FEARLESS

Remember how fearless we felt when we were young?
I try to tap into that feeling whenever new challenges & opportunities come my way.
Fearlessness seemed to seep from my pours, back in the day.
Shortly after my college graduation, I took a job as an assignment desk asst. at KABC in Los Angeles, helping to dig up background for the reporters about their stories for the day or directing them to breaking news. I hoped this would be the final stepping stone to a broadcast journalism career in front of the camera, not behind it.
After my weekday shifts, I’d ask the reporters & photogs if I could shadow them in the field. I’d also go in on weekends for the chance to study their different processes of getting stories to air. Then I’d grab the raw video, & write my own script. I was a hustler, which earned me enough respect from some photogs who would let me record part of my script on camera in the field, & from some editors who would piece it together for me as if it were ready for air. I did enough of these to put a resume tape together. But some reporters I looked up to felt I needed some clips of me ‘anchoring’ from the news desk. So I asked our news director if I could get some video of me doing just that. He was happy to help and not only arranged for me to read an actual news block from that morning, but he arranged for hair and makeup as well. An editor added the set piece to my tape and I mailed it off to just about every small market across the country. That tape landed me my first anchor/reporter job in Texas in 1990.
I was a 21-year-old who wasn’t afraid to ask for a yes, even if the answer was a no. That approach set my news career in motion.
These are the scenes I like to replay in my mind – even today – when I get the chance to stretch myself beyond my comfort zone.
I can’t call it ‘youthful’ fearlessness anymore. But I do like to think of it as ‘mature’ courage.
We’re never too MATURE to try new things, step outside the box, and discover what cool things we can still do!