Mental Toughness
Ignoring a slightly misplaced foot, pushing past a nagging fear of gear failure, or ramping up the intensity to latch a small hold all require mental awareness. Follow these guidelines to maximize your own performance.
Mental Toughness
Fumbling a clip or grabbing the wrong piece of gear can be distracting. These little errors can break you down during a climb. Suddenly you’re falling or back on the ground because of a simple mistake. The errors can snowball into larger problems like anxiety, holding your breath, and subpar performance. How you deal mentally with these situations matters. They can be chances to fail or opportunities to develop as a climber.
Climbers often have unrealistic expectations of their climbing performance. They believe that to climb their hardest they need to perform with flawless technical skill, mental strength, and maximum physical effort. They think they have to be perfect which is impossible. What actually happens is that you make minor technical errors, your mental strength diminishes, and thus you don’t reach your physical maximum. Realizing that you won’t be completely perfect all the time will help you start to climb with high intensity even when everything isn’t going smoothly. Perfection is not the goal. You can still reach a high level of effort without it being perfect.
Practicing
If you misplace your foot, don’t pretend it didn’t happen. An error creates doubt. If you don’t own it, you lose confidence, and then you fall apart. Now you’re holding your breath. Now your eyes are darting everywhere. It’s like watching a trainwreck happen. Realize a mistake immediately and work hard to focus your energy on calming down before you let it take you down a spiral of failure. Don’t focus on the mistake itself, instead focus on moving past it.
Practicing mental toughness means making mistakes and then correcting for them. Onsight climbing or even intentionally climbing a sequence incorrectly can provide opportunities for calm correction. After misplacing a foot or making a mistake, breathe deeply, relax, and attempt the move again
