A lesson in Life, a lesson in Snowboarding....
The first of my Document snowboard magazine columns for the 2010 season.A lesson in life, a lesson in snowboarding?
You’re lining yourself up for that rail again, a slight doubt in your mind on the run in, is your speed too fast? Is your line right? You speed check at the last minute and then realise you’re now just a bit too slow, you ollie up over the rail, stick the nose over and half commit to a board slide but know already that you’ll be off half way down just like the last time! You’ve been here countless times before, the same trick, the same experience, surely one day you’ll nail it! But will you? Are you stuck in a repetitive cycle?
Are the experiences from your past affecting your future and what can you do about it, how do you make the break through and take the next step?
So here’s a thing to consider. Any life style coach will teach you to ‘learn from your past, live the now and so create the future’.
By this they mean ‘understand and learn from what you have done before, leave it in the past and live now for new experiences that give you the opportunity to create new possibilities in your future’.
So how does this relate to snowboarding and can we use a lesson in life style to help us progress in snowboarding?
The same principle applies to pretty much everything we do, both in day to day life and so therefore in our Snowboarding.
In snowboarding, if you’re learning a new trick for example, the biggest factor affecting your chance of success is your knowledge of what has happened before.
When you are learning a new trick for example the experiences you’ve had before will greatly affect how you approach learning the new skill and will greatly determine your initial chance of success.
Imagine you can learn from what happened on your last attempt, see what went wrong, what went right, learn from it and then clear the slate before your next attempt and so give each new moment exactly the focus and commitment it needs in order to succeed.
So many riders have basic riding faults that come from that first edge catch way back in their past when they first began. That initial fear of the edge catch teaches people to avoid the smooth delicate edge change that leads to the highest levels of riding just as the fear of sliding out the back again stops you from nailing that board slide next go.
Your past experiences are a very important part of your learning process, you need these experiences both good and bad to help you build your awareness and progress. By looking at these past experiences you should be able to learn from them, accept them and use them to build the next step.
For some the next step may be to try the whole thing, those that can learn from these past experiences and then switch them off will make rapid improvements. Those that need more input will need to use them to build a progression based upon what they have learnt so far.
Those that can learn from and accept their past experiences without dragging them into the present will definitely build greater opportunities for the future.
A lesson in life, a lesson in Snowboarding? Or a lesson in Snowboarding, a lesson in life?
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