Mentorship Lab

About This Event

The Mentorship Lab is a three-session on-snow series spread across the season. It builds the skills that make someone an effective mentor: earning trust, reading what another person needs, coaching through questions, giving honest feedback, and stepping back so others can lead. Each session starts with a short indoor discussion, moves to hands-on mentorship exercises on snow, and closes with a group debrief.

The Lab is dual-discipline. Skiers and snowboarders practice together in pairs and small mixed groups, and the skiing and riding become the setting for practicing mentorship. Between sessions, you'll use what you learned with a mentee at your home resort and bring that experience back to the next session. The goal isn't better advice-giving. It's developing mentors who help people become more capable and independent, and who eventually develop mentors of their own.

The Progression

• Session 1, Connection and Understanding: Trust before advice. Listening to understand, learning someone's goals, and recognizing what each person needs, including when to challenge and when to support.

• Session 2, Coaching and Honest Conversations: Questions before answers. Coaching without fixing, prioritizing one piece of feedback, delivering difficult observations, and helping people learn from failure.

• Session 3, Creating Independence: Giving away responsibility, knowing when to step back, and helping your mentee begin mentoring others.

What You Will Gain

By the end of the Mentorship Lab, you will be able to:

• Build trust and credibility with a mentee before trying to influence them

• Listen to understand and identify a person's goals, motivations, strengths and challenges

• Adapt your approach to what each individual needs rather than mentoring everyone the same way

• Use coaching questions to help others find their own solutions

• Deliver specific, behavior-based feedback, including difficult feedback, while maintaining trust

• Turn setbacks and failure into learning opportunities

• Delegate meaningful responsibility and create opportunities for others to lead and mentor

National Standards This Event Addresses

This event supports preparation for the PSIA-AASI National Certification Standards in the following skill areas. Not every level listed below will apply to every participant. Focus on the levels most relevant to your current certification goals.

Professionalism & Self-Management

• Level 1: Maintains a professional environment by demonstrating self-awareness and self-management.

• Level 2: Contributes to a professional environment by managing behaviors and emotions in response to others.

• Level 3: Promotes a professional environment by adapting behaviors to positively affect others.

People Skills

• Level 1: Engages in meaningful verbal and non-verbal communication with the group as a whole / Identifies likely motivations and emotions of individuals and understands group dynamics.

• Level 2: Engages in and adapts verbal and non-verbal, two-way communication with individuals and subsets of the group / Adapts to the motivations and emotions of individuals.

• Level 3: Leads verbal and non-verbal, two-way communication with individuals and subsets of the group / Anticipates and responds to the motivations and emotions of individuals.

Teaching Skills

• Level 1: Plans learning outcomes and organizes progressive learning experiences relevant to beginner/novice students / Implements and adjusts a learning plan.

• Level 2: Plans learning outcomes and organizes progressive learning experiences relevant to intermediate students / Implements and adjusts a learning plan for a range of individuals.

• Level 3: Plans learning outcomes and organizes progressive learning experiences relevant to advanced students / Implements and adjusts a complex learning plan for individuals.

Who Should Attend

Supervisors, team leads, trainers, experienced instructors, emerging leaders, and anyone who regularly supports the development of others in their snowsports school. You don't need to share a discipline with your partners. Alpine and Snowboard participants train together.

Prerequisites:

• Current PSIA-AASI membership

• Comfortable skiing or riding intermediate terrain

• Registration for all three sessions. The Lab is a single progression, and attending all three is required.

Session Details

• Each session includes a 30-45 minute indoor discussion, about 4 hours of on-snow mentorship exercises, and a 30-45 minute debrief and application discussion

• Participants receive a Mentorship Field Book to reflect after each session and track their practice between sessions

• 18 CEUs for the full series

What to Bring

• Appropriate equipment for the day's terrain

• Helmets are mandatory

Questions?

Contact PSIA-AASI Western Region Member Services: memberservices@thesnowpros.org | (303) 987-9390