Fireside Chat with Karina Hollekim, Co-Founder of Young Happy Minds

I had the opportunity to interview Karina Hollekim last week. Based in Oslo, Karina Hollekim is the Co-Founder of Young Happy Minds, an organization that exists to positively impact the lives of people across the world by increasing their well-being and equipping them with vital skills needed for the future, using practical tools from positive psychology.

For over a decade, Karina was a professional athlete for Red Bull both as a big mountain skier and Base jumper. Karina was the first woman in the world to perform a ski base. Karina’s life was turned upside down when she had a near fatal skydiving accident in 2006 leaving her in a wheelchair with the prediction of never walking again. She endured 20 surgeries and had to re-learn to walk, but she has returned to skiing and is living life to the fullest today.

Her autobiography ‘The Wonderful Feeling of Fear’ is internationally published and was the basis for her TEDx talk. Karina’s coaching skills come from a background in Positive Psychology, Neuro Linguistic Programming, Active Commitment Therapy and working as a performance consultant since 2012 with clients ranging from professional athletes to top business executives. Her ability to push boundaries, stay focused, and re-mobilize through hardship, are core qualities she transmits through her coaching and speaking.

Karina tells the story of how and why she started BASE jumping. She describes the “gallows humor” her and her colleagues used as a survival mechanism for performing under extreme stress, i.e. asking herself “what could possibly go wrong?” Even today, when she’s in a situation when she feels stressed or anxious about the possible outcome, she brings out that BASE-jumper mentality and asks herself that question as almost inevitably the consequences are less severe.

After her accident in 2006, Karina was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers for more than 3 years and spent more than 4 months in the hospital. She talks about how she could have let her fears and doubts consume her, but she realized she couldn’t go on living with fear and letting it control her life. She decided to not worry about the things she couldn’t control. She has adopted this mindset in many aspects of her life as there will always be challenges, but we can only focus on what we can change and let the rest go.

She discusses Positive Psychology (PP), which is what she teaches through her organization Young Happy Minds. PP is a collective term based on a number of empirical studies that focus on cultivating human strengths rather than fixing what is wrong. It is the study of the “good life” and defining what makes life worth living for you. She talks about how the teachings of PP increase our levels of well-being when things are going well, but are even more important through tough times to help make us more resilient. She used techniques from PP as a little girl, then systematically as an athlete and throughout her rehabilitation.

Karina shares one example of PP called “The 3 Good Things” exercise, which is reflecting for 15 minutes a day on good things that happened to you that day. As your psychological state is like a muscle that can be trained, if you recall good things or things that you are grateful for, you will search for those things that make you happen over the course of the day. This is just one example of the techniques Young Happy Minds teaches in their courses, which they have adapted their in person courses to online for COVID-19. You can learn more about these courses on their website.

We took some great Q&A from the audience as well so hope you enjoy this recording from this very inspirational person:

Hope you can join us for our next Fireside Chat, register on the ACTAI Global website!

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ACTAI Global is a community of Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators that bring their collective knowledge, energy and social capital together in ‘active gatherings’. The community supports projects benefiting environmental conservation and economic empowerment via entrepreneurship. Together we have brought to life a marine conservation area with Mission Blue, supported other conservation organizations such as Ocean Elders, Virgin Unite, Sea Shepard Conservation Society, and Lonely Whale, and catalyzed gatherings around the world including Australia Based WestTechFest, the Necker Blockchain Summit, and the Extreme Tech Challenge.