The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

process.
    7. The Journey . Once in the chaos of risk, you focus on the journey, not the destination. When you’re stressed, you are tempted to rush through the stress. Yet, if you have prepared well, this stressful situation is exactly why you came here in the first place. It holds the rhyme and reason for your climbing. When you’re stressed, you are in prime territory for learning. A journey mentality helps you align your attention forward into the climbing process instead of letting attention wander to the destination, or to self-limiting thoughts that won’t help you solve the problem and learn.

Chapter 1
    Becoming Conscious
    The first Rock Warrior process, Becoming Conscious, lays the mental groundwork upon which the other processes will build. Becoming Conscious revolves around developing your powers of self-observation and examining self-limiting aspects in your current ways of thinking and acting. If you are unaware of how you think and where your motivation comes from, you have very little power to change. Without change, there is no improvement.
    Your goal is to replace lazy, habitual, self-limiting ways of thinking with a disciplined mental outlook that will maximize performance. In order to make this replacement, you must gain a conscious awareness of the way you are now. In Becoming Conscious, the main task is simply to become aware that self-limiting thought processes exist and explore the how and why of them. You will identify different ways in which you squander attention and personal power, including power sinks, which funnel attention into ego and self-image, and power leaks, which fritter away attention through negative self-talk or wishing behavior.
    As climbers, we think of ourselves as adventurous people, yet we often react to challenges in unadventurous ways. After we’ve been climbing for a while, we tend to lose the open-mindedness and quick learning that characterized our early climbing experiences. We fall into patterns and habits that limit our learning. When faced with a challenge, we become distracted from the immediate situation and fall into some sort of ego game or useless inner dialogue. We tend to be highly goal-oriented, and arriving at a performance plateau saps our motivation. Without even noticing, we become involved in an unconscious, repetitive, habitual spiral, and our power declines.
    The ordinary person’s mindset is one of vast unconsciousness. He is imprisoned by habit and doesn’t even know it. An average person has approximately 60,000 thoughts each day, and most of these thoughts are the same ones he had the day before. The warrior’s task is to free the conscious mind of this habitual thought, to direct attention more deliberately, and to respond spontaneously and non-habitually to challenging situations. Full attention and spontaneity are the keys to power, and the first step in improving those qualities is shedding light on our dim unconscious realms.
    An important component of our unconsciousness is our habitual system of beliefs and motivation. Our early learning—our socialization into our culture—has determined much of the mental structure that subdues our potential.
    You can feel pretty worthless at times because reward and punishment have molded you. When you did something that was considered good by your caregivers, you were rewarded, and when you did something that was considered bad, you were punished. Your caregivers associated your worth with your performance—your behavior. Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego, which took over the job of rewarding and punishing. Your caregivers’ expectations were supplemented or replaced by the expectations of society at large, the expectations of a peer group, or the expectations established by a set of beliefs you adopted with little critical thought. Regardless of the source of the Ego’s expectations, the result is the same: we are slaves to externally derived influences, rather than being the masters of our internal, mental environments.
    We generally have adopted established beliefs rather than formulating our own. Society, of course, encourages such conformist behavior. We may be competitive or compassionate, radical or politically correct, sport climbers or trad climbers. These orientations too often derive from a deep unconscious attempt to align ourselves with people we admire or to get others to like or admire us. Though we may hold these beliefs