About Kristen
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 specialist who radically challenges existing norms around the subject of this deeply misunderstood emotion. Starting out as a mogul specialist on the US Ski team, Kristen more notoriously became recognized as being the best female big mountain extreme skier in the world, a status she kept for 12 years. Known for enormous cliff jumps and you-fall-you die descents, she became sponsored by the likes of Red Bull, Ralph Lauren, and Nikon. 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 woman athlete in North America, beating all danger-sports stars, not just skiers.
Retired as an athlete since 2003, she then spent the next 15 years going to the next level — studying intently with a Zen Master, which led to facilitating thousands of clients, addressing numerous subjects such as the mindset of optimal sports performance, flow states, whole mind thinking, how to embrace change, emotional intelligence and more. She developed a highly effective teaching tool called Shift: The Game of 10,000 Wisdoms. This 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. Her revolutionary work has been featured in such media as NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, Outside Magazine, Sports Illustrated and many more.
Kristen’s transition to thought leader on Fear came in 2012, the day she realized that most of her client’s problems –such as underperforming, insomnia, PTSD, panic attacks, excessive anxiety, depression, excessive anger, excessive fear, indecisiveness and more, were quickly and permanently resolved once she helped them address their avoidance of fear. Here are a few client testimonials capturing the power of this work:
"I’ve gotten more out of (3) phone consults than a year of therapy."
"This ain’t no band aid, this is the real deal."
"I am living with color, light and dark, and texture I never noticed until I did this work."
"Wow. Just wow. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I’d emerge from this past weekend as I have. Wow. I feel like I have received a special present from you.
I could not have made it through such an intense transitional year without your teachings. I do not believe the words thank you are powerful enough."
"I am on this amazing turbo charged growth path – I am blooming faster and faster, at a wonderfully rapidly unfolding pace- there are truly no words to describe this."
"Oh my! It was and continues to be all you promised, Kristen, and more. And the tribe we formed is by far one of the most powerful groups I have ever encountered."
"This is the first time that I feel genuinely excited and eager about what the future has in store for me. And I have you to thank for that."
"Thanks again for offering me a life altering experience. A day hasn’t gone by since I was in Utah that I don’t think about the camp."
"Thank you hughly for all that you gave to us and everybody in that clinic. It was just absolutely amazing. It’s not only a once in a lifetime experience but just from a teaching perspective some of the things you did were just really astonishing."
"My fear disappeared about three months ago. I have been public speaking without panic attacks and have experienced ease and spontaneous interaction with people I would have been intimidated by in the past. Also no constant free-floating anxiety in the background all the time. A great relief after 40 years of struggle. So, thank you."
With results like these, she developed quite a following around the world. Although, Kristen admits; “Until a few years ago, I was lazy. I did no marketing. Sure. I had a steady stream of clients and sold-out events, but tried to work as little as possible. Until one day I realized this industry changing message about fear will address so much of human suffering, it was rude of me to not get it out there in a bigger way. So I got my butt off the couch, set out to write a book about what I had learned and start a movement.”
To do all 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 30-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 her message is.
The message being: Fear is not the problem in our lives, it’s our avoidance 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 will then start to sabotage your life in devastating ways that are either obvious, or covert. This habit has gotten so rampant, in fact, that today almost every problem we have is now tied in some way to our avoidance of fear.
Taking fear out of the basement with caring and consideration, however, not only resolves these problems, but allows us a chance to access whole mind thinking, where anything can become possible.
All this is covered in detail in: The Art of Fear. Meanwhile, Kristen is supporting 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 repression and learn how to instead feel and experience fear in a healthy way. This new, revolutionary approach to fear is an alternative for those who have, so far, had limited success with other methods for dealing with their fear or anxiety based problems.
