I Earned this Beanie

Six years ago today I earned this hat.

The PCMR stands for Park City Mountain Resort and I was on day 3 of my training as an apprentice snowboard instructor.

I say "I earned' the beanie because I paid a price physically, emotionally and my ego took a huge hit.

You see, when I decided I wanted to teach snowboarding to beginners and "never-evers", I thought they'd give me a few pointers on how to teach people and I'd be off to the races.

Instead, what I found was they were intent on ensuring that I had good form myself, before they taught me even one thing about teaching others.

When I showed up on Monday, I was all smiles and enthusiasm. By Wednesday, exactly six years ago today, I was ready to quit. In fact, I'd made the long drive to the resort that morning with that exact intent in mind.

Why was it so hard? Part of it was that I was exactly twice the age of the next oldest trainee. I was 48 and he was 24. Everybody else trailed off in age down to 18. Also, everybody else that was learning to teach, went pretty much from learning to walk, to learning to ride a snowboard. They'd all been riding almost all of their relatively short lives. I, on the other hand, didn't take up the sport until the winter I turned 40. I'd taken 3 lessons at that time, but most of what I knew I'd taught myself, and most of that was bad habits.

In this class where I was the old man, I struggled just to keep up. By the time I'd caught up to my coach and all of my class, wherever they'd stopped on the hill, they were rested and ready to go again. Me? I never got a rest the first two days which led to more crashes than I was used to, so by Wednesday morning, I was dehydrated, every muscle I'd ever heard of was sore, I had bruises and scrapes. I was done.

The hard part was quitting. That's always the hard part for me. I really wanted this job. I wanted it because I'm a coach. I was born a coach, and that's what I do best, and this job would be the epitome of coaching with an unlimited supply of people seeking a coach.

On that Wednesday morning, Jamie, the instructor for our class seemed to know I was on my last bruised and sore leg. It seemed like she was avoiding me. Since there wasn't an opportune moment to raise my hand and say, "I'm out". I found myself tagging along the class, bringing up the rear, dragging my board in the snow as we headed to the lift for our first lap of the day.

Jamie astutely sent the rest of the team on two quad lift chairs ahead of us and she rode alone with me. Before I could get the words out, she cut me off. I remember it this way, "I hope you won't quit. I know this is hard, really hard. But you have something that's rare. Something I don't see in the rest of the class. Something I hardly ever see even among our tenured and certified instructors. You have the ability to teach, and it seems like you want to." she said.

By this time I was convinced Jamie could read my mind.

I leveled with her, that I had shown up that morning only so that I could quit in person. But her vote of confidence, and her ability to see in me what was really, truly in me, made me stick it out.

I didn't quit. There were other times before that week was out that Jamie pushed me beyond what I dreamed I could do, but it just made me better. It made me a really strong instructor. Jamie's a coach too.

I got to the end of the week, got my bright red uniform, my badges and two hats, the beanie in the picture is one of them.

Great managers do what Jamie did. Great managers are coaches first, and administrators time permitting. Great managers push their team to be more than they thought they could be.

Great managers make you earn your beanie.

Ryan Houmand has consulted, coached, trained and been a speaker to senior leaders and managers all over the world. He has 25 years of management experience in corporate and retail environments. He's the author of "A Passion for Monday" and has appeared on FOX, NBC and CBS discussing "The 3 Mistakes That Make People Hate Monday".