The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

Let’s now elaborate in more general terms on the art of honesty and accepting responsibility.
    Radical Honesty
    You cannot act effectively upon a lie. If you are not honest with yourself, your attention will be wrapped up and weakened by deception. The facts you might use to deal with challenges won’t be reliable. We lie to ourselves as a way of shirking responsibility for acts or outcomes that make our Egos uncomfortable. We do this in several ways.
    Earlier, we mentioned wishing, hoping, and victim thinking, typical mindsets that keep us from accepting a situation as it is and taking responsibility for dealing with it. Now let’s examine specific ways we shirk responsibility: blaming, denial, excuses, pretending, and justifying.
    By blaming , you transfer responsibility to someone or something, thereby absolving yourself from acting to change the outcome. For example, during a redpoint effort you pull for slack to clip a bolt, but the belayer doesn’t give slack quickly enough. In the process of clipping the rope, you fall. You blame the belayer.
    You can choose to hold your belayer responsible for the outcome, but how much does that help? What was your part in the belayer holding the rope too tight? Did you instruct him on how to belay you? Perhaps you even noticed he was keeping the rope a bit too tight. You wanted the rope tight because you were fearful, and then you hoped it would pull freely when you needed it. Maybe you even saw the problem coming but knew you were pumping out and wanted the excuse of getting tight-roped on the clip. Even if you instructed the belayer to keep the rope loose, and he was totally responsible for holding it too tight, what is the best way to respond? Will you focus your attention on blaming the belayer, or save that power to do something to improve the situation?
    Denial is another way to shirk responsibility and lose power. For example, you go for a redpoint effort and don’t redpoint. Then you say, “I was just practicing.” This is denial behavior. You’re not being honest about your intention. You say you were practicing when, in fact, you were having trouble fully going for it. You’re ready to redpoint, but you’re stalling. Why? You don’t know, and denial isn’t helping you find out. In fact, you have a motivation issue, which is no different than a strength issue or a technique issue. Denial is keeping you from approaching your motivation issue with the same straightforward problem-solving tactics you’d apply to figuring out a sequence of moves. Don’t indulge in denial behavior, which only creates illusions and reduces your ability to see how to improve.
    Excuses behavior also causes us to shirk responsibility. You may say, “My forearms are too weak.” That may be partly true, but what else contributed to your arms getting pumped so quickly? What about your breathing, your balance, how you paced yourself, how much you were overgripping, or how much pro you placed? It is very common to use the excuse of weak forearms as a reason for falling. There are many, many reasons, however, why your forearms might have become so tired in the first place. Inherent weakness is probably not the most significant one. Regardless, that excuse simply diverts attention from applying skills to conserve forearm strength and climb the route.
    You might pretend that climbing well isn’t important to you. If you state, “I don’t care about climbing well,” you’re probably pretending. You pretend in order to dull the disappointment of a substandard performance. You’re coddling your Ego. You aren’t being truthful. Pretending that climbing well isn’t important makes it more difficult to climb well.
    Like pretending, justifying behavior is a way of coddling the Ego: “I couldn’t do it, but no one else could do any better if they were in my shape.” The Ego is running the show here using its typical ploy of comparing your performance to others—as if that had anything to do with learning or personal power. You’ve justified your external performance while conveniently sidestepping the real issues, such as why you are out of shape, how well you climbed given your level of fitness, and what you could learn from the experience as a whole. You focused your attention on justifying your performance instead of learning from it and figuring out how to improve. What a waste of power!
    These behaviors not only drain attention away from the effort, but they direct that