It's a mind thing - the mental side of mountainboarding

Whether you're a beginner stepping on a board for the first time, a good rider working on your backside 360's, or an elite rider putting the finishing style touches to your corked sevens, you are all learning in exactly the same way.

There are four stages to learning, and like every mountain boarder, you start out being unconsciously incompetent, which simply means that you don't know how to do it, and before you can learn a new skill you have to move onto phase two and become consciously incompetent, or aware of how little you know. Maybe someone tells you how or you work it out by watching someone, but you get practicing and it's not too long until you get yourself onto the third stage. The third stage is conscious competence, where you know how to do what you want to do. You can perform that trick you've been learning (and people tell you how good it looks) but you always have to think about it before you do it. You could be satisfied with that and your learning could stop there, but being motivated as you are and eager to improve, you want to move onto the next stage and you know that only practice, practice, practice is going to make you unconsciously competent, where you know the trick so well can do it without even thinking about it, and make it look really stylish, of course. Once you've reached this stage that trick has become second nature. You might think this is the end of the learning process, but you'd be wrong. This is where the mental side of mountain boarding starts to get interesting...

You decide you want to know more about how to improve your learning so you Google "mental side of mountain boarding"; but that only gives you "The Smoky Mountain Center for Mental Health." No help there! You happen to pass the library and in the sports section you're lucky enough to find a book about sports coaching. Reading the book you can't find anything about mountain boarding, but what it says about how other athletes improve their skills makes sense and you so you read on. You quickly start to understand how you can improve and speed up your learning process and that by using techniques such as visualization, positive self-talk, and effective goal-setting you'll be able to learn new tricks more quickly.

As you read, you find out that Visualisation is the process of creating a mental image or intention of what you want to happen. You can use this technique to 'intend' an outcome of a trick or run. By spending time when you're not riding imagining the scene, complete with images of a previous best attempt or a future desired outcome, you can 'step into' that feeling when riding. While imagining these scenarios, you should try to visualise all the details and the way it feels to nail the trick the way you want to. Using your mind, you can call up these images over and over, enhancing your skills through repetition or rehearsal, similar to physical practice. With time and practice your mind and body become trained to actually perform the skills you have imagined. "Hmmm, interesting", you think. "I could do that. What else is there?" you wonder.

Positive self-talk is the next thing you read about. Self-talk, the book says, is the inner dialogue we all have going on in our heads all the time. Henry Ford said, "If you believe you can do something or believe you can't, you're probably right." He was right. Thinking negatively causes failure. Thinking positively causes success. And where positive thoughts can help improve your performance, negative thoughts can hinder your mental and physical capabilities. The power of positive words and thoughts can improve your riding by increasing your self-confidence. Repeating to yourself a positive thought pattern such as "I have the skills to do this run" will improve your performance and make you more likely to achieve what you are trying to do.

Now you're really getting into all this stuff, so you read on and find out about how goal-setting can be an effective tool in improving your motivation. Goals provide you with a motivational focus, a purpose if you like. If you set goals appropriately, and achieve them, you will feel satisfied, more confident and calmer. The flip side is that inappropriate goals can be a source of anxiety or stress. Goals that focus on self-improvement or effort are usually more positive than goals that focus on performance against others.

"Right," you say to yourself with a determined tone. "I've now got some mental techniques I can use to develop my skills, increase my confidence and improve my internal motivation." These techniques will go a long way to helping you improve your riding and may be all you ever need. But you're not the kind of person who stops there. You go looking for more. You realise that the drawback to all these techniques is that they require you to think, and that that is ultimately their limitation. You know that when you ride you almost stop thinking, your perception narrows, your focus becomes clearer, your reactions sharper. You are getting into flow.

Experiencing flow, being in the zone, the perfect harmony of mind and body, board and terrain, whatever you call it, "flow" is a state of mind where concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant. Some of the characteristics of flow include deep concentration, highly efficient performance, emotional buoyancy, a heightened sense of mastery, lack of self-consciousness, absorption, lack of awareness of time, and intensity of concentration in which limitations are forgotten. "Wow", you think to yourself. It's not hard to see how all of these things would improve your riding.

"So, how do I find flow?" you ask yourself. Well, it cannot be forced, or produced at will, that's for sure. You can only prepare the ground for it to happen by pushing fear, doubt and worry from your mind, by forgetting the self, and by becoming immersed in what you are doing, and by enjoying riding for its own sake. But when you do find it, a feeling of effortlessness in the midst of intense exertion will overcome you. You'll be fully in the present, action and awareness will be merged, and that special feeling of mastery will be achieved. In a state of flow you will reach a higher level of confidence and competence than you thought possible, and you will achieve those tricks with ease

And finally, here's twist. When you do find yourself in a state of flow you'll be so in the here and now-ness of it all, so cool, calm and collected that you'll stop caring about whether you're improving and you'll just be riding for the love of it.