Know what you want?

It may be easy to identify what’s not working for you and what you want to change, but how to make the change might be more elusive. What I share here may surprise you…

Try changing your grip

When we’re apprehensive or fearful, we can recognise feelings of being tensed up. For anyone who wants to learn to ski or snowboard, controlling speed down a slope is an obvious skill that requires mastering early on. It’s natural to fear going straight down too fast - that’s our subconscious survival response to the perceived risk of getting hurt.

So, feeling like a novice in unfamiliar terrain, how to control speeding down the ski slope? One way is to steer a bit of an angle away from ‘straight down’. When fearful of going a bit too fast for comfort, there’s an intuitive tendency to throw the shoulders inwards towards the mountain slope as if to grip onto or ‘hug’ safety, but this actually throws balance off and loses control - body and mind are not in harmony. Instead, if the shoulders and upper body lean towards the valley below, leaning away from the mountain (even if it’s a bit scary) and focusing on the destination, the glide is just allowed to happen at a more comfortable speed. More angled turns can be made to zig-zag in stages safely to the bottom.

With repetition, the counter-intuitive leaning away from perceived safety and leaning into any fear becomes more familiar and intuitive. Like any sport, practice is key to mastering a sequence of movements until it becomes tuned and second nature. In a similar way, we can focus on an elusive change we want to make, even if we don’t know how, step outside our comfort zone, try changing the grip and start gliding towards the destination.