Undoing bad habits or "the wrong way" is twice as hard as learning to do it the correct way from the start.
Yep. One summer, maybe when I was about 12, at band camp... oh wait that's another memory.
But maybe I was 12 or 13 I went waterskiing one summer, learned how to do it maybe did five or six trips with the folks down to Lake Anna. I spent the next
four winters trying to stop leaning back when snow skiing. Ever since then, I haven't had much of an urge to try to waterski again, though jet skis sound pretty fun!
You know, reading Tucker's comments, a thought also occurred- when you're in real technical terrain (tight trees, chutes, a good mogul field, etc) you have to focus on the terrain much more and therefore concentrate on your technique much less. In other words, you have to have an inherent trust in your skiing ability and be constantly, subconsciously adjusting as the terrain changes. Early season mogul fields out west are a great place where this happens, because you just never know what you're going to find around the next bump (rock, stump, powder, bare patch, snow, ice, repeat), so if you're thinking "flex knee here, put pole there" you're going to get chewed up and out and need a new set of skis by the time you get to the bottom. I found it easier to make a set of 10 or 12 turns and if they didn't feel right, pull up, work through the line in your memory and feel what you were doing wrong, as opposed to trying to overcompensate on the fly. Usually the next set of turns set up better, then you go through another mental model and adjust, etc.
As you stay in terrain like that, work up and improve within it, I find at least that your confidence increases and you take harder lines almost for the fun of it. Some of the trees I was skiing through at Cooper in March, while doing the snowcat skiing, were so tight I wouldn't have dreamed of ever doing anything like it, but there I was on these powder skis and I felt invincible. Granted, I wasn't invincible, which was driven home when on the last run the best skier in our group blew out his achilles tendon when he blasted through a creek bed he didn't see coming. Again, a good reminder to always have some awareness of the terrain. Even a seeming-wide-open powder field can hold surprises for which you should at least be dimly scouting for while enjoying the epic run of your life.