Committing to moves

Yesterday I worked with Chris who has been climbing a while but had got a bit stuck. It was tricky working out what the problem was, but I think we got to the bottom of it.  It seems as though Chris was struggling to fully commit to harder moves.  This can arise for lots of different reasons.  It can be to do with low expectations of yourself (not thinking something is possible), fear of failure, lack of practice, fear of falling, lack of trust in the belayer, embarrassment or even not knowing how it feels to physically try at your limit.

Whatever the cause, the effects of this are easy to understand.  Its a vicious downward spiral, where you never climb at your limit, and so your limit gets steadily lower and lower - you dont maintain your limit/grade, it steadily drops.  We need to constantly push up against our limits/ boundaries just to maintain them, let alone begin to expand them.

The remedy takes a big commitment in and of itself.  It means challenging yourself systematically and regularly, and making sure that you fully commit to this, and not just pay it lip service.  Its quite a subtle thing to be sure of.  If you are doing routes/ problems that you are failing on, then you could be trying at your limit, but equally, you might be stopping short of giving something 100%.  Ask yourself, am I falling off naturally here (ie in the middle of a move), or am I paused and clinging on before letting myself drop off.  Its not easy to tell sometimes.  Our mind is so powerful that if the thought creeps in that maybe this is a bit too hard for us anyway, then we tend to tail off our effort.  Expanding our expectations of ourselves also brings with it painful possibilities - of losing motivation as we achieve fewer successes, altering how we see ourselves.  The trick is to choose small increments by which to expand our horizons, steps which might just be a few millimetres away, but very definitely within sight and almost within our grasp.