Building Self-Confidence
/How a snowboarding accident helped one woman believe in herself
Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash
“Snowboarding would be a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of challenge: If I could act confident long enough to get me down the mountain, then I would develop actual confidence.”
Maya Kroth’s goal for the New Year was to bolster her self-confidence, and she decided to start by taking herself snowboarding. But things did not go according to plan.
In this episode, Maya shares her story, exploring how you can get your mojo back, even when things go very wrong.
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Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.
VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.
WILLOW BELDEN: Happy New Year, everyone! I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
So, I have a favor to ask. I’m putting together our next season. And we have some really wonderful stories in the works. But creating those stories is expensive. We spend months crafting each narrative, and producers need to get paid. We also have costs for music, editing software, audio hosting, and a lot of other things.
If Out There brightens your day at all, please consider joining me in investing in our next season. Your dollars will go straight to work funding stories. There are several easy ways you can contribute. Just go to outtherepodcast.com/support or click the link in the episode description.
And now, on to our story for today.
The New Year is all about new beginnings. It’s a time for starting fresh and putting failures behind you. It’s a chance to become the person you want to be.
But of course, New Year’s resolutions don’t always pan out. So what then? What do you do, when you have a really important life goal for the New Year, but things go horribly awry?
In this episode, Maya Kroth takes us snowboarding near Lake Tahoe, and tells a story about trying to gain confidence.
MAYA KROTH: There’s a saying that how you spend New Year’s is how you’re going to spend the rest of the year.
I didn’t expect to spend New Year’s Day 2022 in the emergency room of a remote rural hospital. By myself. Without health insurance. Waiting for the doctor to tell me just how bad the news was.
I was alone. Broke. And broken. This didn’t bode well for the rest of my year.
I’m not really the type for New Year’s resolutions. I make a few, the same ones everybody does: drink more water, get those 10,000 steps. But what I like better is to pick a New Year's word—a mantra or a theme, some idea to define the year ahead. And in 2022, it needed to be a good one.
2021 had been rough. When I played back the tape from the movie of my life that year, the word “failure” seemed burned into every frame. There was that thing with that guy that didn’t work out. That podcast series I couldn't sell. There was that trendy weight-loss plan that majorly backfired. By the time I arrived at my parents’ house for the holidays in December, my self-esteem was at an all-time low.
One night at dinner, we sat around the dining room table to discuss our hopes and dreams for the new year. I should say, my dad and I discussed. We are the talkers of the family. The over-analyzers, over-thinkers. My mom is like a Zen monk, listening twice as much as she speaks. And she hates these kinds of conversations. She prefers to live “in the moment.” Thinking about the future too much makes her nervous, I think. Like we’re going to jinx it or something.
I told them about the goals I had for the New Year: jobs I wanted to pursue, relationships I hoped to nurture. But I kept holding myself back. Hesitating. I just wasn’t sure I was good enough to get the things I wanted.
What I needed in 2022 was some swagger. Some mojo. So I decided that my word for the year would be “self-confidence.”
After dinner, I went back to my old room and started getting ready for bed. I reached into the closet to hang up a blouse and spotted my dusty old snowboard bag shoved in the back corner. Man, that thing brought back memories.
I remembered the first time I really got the hang of it. I was 20 years old, on vacation in Lake Tahoe with my first boyfriend, Mike. We’d drive up to the Sierras almost every weekend back then. Mike coached me from the sidelines: “Keep your knees bent! Sit back into your heels!” I remember how excited we both were when I learned how to link turns and could finally keep up with him on the intermediate runs.
God, that felt good. If I could bottle THAT feeling…
It was all there in the bag: board, boots, bindings. Almost taunting me. Even my old bib and jacket were in there. And they still fit. Kinda.
I hadn’t laced up my boots in a while, but I wondered if getting back on that board would be the key to juicing my self-confidence.
There was just one problem: I was scared of falling. And fear is your worst enemy on the slopes. In snowboarding, you’re supposed to keep your weight on your front foot almost all the time. It helps you stay in control of the board. But it also makes you go down the mountain faster. And speed terrified me. The faster the velocity, the greater the chance of breaking something.
But the alternative was worse: If I wavered at all, shifted my weight to the back, even for a moment, I was a goner. It’s a mental game as much as a physical one. I had to stay confident, even in the face of fear. Not unlike my life at the moment.
In my vision, snowboarding would be a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of challenge: If I could just act confident long enough to get me down the mountain, then I would develop actual confidence from having done the scary thing. It’d be a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop: Believe you can do the thing, successfully do the thing, rinse, repeat.
So I bought a lift ticket online, and the next morning I packed my old board into the car and headed for the hills.
