I used to climb with a guy in college who thrashed around on V9s and v10s exclusively, and he had no business on them. He could only V6, and I never saw him do anything above it. I never understood why he apparently liked failing so much, day after day, year after year, and didn’t just climb stuff at his level and taste success now and again.
I’d also like to be very clear - I was guilty of the same strategy, which, in part, was the reason it caught my attention.
It took me a while to realize he was afraid of knowing his real limit, because, if he found it, he’d have nowhere else to go other than to admit it, and admitting it wasn’t an option since his self-image, of someone who climbed such and such a grade, was so engrained in his being that if you took it away, the house of cards would fall. His fear of finding his limit, of course, was also a function of how others perceived him - aka FOPO, fear of other people’s opinions.
FOPO is one of the most noxious and elusive weeds in the climber’s mental garden. As a lifelong climber and gardener of the mind, I’m going to give you a bit of truth on managing FOPO and tell you that there is a silver bullet…except it’s hard to polish the silver. And it takes a while. It also may not be for everyone.
FOPO isn’t just about other people’s opinions of us, but, largely, our opinion of ourselves. In short, if our opinion of ourself is solid and unflappable, it won’t matter what others think. This, of course, is rarely the case. We all care what others think. We’re human.
The silver bullet? As long as you attach value to your climbing achievements, you are going to be insecure about your climbing in equal proportion, and thus avoid situations where “you” are exposed. You will fear exposing yourself to others, and exposing yourself to… yourself. You are either going to try things too hard, or things too easy, or you are never going to try hard, or you are going to try too hard. All of these options lack discernment, will stifle the learning curve and obscure the truth as to what it takes to climb hard.
Ninety nine percent of us attach value to our external achievements. It’s normal and accepted. It’s what we’ve been taught as athletes and individuals since we were young. I fight the urge every day. While it is extremely difficult to attach no value to your achievements, even the smallest gains in separating your value - who you are, how you define yourself - from medals, grades and routes, will deliver dividends.
Consider I gave you a task of rolling a basketball down a field where the goal is to hit a tree at the other end. A simple and stupid task for sure. Now I tell you to try hard and not to miss. You try hard and hit it a few times but miss most of them.
I then ask you if you “failed at the task” of hitting the tree.
“Yes, I guess,” you say.
I then ask, “Do you feel like a failure? I mean, does the feeling nag at you in a deep way?”
“Of course not,” you reply. “I was just hitting a tree with a ball.”
What’s happening is that the task has no meaning for you. You are not invested in it. You do not positively define yourself by your ability to do it, nor does not doing it negatively affect you. You did fail, but you didn’t feel like a failure. There’s a big difference. The feeling of failure comes as a result of leveraging yourself against your climbing. Ironically, what I can say is that if you did this simple ball rolling task you’d embody a lot of traits you want in your climbing—you’d be relaxed, unfazed by the outcome, loose. There’d be a lightness. All of these things are needed to climb hard.
What often keeps us from climbing hard are all the things we place between us and “our” climbing.
For some people, climbing is like hitting the tree with the ball—they don’t care. But, if you are still reading this, you are likely the person who cares. Climbing is a big part of your life. Sending is important. You want to be a good, real climber, and climb real, hard things. You are tortured by never being good enough. You define yourself as a good climber, or strive to be. All of this is normal. But it might also be keeping you from climbing at your full potential.
I think the real problem in all this talk of caring and FOPO and self-criticism is this - we want to get rid of the bad feelings but keep the good ones. In other words, we don’t want to be self-critical, feel shame when we fail and let down all the time, and we don’t want to bring all that negativity into our climbing. And yet, we want the positive outcomes - confidence, status, etc. The silver bullet needs to be shined - you need to get rid of the positivity to get rid of the negativity. You can’t not feel the pain and only feel the pleasure.
And yet, we have options.
Jerry Moffatt credits Lanny Bassham, an American Olympic gold medalist and multiple world record holder, with changing his life. Bassham was not only a top-tier athlete. As a mental coach, he interviewed hundreds of elite athletes in his quest to understand the ideal state of mind. Bassham’s advice is simple: “the best focus, in my view, is on a winning performance, not on finishing on top.”
Since we are necessarily driven, be driven by the desire for a winning performance: right effort, lack of frustration, good decision making, a clear head, a very light attachment to outcome.
One tactic is the second you send something, don’t indulge the number-driven ego talk. Refuse the buzz and prideful whispers it gives you. Laugh at it. Reject its advances. Rather, be proud you performed well, even if it meant not sending. Remember, it’s not all in your control. Not sending is going to happen, but not sending need not translate to feeling like a failure. If you performed well, be content with that. Focus on climbing, on your body, on what a route or a boulder is asking, and stop fantasizing about the moment you are on top (something I was obsessed with for a very long time).
If you can implement the above, even if just a bit, you will redefine what winning means - it means the performance. You will begin to fear less your or others’ opinion of yourself because your focus is on something internal, not an index of external validation.
This is hard work, and goes against the grain of what we’ve been told, namely, to climb the difficulty ladder, to feel a sense of accomplishment in the numbers. However, you can begin to move with no strings attached. You will be looser. You will focus on what the route needs, rather than what you ego needs. The feeling of doing so is phenomenal, otherworldly even, and it isn’t so much pleasing as it is deeply joyful. For once, you come face to face with the only thing our sport is about - moving over stone. And you will improve. That’s strong mind.
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Francis Sanzaro has been climbing for about 30 years—trad, alpine, ice, sport, etc. He is the author of The Zen of Climbing (US or UK), among a few other titles, and is the former Editor in Chief of Rock and Ice magazine. He lives in the mountains of Colorado.
