As career boosts go, being attacked by eagles must rank as one of the strangest. But Nicky Moss, Britain’s leading female paraglider and a British record holder in the sport, has turned her unusual and terrifying experiences into a business opportunity.
Nicky narrowly avoided death when her canopy folded in on itself in 2006. She fell several hundred metres before crashing into a gum tree. Undeterred, she took to the air again and a year later was attacked by two wedge-tailed eagles while competing for world titles in New South Wales, Australia.
Now Nicky, 40, from Loughborough, Leicestershire, gives talks and workshops about dealing with fear, charging €100 (£88.80) for an hour-long presentation or €500 (£441.20) for a workshop session.
‘Some of my sponsor companies have asked me to make presentations to conferences with over a hundred delegates, and training courses where I talk about how I have achieved my results in spite of a few setbacks along the way’, she told us.
‘Setbacks’ is a monumental understatement for moments such as the bird attack two and a half kilometres above the ground when the two huge eagles with a wing span of more than two metres tore holes in her canopy, became tangled in her lines and clawed at her head.
In a sport where misreading conditions or failing to recover from unexpected turbulence can at worse be fatal, Nicky told us ‘Things happen very quickly and you have to deal with them’.
She was back flying again the next day and has even said: ‘It was actually in some ways an amazing experience and fantastic to see them so close up. I would’ve preferred that they weren’t attacking me, but it was amazing really in hindsight’.
Nicky also runs training courses for up and coming paraglider pilots where sports psychology and dealing with fear figure highly. ‘Dealing with fear can affect everyone in day to day life,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t have to be your life at risk.
‘As a result of nearly losing the thing that was, and fortunately still is, the biggest part of my life, namely flying, I have found ways that work for me to get perspective and deal with the “real” as opposed to “imagined”.
‘For me, being able to be calm and rational under extreme stress allowed me to walk away from something that could have gone horribly wrong. You can only get this level of calm when what you are doing is subconscious and that in a sporting context means a lot of practice doing whatever it is that you do.
‘Doing it well enough to be successful in life and business as well as competition can involve visualisation, writing performance scripts, constant goal setting and monitoring performance and comfort zones against these goals, writing and using affirmations and developing a positive mental attitude.
‘Developing a winning mindset is about setting your goals and then reviewing them constantly. The biggest factor in achieving success in anything is motivation, a goal, and focusing on that goal – having a dream and acting like the person who is that “winner”.’
Nicky has come a long way from the early days when she took up paragliding at an unhappy stage in her life while living in Edinburgh and working as a chartered quantity surveyor. She has said: ‘It was the classic scenario of going through a tough time that brought me and paragliding together’.
A less driven woman might have consoled herself with simple pleasures like a DVD and a few glasses of wine. But Nicky, now based in Barcelona, recalls how, living in a new city with no friends and going through a relationship breakdown, she thought: ‘What shall I do? I know, I’ll learn to fly.’
Her life quite literally took off, taking her all over the world for sporting events where she travels to the clouds and back under the power of the wind and weather and covers dozens of kilometres in a single flight. She has said of paragliding ‘We play with the air currents and soar with the eagles. It’s all down to belief and finding out who we are and about learning and working hard at that’. Looking back on her old lifestyle, she told us: ‘It just doesn’t compare’.
Nicky, who says she prefers to live her life according to her shoe size (UK 6 ½) and not her age, now goes flying whenever the weather and her health allow her to and is now competing to improve her rankings which slipped after her accidents. Her life revolves around the sport which even extends to her job importing paragliders. Talking about what it takes to be a competitive paraglider, she told us: ‘It takes a certain kind of woman, you have to be quite selfish,’ commenting that it helps that she does not have children taking up her time.
Asked what advice she would give anyone considering giving paragliding a go, she told FMWF: ‘Don’t think about it, just do it.’
Links:
Nicky Moss’ website: www.nickymoss.com
Expedition page: www.fly-k2.com/content/expeditions
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