Skydiving - stop comparing yourself to others

Hi guys and girls - It's me again.

Let me tell you a story real quick.
I was sitting eating my lunch one day between loads. I had had some great AFF, tandem and video jumps - just doing my thing. But one thing had bothered me since load one. I had to let a student repeat a level, altough the student really needed a bit of confidence, and the last thing she needed was to be told that what she had just done wasn't good enough.
We had a bit of a talk, because she was being real hard on herself. She would look around on all the others at the DZ that day, and feel like a complete failure. She was the only AFF student there that day. She was so concerned that all the others would think she was not good enough.

FYI: This is not the guy I am writing about in this post

So I think: "Is that really fair"?

Let me tell you this: Although I have around 6000 jumps, I am no big freefly talent. In fact I was not even a very talented skydiving student. I had spent my whole childhood looking at skydivers, but only made it through to my license by being persistant.
But what I do have is a lot of skydives because I bought a camera and started doing video for 4-way teams, then got my tandem rating, then moved abroad and started skydiving for a living.

It would be unfair for an AFF student to compare his or her skills to mine, because I have a 14 year 6000 jump head-start.

But she was sitting there. Pretty sad and feeling like a failure. So we had a little talk.
I won't go in to too much detail with this.

YOU are the best at being YOU!

But the jist of it is: If you compare yourself to others all the time, that being an AFF student comparing yourself to your instructor, being an AFF instructor comparing yourself to a freefly world champion, or a hobby photographer comparing yourself to a Hollywood film-maker, in my opinion you are doing yourself a disfavour. 
You need to take a long hard look at yourself. Everything you do, you should do because it makes you feel good, and because you want to. Not to make others look upon you with favour, and you should not track your progress and skills by comparing yourself to others, because you are not them, and they are not you. In fact no one is better at being you than you. And if you start to try and keep up with someone who are not at all like you in what ever way that might be, you will loose yourself in the progress. LIFE is not a competition. competitions are - and that's a whole different thing.

Skydiving should be about having fun, pushing the limits of what YOU think YOU can do - not your friends, family or Instagram-followers. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't brag about it - because just the fact that you hurled yourself out of a plane is cool!

I know an AFF student once who kept comparing himself to me, and let's be honest - he wasn't great. Like looking at myself in the beginning. But no matter how poor skills in freefall, he was awesome in so many other ways that totally deserved respect, and so are YOU!

What I bring to the table

I've written it earlier, and I will write it again: I am no freefly talent. BUT: I get by being an AFF instructor, tandem instructor and videographer + I do make one hell of a tomato-sauce. We all bring something to the table :)

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What music and skydiving have in common

Thor Heyerdahl (1914 - 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer (systematic study of people and cultures) known for sailing the raft Kon Tiki 8000 km (5000 miles) from South America across the Pacific Ocean to the Toamotu Islands.

Before this, and before he was actually interested in ethnography, he and his newly wed Liv went off to the island Fatu Hiva in the middle of the pacific. They went there to escape civilisation, and live from the earth without any contact to the world outside. They stayed on the island for one and a half years. Thor Heyerdahl and Liv eventually found out that the paradise on Earth they were looking for, didn't exist.

In one of the books he wrote about this particular expedition, he says that humans only invented music because of the need for something to give the senses the change of moods and impressions. Something that humans used to get from living in the forest and being one with nature. When we left nature to build up civilisation, the natural powers that kept us sane were lost for good.
We tried to replace it with music.

For me, skydiving does the same as music. Like walking in a forest or listening to music, skydiving sharpens my senses. Have you ever walked in a deep forest for hours or days, and then suddenly you start noticing things? Things that have always been there, but hidden to your senses only to reveal itself when your senses open up to it.
As I'm writing this blog, I'm listening to my favourite music for relaxation on repeat. After listening to it for an hour, I start noticing new instruments, passages and levels in exactly the same way.

When skydiving, you notice things about yourself and your surroundings you didn't know existed. But only if you allow yourself the peace and repetitiveness.

To open up the senses and see, hear, taste and feel what is REALLY there, you need to let go of emails, tasks at work, shopping lists and drama, and just BE. Just like you need to let go of the same things to really hear ALL of the levels of music, and all the birds in the forest.

To many skydivers, jumping becomes rutine, and we start to focus on other things. When working in the industry, in freefall your focus is sometimes to smile to the camera while taking a tandem client, sometimes about how to get time for lunch, or the DZ drama. Your senses can't hear the music, and this is a problem.
Firstly, your head is not on guard to eventual dangers, but in this post I will focus on the other problem: For most of us, skydiving is mainly about opening up senses, and if we loose that, we will slowly forget why we started to skydive.

One of the things that makes up my passion for skydiving is the passion for seeing, hearing, tasting and feeling all that is there, and just like the different layers of music will be there whether we hear it or not, our passion for skydiving is never lost, sometimes we just can't hear it.

I fell victim to this a couple of times, and it turned out the fix was right in front of me:
Go out and re-open the senses. Do some jumps where the focus is on hearing, tasting, seeing and feeling. Do a fun-jump where you forget about forcing a smile, forget about lunch and all the DZ drama, and forget about turning points. Just get out of the door with no other purpose than having fun.

Hear the music, and see the whole forest