Defeating Fear with Past Success: The Climbing Experience Applied to All of Life

July 28th, 2009 | Posted by: brandon

This weekend I was climbing at Cathedral Ledge in New Hampshire, on a route called Recombeast (5.9+). The crux of the route is on pitch 3, where you have to make a traverse onto a flake, with nowhere to put your feet except for smearing on the rock. This day, the area for my feet was wet! So it made it quite a challenging task. It took me a while to make the proper moves, but ultimately what got me through it was by standing still and remembering past experiences I had.


When I remembered that I done other scary traverses on harder routes, I realized that I would be able to do this one. I remembered, “I was afraid before, but it turned out to be ok. It will be ok this time.”

This experience can apply to all of life! When we face challenging and even scary situations in life, we must take a moment to think logically, instead of acting out of fear. Ask yourself these questions:

  1. Have I had similar experiences before?
  2. How did I respond?
  3. What can my past response teach me now?
  4. What will be my next action

Some simple things…but it can go a long way.

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Posted in Climbing Experience Applied to Life, Experiential Education, Rock Climbing 4 Comments »

4 Comments

  1. Do you feel the presence of God when you climb? Has He ever put something under your foot? Thank You! streetfreak

    Posted by streetfreak on July 30, 2009 at 10:26 am | Permalink

  2. Most definitely. I always feel the presence of God when I climb. Being outside in His creation is wonderful and I can sense His presence.

    Posted by brandon on August 4, 2009 at 2:12 pm | Permalink

  3. There are times when the best response to the situation is to retreat. If you assess the fall consequences and the conditions and decide that when wet it’s a 5.12 move with a swing into a wall that would likely result in injury if you fell, then you have to over come the fear of having to tell your friends you retreated. I’ve gotten to the point where I wasn’t afraid of the move, it just logically didn’t seem worth doing. Present success can take many forms, and also serve for dealing with the next fearful situation.
    I like the comments on God too. I’ve even had an atheist friend comment on what a great route setter God is, how holds sometimes seem to be just where you need them.

    Posted by Mark on August 12, 2009 at 9:47 am | Permalink

  4. That’s a great point Mark. I’m happy that you bring that up. It is of utmost importance to learn how to respond to fear when it really is telling you that you are in grave danger. I also have retreated from climbs because of true danger, not just because of irrational fears. So I could look at that and say I succeeded…because I made the right decision. Maybe the title of my post should’ve been “Responding Appropriately to Fear”.

    Thanks!!

    Posted by brandon on August 12, 2009 at 3:05 pm | Permalink

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