Your relationship with fear is the most important relationship of your life

because it's a relationship that you have with yourself at your core.

Drop me off alone at the top of this massive peak and it doesn't even have a name

because nobody's ever stood up here before and I have my hand on the steep above because it's

so steep. The slope is just so steep that I can't even see beyond 20 feet below me except for the

valley, thousands of feet below. Then I hear on the radio the guide saying, hey, Kristen, it might

avalanche. So have a plan. But I can barely hear him because there's a helicopter hovering

right there and it's making all sorts of racket and they're going to film me skiing this

face from the helicopter and the pressure's on because it's 50 bucks, 50 bucks.

There's a long pause and I'm waiting for it, I'm waiting for it. Then I finally hear the countdown

three, two, one go and I push off. So this is how I made my living for a really long time and these

are some of the things that I did in those mountains. Now, wrap your mind around this though.

So when I get the call from Vision three months ago saying, won't you speak at AFES in

Bali? I hung up the phone, I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

You see, it took me a while to figure this fear thing out. I don't believe you learned from

experience. You learned from reflecting on the experience and I have had a lot of experience to

reflect on. For 12 years I was considered the best woman big mountain extreme skier in the world.

I was voted the most extreme woman athlete in North America beating women in all sports disciplines,

not just skiing. I was called fearless. I felt fearless and I was celebrated for it.

So I've had a lot of experience dealing with a tremendous amount of fear. First 15 years as a career

athlete where I did some things right by fear and I did some things wrong by fear risking my life

on a daily basis sometimes. And then when I retired I spent 15 years voraciously studying a

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