Amber’s Links:
Episode Intro:
Dear listeners of the Female Guides Requested Podcast, happy Wednesday. This is your host Ting Ting from Las Vegas. Today our guest is Amber Smith.
Amber is a femme-queer AMGA Certified Rock Guide with over a decade of experience. Most summers you’ll find her at the Yosemite Mountaineering School, climbing grandiose granite walls with her guests. She is passionate about playful, trauma-aware, and embodiment-focused instruction, and she views climbing as an opportunity for powerful personal transformation. If you go climbing with her, she will encourage you to craft a positive affirmation to hone your power.
Before landing in Yosemite, she guided throughout the western United States. She has led glacier mountaineering and alpine rock objectives in Washington’s North Cascades, ski descents in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, sandstone crack climbs in Utah’s deserts, and girls’ climate science research expeditions on Alaska’s glaciers. In 2016, Amber earned a degree in Geography and wrote her undergraduate thesis on what she called “Feminist Outdoor Leadership: A Guide to Facilitation Strategies for Inclusion and Participant Empowerment in Outdoor Adventure.”
I enjoyed my conversations with Amber. Her thoughtfulness was evident when listening to her reflections on her life journeys. She is also inquisitive and not shy about experimenting with new ideas. She is keen on exploring her inner voices to facilitate her own growth and be tuned to others’ needs. Now please enjoy this episode with Amber.
What We Talked About
- Amber’s current, past, and future plans
- Amber’s Affirmation on guiding – be safe, have fun, try your best
- Doubts and questions about guiding as a profession
- Engrossed in the outdoor leadership program in college
- Feminist outdoor leadership
- From Oregon to Washington, stepping into commercial guiding and keep her foot in outdoor education
- Transitioning to Yosemite and guiding full time
- Loved the Yosemite climbing community
- Yosemite climbing and work cultures
- Hosted a webinar about working in Yosemite
- Thinking entrepreneurial – mental health and mindset fields
- Learn to Lead with mindfulness clinics
- Experiments / Curiosities on grief and climbing and guiding
- Affirmation in life – exercise your weakness, leverage your strengths, don’t worry about the looks
Quote:
- Keep my priorities clear. And its number one, keep yourself and your guests safe. If that’s all I do at the end of the day, nobody had a great time, but at least we were safe, then that was a successful day.
- I’d say that’s the whole journey of this industry for me is building the confidence in my voice, trusting myself and figuring out how to be myself in these spaces while also still sort of meeting some of the expectations of what your employers and your clients may want from you.
- I’m definitely not [the best climbers in the world]. But what I am good at is supporting people in their climbing goals. And that’s what the job is actually about..
- I think that’s really rad that I’m an ebike commuter to my rock guiding job.
- I think we get a lot of burnout when we’re not being intellectually stimulated.
- I’m basically not like ingraining negative association with the experience. I’m keeping my association with the process positive. and by having these positive associations, then I want to keep doing it
- One of the most important attributes of a guide is that you need to be intuitive with your guests. It’s very customer service type job. And we need to be intuitively listening to what they need all day.
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EP 52 – Amber Smith – AffirMATIONs – Female Guides Requested Podcast
