Episode Details

Why Ultra-High Performers Love Fear, and Why You Need To | Kristen Ulmer

A note before we begin: This episode discusses risk, mortality, anxiety, and the deaths of friends in extreme sports. If any of it lands hard, please pause and reach out to someone you trust.

What if the world's most elite performers are not the ones who beat fear, but the ones who become intimate with it?

For twelve consecutive years, Kristen Ulmer was named the best big mountain extreme skier in the world. Powder Magazine called her the protoplasmic mass of skiing. Every interviewer who ever sat across from her called her fearless.

. She has spent the rest of her life trying to explain what they got wrong. Because Kristen Ulmer was never fearless. She was a fear addict, and the world misread that addiction as courage, while four of her closest friends, including ski legend Shane McConkey, paid for the same addiction with their lives.

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After fourteen years of study with a Zen master, Kristen has spent the last twenty years arguing one contrarian idea against the entire personal-development industry: fear is not the enemy. The way you have been taught to handle it is. In her new book, The Art of Fear, she lays out four levels of relating to fear, resistance, acceptance, feeling, and intimacy, and makes the case that almost every coach, therapist, and self-help expert on the planet is teaching levels one and two while calling it level four.

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And here is the line in this episode that may rewire how you think about your own life: only the best of the best of the best athletes in the world develop intimacy with fear. The second-best never do. It's not the talent gap, it's not the training gap, it's not the genetics gap. It is the relationship gap. And the same is true in business, in leadership, and in love.

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Then Dov does something rare. He stops Kristen mid-thesis and asks the question she admits nobody has ever asked her before...

. Not the clean version, Kristen. What is the most frustrating part of this work, the thing you would only tell a friend over a glass of wine? What she says next is the most honest moment in the episode.

Inside this conversation:

• The sentence that may rewire your entire life: fear has never held anyone back from doing anything; it is your unwillingness to feel fear that holds you back

• The four levels of relating to fear, and why only level four (intimacy) produces both elite performance and the ability to sleep at night

• The one trait the best of the best share that the almost-best never develop, and what it costs the rest of us when we mistake one for the other

• The moment Dov asks Kristen what she was actually avoiding her entire ski career, and the answer that reframes the whole episode

If you came here for comfort, you are on the wrong podcast. If something in you has been quietly wondering whether you traded aliveness for stability, and you can no longer remember how to feel anything in full color, this is the conversation you have been outrunning. Press play.

Connect with Kristen Ulmer:

• Website: https://kristenulmer.com (free 20-question fear and anxiety assessment on the homepage)