The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

mindset becomes one of action. You disengage the conscious mind. You allow the free blending of information you’ve gained in the preparation phase with new information you gain as you climb. Let intuition guide your exploration of the unknown, because your conscious mind cannot.

    Trusting the process on an overhang at the Shawangunks, New York. Photo: Jeff Achey
    Remember, your highest goal is learning, and only in action does true, experiential learning occur. This is what you climb for. In order to transcend a risk, you need to learn something, and you’ll only be able to learn by staying open and receptive. In your preparation for the risk, you’ve meticulously set specific parameters to avoid serious injury and safeguard your life. You’ve decided that the risk is appropriate and that you want to take it. Your art now is to participate in the risk in the most empowering way possible. You’ve committed. Disengage the conscious mind and trust in the process. Remind yourself of this with the action word for the Listening process: Trust .

Chapter 7
    The Journey
    The preparation phase of the Rock Warrior’s Way focuses on understanding how our conscious minds work. We play little tricks on ourselves that drain power and inhibit our performance. Fears, real and imagined, can negatively influence our behavior under stress. Recognizing fear and the various kinds of fear-based motivation allows us to develop a more love-based foundation for action. Love-based motivation moves us from an avoidance orientation toward a learning and seeking orientation, which focuses our attention more sharply on the task at hand. The whole process of meeting risks and challenges becomes not only more efficient, but more enjoyable and rewarding. This increases our motivation and willingness to put ourselves in challenging situations. Thus, the Rock Warrior’s Way places us in a positive feedback loop, a path that continuously increases the personal power we have available when entering into risks and challenges.
    In the transition phase we focused on creating a 100-percent commitment to action. The preparation phase helped us to do this, since through it we have a much better idea of exactly what the risk is. We’ve examined the risk scrupulously, made plans that limit the danger, and resolved questions about our intent in risking. We also developed specific psychological strategies for fully committing to the process.
    Now, in the action phase, we keep ourselves mentally in the action, in the most empowering frame of mind possible, despite our natural tendency to seek escape. The Listening process concentrated on opening up the subconscious and intuitive information systems and limiting the role of the conscious mind. The final process, the Journey, focuses on keeping attention in the moment to find comfort and meaning in the risk.
    When we are in the chaos of a risk, our attention has a tendency to seek an escape. It wants to leap ahead to a place of comfort, such as the top of the climb, the next protection, or the next rest. We need to learn to keep our attention focused in the present chaos, where it can work for us.
    The Rat Race
    Early in our lives we are taught to be competitive and value achievement and results. We are encouraged to “make something of ourselves” or to “get ahead.” The emphasis is on a future destination, for which we will sacrifice the satisfaction of the present. Ironically, once we arrive at a destination—landing that sought-after job, climbing that 5.12 grade—we find it’s not a final destination at all. We aren’t satisfied to stay there. We may even look back nostalgically to the passion we possessed when we considered that destination a magical promised land, before we realized it was simply the end of a journey. Inevitably we begin a new journey, and a new one after that. In fact, our entire lives are spent journeying.
    The warrior is the ultimate realist. He knows that life is a journey, and rather than rushing blindly toward the next destination, he appreciates the journey itself and consciously lives within it.
    The destination mentality is the way of life in normal society, and we tend to adopt it by default in situations of acute stress and discomfort. When we come to an uncomfortable climbing situation, a strenuous offwidth crack climb for example, we immediately look up to determine where the effort will end. Seeing only ten feet until we can rest, we may feel energized,