I got the opportunity to go on vacation over Christmas. My family has always picked the beach over the mountains because we’re generally lazy people who don’t want to do any strenuous activity on vacation – sitting on the beach with a drink under an umbrella almost always sounds like more fun to me than putting on 18 layers of clothes and going skiing. This Christmas, however, we headed to the mountains for three days of skiing. I have been skiing once before, when I was in the 8th grade with my church youth group. Either my memory of that trip 20 years ago (O.K. 23 years ago) is incorrect, or maybe I have a ridiculously large ego. Either way, in planning the trip, I became convinced that I did not need a ski lesson.The first day, I was the only one who had planned on skiing. My wife and kids had decided to take it easy for a day because they didn’t think they would like skiing anyway. Can you tell whose idea this trip was? When I woke up that first morning the temperature was 17 BELOW ZERO with a wind chill of 40 below. Nonetheless, I put on most of the clothes that I had packed for the week and headed to the ski lift. I quickly realized that I had forgotten almost everything that I had learned 23 years ago after it took me 30 minutes just to put on my boots and skis. This process took so long because I actually asked three different people how you could tell the difference between the left and right ski (there is no difference, they are interchangeable).

The next challenge would be the chair lift, which surprisingly I managed to get on without incident. Getting off the lift, however, would prove to be much more difficult. I fell off the chair before I ever reached the sign that said, “Depart here.” I’m not sure the lift attendant even knew what happened because the next chair hit me square in the back of the head. Suddenly, those $10 a day for helmet rental didn’t seem like such a waste of money. I called out desperately for help and finally he stopped the lift. After helping me to my feet three or four times, I managed to ski away about 15 feet and attempt to recapture my composure and wait for all of the people who were laughing at me to ski away. Then I took a look down the slope I had chosen and I almost had a heart attack. I re-checked my trail map a few hundred times before finally realizing that this was in fact the bunny slope named “Easy Way Down.” I probably fell at least 10 times in the first hundred feet, and it took me well over an hour to go down the simplest slope on the mountain; after which, I promptly headed back to the room and acted to my family as if I was an expert skier.

My guess is that most people involved in the housing industry know exactly how I felt when I reached the top of that mountain. Managers like I face situations every day that we just aren’t familiar with. We find ourselves unsure about how to help salespeople who we thought were good but now have no sales and no paycheck. We don’t exactly know what to say when one of our largest customers says he just doesn’t have any money to pay his bill. We don’t know what to say to the loyal employee who we have to let go to protect our bottom line. These and a hundred other situations come about every day with our current economy.

Much like my skiing adventure, the instructors are at the bottom of the hill, and somehow, someway, we have to navigate our companies through the ridiculously difficult hillside that lies in front of us. Unfortunately, there are no manuals to follow and there is no historical basis for how to handle the steep mountain staring us in the face. We just have to head down the hill, try our hardest to stay on our feet, pick ourselves up when we fall down and eventually we’ll all get through this tough period. If I learned anything from that first day on the slopes (besides the fact that skis are interchangeable) it’s that everybody falls down occasionally and everybody eventually makes it down the hill one way or another. Sure, we might stumble a little, but in time, we’ll all find ourselves back at the condo acting like a genius.