How To Stay Centered When You're Skiing Off a Cliff | Angel Collinson
Angel Collinson, an extreme skier, meditator, and climate activist, discusses how mindfulness and visualization help her navigate high-stakes skiing and difficult life conversations. She also shares insights on overcoming self-doubt, finding identity beyond career, and her approach to climate advocacy.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Introduction to Angel Collinson and Her Background
Angel's Meditation Practice and App Usage
Understanding Big Mountain Skiing and 'The Line'
The Role of Visualization in Skiing and Life
Applying Visualization to a Difficult Conversation with Her Father
Navigating a Radical Life Decision: Buying a Sailboat
Mindfulness Meditation and Managing Stress Responses
Similarities Between Skiing and Meditation: Achieving Flow State
Impact of Mindfulness on Daily Life: The Meteorite Story
Coping with Loss and Death: A Personal Experience
Gender Dynamics and Self-Doubt in Extreme Sports
Meditation's Role in Overcoming Self-Doubt and Imposter Syndrome
Identity Beyond Career and Physical Abilities
Passion for Climate Activism and Personal Hypocrisy
Strategies for Climate Action and Overcoming Inaction
5 Key Concepts
Visualization
Visualization is a powerful mental tool where one imagines a scenario, engaging all senses (sight, sound, smell, feeling) to run through the best possible outcome. This practice helps prepare mentally and physically, making it easier to achieve desired results in activities like extreme skiing or difficult conversations.
Slough
In big mountain skiing, 'slough' refers to loose, moving snow that is not a full avalanche but can still sweep a skier off their feet. Skiers must plan their 'line' to navigate around or manage this moving snow, often identifying 'islands of safety' to pull off to if needed.
Flow State
Flow state is a mental state where one is completely immersed in an activity, experiencing heightened senses and a perception that time operates at a different pace. Meditation helps individuals become 'flow-ready' by tuning out mental static, making it easier to enter this focused and calm state when needed.
Mental Governors
Mental governors are self-imposed, invisible limitations or barriers that individuals construct in their minds, restricting what they believe they are capable of achieving. These often stem from self-doubt and prevent people from pursuing possibilities outside their perceived comfort zones.
Carbon Fee and Dividend
This is a legislative proposal that puts a price on carbon emissions, creating a market-driven approach to shift the economy away from fossil fuels towards renewables. It aims to instigate structural change by making carbon-intensive activities more expensive while returning revenue to citizens.
8 Questions Answered
Angel was always interested in Buddhism and found she was already clearing her mind before competitions. She got more seriously into it when she started extreme skiing and sought spiritual identity, with a boyfriend's help, about 10 years ago.
A 'line' refers to the specific path a skier chooses down a mountain face, navigating obstacles like cliffs, ridges, and managing loose snow (slough). It requires a detailed navigational plan visualized from the bottom of the mountain.
Visualization helps by allowing one to mentally run through the best possible scenario for a conversation, imagining the positive feelings, sights, and reactions. This preparation fosters a sense of presence and control over one's emotions, enabling a more thoughtful response rather than a reactive one.
Mindfulness meditation helps by training the mind to return to a calm center amidst chaos, similar to returning to a flow state. This practice makes it faster and more effective to manage physiological stress responses like shaky hands or racing thoughts when facing intense pressure, like on top of a mountain.
For Angel, skiing is a form of meditation because it allows her to completely focus on the present moment, entering a flow state where the outside world seems freeze-framed. While both involve focus, skiing is an active, heightened sensory experience, whereas formal meditation cultivates a calm stillness.
Overcoming self-doubt involves recognizing it as just a story and cultivating kindness towards oneself, embracing the idea of 'begin again.' Seeing other women's successes can also inspire and break through self-imposed limitations, fostering a collaborative mindset rather than competitive scarcity.
Meditation provides tools to cope with the identity crisis that often accompanies injuries, which strip away one's ability to do activities tied to their self-perception. It helps in questioning 'who am I' beyond work or hobbies, allowing one to define identity based on intrinsic qualities like caring and warmth.
Effective individual action includes electing policymakers who take climate change seriously, calling Congress to express concerns, and supporting companies that are working towards solutions. It's also crucial to identify one's 'lever' – whether through social media, corporate influence, or community involvement – and push for structural change.
30 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Detailed Visualization
Engage all your senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, and body feelings—when visualizing an outcome or scenario to make the mental rehearsal more powerful and effective.
2. Practice Intuitive Self-Awareness
Develop self-awareness to recognize when conditions or your personal state are not optimal for a task, and trust your intuition to back down or postpone to avoid negative consequences.
3. Train Mind for Centered Response
Practice mindfulness meditation to train your mind to quickly return to a calm, centered state, helping you manage stress and respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively in chaotic or emotionally charged situations.
4. Reframe Challenges as Growth
View significant challenges, difficulties, or tragedies as opportunities for personal growth, learning, and discovering valuable insights or ‘silver linings’.
5. Challenge Self-Imposed Limitations
Identify and actively challenge your own ‘mental governors’ or self-imposed limitations, and seek external perspectives from trusted friends or mentors who can often see your true capabilities more clearly.
6. Choose Your Emotional Response
Recognize that you have the power to choose how you respond to any situation, regardless of external events, and that your perception and chosen response shape your experience.
7. Visualize for Difficult Conversations
Before engaging in a difficult conversation, visualize the best possible outcome, including positive reactions and feelings, to manage anxiety and prepare for a constructive dialogue.