January 1, 2022, was a beautiful bluebird day. Fresh powder from a Christmas Week blizzard blanketed the Sierras. There were still a handful of spots left in the parking lot at Donner Ski Ranch when I pulled in just after 9 a.m. Standing next to my rented SUV in the thin winter sunlight, I wasn’t even shivering as I snapped into my bib. Helmet, check. Goggles, check. Power bar, check. It was all coming back now, these familiar rituals from another lifetime.
In the past, there was always someone there with me, a shoulder to lean on while I shoved my feet into those bulky old boots. Snowboarding isn’t something I had ever done by myself. But by now most of my friends were busy with kids and spouses and anyway, I had resolved that this was a solo mission. My self-confidence was broken and I alone could fix it.
I grabbed my board and tottered toward the lodge to meet Daveed, my instructor for the morning. Daveed was a lanky 19 year old with an accent. A mop of shaggy dark fringe peeked out from under his beanie, covering the left half of his snow goggles. As we rode the lift to the top of the bunny hill, he explained he was from Chile, just working in Tahoe for the season.
At the top of the slope, we strapped into our boards and Daveed motioned for me to head down ahead of him. He’d watch me first: check out my form and then teach me what I needed to improve.
I took off down the gentle grade for the first time in a decade, wobbly but OK. I whispered to myself, “You got this.” Weight on the front foot. Heel turn. Toe turn.
I got all the way to the bottom and didn’t have to stop once. This mission was off to a good start!
Daveed led me to another chair lift that went up a different, harder slope. He turned to me and asked: “So what is it you want to learn? Your form looks good.”
I told him self-confidence was my motto for the year. That I wanted to believe in myself more.
We did that run, then another. On our fourth trip up the chair he told me, “You don’t need me. Your body already knows exactly what to do. Trust it.”
He was right, and I could feel it. That next run, I was soaring.
It went on like that for a few hours. When the lesson was over, I gave Daveed a grateful hug and went up the lift for what I decided would be my last run of the day.
The mountain was quiet. I’d missed that silence: the way snow muffles all the extra sound, leaving only the rusty squeak of the old chair lift. It carried me up, higher and higher, until the lake came into view in the distance. There was no boyfriend next to me this time, but who needed one? I was getting back in touch with something elemental about myself, my essence. Getting back to ME.
The lift reached the top and I got ready to unload. I angled my body sideways off the chair and placed my board down on the snow, facing forward, weight on my front foot. I stood up and put my back foot on the stomp pad, just like I had a hundred times before, and got ready to glide to a graceful stop in front of a snowbank at the top of the run. But just as I pushed off the chair to start my glide: I caught an edge.
My board and I went end-over-end in a slow-motion tumble. My right foot, not yet strapped into the rear binding, got twisted into an unholy shape. I heard a snap, like a dried twig, beneath my skin.
I lay there in the snow, not knowing what to do. I didn’t dare try to stand up. I was only 15 feet from the top of the chair, but the teenage lift operator hadn’t noticed that my little fall was way more serious than it looked. People just kept skiing past me, off the lift and down the mountain, one after another.
Finally, one skier realized I needed help. She flagged down ski patrol, who strapped me into a little red emergency sled and skied me down the mountain.
The next few hours are a blur. I remember someone pulling off my right boot and duct-taping a cardboard box to my ankle, a makeshift splint. I remember driving myself an hour to the nearest hospital because I was scared of how much the ambulance would cost. I remember being X-rayed, and waiting forever to hear the results.
An hour turned into four, turned into six.
It gave me a lot of time to think. Or more accurately, to freak out. Is it broken? How bad? I’d never broken anything before. How much was this going to cost? And if it had to be broken, why couldn’t it at least have happened in a more heroic way? Catching air during an epic jump or something? Instead, I was just a middle-aged lady with no friends who face-planted in front of a teenage lift operator at one mile an hour.
It was all so humiliating. I’d come to the snow to bolster my self-confidence, and I’d wound up doing exactly the opposite. By the time the nurse came out to tell me my ankle was broken and I’d need surgery, I’d already mentally tossed my New Year’s motto in the trash. Confidence seemed more out of reach than ever.
The rural ER didn't have a surgeon on hand to repair my shattered bone, so they just handed me a bunch of paperwork and discharged me. My 80-year-old parents had to drive three hours on icy roads to pick me up and bring me home again.
It took a while to get the full picture of what lay ahead: Surgery to weld my bone back together with pins and plates, then a month in a cast, then another month in a walking boot, then months of PT. No flying home to Atlanta, no driving a car till spring. I’d be lucky to get 10,000 steps all winter.
In the meantime, I was at the mercy of mom and dad if I wanted to go anywhere, do anything, even just make a cup of coffee. (Have you ever tried to make pour-over on crutches? It’s a nightmare.)
In the weeks after the surgery, I watched my Fitbit with dismay. My step average went down, down, down. The muscles on my bad leg shrank down to strings. It was the winter of my discontent.
