“Sometimes we humans need a gentle shift to continue our journey in the right direction that supports our growth. Ending the un-winnable war with fear and making friends with it instead, is one of those shifts.”
Kristen is a thought leader, master facilitator and fear/anxiety expert who radically challenges existing norms around the subject of this deeply misunderstood emotion. Her education on this subject comes from practical, real- world experience, starting with being a mogul specialist on the US Ski Team. Kristen then became more notoriously recognized as being the best female big mountain extreme skier in the world, a status she kept for 12 years.
Known for big cliff jumps and you-fall-you die descents, she became sponsored by the likes of Red Bull, Ralph Lauren, and Nikon, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame September of 2019. Her mastery of other danger sports including paragliding, ice and rock climbing, kiteboarding, adventure mountain biking, and flying trapeze also gained her the outdoor industry vote as most extreme “fearless” woman athlete in North America, beating all danger-sports stars, not just skiers.
Retired as an athlete since 2003, Kristen spent the next 15 years going to the next level– by intently studying Zen and also learning how to facilitate voice dialog as a way to transmit Zen concepts to practitioners in a quick and digestible way. Her mastery of this dialog led to her facilitate over ten thousand clients now, helping them access and integrate the mindset of optimal sports performance, flow states, whole mind thinking, embracing change, merging in a healthy way with emotions and more.
Her teaching tool that she has developed is called Shift: The Game of 10,000 Wisdoms. Shift is a facilitated dialog which helps groups or individuals access the resources of their own minds to solve problems in a matter of hours that would otherwise take decades of therapy to achieve. Ken Wilbur calls such process, “Arguably the most important and original discovery in the last two centuries…” and “an astonishingly original, profound and effective path for waking up.”
Her revolutionary work has been featured in such media as NPR, The Robb Report, The New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, Tim Ferriss ‘Tribe of Mentors’, Mindvalley, Spartan, The Megyn Kelly Show and many more.
Kristen’s transition to thought leader on Fear came in 2012, the day she acknowledged that many of her client’s issues –such as excessive anxiety, under-performing, insomnia, PTSD, panic attacks, depression, excessive anger, excessive fear, indecisiveness and more– were quickly and permanently resolved once she helped them address their avoidance/resistance of Fear.
After gaining tremendous results with her clients, Kristen developed a following around the world. Although, Kristen admits; “Until a few years ago, I did no marketing. Sure. I had a steady stream of clients and even sold-out events, but I was in recovery from my ski career and tried to work as little as possible. Until one day I realized this industry-changing message about fear addresses and resolves so much of human suffering, it was inhumane of me to not get it out there in a bigger way. So I got my butt off the couch, wrote a book about what I had learned over all these years, and started a movement.”
To do this, she started gathering thoughts and notes together. Then, one night at 1 am, she recognized a big wig from Harper Collins standing across the room at a Halloween party. Seizing the opportunity, she walked right up and told him what she’d been teaching about Fear.
Ten minutes later, combined with a 25-minute phone call the following month, she was offered a book contract to write: The Art of Fear: Why Conquering Fear Won’t Work and What to Do Instead. It is very rare for an unpublished author to score a book contract without writing a book proposal, but this illustrates how needed and timely is her message.
The message being: Fear is not the problem in our lives, it’s our avoidance/resistance of Fear that is the problem. If you become unwilling to feel or even acknowledge it, and put Fear in the basement –a habit that is almost universally supported by society– that emotion then starts to sabotage your life in either obvious or covert ways. This habit has gotten so rampant in fact, that today almost every problem we now have is tied in some way to our avoidance/resistance of Fear.
Conversely, however…
…Taking Fear out of the basement with caring and consideration not only resolves these issues, but also allows us a chance to be in flow with our lives. Where, anything can then become possible.
All this is covered in detail in: The Art of Fear. Meanwhile, Kristen supports the books message and your experience with it through online workshops, talks, interviews, live facilitated events and more. The Art of Fear outlines a clear path to stop the cycle of avoidance/resistance (and repression) to Fear, and how to instead, learn how to feel and experience it in a healthy way. This new, revolutionary approach to Fear is an alternative for those who have had so far, limited success with other methods for dealing with their fear or anxiety issues.
Induction Into The Hall Of Fame
September of 2019 Kristen was inducted into the US Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. This was no small accomplishment, as 73 athletes, influencers and industry professionals were nominated this year alone, all of whom were highly qualified. Only 8 made it in this particular year, including the man who invented Snowboarding (Tom Sims), the most decorated US male ski racer of all times –Bode Miller, and of course, Kristen.
“I feel so honored to make it into the Hall alongside such amazing individuals, and to be enshrined as part of snow sport history and culture at the Museum in Michigan in such a formal and public way. The US Ski and Snowboard Industry is rich with many colorful and influential characters. We all work together to make these sports evolve and be as epic as possible. To be recognized for my role in this –to be recognized as being a piece of that amazing and grand puzzle– is both a humbling and exhilarating experience.” -Kristen Ulmer