Spoiler Alert: The Kid Lives
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I went skiing. Now this isn’t unexpected, but pretty much everything else that follows certainly is. It all started when we arrived to a completely full, sold out parking situation, which was quite strange this late in the season on a weekday. This meant we ended up at a tiny little hill down the road we had never skied, where the skiing was, inexplicably, free. Super weird. Then, it was only 18 degrees and dumping snow, not really the weather you sign up for with spring skiing.
Heading up the chairlift for our last run, there was a calamity in front of us. The Mom got off at the mid-mountain stop, but her 5-year-old did not. The liftie stopped the chair, but not quick enough. The little guy was too far off the ground to get down, the chairlift couldn’t run in reverse and Mom couldn’t reload the chair. Small fry was going to go all the way up to the top by himself. Oops.
This is how we ended up in charge of a miscellaneous little British boy visiting Colorado for a ski vacation with his Mum. We offered to help get him down to her, figuring, how hard can this be? After a tense ride hoping the kid wasn’t going to fall off the chair before he got to the top, the liftie at the top stopped the chair and set him on the ground to wait for us.
“Jack” was super cute, and somehow not crying, and set off to ski down to his Mum. So many questions we didn’t think to ask resulted in him skiing straight down a not-beginners slope, going approximately a zillion miles an hour, ending in a spectacular crash. One ski came flying off, Jack tumbled and rolled and finally came to a stop. We got to him, and he stood up, miraculously unharmed, and announced he was now tired of skiing. Just in case our day wasn’t unexpected enough, I went to pick up this kid to carry him down the rest of the way and realized the 40-pound kid I was expecting actually weighed closer to 65 pounds. My husband ended up carrying him (“oof, he IS heavy!”) and successfully skied him to Mom. All was well. Unexpected but a great day regardless.
Along the lines of unexpected but great, I have an announcement! After 23 years of owning my own therapy business, I have joined forces with a remarkable international company called The Resilience Institute. Now I can extend my offerings beyond therapy (yes, I’m still practicing) and into corporate team trainings. I am certified to offer training to build resilience, well-being and mental fitness for leaders and their teams throughout the US. If you know of a team that is struggling with poor performance, wants to increase grit for their employees, or needs expert, science driven workshops with measurable results, please let me know. I’d especially love introductions to HR managers, Chief Learning Officers or Directors of Training and Development.
