Yesterday I took a trip over to The Chill Factor near Manchester, UK with a client of mine who hadn’t been skiing for 6 years because she had lost her confidence on the slopes. She’s now booked to go on a family holiday over the New Year and was dreading it! In fact, when I suggested we have a couple of hours on the indoor slope it took all her courage to say yes!
As you can imagine, the first run down after six years off was tense! But she did it! Then we started on re-building her confidence. ’What’s your goal for the session?’ I asked. ’To have a run without panicking’ she answered. A great goal in many ways, but not so good in others.
A goal really needs to fulfil the 3 P’s – Present, Personal and Positive – well, as the song says, two out of three ain’t bad! But I needed her to have a POSITIVE aim for our session so her goal became ‘To ski down relaxed and happy and having FUN!’ Now there’s a great goal!!!
Over the next few runs I gave her a few of my simple tips to work on from focussing on what her feet were doing inside her boots to bouncing along like Tigger (you really had to be there!) and before long she relaxed and actually started smiling as she came down the slope! She realised that without mentioning anything to do with technique, her skiing automatically changed.
How can this happen? I explained that our bodies know how to balance, how to change direction. As a racquet ball player she understood as I asked her if she has to think about running, or stopping or changing direction to reach a shot? Of course not, she said. And so it is with skiing. Yes we need to have the basics under our belt but if you are in a panicky or frightened state, technique flies out of the window.
As the time passed I was aware that our session was nearing it’s end I gave her one final tip and then simply said ‘This is going to be your best run yet’. The difference was AMAZING! When she reached the bottom, smiling and whooping I asked what had made the difference? ’Well’ she said, ‘All the way down I was thinking ’I wonder why this is going to be my best run?’ And because of that thought – it was!
You see, you can only think one thought at a time. And the thoughts we think create our actions which determine our results. The thought I had unconsciously planted in her head was that she was going to have her best run yet, words which she repeated over in her mind as she skied joyfully down the slope!
I know that for many people this sounds just too simple to be true – but take it from me, my client and her now VERY happy family – SIMPLE REALLY WORKS!
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