In the climbing gym, route setters set routes with the intention of not being partial to one climber over another, but they are. They cannot help but be unfair because of the variety of body types and sizes that are getting on those routes make it impossible to make everyone climb it the same way. The shorter climber is going to have to do something different than the taller climber. The more powerful climber is going to have a different experience than the weaker climber. The more flexible climber has more options in terms of movements than the less flexible person.  

To achieve this positive and rewarding environment for me to workout I took the following steps.

• I turned my garage into a workout space with mats on the floor, free weights, hang boards, a skipping rope, crash pads, and resistance bands.
• I bought a medicine ball which I ferociously throw against a crash pad venting pent up agitation and anger.
• I have lots of options on what I can work on to prevent boredom.
• I have encouraged others to join me and we have a regular workout schedule.
• I track what I am doing so I can easily see my gains.
• I only allow myself to do 40-45 min of high intensity hard work on fewer days a week. This is key to maintaining my physical wellbeing.
• I determined what I would stop doing in order to have time for these workouts.
• I pay attention to my body's needs. I always start with mobility and when I am feeling cooked, I go back to mobility.
• I laugh every time I find that place my body just cannot execute the move.

All of these little things have made it easier to actually go and do the workouts. Most of these things have made it more fun. As I look out my window at the sleet, I am actually grateful I have exercise to do inside rather than have to do anything outside or away from home.

Humans are creatures of habit. Changing habits is not as easy and seamless as we may like. That's another great reason we want it to be fun, engaging, passionate, joy-filled. When we set those New Year's goals, we definitely need to bring some resilience to staying on track. Resilience is made up of a multitude of ingredients.
Challenge is the essential ingredient. If we are not challenging ourselves, we are not asking ourself to be resilient. Whatever you want to do to build resilience, it must be outside the comfort zone. 
Health and wellbeing are key to allowing us the fortitude to meet the challenge. Sleeping well, eating as well as we can, improving or maintaining our flexibility are all important to wellbeing. Breathing well is critical. How? Breathe into the belly to relax and soften the mental grip, reduce cortisol. Full sighing exhale allows for relaxation. Breathing in the rhythm of the physical exertion helps me focus and put skillful effort into the effort. Using proper form reduces my risk of injury. It's about how I execute a skill, not the "score" of skill. 
Connection and sharing what I am doing with others makes it more interesting and engaging. It also allows me to laugh at myself and lighten my mental intensity about being productive and getting things done. Being better is a bit of thing for me to grapple with and when I am mentally all about being better, I am intense and purposeful. Things are less fun. Too serious.
Cognitive and emotional strength provides the right attitude and problem solving skills needed to be in the discomfort and persist. I cannot emphasize enough how important developing cognitive and emotional strength is to being able to be outside the comfort zone. With a son in the military, this ingredient has had to move high on my priority list. I worry about him. I cannot control his decisions and I definitely, more than anything, want to stay connected to him. I have to focus on optimism. I have to be curious. I have to listen and pay attention. I have to have compassion and understanding and step aside of my own opinions and feelings to see things in a broader way. Perspective changes everything. 
Confidence is necessary to try and it is a reward of trying. The first day I was going to try a box jump, I was intimidated. I was afraid of falling and failing. What would it say about me if I can't do this jump would crush me. I took a deep breath and gave it my best shot with proper padding to protect me should I fail, and I was successful. Now, just a week later, I am trying it with a weight vest. I went climbing and tried hard, something I haven't done in a very long time. 

What about you?
Where have you been forced into your own hero's journey in 2025? And what new skills, wisdom are you taking into 2026?

Life is not meant to be easy. It is meant to be a continuous growth,

Recently I have found myself in an interesting conundrum trying to determine the best course of action. Let's say I take option A. That means I remove myself from a position of being able to have a say. I could end up the winner, or I could lose it all. Option B means I maintain the power I have at least potentially. It has been a tough decision and I cannot help but notice how much of the decision is being influenced by the fear of losing it all. Debating with others the value of option B makes me very aware of choosing to stay in the shadows. 

I sat with the feelings this situation provoked. I realized was my reaction was born from a collage of beliefs, all wrapped in negativity. Belief about my own abilities, belief about how I am perceived. Belief about the other people involved in this situation. Belief about what this all means.

