Staying Out of the Trees: How learning to ski made me a better facilitator…
When I was 2, my grandparents decided to retire to a cozy house on the side of a mountain in a remote ski town in Colorado, and my life was changed forever: I learned to ski.
To begin, skiing is a hard sport to master, fundamentally. You don’t have to run fast like in soccer or basketball. You don’t need a powerful swing like in tennis or baseball. You have to be brave enough to point your tips downhill, shift your weight from side to side, and listen to your body. It doesn’t come naturally to most and takes years of practice to get comfortable in it. Learning to ski was one of the biggest challenges I’ve taken on in my life. It shaped my work ethic, my grit, and I’ve found surprising parallels in my work today in 2020…
Skiing was hard for me. Really hard. What we didn’t know then, was that I was born with a visual spatial learning disorder. What that means is that the synapsis in my brain that processes visual and spatial information don’t fire quite correctly. I’m not walking around seeing the world as a Picasso cubist dumpster fire (which some have wrongfully assumed I do). In the same way that dyslexia makes it challenging for some to read properly, my VSLD makes it harder for me to estimate size or distance, it makes me a little clumsy, and at a young age, it impacted my motor skills. When I was properly diagnosed at 10, I had the reading comprehension and verbal skills of an 18-year-old and the fine motor skills of a 5-year-old. Simple tasks like gripping a pencil for legible penmanship, or balancing on a balance beam were Herculean in scale to me. But here I was, 7 years before that diagnosis attempting what at the time felt impossible. When talking to my mom, she said at times she felt guilty pushing me to go back to lessons every day, but also just assumed I was being stubborn in my refusing to learn how to ski.
But, I kept trying each year we went back to Colorado. It was still hard, and at times uncomfortable, but I stuck with it. At age 10 (right around the same time my VSLD was properly diagnosed), something clicked. As clear as day, I have this super-strong memory: I was in a ski school class, following my instructor and a few of my classmates in a neat little line down a side of the mountain called The Big Burn, humming a song I had listened to earlier to myself and it hit me: “I’m getting good at this. And I like this!”
From that point on, it was “tips down” as they say. I started looking forward to our annual ski trips, I eventually out grew ski school, and quickly began to smoke friends and family on the slopes. For years, learning to ski was the barometer I’d measure other challenges against. “Will this be as hard as skiing?” I’d ask my parents when facing a new challenge. Starting a new school? Not as hard as skiing. Playing the piano? That was as hard as skiing.
But no matter the difficulty level of the challenge, what mattered was that I knew I could master it. Learning to ski at a young age made a lot of things that feel hard and scary in childhood feel like an afterthought to me. I felt ready to face the unknown, and know that I’d be OK. In my first job interviews to be a camp counselor, a lifeguard, or a nanny, I’d reference my challenge of learning to ski as an example of my ability to learn new things and not back down in the face of adversity.
So, what does skiing have to do with facilitating? I had been reflecting a lot on what I really believe facilitation to be and why I felt called to it. What does the challenge of learning to ski teach me now, in 2020? Here’s what I found:
It’s not as hard as skiing. Facilitation felt natural for me to slip into. I initially took a facilitator training class to help enhance my skills as a project manager (there’s a lot of overlap). As soon as I got in front of my first group in a meeting setting, I thought “I’m getting good at this. I like this.” That same sensation I got coming down The Big Burn at age 10, when I realized I was good at skiing was my starting point as a facilitator.
You have to prepare. Before you head down a run, a good skier will take a minute at the top of the hill to assess. Is the run crowded, or empty? How’s my light? What’s the terrain? What’s my line, or path down the hill? In the same way, a good facilitator is prepared at the top of a run or a new project. They understand the overall objectives of the session, who will be participating, and what each activity and agenda item will consist of.
Stay out of the trees. There are some skiers who love nothing more than a day in the trees, skiing off the marked runs and dodging and weaving between fir trees in ungroomed powder. My brother is one of these skiers. And if you are too, more power to you. But I never loved skiing in the trees, and I feel the same way about working with groups. There are some tangents and rabbit holes worth exploring; just in the same way that going off the groomed run can get you into some great skiing. But you can also end up in waist-deep powder with no way out. As a facilitator, I make sure we stay on task and head back to the agenda before we end up too deep in the trees to achieve our goal.
Rest when you need to. For a while, I thought that if I had to take a break mid-way through a ski run, I wasn’t a good skier. It took some time, but I realized that taking a breather after a particularly steep stretch or stopping to regroup after some leg destroying moguls wasn’t just OK; it was the best thing for me. Pushing myself too far led to exhaustion and injury. When digging into the deep, meaningful work I explore as a facilitator, it’s just as important to give people that chance to rest and regroup. Giving people time doesn’t just allow them time to check their email or have a snack, but to sit and marinate on the work we’ve been doing as a group. That refreshed energy, or their “fresh legs” when we gather again makes all the difference when we’re in the final push at the end of the day.
Let go and trust. Over time, I began to learn that for all the preparation, careful planning, and rest I took on a full day of skiing, at a certain point I also had to let go of my perception of “control”. I had to trust my training; that my skill level would take me down the hill and back up again. Trust that my equipment would protect and help me in getting back down the hill. And trust that my fellow skiers would keep an eye out and also take care of themselves to ensure we were all safe. And when you’re facilitating, you have to do the same. You prepare, you build agendas, you design meetings and activities, you bring all the materials into the room, and then the session starts. And as a facilitator, that’s when it’s time to let go, trust the process and let the work work. Of course, just as in skiing you take the reins when you need to. You steer away from the trees, you stop when you’re too tired, you keep an eye on the weather. But until those moments, when you let go and trust in your training, that’s when you can really fly. The sensation of carving out a clean path in the snow as I zip down the mountain is the same feeling of guiding a group of people through activity and watching them excite at their discoveries. I didn’t control the shape of the snow any more than I could control the input of a team on an exercise. But those moments of freedom are where the thrills lie; it’s what makes the training and hard work worth it.
As I’m typing this, my mom and aunt are packing the last few boxes of things from my grandmother’s house in the mountains. As she approached her 90s, living in an isolated town on the side of a mountain grew to be less and less of a maintainable lifestyle. So she’s sold her home and moved to Kentucky permanently. I don’t know when my next opportunity to ski will present itself to me. I don’t know where it will be, or who I will be with. All of those things that felt like a given for 30 years of my life as now murky and unknown. My ski gear is packed up in a box and will arrive at my doorstep soon. What will I do with skis in California in mid-July?
But even with these unknowns, I don’t feel disconnected from skiing, from the ski town, or from that home in the side of the mountain. I carry those things with me, into every interaction. My bindings are tightened, my skis are freshly waxed, and my tips are pointed downhill. Will you take this next run with me?
