When you stand at the top of a snowy mountain, your board angled downhill and your heart pounding in your chest, you face more than just the slope ahead. You face yourself—your fears, your doubts, and your limits. Snowboarding, often seen as a thrilling winter pastime or extreme sport, is much more than carving through powder and catching air. Brent Yee Suen emphasizes that for those willing to look deeper, snowboarding offers profound lessons about fear, failure, and the value of falling forward.
Confronting Fear on the Slopes
Fear is one of the first and most persistent emotions new snowboarders encounter. It arrives quickly—often before your first fall—and remains as a companion throughout the learning journey. The fear of losing control, the fear of injury, or simply the fear of looking foolish can be paralyzing.
Snowboarding teaches that fear is not the enemy—it’s a signal. It tells you that you’re pushing beyond your comfort zone, stepping into territory where growth can happen. Rather than avoiding fear, snowboarders learn to work with it. They acknowledge its presence, listen to what it’s telling them, and then choose to move anyway.
This practice has clear parallels in everyday life. Whether you’re facing a tough career decision, public speaking, or a personal challenge, fear often arises at the edge of transformation. Snowboarding teaches us to lean into that edge, knowing that growth lies just beyond it.
The Inevitability—and Value—of Failure
Falling is inevitable in snowboarding. Even the best riders still hit the ground from time to time. Beginners fall constantly—awkwardly, spectacularly, and often painfully. It’s a humbling experience. But it’s also instructive.
Every fall on the slope is an opportunity. Each wipeout reveals something about your posture, your timing, your balance. Learning how to fail safely—how to protect your head, how to roll with the momentum, how to get up again—is as critical as learning how to ride. In fact, the very act of falling is baked into the learning process. You cannot become a better snowboarder without falling.
This truth translates powerfully off the mountain. In business, relationships, creative pursuits, and personal growth, failure is an unavoidable part of the journey. But like in snowboarding, each failure carries lessons—about your strategy, your mindset, your preparation. Snowboarding teaches that failure is not an indictment of your worth or potential. It’s a necessary and natural step toward mastery.
Falling Forward: Progress Through Persistence
There’s a phrase often used in personal development circles: “fail forward.” Snowboarding embodies this idea in the most literal sense. Each fall on the mountain leaves you a little more experienced, a little more confident, a little more equipped for the next attempt. You don’t retreat back to the ski lodge in defeat. You get up, reposition your board, and try again.
This “falling forward” mindset fosters resilience. It replaces the fear of failure with a curiosity about it. What went wrong? What can I try differently next time? How can I adjust?
Over time, this resilience builds into something more powerful: trust. Trust in yourself. Trust in your body’s ability to adapt. Trust that falling doesn’t mean the end of progress—it is the progress. You learn to celebrate the small wins, like making it down a section of the slope you used to avoid or finally linking your turns without catching an edge.
Learning to Let Go
Another profound lesson snowboarding teaches is the importance of letting go. Control is important, but over-controlling your board or your body often leads to stiffness and falls. Snowboarding requires flow—relaxing into the ride, trusting your instincts, and moving with the mountain instead of against it.
This act of surrender isn’t passive—it’s intentional. You let go of the need to be perfect. You let go of rigid expectations. You tune in to the present moment and respond with agility and awareness.
In life, this same practice of letting go can help us deal with uncertainty and change. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. Snowboarding teaches us to loosen our grip and ride with the terrain of life, not in defiance of it.
Building Confidence One Ride at a Time
Perhaps the most enduring gift snowboarding gives is confidence—not a superficial bravado, but a deep, earned confidence that comes from facing challenges head-on and persisting. You begin your snowboarding journey unsure, tentative, and frequently on the ground. But with time, each small victory adds up. You master your turns. You tackle steeper terrain. You fall less often, and when you do, you recover faster.
This confidence seeps into other areas of life. It reminds you that you can do hard things. That your first attempts don’t need to be perfect. That perseverance pays off.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll start to seek out other mountains—both literal and metaphorical—because you’ve learned that falling isn’t failure. It’s part of the ride.
More Than a Sport
Snowboarding is exhilarating, no doubt. But it’s also profoundly educational. It teaches you to face fear, embrace failure, and fall forward with intention. It reminds you that growth comes not from avoiding risk, but from engaging with it thoughtfully and persistently. It shows you that every stumble is a stepping stone—and that the only true failure is never trying at all.
So the next time you strap into a snowboard—or face any challenge that scares you—remember: it’s okay to fall. Just make sure you fall forward.