Fear Of Swimming: How I Eventually Got Over It

The Fear Of Swimming

    written by: Josh Ortiz
As an athletic child, my mom was always shocked that I was scared to swim. It was the one thing that I was truly scared of because I simply never tried it. Though swimming is certainly not "difficult," it still takes a lot of practice and dedication to perfect the correct swimming strokes. This is why I needed to somehow get over the fear and finally get in the water and swim. Here are a few things that I did to finally get over my fear of swimming.

Feeling Safe in The Water is Important

Talk To Your Friends

The first step to starting to swim is to gain the confidence to actually start. I was able to gain confidence by just talking to my friends that were already very good at swimming. They would tell me about their stories and how they first started out. It is certainly normal for people to be afraid of swimming but you need to overcome this right away. My friends were very supportive and you need to stay from people that will try and scare you away from the pool. As long as your friends are supportive, you will be able to gain some confidence.

Start Slow

The next step is to simply start out slow. Don't be embarrassed about wearing floaties or by just leaving your feet in the water. Though this might seem like something only children do, you need to go through this step to start swimming. The problem that a lot of non-swimmers have is that they expect to learn how to swim right away and they don't want to start out slow. They will eventually get overwhelmed and the progress will end.

Wait... Get Your Lesson Plans Here

Get Lessons

The last step is to get some professional help. This means that you will just need to find a teacher in the area that has experience with teaching people how to swim. This is where you will get the most confidence because you know that you are doing the right thing. When you are able to get lessons, you are going to be guided and this is very important. In just a few lessons, you will see that you start doing different swimming strokes and you will be addicted.

This is the route that I took and I believe that it is the best way to just learn. Too many people will go straight into lessons but this can be too much for most people. You want to build some confidence on your own and then slowly work your way up to getting a lesson. I will admit that I was one of the worst-case scenarios because I was really scared of water. However, after a while, I realized that it was never as bad as I thought. I eventually learned how to swim and I am now addicted to the swimming pool. If you want to get in the water, you need to slowly take these steps and then you will look back and simply laugh at how scared you were in the past.

Enjoy
   Richard