Emotional intelligence is the ability to know how to recognize and channel our emotions and thus be able to reflect on the automatic behaviors that tend to precede our will.
We are emotionally intelligent skiers when we know how to manage our own emotions. Observing the meaning of the emotion we are experiencing allows us to understand what it is that lead us to react, or not to react, and to learn from that reflection instead of being dominated by the emotion.
Emotional maturity lies in reaching a focused and constructive approach to our own skiing, avoiding excessive enthusiasm, immobilization due to lack of confidence, or fear of failure, reaching such a comfort with the activity allowing to know how to accept our own limitations.
A phenomenon observed is that, when faced with a challenging situation such as, for example, a very deteriorated slope, we let ourselves be carried away by the emotion that invades us. To avoid being emotionally overwhelmed, we have the following options: avoid facing it by choosing another slope; if we decide to descend, we can minimize the situation by selecting the least difficult places to descend; and, if we are already descending, try to make the situation affect us as little as possible, focusing our attention on something in particular in order to reduce the anxiety and tension generated by our thoughts that something unpleasant might happen.
If we are emotionally affected, then expressing our emotion reduces its intensity. We can also choose to rephrase it, i.e., label it differently with a practical solution such as “I’m afraid, but I’m still going down this slope”. By doing so, our fear does not disappear but we accept it in order to focus on the actions to be taken. Trying to suppress a negative emotion using the strategy of not feeling it is not the most convenient.
Emotional management, especially of unpleasant emotions, is a common problem when skiing. Negative emotions are considered so when they reach an excess, then we are prevented from producing appropriate actions hindering conscious decision making.
In certain threatening situations we may lose the balance between pressure management and emotional control. In these pressing situations, to become emotional intelligent skiers, we should pause, take a few minutes to breathe consciously and rhythmically, and then continue the descent with the clear intention of focusing on the actions to be taken, trying not to be tempted to think about what may happen until the emotion gradually dissipates.
We can be considered emotionally intelligent skiers if:
- We can solve situations instead of avoiding them.
- We face adversities positively.
- We adapt to changes considering them as learning opportunities.
- We accept our own frustrations.
How to become emotionally intelligent skiers? Practicing the analysis of the motives and reasons of the acted and thus being able to reach the harmony between the three dimensions of the behavior: the cognitive (thinking), the affective (feeling), and the behavioral (doing).
Emotional intensity
We differ in emotional intensity by perceiving, thinking, and reacting differently according to whether it is a high or a low level. Certain events elicit different emotional reactions. In some situations, we exhibit disproportionate reactions to routine circumstances, while in others we remain unperturbed by unpleasant events.
We can assume that experiencing a marked emotional intensity results from a complex sense of the Self as we perceive skiing in a more intricate way than if we experience emotions in an attenuated way. In this sense, every simple event may become decisive, tending to exaggerate the emotional impact of every situation we encounter, feeling as if we are in the center of an emotional storm, and experiencing a constant emotional urgency.
The emotional threat system
According to neuroscientist Joseph Le Doux, the threat or protective emotional system is an emotion-regulating procedure that allows us to detect and respond appropriately to threats that generate negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, or anger. It is a dominant system that promotes ‘negativity bias‘, i.e., for evolutionary reasons, negative events are more easily paid attention to, processed, and remembered than positive ones.
Threat emotions can arise if a motivation is hindered by experiencing anticipatory anxiety in contexts in which we feel we could not dominate. We may clearly feel threatened by external circumstances, but also by internal factors such as our own anger or intrusive thoughts. This may be common and negatively affects us, especially if we are beginner and intermediate skiers as well as if we are experts seeking strong sensations provoked by jumping boulders or descending steep slopes. In these cases, these emotions generate the adrenaline that drives us to perform actions that challenge our own physical integrity.
On the other hand, we may feel fear of positive emotions when we perceive that, after experiencing satisfaction for what we have achieved, something bad could happen. This conflict may come from our childhood in that certain punishments, perceived by us as threats, occurred in a context of joy or enjoyment, generating the classic conditioning of aversive memory to positive emotions.
There are also situations in which we have difficulty feeling rewarded and cannot calm down while skiing because the feeling of calmness triggers aversive memories of past traumatic events that occurred during calm skiing.
If we have survived an avalanche, we are likely to be traumatized by imagining what might have happened to us as well as thinking that it could happen again. This ability to speculate and worry stimulates our emotional threat system which has evolutionary reasons. Our current brain, or neocortex, comes with vestiges of the old or emotional one. Although in the neocortex evolved the cognitive capacities that allow us to reason, calculate, imaging, and anticipate making us being more intelligent and able to solve problems, it still contains emotional functions of the ‘old’ brain, which distort the optimal functioning of the ‘new’ brain.
