Lessons from the alps | 4 things I learned 3,000m up

As you probably already know (I’ve only mentioned it about 100 times), I’ve recently come back from a ski trip with my work place. It was a trip filled with some good exercise and lots (and lots, and lots…) of drinking, socialising, and treating my hangovers with bacon omlettes. On my first full day at the resort, as I always do – I was blabbering away on Facetime to my boyfriend, and letting him know about how many life lessons I’d actually learned in just under 24 hours up in the alps. During the conversation, I started to scribble down all that I was blabbering to type up into a blog post – as you do. Follow the jump to read my 4 lessons from 3,000m up.

 

1. If you don’t ask, you don’t get…

This is something I’ve always been quite bad at throughout my life – I’ve typically just waited for things to come to me instead of sometimes just going out there and snatching things for myself. Even with this blog, it’s only been within the last few months or so that I’ve started actively contacting brands for partnerships/collaborations, whereas in the past I’d just sit back and wait for them to pop up in my inbox which is not always the most productive thing to do. When I went skiing, we all had to share rooms, and after a room was picked for me I was given the opportunity to switch and speak up if I wanted to share with someone else, the choice was literally handed to me on a plate. My flatmate was also on the ski trip, so naturally that’s who I’d want to share with. But, I figured I really didn’t mind who I shared with and even came up with the idea that “jeez, we’re not in school – do we really need to pick rooms?” When I arrived at the hotel, I suddenly saw everyone walking off arm-in-arm with their work besties to their rooms, and I realised – “oh, I guess it was just me thinking that then?!” As I said, I wasn’t too bothered whoever I shared with in the end and actually, I enjoyed rooming with my roomate and getting to her – but of course the most optimal situation would have been to room with one of my closer friends which would’ve been possible if I had just asked.

 

2. Confidence is the key… to almost everything

I wouldn’t necessarily say confidence is the key to everything, but it is definitely the key to most things. For example, if I was sat at my desk at work feeling pretty damn confident – that’s great! But at the end of the day, if I didn’t know wtf I was doing, then I wouldn’t know wtf I was doing even with this amazing confidence. However, for most things, confidence is a major key. This year skiing was actually the first time I’d ever skiied in my life, so I booked a few beginner lessons with a fellow first-time-skiier at my firm. I won’t tell you I was a great skiier, ’cause that would be a lie, I could barely even make it through green slopes. But, my skiing always improved 100x when I just… skiied with confience (which is of course easier said than done). This is probably stating the obvious – but it always shocked me a little how much my skiing would improve from one run to the other (literally one minute apart), when I just decided I was going to go for it and ski with confidence. The other first-time-skiier definitely did a lot better than me over the course of the holiday for the very simple fact that he had more confidence on the slopes – whereas falling over to me sounded like a nightmare and progressing any steeper than what I got used to sounded like an even worse nightmare, he’d just go for it, even if he fell 50 times. And hence he progressed more. Confidence. Is. Key.

 

3. Sometimes your opinions become polluted with others’

This isn’t related to the ski trip and is not something I necesarily experienced over the few days, but it is definitely still something I reflected on whilst up in the alps. Your opinions… are they even yours? It sounds like a really silly question, but way too often we let our minds get polluted based on what’s being whispered to us. Recently, I started to hear from word of mouth that someone I sort of knew was just a ‘nightmare’. And I was hearing this from people whose opinions I actually valued. When I finally started to get to know this person properly, I instantly judged them. In my head I was thinking that this person was annoying af, and at the back of my mind I didn’t even really want to converse with them at all. Eventually, I dropped my guard, and just… let myself got to know them, and before you knew it I had completely shocked myself and seen the flaws in my ways. Before you knew it me and this person were connecting on things we had in common, and engaging in long winded conversations. Your mind can be polluted sometimes even by the people you respect the most, so sometimes before you blurt out an opinon, check to see if what you’re saying you believe is something you can justify, or if you’re saying it just because everyone else is…

 

4. You should really only rely on yourself

It’s not to say that I definitely don’t rely on others, because I do! But when it absolutely comes absolutely down to it – you should really only rely on yourself when it comes to your own happiness. On this ski trip, most of the people I knew were quite seasoned skiiers, however as someone brand new to this world, I was for some reason under the impression that we’d all ski in the morning, come together in the afternoon, eat lunch together and skip off into the sunset. The reality was, once I had finished my lesson in the morning at gotten back to the hotel thinking okay! LEH-GO WHERE YA’LL AT?! – everybody was out skiing in places I couldn’t join because I didn’t want to break my legs. And that was the reality. So, the next day, I just went out to practice myself. I went to the green slopes as a beginner, did some hours of practice, met up with my fellow beginner skiier, did a few more hours of lessons, grabbed a snack and a quick break together, then went back to the hotel to get ready to meet everyone for drinks. On the second day, I determined what I did, I planned my own time, and essentially I was incharge of my own happiness for that day, as cheesy at that sounds. This is a fact I always have to remind myself. If you life isn’t based on relying on others and you take more control on what’s in front of you, trust me – you’ll be a lot happier.

And, there you have it, 4 lessons I learned from 3,000m up. I scribbled these all down on my first day in the resort feeling like a real-philosophical-bad-b. The trip overall was so much fun, I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to. Not just because I enjoyed the skiing, but also the social aspect of it and getting to know a lot more people that I work with on a better level, and in a more casual setting.

Hope these tips can be useful to you guys! Let me know any recent lessons you’ve learned in the comments.