Written by Paula Margulis, Perception & Leadership Strategist, whose work explores the intersection of awareness, decision-making, and transformation. With a background spanning business, project management, and real estate, she helps individuals recognize patterns more clearly so they can lead, choose, and move forward with greater alignment and self-trust.
I’d like to continue sharing my journey through pivotal events that contributed to shaping my character and how I originally interpreted those experiences versus my current perception and understanding.
In my last article, I shared the knowledge and wisdom that emerged from my transition from elementary school to high school. I took you through that brief season of my life and demonstrated what it looked and sounded like while I was living the experience. I also shared the story I choose today, decades later.
My whole intention in communicating this way is to demonstrate the possibility that one’s story can, and often does, change. How? That’s entirely up to you.
Let me set the scene.
As a child of divorced and remarried parents from the age of three, and the youngest of a blended family of five children, I was shipped around and put places. Summer with my dad meant camp. Sometimes it was day camp. Sometimes it was sleepaway camp.
By the time I was thirteen, I had landed at one particular sailing camp. By then, sailing had completely captured my heart. I had already spent three summers in sailing day camp. Sailing was officially my jam.
I spent every summer for the next five years sailing the Great Lakes of Canada. I began my adventure with this camp as a trainee, a student, if you will. After a couple of summers, I gathered enough courage to enroll in the winter leadership program, where I would be educated and qualified for a leadership position aboard the ship.
Why did I want a leadership position?
Simple.
It meant I got to sail for the entire summer… for free.
Woohooooooooooooooooo!!!
YES!!!!
I was all over it like white on rice.
And so it was.
I completed the winter program and became a freshly minted Petty Officer just in time for my sixteenth birthday, setting me up for what would become one of the most transformational summers of my life.
There was just one problem.
I had a fear of heights.
Tricky thing, handling heights was an integral part of my new responsibilities as Petty Officer Margulis, aka PO Margulis. Not only was it my job to work aloft, it was also my responsibility to lead and train the trainees to do the same.
Looking back, I think I was partially in denial about this aspect of my responsibilities while simultaneously longing to free myself from the fear.
I loved sailing.
I loved this community.
Walking away simply wasn’t an option.
The program staff and crew knew about my fear. They were prepared to support me.
Side note: As I write this article, I am being blessed with a completely new interpretation of this experience. How is that possible? Through the absurd amount of work I have invested in my healing, growth, and development.
I haven’t given this experience this much attention in years. Since then, I have experienced many upgrades, and with each one has come a more expansive point of view.
Let’s continue.
The summer I turned sixteen, we crossed Lake Ontario and headed toward Lake Erie through the Welland Canal.
Only a few days into our eight-week voyage, we emerged from the canal at Port Dover and were greeted by what sailors simply call “weather”: eight-foot swells, steady rain, and a strong headwind, the kind of weather that, as I would later learn, makes great sailors.
Before we could continue our voyage, the sails needed to be unfurled. This required going aloft and releasing them from outboard to inboard, the proper and safest sequence.
Just saying!
Then I heard, “PO Margulis, unfurl the forecourse sail!”
This was one of those moments in life where an experience affects you viscerally and manifests a physiological response.
I nearly shat my pants.
I was experiencing a physiological response coupled with a very real emotional response, sacred rage toward my Captain, who had decided this was my moment.
In complete fear, matched only by my rage and frustration, I took myself on and climbed the shrouds, the taut wire rigging supporting the masts.
I was not alone in this activity. Two of my crewmates were handling the upper square sail while I was responsible for the lower sail on the starboard side, still more than twenty feet above the deck.
As I mentioned earlier, there was a proper sequence for releasing the sail.
I forgot all of it.
Panic has a remarkable way of overriding critical thinking.
Instead of releasing the sail from outboard to inboard, I did exactly the opposite.
Within seconds, the sail caught the wind. I found myself stranded at the very end of the yard, twenty-five feet above the water, with no way to make my way back toward the mast.
The ship continued rising and falling beneath me.
I was stuck.
I needed to be rescued.
Thirty years ago, I believed my Captain betrayed me.
Today, I recognize he liberated me.
Knowing what I know now, Captain Neil Autton has become symbolic in my life. He represents a leader willing to create temporary discomfort in service of long-term freedom.
Think about that for a moment.
At sixteen years old, I was compelled to challenge my limitations, confront my fear, and discover something I never knew existed within me, my capacity.
What became possible was far greater than overcoming a fear of heights.
I discovered that I was capable while terrified.
That realization changed the trajectory of my life.
I wasn’t only freed from my fear of heights; I was freed from believing there was anything that could truly stand in my way.
Over the decades that followed, I would draw upon that same lesson repeatedly, including when I finally quit smoking after twenty-eight years.
This experience, thanks to my Captain, shout out to Captain Neil Autton, became my first profound experience with personal power, intention, and self-trust.
I was blessed with knowledge that came from accessing parts of myself I didn’t know existed.
Captain Autton taught me that I was capable while terrified.
The moment didn’t change.
The story did.
And everything followed.
Explore Paula Margulis’ Work.