On one level, I knew how lucky I was. My ankle would heal in a few months, and I’d go back to my able-bodied lifestyle in no time. But still, I hated this new reality. I struggled to accept how helpless I’d become overnight. This was the opposite of the self-reliance I was supposed to be manifesting. And watching my mom race around the kitchen preparing my meals was making me feel so guilty. Wasn’t I supposed to be the one caring for them at this age?
I became obsessed with snatching back scraps of my independence in any way I could.
INFOMERCIAL: Are crutches or knee scooters slowing you down?
MAYA: As I stayed up late one night, doom-scrolling, I came across an ad for a hands-free crutch.
INFOMERCIAL: It’s a new era. Walk, climb, carry, get your life back.
MAYAA: The infomercial showed all these smiling injured people walking up stairs, washing their cars, playing with their kids, without depending on anyone for help.
INFOMERCIAL: iWalk 3: live your life.
MAYA: It was the quickest 200 bucks I’ve ever spent. I was so excited when it arrived in the mail the next day. Imagine a high-tech peg leg, with a little padded shelf at the knee where I could rest my cast. It came with what seemed like hundreds of velcro straps and snaps. It was complicated as hell to set up, but it got me back in control of my coffee situation, and that felt like a win.
But even clawing back some independence didn’t lift my gloom. Friends called to check in. They texted me jokes and baby animal memes. Nothing would cheer me up. Having to rely on others was grating on me. I wanted to get back to manifesting the confident, independent self I was meant to be.
My folks and I fell into a routine. Each evening my dad would cook dinner, my mom would make tea, and I’d hobble into the den on my bionic leg, in a cranky mood.
After dinner on one particularly emotional day, my mom went to fetch the pot of chamomile, like always, along with a tray of little tea cakes. As she poured the tea, she repeated a story she likes to tell sometimes. It’s about a dream she had when she was pregnant for the first time, with my sister, and anxious about becoming a parent.
She dreamed she was floating in a river. The current picked up, and she felt frightened. She knew she had no control over where she was going. But then her fear started to dissipate, and she felt calm. She understood she was being supported by this river, buoyed up by this force that was bigger than she was. Powerful but benevolent.
“What is that, you think?” I asked her, dipping a cookie into my mug. “What is the river a metaphor for?”
My mom, predictably, felt the parable didn’t need analysis. My dad, the ex-Catholic, suggested the river might be God. We decided each of us might have our own definition for the river. Maybe it’s God, or friends, or nature. Something to which we can give up control. Jesus take the wheel and all that.
Slowly, I began to surrender. I let myself be cared for. I started to understand that my recovery depended on accepting help from other people. It was ok to rely on encouraging texts from friends, a cup of tea from my mother’s hands, a kind stranger on the ski slope. All of these people who were there for me: they were my river.
The days stretched out like that. Dinner, TV, tea. We talked about dreams. We watched Succession. I let my bones heal. When the cast came off and the doctor cleared me to drive, it was time to go home. To get back to taking care of myself.
And now here I am, heading into another new year. I still haven’t gotten back on the snowboard. But strangely, the whole experience did wind up making me more confident. It’s just a different vision of confidence than the one I started with.
I had thought snowboarding would help me feel stronger, hotter, to become the badass I wished I could be. I pictured myself flying down the mountain — and through life — strong, swift, agile, self reliant. And instead, I fell flat on my face. Literally.
Now I understand that confidence doesn't only come from being the best athlete or the most successful podcaster or the most independent person in the world. Sometimes it can grow through vulnerability, and reliance on others. It’s not that I’m confident that I alone can manifest my best life. Now I’m finding confidence in the idea that when life doesn't go as planned, my river will keep me afloat.
WILLOW: That was Maya Kroth. She’s an audio producer based in Atlanta. You can see more of her work at mayakroth.com.
Our next season is set to launch this spring. And as I mentioned earlier, we are raising money to fund that season. If you feel inspired to help out, just click the link in the episode description, or go to outttherepodcast.com/support.
If you’d like to stay in the loop about our upcoming season, you can also subscribe to our email newsletter. I’ll be sending out occasional updates there. Again, just click the link in the episode description to sign up.
Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. You can check out all the other shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
Today’s story was written and narrated by Maya Kroth. Story editing and sound design by me, Willow Belden. Out There’s audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
Special thanks to all our listeners who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Bryan Stokes, David Dolton, Mike Bachman, Caitlyn Bagley, Josh Weingarten, Jodee Pring, Carrie Gulvin, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Sue and Gary Peters, Deb and Vince Garcia, and the family of Mike Ludders. Thank you so much. This podcast exists because of you.
Happy New Year, and we’ll see you in the spring. In the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.
Credits
Story by Maya Kroth
Story editing and sound design by Willow Belden
Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions
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