF course as smoothly as a waterslide. Overtime, the truth will soon reveal itself: learning to skydive well and safely is far less like a waterslide and more like a long, challenging hike: not about success, but about the journey. Sometimes, you’ll fail. Whether it’s not performing a task correctly or even needing to repeat a level, that’s okay. It happens to all of us!
Failure is part of the learning process. It’s not a sign of weakness or lack of skill. It’s an opportunity to learn, to improve and to become a safer and better flyer. Every skydiver, even those with thousands of jumps, has faced setbacks. It’s how you respond to these challenges that defines your journey in the sport.
The key is to keep an open mind and manage your expectations. Understand that skydiving is complex and sometimes things don’t go as planned. When you embrace the possibility of failure, you’re not only prepared for it, but also better equipped to learn from it. Here are a few tips to help you handle failure:
1. Stay positive
It’s easy to get down on yourself, to get frustrated, to get distracted by the challenges. When you start to slide down that slippery slope, take a brief pause to remember why you started skydiving in the first place. You can think of it like this: you’re in a relationship with skydiving and it’s your responsibility to keep that passion alive.
2. Use “feedback energy” to create positive change
Your instructor sees things you might not. When your instructor gives you corrections, they’re doing it to increase your safety and improve your skills, not to make you feel bad about yourself and your performance.
That said: in the heat of the moment, sometimes it can be challenging to trust that guidance and use their feedback to make the necessary adjustments. You can expect that receiving feedback will create a spike of energy that will probably feel unpleasant. It’s part of the human condition to feel defensive in this situation.
There’s a trick, however, to take that wave of energy and surf it towards the positive, not the negative. That is to say: don’t use the energy to take the feedback personally or to make excuses. Instead, take that spike of energy and focus it on the positive, on simply doing, to the best of your ability, what your instructor is telling you to do. In this way, that “zap” of energy can be a gift that moves you forward.
3. Practise patience
Patience, as it turns out, takes a lot of practice. After all, it’s hard. Especially in a world where social media companies make a lot of money by erasing all evidence of the hard work that’s required before the achievement of stunning results. Progress will probably arrive more slowly than you expected. All along the way, you must remember that every step, every seeming setback, counts towards your progress.
You will have “bad” jumps. You will biff landings. You will botch an AFF level. You will flub the exit. None of this means that you aren’t cut out for skydiving. It means you’re learning, growing and pushing your limits.
So, my friend: are you ready to fail? Because if you are, you’re ready to truly learn and succeed in this incredible sport. Keep these three rules at heart and you’ll fail forward, right alongside the rest of us and I promise it’ll make you a little bit better every day.
