By: Oli The FreeSkier

We arrived in Zermatt to be greeted by the sight of the sun lit Matterhorn, what a great place for the first Freeski camp! After a day of organising final details, quest coach Andy Longley and myself were joined by Roddy Willis sports NLP and mental performance coaching.

First, Roddy focused his attentions on Andy Longley, he’s currently Britain’s number one moguls skier and is destined for the Olympics after achieving top results in the world champs last year. Roddy started mapping Andy’s thought process off the mountain by asking a series of progressive questions over a couple of hours. Following questions reasoning would be applied to the answers and then a statement or question reversed, perhaps even the use of some complex rhetoric. Following this Roddy returned to the same questions and received very different and more positive answers from Andy, who then remained determined and confident throughout the week – sometimes to my dismay – and shows that if you’re open to it then NLP can have a powerful positive effect on sports performance.

Next up on Roddy’s hit list the Freeski campers, everyone seemed a little intimidated by the prospects of hitting the park for a week with a new peer group on the first official day. Roddy worked his magic on the Campers and also taught Andy and I the basics of how to imbed commands into our natural speech (it’s actually pretty tricky, especially when you are consciously attempting it). Together we seemed to quickly create a relaxed environment, and everyone both opened up to our ideas and started to get stuck in.

This NLP malarkey really works when you want it to, Freeski will definitely be collaborating with Roddy on future camps and Freeski team training.