Podcast: Kristen Ulmer on how skiers can overcome fear

Kristen Ulmer has transformed from an expert skier to an expert on fear. (Getty Images)

Kristen Ulmer is an American skiing legend with roots in New England.

She grew up in Henniker, N.H., and learned to ski at Pats Peak. She went on to become a member of the U.S. Ski Team, where she competed in moguls. But her biggest impact came in big-mountain extreme skiing. Now she’s an expert in fear and her aim is to help people overcome anxiety with a method that she feels passionate about.

She recently was a guest on New England Ski Journal’s Basecamp Podcast. Here are highlights from our conversation with her. (Portions of this have been edited for clarity.)

“In the early days of my ski career I was competing in moguls. With no goals or intention, mostly I was just wanting to hang out with my friends and go on cool road trips. So I wasn’t a really good mogul skier but I was really good in the air. And I thought I could use my powers of conviction to talk this guy Eric Perlman, who was filming what was then called the North Face Extreme Skiing Video Series, into auditioning my skiing for his movies.

“I had never jumped off a cliff skiing. I had never thrown a ‘backscratcher,’ which is what all the guys were doing back then. I’m like, ‘OK, clearly what I need to do to get in this movie is jump off one of these cliffs and throw a backscratcher.’ So I did three of them. And I landed them all. And guys had never seen any girl do anything like this before. I had no idea. And they were loudmouths so by that afternoon everyone in Squaw Valley knew my name. By the end of the week, everyone in the ski industry knew my name. And by the end of the month, I was having articles come out and all the major ski magazines called me the best woman big-mountain extreme skier in America — because of my ability to jump off these cliffs.”

Watch the podcast here

Before long, Ulmer found herself on the U.S. Ski Team for moguls.

“I never had any formal training (on moguls). One day I just got really good. I went to Asia for four months to work on my self-esteem. Traveled by myself. Made myself as ugly as possible because I knew that my self-esteem was based on being pretty and on being a pretty good skier. I also gave myself the rule during that trip to not talk about skiing. Tried to figure out what else made me me and what gave me confidence, besides those two things. I came back from that trip, hadn’t thought about skiing all summer and next thing you know I started winning everything. I literally went from last place in moguls competition to winning.

“I entered nationals. I took seventh place. And there are six women on the U.S. team, and there was an injury with one of the women and then I got her spot the next winter. So I literally went from last place to World Cup in one year, without any formal training competing against girls that had the best training that money can buy, who had been groomed their whole lives to make the U.S. Ski Team. It was pretty cool. It was one of the proudest moments of my life, actually. But it was a little overwhelming because I didn’t know what to do about the fear in the gate. And I felt like I had impostor syndrome. And I just felt over my head; all of a sudden there’s thousands of people screaming and cameras in my face. And I wasn’t used to that or prepared emotionally for that. And I did not do well on the U.S. Ski Team.

Ulmer’s stint skiing moguls and representing the U.S. didn’t last long. She found her way back to big-mountain skiing. 

“I was being offered money to go heli-skiing in Canada to jump off cliffs into powder. So for me the choice was pretty obvious. That’s what I wanted to do instead. And that was the end of my moguls days. And I haven’t really skied moguls since.”

It was on the U.S. Ski Team that Ulmer recognized some issues with fear that she would come to spend so much of her life focusing on.

“Once I got in the World Cup gate, I didn’t know what to do. The coaches, they weren’t really paying much attention to me because they were waiting to see if I would be worth their time. But I didn’t know what to do about the fear. I was so out of my comfort zone once I got in the World Cup gate. And I didn’t thrive because I didn’t know how to deal with the fear. I tried to do the things we’re always taught to do, which is put it out of my mind or convince myself that I didn’t care and rationalize it away. None of that stuff works. I mean, it might get you through a moment, but it builds upon itself and eventually the truth is going to come out, which is that you’re overwhelmed with fear.”

Ulmer became a media figure talking and writing about skiing. “I had hit a point in my ski career where I was epitomizing the dream,” she said. But she didn’t find it fulfilling enough to spend her whole career there. She had a turning point when she encountered a Zen master who would change her way of thinking.  

“I wanted to be introspective and figure out what I’d learned from 15 years as a pro skier. So I started these mindset-only ski camps called Ski to Live, and I hired a sports psychologist to facilitate them. And I realized this guy had no clue what made for great athletics. So I hired a Zen master who had a history with athletics but was not a skier. And I learned more about myself and what the magic was for me as a pro skier in the first 10 minutes under his leadership than I had in 15 years as a pro athlete. We’re 10 minutes in, and the entire room is holding back tears because of what they learned about themselves. I studied with him for 15 years and now I run my own ski camps. They’re mindset-only. They’re really cool. They really affect people, not only their skiing but their lives. I’ve seen people go from being an intermediate to an expert skier in one run.”

Ulmer now considers herself an expert in fear and in how people respond to it.

“What makes me an expert is I’m not repeating anything I learned in college. It’s great they’ve come up with amazing ways to buy us time and limp us through anxiety disorders. What I’m doing is teaching the radical opposite of those tools. When studying with the Zen master I learned a facilitation tool called voice dialogue. And everything that’s in the book and everything I teach, this is not my personal philosophy. I’ve actually spoken to the voice of fear through voice dialogue with tens of thousands of clients at this point. So I just ask fear, ‘Hey why are you acting so crazy and showing up as an anxiety disorder? What’s going on?’ And basically what fear has told me through my clients — it’s what I teach. And I show the clients. All I do is facilitate a conversation between them and their fear. And then whatever fear asks the client to do about it is what the client does, and then these anxiety disorders resolve very quickly. So none of this is my personal philosophy. It all comes from talking to fear.”

Ulmer also wants to show people how fear presents itself in perhaps unlikely ways.

“When I say fear, it rarely manifests as scared or afraid. It’s just any kind of discomfort in our bodies. That’s our fear. Because we fear-shame each other. Fear is just an embarrassment. Dad says there’s nothing to be afraid of when we’re younger, even though there is. None of us is in flow with our fear anymore, the way nature intended. Instead what we do is we hide it; we’re embarrassed. We fight and run away. This is an interesting point for skiers. Fear does not hold anyone back from doing anything on the mountain. We get that wrong. It’s our unwillingness to feel the fear that holds us back. So nobody knows how to feel the fear.

“Fear does not make us freeze. It’s our reaction to it that does. We can call it kinking the hose. We stop the flow of the fear, we try to get rid of it. Next thing you know the fear builds up in our system and starts to flood into our chest or our throats. Then it’s looping fearful thoughts or anxiety. So trapped fear behind a kinked hose is anxiety. So the solution is to do the exact opposite of what we’re taught to do: Unkink the hose and get back in flow with fear the way nature intended. You turn toward the fear that’s maybe keeping you up and you learn how to feel it. Then, if you can have intimacy with it, it shifts from being a hold back to being the greatest experience we have here on Earth, taking it to a flow state, for example, while skiing.

“I like to see fear as a person because it lives in your body. And with it you share a heartbeat. And if you’re fighting with it, you’re fighting with yourself. And you’re missing the whole point of why we’re skiing in the first place, which is we’re here to challenge ourselves. And with challenge comes fear.”