RHM Blog: Day 66 — Feeling the fear

As if running the Reading Half this weekend isn’t enough to worry about I decided to step out of my comfort zone one more level after taking a quick peek at Twitter last night.

I don’t look at Twitter much but I did happen to see a retweeted post about BBC Berkshire looking for Reading Half Marathon runners to contribute to the Breakfast Show this morning and all interested people were to call a number to arrange. The original tweet was sometime yesterday morning and I was reading it at 22.45 last night so I thought that they would have enough people, but I thought ‘oh what the hell, I’ve come this far why not let others know what I’ve been up to‘.

I know that to get what ever you want in life you need to prepare, plan and visualise. So I checked the BBC Berkshire website to see what time the breakfast show started. I put the telephone number into my mobile so I didn’t have to scrabble around for it this morning and I set my alarm for 06.30 thinking that should be enough time to call the studio and see if they needed anyone still.

And I went to bed and imagined me getting through and being on the show.

Of course with all this excitement I didn’t sleep. Oh my head just wouldn’t stop wondering, thinking and working out what was going to happen, what would I need to say, how would it sound? I have an achingly embarrassing memory etched on my soul from when I was about 8 and entered a radio competition which has put me off ever calling a radio station ever again. I’ll share that with you another time. But it was instrumental in me not getting much sleep last night 🙂

What a lot of fuss. But the fear of the unknown and putting myself out there — willingly — was messing with my head.

I eventually did sleep but was wide awake before 06.00 still wondering, thinking and working out if this was such a good idea.

I pulled myself together, ‘Oh just damn well call them‘ and so I did.

Amazingly they were still really keen to hear from people and so I was scheduled for 07.55.

Great, the first hurdle was overcome. I still had time for a shower and time to write my weekly Friday with Heidi newsletter. So I started to go through the motions of getting ready.

At 07.24 and the phone rings. I am only just out of the shower and putting the finishing touches to my email “oh hello Heidi, can we put you on now please?” … crap!

30 seconds later and it’s all over, of course there was nothing to worry about, the interviewer does most of the talking and before you can say ‘Vitality Reading Half Marathon’ you can hear the traffic news being presented and you’re done 🙂

How often do we make too much out of something quite insignificant?

How many times do we not step out of our little safety bubble to try something new, do something different with the risk of being a little bit daft?

Next time (and there will be a next time) I’ll just do it and not lose sleep over it.