Motivation… Keeping it All Season Long

BY TERRY MCLEOD PSIA-NW TECH TEAM

As you’re reading this, winter is still in its early stages and we’re excited and looking forward to a great season. After last year, great has been redefined as, ‘the mountain is open’, and we’re going to make the most of it now. But unless you’re truly supernatural you realize that at some point between now and closing day you will go through some version of burnout, depression, unenthusiastic attitude, the blahs, the Mondays (to quote Office Space), or some other derivative of lack of motivation. My intent in writing this isn’t to start bringing you down before the season is even in full swing, but rather to give you the chance to plan ahead to minimize the effects of this unavoidable occurrence.

I believe this is definitely a case where preventative maintenance is far more valuable than trying to treat or cure the problem once it has reared its ugly head. Following are some suggestions that can all be used together in one giant .battle plan. or you can pick and choose the ones that best fit your needs and personality.

Define what you want from the ski season. Some might say, figure out your purpose in skiing. Is it to make more money, free ride a lot, get more request business, train for an exam or tryout, move up in your schools supervisor or trainer hierarchy? Once you know what you’re trying to do you can make decisions that move you closer to your target. If you want to free ride a lot you may make the choice to schedule yourself for one less day a week so that you know you have the extra day off to rip.

?Set some specific goals for the winter and then map out the necessary steps to reach them. This is obviously very related to the point above but it adds the part of actually writing down a series or sequence of events that will move you towards your stated accomplishment. If a goal is to get more request lessons some of the steps might be to buy/update your business cards, keep an address list and info sheet for all your students, write follow up/thank you notes to each student after every class, network with other staff on the mountain (rental shop, hotel staff, bartenders), pick the brains of other successful instructors, and pre-plan remarks or phrases to ask clients for their return business. As the winter grows colder keep referring to your list as a way to track your progress and stay focused on what you’re doing, rather than being distracted by things that we sometimes think we’d prefer to be doing.

?Schedule a sanity break or ‘vacation’ from working on the hill. Naturally you need to coordinate this with your managers first, but having a pre-set break can help in a number of ways, depending on your personality and the way the season plays out. 1) it may give you the assurance that, .if I hold on a little longer I have a break coming.. 2) It may force you to cram as much work and skiing in as possible knowing that you’ll be away from the hill in the upcoming scheduled absence. 3) By the end of the break you may have a whole new ski Jones going that keeps you fired up till the end of the year. 4) If you coordinate this break with a business trip or some other workload from a ‘normal’ job, you may realize how great it is to work for the ski school and that a bad day teaching and riding is better than a good day at work.

Make a list of ‘greatest challenges’ and ‘biggest opportunities’ for your wintersports season, and then commit to ways of addressing them. Challenges might include this whole problem of staying motivated, a staff member on the mountain that drives you crazy, a particular lesson or student type that you don’t feel confident/ comfortable working with, organizing your time to meet all the obligations in your life, or changing something about your personal communication style that is limiting or adversely affecting your relationships. Potential opportunities could be a new role in your school, that next exam or tryout, learning opportunities from a particular trainer or mentor, a new commitment to building your referral business, or a new/improved relationship with a ski shop or similar business.

If all of these ideas fail and you still find yourself crying the mid-winter blues, try writing an article about how to recover from this curse. The research and mental probing you have to do for this project may be just the thing to drive you out of the house and back on the hill with a new vigor and vitality that you hadn’t felt since December.