The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers

It’s that simple, no?
    No.
    Everything from ancient wisdom schools to the newer “mental fitness” disciplines insist that transformation is largely a matter of practicing smarter, not simply harder. Practicing harder often results in the rein-forcement of limiting habits, meaning, you’re just practicing the same old mistakes and reaping the same old results.
    Any worthwhile self-improvement program—the Rock Warrior’s Way included—allows us to learn from our direct experience in an accelerated way. It will provide a flexible road map to success, which keeps us on course toward mastery and empowers us to make critical course corrections before we find ourselves totally lost in old habits. Such is the essence of practicing smarter. It involves consciously studying the what, the how, and the why of our actual experience. It takes us out of a pure doing mode and requires learning and practicing things that can make us wonder if we haven’t taken an awfully indirect route to the mountaintop. As the saying goes, the direct path to mastery is seemingly indirect.
    For instance, it might seem questionable that redefining our notion of success could radically steepen our learning curve—but it can. So can other basic tenets of the Rock Warrior’s Way. While I won’t try to explain the course’s content, there are several points worth mentioning that might help orient a person toward sound results.
    First, accept that life is hard, and that transforming our life—or our abilities, which amount to much the same thing—is very hard. For a thousand reasons, we all have a part that wants to believe the world was made just for us, and that the pearls of existence are our birthright. In a sense, they are, but we must dive deeply to find those pearls—down past our resistance and mechanical thinking and behavior, and that always involves hard, sustained, conscious, and disciplined effort. Few stumble across those pearls by fluke or good fortune, and if they do, they typically lose them just as fast. This course will head you in the right direction and even give you a stout push that way, but you must do the work.
    A colossal swindle of the “New Age” movement is the notion that gaining a state of effortless being and doing requires no effort. In fact, great conscious effort, discipline, and patience are normally required to enter the “flow zone” where previously frightening challenges start taking on an aspect of relaxed ease. The venue does not change. Everest does not get smaller and the North Pole does not get warmer. It is we who must transform, and that takes work. If the process was easy, we’d all be world champions.
    Second, the work is a process, and that process lasts a lifetime. Every time you gain a new plateau, a massif of unrealized potential soars above you. In this sense, you never “arrive,” once and for all, on the mountaintop. At certain points along the way, the quality of the process changes dramatically. This is especially true for those breakthrough moments of peak performance, where months of sustained effort conspire to create a sort of wormhole of grace through which we pass—often suddenly and with little “effort”—into a higher realm of being and doing. The climb that once spanked us now seems “easy.” In such moments we tend to forget the arduous run-up to the crown. It is then that we might recall all of those championship coaches who remind us that the game is won or lost on the practice field.
    That leads us to the third and most important point: the qualities you bring to game day will be the exact same qualities you cultivate during practice. In other words, the way you live your life is exactly the way you will climb. It’s a simple enough concept to grasp, but taking it to heart and putting it into practice is typically something only the most dedicated can manage; probably because they’re the ones whose lives might depend on doing so.
    At the recreational level, climbing is often held in an entirely different light than one’s “normal” life. The casual climber sees her climbing as a welcome if not essential restorative practice. Half way up the climb, she transcends her daily stressors and morphs into a “different” person. But when she confronts the summit headwall, and her abilities are stretched to the breaking point, the “different” person reverts to old habits. She will meet the challenges with exactly those qualities she’s