8. Visualize for Optimal Performance
Before a challenging task or performance, visualize the ideal scenario, running through it perfectly in your mind to enhance preparation, confidence, and mental readiness.
9. Identify Safety Nets in Planning
When planning for complex or risky situations, visualize potential problems and identify ‘islands of safety’ or contingency plans to ensure preparedness for unexpected challenges.
10. Treat Your Mind as a Tool
View your mind as a tool that can be trained through consistent practice to work for you, making it more effective in achieving desired states and actions.
11. Find Zen Amidst Chaos
Understand that meditation is not about eliminating thoughts or distractions, but about repeatedly finding moments of peace and calm within challenging or chaotic circumstances.
12. Reduce Mental Static with Meditation
Use meditation to ’tune the dials’ of your mind, reducing mental static and white noise, making it easier to enter a flow state and focus effectively.
13. Practice Kinder Communication
Engage in mindfulness meditation to improve your communication, leading to more thoughtful, less reactive, and kinder interactions.
14. Let Go of Worries
Develop the skill of letting go of worries, trivial concerns, and self-criticism through meditation, fostering greater acceptance of your present situation.
15. Prioritize Mind-Body Self-Care
Prioritize self-care for both your mind and body to maintain a state of homeostasis, which helps you recover faster from stress and emotional upset.
16. Define What You Live For
Shift your focus from ‘Is this worth dying for?’ to ‘What do I live for?’ to identify and pursue activities that genuinely make you thrive and feel alive.
17. Navigate Identity During Change
When experiencing an injury or significant life change that impacts your identity, actively use mental tools to explore who you are beyond your roles and activities.
18. Perform Identity Thought Exercise
Regularly conduct a thought experiment: imagine losing all your current roles and physical abilities, then define who you would still be and how you would want to show up in the world.
19. Use ‘The Story I’m Telling Myself Is…’
When experiencing self-doubt or negative thoughts, use the phrase ‘The story I’m telling myself is…’ to recognize them as subjective narratives rather than objective truths.
20. Embrace ‘Begin Again’ Mindset
Cultivate self-compassion by embracing the mantra ‘begin again’ at any moment after making mistakes or experiencing setbacks, allowing yourself to restart with kindness.
21. Foster Conviction and Confidence
Develop strong conviction and confidence in your abilities and goals, recognizing that self-doubt and second-guessing are primary obstacles to achievement.
22. Use Meditation Apps for Accountability
Utilize meditation apps to maintain accountability and consistency in your daily meditation practice, even for short durations like 10 minutes.
23. Integrate Morning Breathwork & Visualization
Incorporate breathwork and short visualization into your morning routine to center yourself and prepare mentally for the day ahead.
24. Support Women’s Collective Success
Counter the scarcity mentality by viewing other women’s success as a positive force that elevates everyone, rather than a competitive threat.
25. Raise Capable Children
When parenting, avoid making exceptions or ‘dumbing down’ activities for girls, treating them as equally capable to foster confidence and break through societal limitations.
26. Live Authentically on Social Media
Strive to share your authentic process, including struggles and self-doubt, on social media to promote vulnerability and counter unrealistic portrayals of life.
27. Normalize Self-Doubt for Causes
Acknowledge and normalize feelings of self-doubt and hypocrisy when engaging with major causes; redirect energy from self-criticism towards positive accountability and collaborative solutions.
28. Identify Your Climate Action Lever
Determine your unique ’lever’ or area of influence (e.g., social media, company connections, voting) and actively use it to advocate for climate action.
29. Call Congress on Climate Change
Periodically make short phone calls to your congressional representatives to voice your concern about climate change, as this feedback is reportedly scarce but impactful.
30. Vote with Your Dollars for Change
Consciously ‘vote with your dollars’ by supporting companies and organizations that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability and positive environmental impact.
7 Key Quotes
Being able to back down actually is people ask you like, what's your proudest moment, you know? And I would say it's the times when I've stepped away from stuff that I really wanted or knew I was capable of, but had to have the self-awareness to be like, this isn't the day for it.
Angel Collinson
Our minds are so powerful. And a lot of athletes can say that if you can't visualize doing something, we can't do it. And until we know that we can run through the whole thing in our head perfectly, we can't do it.
Angel Collinson
It's not a process of cutting out all the things that are going on around you. It's a process of, like, finding the zen moments in the crap again and again and again.
Angel Collinson
The meteorite was never actually lost all of these different times. It was just my perception of the fact that it was lost that totally turned my world upside down.
Angel Collinson
I think the more interesting question is, what do you live for? And like, what makes you thrive? Like, what makes you really, really 100% be stoked on your time here?
Angel Collinson
When one woman does really well, it raises us all up, you know, like a rising tide lifts all ships, instead of, oh, shoot, she just did so good. Now I'm gonna look extra bad, you know, but that's how we're trained in society at large, in a huge way, is kind of from this scarcity mentality.
Angel Collinson
At any moment, you can just start over. At any day, you can start over. And having that kindness and that softness with yourself when you're trying to work through like some of your deep hangups, that's where the rubber really meets the road.
Angel Collinson
1 Protocols
Visualization Practice for Optimal Outcomes
Angel Collinson- Take a couple of breaths to get centered and still, calming the mind and heart.
- Put yourself in the situation you want to visualize.
- Imagine how it will feel, look, sound, and smell, engaging all your senses.
- Envision yourself running through the entire situation with all senses involved, focusing on the best possible case scenario.
- Run through different possible scenarios and identify 'islands of safety' or alternative plans if things go wrong.