Scared to Move

How often have you heard someone say „Just relax, you´ll be fine!”?  But, how difficult is it to relax when every nerve ending is screaming at you to stop?!
So far this season I have had an unusually large number of students who are scared.  There are normally one or two a season, but this year I´ve had one every week.  Most have been part of a couple where the man can already ski and the lady “wants” to ski but is too scared to move.

The “wants” is an interesting topic in it´s own right. (And probably a subject for another Blog entry!) Lots of different people have lots of different reasons for wanting to learn to ski.  Those whose reason is to please someone else i.e. “My husband really enjoys skiing and he wants me to enjoy it too” can often be the most rewarding and/or frustrating to teach.
Frustrating because they say all the right things about wanting to ski and to enjoy it, but, if they don´t really believe that they want to then they come up with a hundred and one excuses for why they can´t.
Rewarding is when the person really starts to feel at ease on their skis, they feel the flow, enjoy the feeling and start to really want to be there for themselves.
Back to the lady who is too scared to move.  Over the years I´ve figured some stuff that works and some stuff that doesn´t! (Telling someone to relax when they are clearly terrified is pretty high up on that list that starts with a chocolate teapot!)
I bought an excellent book once called In the Yikes! Zone: A Conversation with Fear by Mermer Blakeslee.  It explained why people feel scared and how people behave when they are, it also had lots of case studies with ideas of how to get people moving again.  It was great… but after reading it I realized that the real skill in a ski teacher with a scared student is knowing which approach is going to work best.  Some need cajoling, some need commanding, some need distracting, some need lots of technical input, some need to be pushed out of the comfort zone, some need to stay well within it… 
Some of the stuff that has worked so far this season includes: a student with a mantra “Breathe in, breathe out and smile”, a student who sang German nursery rhymes, one who taught me to count to 10 in Polish, one who gave herself goals of a number of turns before she could have a cigarette break, one who concentrated on the feeling of how a flat ski slides (and how an edged ski won´t turn!) one who worked on having springs in her legs…
My favourite moment though was when one of my students said she was skiing too slowly.  Last year she was shaking and crying simply standing with her skis on at the bottom of the beginner slope.  This year we were doing flatspin 360s and she told me she was going too slowly!  I think I can count that as a success!