And yet it was all just thoughts that I could not possibly know were true. I could not know if everything I was thinking was accurate because so much of it was in the minds of others. I was choosing to believe in the perspective I was under attack and needed to defend myself. 

The greatest athletes I have known are able to see the possibility in a moment. I am not sure if they just have less concern about others, or if they have greater confidence in themselves. A great athlete takes a moment of defeat and uses it to learn, or to improve the future moments. That's the real winning... being in a growth mindset as much as possible.

This week I awoke one morning with a head cold. Sinus filled and runny nose, sneezing, coughing and general malaise. I had a couple of work calls on my schedule and I spent the morning trying to feel better and decide if I should call in sick. One thought that struck me was, there are many who call in sick with the slightest sniffle, it is not the end of the world. I was trying to justify not attending the calls so I would not feel bad.

​I grew up with the knowledge that we, my siblings and I, would not go home until we had picked enough blueberries to fill the Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken family bucket. We were not allowed to go out until homework was complete and chores were done. We needed to commit our weekend to helping with stacking firewood - all 3 cords.  We were raised by a woman who lived through the tail end of the depression in a home with a father away working and 6 children, half of whom were younger than she was. My father was raised and worked on a dairy farm and was making money selling belts when he was in his early teens.

This upbringing taught me to value a strong work ethic and to prioritize getting things done and getting them done right before play and rest. I am grateful. This value has allowed me to be successful in all my pursuits be they physical pursuits as an athlete, academic pursuits, and professional pursuits. You see, the willingness to be uncomfortable and keep going is essential to doing the next level, whatever that next level is for you in the moment you are in.

During my long tenure as a coach I would advise my athletes to establish goals that were based on the things they could control. For example, rather than setting a goal to win regionals, set a goal to be consistent onsighting the grade most likely to be set in routes at regionals.

If financial security is the goal, then determine an amount of savings in the bank that brings the sense of security. If there is number that gives you a sense of security, then set a goal to get to the amount you need to put into saving to get to that number, do you need a second job or other source of income? Or do you need to tighten the budget? Then set the objectives to get to the number you want.

In my experience, we are pretty good at not always choosing the right goals and really only get to know that through achieving something and finding out it wasn't really what we wanted. For example, the feeling of financial insecurity may stem from the annual salary we are getting. Looking around at folks we know and what they make, we may think we should be making more. However, it could be related more to the sense of not being valued leads to feeling financial insecurity, which leads to believing if we had more money, we would not feel this way. If the real desire is to feel valued; a feeling not contingent on the money in the bank. 

A desire to feel valued begins with valuing oneself. To achieve that goal, you have to look to yourself first to take steps to compliment your work, to value your time, to ensure you negotiate for what your personal needs are, and to live in accordance with your own values. Not only that, you must acknowledge your accomplishments every time you hit those. Gradually, you will feel that you are valuing yourself. 

Bottomline... to determine what goals to set, you need to know what leads you to the positive emotions of being fulfilled, that your contributions matter to something much bigger than yourself. An Olympian who competes to win a medal for the sense of self aggrandizement will quickly falter when the ego is battered by the better performance of another athlete.  The Olympian who competes for the love of the sport and the Nation's betterment will not be deterred by the high performance of another athlete. They will be spurred on to try even harder. 

I get to work with a variety of learners in a variety of formats and with a variety of content. There is nothing worse in my books than spending my time with people who do not want to be there. These folks are not motivated or inspired. A motivated person will show up with some curiosity about what they can take from this experience, be that knowledge or connections. An inspired person is hungry. They not only look for what they can learn, and who they can meet, they look for how what they get from this experience can take them to a place of being able to give to others. 

Motivation is driven by a desire to reach a goal. Consider this quote by Muhammad Ali, "Don't count the days. Make the days count," This is designed to motivate action in the moment. If you want to complete a degree, don't count the days until graduation, make the days count toward earning the degree - go to class, do the work.

Inspiration is rooted in purpose. Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras is quoted as saying, "When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind transcends limitations; your conscious expands in every direction; and you find yourself in a great, new and wonderful world". Inspiration is taking yourself beyond what you believe is even possible. That takes a great deal more than motivation, it takes a belief in the value of the effort.

