By Carlos Taurino in 2019.
Snowboarding rewards us with strong and different emotions. Some, like stoke, joy and general good feelings are positive, making us keep riding and feeding our will to expand our knowledge. Some others, like fear and panic, can have a negative impact on our riding and can stop us from learning new skills and progressing. Because we are too scared to try new things we risk to lean too much into our comfort zone.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF FEARS
Fear is something internal in our minds, it’s not something physical that you can point at. It is by-product of our reaction to things and once we are aware of its causes we can control it, work with it and eventually remove it as a problem in our snowboarding. Before we need to learn about the different kinds of fears and understand its symptoms.
Healthy and Unhealthy Fears
Fear is not always a negative feeling to have. Healthy fears like not wanting to jump off a 50m cliff or going on a terrain we are not comfortable on, keep us safe and let us making good decisions. Unhealthy fears like panicking when you realized you are in a sitution you didn’t want to be or simply you don’t know what to expect are the ones that put a stop in our mind making us act instinctively and can harm us if we don’t know how to face them.
Rational and Irrational Fears
Rational fear is being afraid of something that is truly dangerous whilst irrational fear is being afraid of something that may or may not exist.
Symptoms of Fear
Symptoms of fear can be: racing heartbeat, dizziness, anxiety and panic, sweating, needing to escape, felling powerless. You can also learn how to recognize visible symptoms in your students i.e. esitation, leaning back, jerky movements out of control, shaking tone of voice, making excuses
This is crucial in teaching snow-sports – how do you know someone is scared if you don’t know them well? If you’re not sure, you could always start with explaining how you know YOU are scared!
HOW TO UNDERSTAND, INTERACT WITH AND FACE YOUR FEARS
When the fear level goes up, our ability to think rationally trends downwards making us act inappropriately to the situation. The important point though is to make a conscious decision about whether to be fearful in a situation or to allow the rational mind to make a choice amongst the possible solutions relying more on technique and snowboarding knowledge. To allow you to make the best decision, you can go through these three following steps.
Understand Fear
1) First, it is important to know that it’s ok to have fears, as previously said some fears can be good and have a protective role.
2) Consider its origins: intrinsic (something we personally are afraid of because of a past experience or common sense), or extrinsic (some fears are brought from external factors, i.e. parents, family or friends can program you to fear certain things or situations especially from a young age), this last origin of fear is one of the most commonly found in kids: “I don’t want to go in the snow-park because my mum told me that it’s dangerous and I can get hurt”.
3) Reflect on any traumatic event, understanding symptoms, and recognize when fear becomes overwhelming. To begin with it’s important we examine our thoughts as soon as possible after the event (what caused me to react in a fearful manner?), then we need to understand what symptoms we felt (dizzy, anxious, panicky) and if we let this symptoms overwhelm us and take over.
Try to understand where the fear comes from and that will be a major step towards regaining control.
Interact With Your Fears
Interacting with your fears can be hard and frustrating, but it will give us a better understanding on how to control it, so we can build the courage to face them.
1) Acknowledge your specific fear naming it like fear of steeps, fear of jumps and rails, fear of going too fast and loose control. Doing this we need to pay attention in not to judge ourselves or our fears.
2) Understand what triggers your fears and question the power the fear holds over you. This will allow you to stay away from a situation that can contribute to generate fear in your riding i.e. learning a new trick, standing at the top of a feature with a lot people behind, can put pressure on you and generate fear of failure ending up you not trying it.
3) Imagine the desired outcome. Now that you better understand your fear, think about what exactly you want to change i.e. being at the top of a feature and feel neutral about all the other riders behind you.
Facing Your Fears and Benefitting From Them
Now that you know the origins of your fears and you know how to interact with them it is time to face them and regain control. This process might take a considerable amount of time in snowboarding as we are dealing with a sport that can have big consequences, so the key is in PATIENCE.
1) Try exposing yourself to your fear gradually. Most of the time we are afraid of something because we haven’t been exposed to it very much (Fear of the unknown) i.e. “I’ve never been on steeps because I am afraid”, of course you’re not going to find the steepest terrain in your resort where to try your first time, but gradually and progressively getting from a mellower steep to a steeper and steeper slope every time you face the task.
2) Practice engage with the fear. Labelling the fear gives you self-understanding and emotional intelligence and engaging with it, instead of escaping from it, has the incredible power to help you overcome fears and regulate emotions.
3) Make your fear a source of fascination. Try to re-program your fear into a positive thought, thinking about the positive outcomes coming from facing it.
4) Learn to love the task through using an assortment of positive reinforcement technique. Tell yourself that the task is good for you and will make you a better snowboarder.
5) Train yourself to acknowledge the fear and accept it for what it is, simply your mind telling your body that something concerns it. Repeatedly telling yourself that you are no longer concerned about it and not to be afraid will help you to believe.
SUMMARY
Always be kind to yourself, fear is sometimes part of snowboarding and it doesen’t have to be undertaken, but it can be studied and tackled in an effective way and sometimes it can be used at your advantage to become a better rider, you can learn to work with it and nullify its effects rather than take control.
I have used this on myself and a lot of students and just being kind and patient and empathising with them asking questions, delve deeper into those fears, you can help them getting over them.
Fear can be controlled, and we can learn how to do it in many different ways. I personally learnt how to do it to improve my freestyle and free-ride riding using a fair amount of repetition and visualisation to get those movement so automatic that have removed the fear to execute them.
Start to get to know your fears and you will discover that you are more courageous than you thought.