When the Thunder Booms -LISTEN!

This article is to raise awareness of the role feelings can play in keeping us safe. I believe that most of us could benefit from a tuneup on being aware of our feeling ‘states’ moment to moment.I invite you to focus on two primary feeling words: Fear and Guilt.

The Problem:

There was a major loss of life recently in Missouri involving an amphibious tour bus. As it is my contention, that this disaster, like many others could have been avoided had two key people, who could have stopped it, been able to respect their feelings of fear and guilt and heeded the gifts in these feelings.

The Gifts in Fear and Guilt:

  1. Fear is about alerting us of real or potential danger. It is like the sound of an approaching storm or the rattles of the buttons at the end of the tail of a rattle snake. Our response is to avoid contact. Get out of this killer’s path.

  2.  The gift in Guilt is to bring us to pause as we consider the potential cost in what we did or are about to do. Guilt alerts us that our actions could bring us face to face with legal authorities.

The Warnings were available the day of the accident:              

    1. There had been severe weather alerts that morning for the area where the incident occurred.

    2.  The WWII vintage vehicles were known to have serious safety issues. The biggest being they were not very sea worthy and tend to leak. Ironically, I had been a passenger on one of these vehicles recently.  Being a sea captain myself (50 Ton Master), my sense was that the vehicle was unstable in the water even on a calm day.

Solution:      

Had the captain and the driver been able to heed the warning, honored their feelings of fear and guilt and acted on them, they could have avoided a disaster. It’s a different matter when key decision-makers are numb to their feelings. Then, for these, feelings are not a tool available for their safety.

Summary:

The scariest thing to me is that many so called “accidents” could have been averted had warning signs been honored, like respecting when the thunder booms or hearing the buttons rattling on a Diamond Back rattle snake, what are my feelings indicating? I have a simple “Feelings Tune Up” exercise to share in article #4 if that might be indicated.