The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

to remind you of your specific intention.
    By setting a specific intention you’ll sharpen your focus and reduce the chance of falling into your habitual way of climbing. Setting an intention helps you stay on task for what you want to practice.
    2. Visualization
    Have you ever had a route that you really wanted to do and couldn’t get out of your mind? When you went to sleep at night you saw yourself going through the moves? That’s visualization. Visualization is a long-standing staple of mental training, used by athletes from Olympians to tennis amateurs. Essentially, it’s nothing more than closing your eyes and mentally going through the activity you want to do, in the way you want to do it. Even if you don’t consciously “visualize,” you still have images in your brain that will strongly influence your performance. Most of these will be unconscious. They may include images of you becoming helplessly pumped or falling off the crux move. These images tend to bring about the reality. Likewise, images of you climbing effortlessly, in perfect balance, and of powering smoothly through crux moves, can create that reality. Your body responds to commands from the mind. By deliberately practicing visualization you choreograph the performance you want and ingrain it, not only in your mental realm but also in your physical body. In your mind’s eye, see yourself going through the moves flawlessly and precisely, as you want to do on the rock. Make the vision as realistic as possible, including tying into the rope, the sounds and smells of the environment, and the texture of the rock. These details will help the visualization match the actual event and “kick in” as you begin to climb.
    Chapter 1, Becoming Conscious
    1. Meditation
    Meditation takes many forms. For our purposes, meditation means keeping your attention on your breathing and witnessing when thoughts carry your attention away from the breath. Your attention may go to sounds you hear or things you need to do later.
    Meditation helps you identify the Witness position. You are not your thoughts; you are the observer of your thoughts. The Witness is the position from which you notice thoughts carrying your attention to other things in your environment. By identifying the Witness you give yourself a position of power from which to observe your thoughts. Then, you can consciously choose whether or not to act on any given thought.
    2. STOP
    This exercise comes from George Gurdjieff, the Russian author on warriorship. It’s a simple exercise: you say “STOP!” when you catch yourself in a habit.
    If you can stop the habit, you prove that you have conscious control of your behavior; if you can’t stop, you are unconscious and functioning on “automatic,” a slave to the habit. For example, if you habitually become defensive when corrected by someone, say, “STOP!” Can you stop defending yourself?
    The purpose of the exercise is to check your consciousness of habits, and help break them. By saying “STOP!” you give yourself a moment of consciousness to stop acting out the habit.
    3. Delay and Dissociate
    Setup : Choose a route that is outside your comfort zone. If you’ve done lead climbing then it’s best to do this exercise on lead. Climb to the point where you think falling is inevitable. Habitual thoughts will arise, such as to down-climb or to grab a draw. At the moment of truth, you’ll … wait.
    Set the intention : to delay acting out a habit. Recognize before you start up the route that as you get stressed, “comfort” thoughts will come up. Perhaps you’re in the habit of telling yourself that you must grab a draw, say “Take,” or in some other way escape the discomfort of the effort. Welcome these thoughts. When they arise, simply delay acting on them. Don’t down-climb, don’t grab a draw, don’t do anything. Simply hold on to the holds and stay where you are.
    Next, begin “dissociating” from your habitual flow of actions. By delaying, you’ve broken the one-two momentum of the habit. Then, further break down the habit by talking about it and making it conscious. Talk to yourself. Call yourself by name: “Okay Arno, you just thought about grabbing the draw. You may still grab it, but for now you’ll delay.” While you delay you can make a move up or down or reposition your body. Delay or do anything that is different than what you habitually do. Once you’ve broken the chain of actions that form a habit, you can