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I think the key to trying to overcome or manage your fears
is confidence, trying to just push that edge of that comfort
zone out a little bit.
And all of a sudden you find something
that you love doing that you were terrified of before.
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I'm a professor of orthopedic surgery
at University of Virginia.
I do motion analysis and modeling of human movements.
We're looking at different disabilities
and trying to come up with ways we can help those individuals.
I spend my time trying to figure out how people work.
For the last 15 years, I've been helping people out
at Wintergreen Adaptive Sports.
Anybody that has any kind of disability, our goal
is to get them out.
Get them on skis.
They spend all day in a chair being told what they can't do.
So our main goal is showing them what they can do.
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There's a really unique situation
here where I'm able to go to a mountain resort that's
close enough, take the biomechanics
and the understanding of human movement,
and apply that to my lessons.
That lets me tune the lesson to their abilities.
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My graduate students have an interest in how people move
and helping people out.
So one of the things I do is get them involved with the program.
They're very hands on here in the lab with patients,
dealing with them, interacting with them.
But it's gratifying to see them out on the mountain
and having some of those aha moments of, wow,
this isn't just something that happens in the lab
or in academics.
This is something that has real life applications
and changes people's lives.
Watching these people do things they never
thought they would do, the feelings you get out of that
are just--
you can't explain them.
My whole idea is to get you over that fear of trying something.
Show you the confidence to say, maybe something else
is possible.
From the top of the mountain, you can see anything.
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