The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

Responsibility are detachment from reality and passive thinking. Wishing behavior (“I wish these holds were bigger,” “I wish I was taller”) embodies both. We dream up an alternative reality of bigger holds and longer arms, and channel our attention into that fantasy. The attention going into the fantasy is unavailable for doing anything active, such as figuring out how best to use the holds that exist. Hoping is as passive as wishing, with the difference being that instead of conjuring our own fantasy world, we channel attention into waiting for a favorable world to be created for us. When we say, “I hope I make it up this climb,” we embark on the effort passively. We delude ourselves that some external power, rather than the pure quality of our effort, will determine the outcome. We wait for lucky breaks instead of working skillfully toward our goal.
    The most passive of all delusions is victim thinking. We pretend that so much misfortune has befallen us that we can no longer be held responsible for taking charge of our lives and improving our situations. The victim mentality can be so obvious that it appears comical to an outside observer. We can all probably think of examples of our own or friends’ “poor me” behavior. This mentality also can be subtle. For example, some trad climbers I know harbor murky excuses that relate to why they haven’t excelled at sport climbing. They resist pushing themselves to the point of falling. When questioned, they may finally admit, in so many words: “I’m a trad climber who was taught that ‘the leader must not fall,’ so there’s no way I can be expected to get comfortable taking falls.” In fact, this is a ploy of the Ego claiming to be a victim, when in fact, it is merely clinging to a comfortable but limiting old habit. Certainly there are situations, such as very runout trad routes, where a fall will cause injury. I’m not referring to routes like this. Making a blanket statement, however, that a leader must not fall limits us and causes us to stay stuck in an old habit.
    The trad climber may further obscure his sport-climbing and falling issues with moral overtones. In fact, the whole concept of accepting responsibility is often morally charged. The warrior, however, does not think of accepting responsibility as a moral issue. The warrior’s concerns are pragmatic, and “right” and “wrong” are inappropriate concepts for the job. By not accepting the maximum amount of responsibility we reduce our ability to respond and therefore our power. Learning how to respond to tough challenges in a way that increases power is one of a warrior’s most important tasks.
    Describing Objectively
    An important component of the Accepting Responsibility process is gathering objective information. Objectivity, however, can be surprisingly elusive. Our expectations cause us to lose our objectivity.
    The ultimate model of objective inquiry is scientific research. The scientist, a trained observer, carefully examines factual data, formulates ideas, and conducts experiments to rigorously test those ideas. What could be more objective? Even in the “hardest” sciences, however, expectations and associations seem to influence the results. In the early research of quantum physics, for example, scientists attempted to determine whether light was essentially made up of particles or of waves. Some scientists designed experiments to detect wave-like characteristics, such as interference, while other experiments were designed with particle behavior in mind. Each kind of experiment found what it set out to find. Light eventually proved to be a more mysterious entity that possessed both wave and particle characteristics, but this outcome at first hadn’t been considered possible. Even in science, then, the expectations associated with an inquiry can undermine pure objectivity.
    In our own inquiries, objectivity is even more slippery. We often unconsciously lie to ourselves. In his book The Gift of Fear , Gavin de Becker relates a relevant story about expectation and self-deceit. A man was home alone and heard a noise downstairs. He went to check it out, telling himself, as many of us might, that he was “making sure everything was okay.”
    “Making sure everything was okay,” however, was not an objective description. In fact, it distorted the task. The man heard a noise and his intuition linked that noise to danger. Being honest with himself about that danger,