As an athlete, I was not inspired. I was motivated to try hard and make the days count by doing deliberate practice. I struggled to buckle down to do the weight lifting or campusing. I struggled to make the days longer than the additional rep required. I did not enjoy the process, nor did I feel motivated to work through great pain for some send that was the next level for me. 

However, as a coach, I am inspired to get my athletes to believe in their own potential to be a better athlete than they currently were. That means I am inspired to understand the biomechanics of movement, to learn body cues that told me what muscles the athlete is activating, and where they are not activating. It requires me to learn about injuries and understand the best course of rest and return to play. Most importantly, it requires me to understand the attitude and individual purpose of each athlete. Their unique internal dialogue when confronted with challenge and fear. Using my own body and mind as a research subject, I am able to learn and to better understand and, in turn, coach.

Considers what motivates you. What goal are you wanting to achieve?

• Perhaps you want to get the job, or run at a particular pace, or finish a project.

What do you need to do to complete the goal? Notice how you feel as you write the list.

Now consider, what inspires you? What do you want to help others achieve? 

• Perhaps you want to see their smiling faces and the connection by bringing them altogether.
• Perhaps you want to see the shine on their face when they reach their goals.
• Perhaps you want to see the calm and peace in their heart and mind. 

What can you do to help them get to that feeling? What do you need to understand first? How can you create the space for it to happen? How do you feel as you consider these questions?

I suggest that the things that inspire bring forth more powerful feelings than the things that motivate. 

This is how the mind works... it takes external information and uses it to inform how we should feel. Read through the following thought development,

• I am trying to get an arrow onto a target from a specified distance. I miss the target. The thought is. "shoot, that wasn't very good." Pun intended.
• After ten weeks of practice though, I aim for the target at the same distance and I miss, the thought becomes, "I am not very good at this."
• Years of shooting arrows and 10,000 hours of practice and thought becomes, "I can't do it! I am unteachable!"

I went from "the shot wasn't good" to "I can't" and "I am unteachable."
Or, I went from focus on the performance to focus on how the performance defines me. 
Those 10,000 hours of just shooting arrows do not mean a thing if I am not applying deliberate practice. 
Deliberate practice is the craft of looking at how I was positioned making the shot and refining what I need to change or correct to improve the shot. 

How many of us use the principle of deliberate practice in our daily life?

• How frequently do we examine our interacts and see where we could have refined our word choice or our question?
• How frequently do we examine our daily habits and use deliberate practice to examine where we could have interrupted a habit with a more skilled choice?

If you are like most folks, probably not very often. We coast, repeating the patterns of thought we usually have. Doing so means we have the same outcomes. 

​This evening I thought about going to the grocery store, aghhh.. but the drive and the people. I thought about watching Netflix and aghhh, the boredom and snacking. Neither thought made me happy. Then I thought, go to the beach, no phone, no one else, just meander along the beach and see what happens. The result has been the reflections in this post. I hope you find it helpful and if you are unhappy, then deliberately practice disrupting the discouraging and negative thoughts and reframing the thoughts to more gratitude and awe is the path to start traversing.

When I first went into climbing gyms, the routes could meander and cross over each other when lead climbing. Climbers understood the practice of looking where the route would go and making decisions about which quickdraws and when they would clip them. Now gyms set routes in very narrow corridors to avoid cross over, the quickdraws are much closer together to avoid big falls, and the setters often allow for good clipping positions to remove the risk of a fall while clipping. These changes to how we approach climbing in a gym have been developed to prevent incidents. Consider that when I started climbing, I learned outside on traditional style routes. The potential for a serious fall had potentially bigger consequences so I was forced to understand how to prevent those consequences, or suffer life altering consequences. 

I do not think climbing is the only arena in which this is playing out. Folks going to school with an emphasis on consuming information and regurgitating it rather than applying due to the vast amount that is expected to be learned. I am curious where this will lead. Wisdom is often gained through the experience of applying knowledge in a variety of milieus. Relating what seem to be very different ideas to create something new.

Blooms taxonomy is a description of how one can assess the depth of learning. The lowest level of learning is in the realm of recall or remembering something. The middle level of understanding is analyzing something and applying the knowledge to make a judgement. This would be like assessing someone's belay skill and experience with a belay check. The greatest depth of learning is assessed by determining if the person can use the information to create something. If you wanted to assess a person's knowledge of climbing movement skills, you could ask them to set a route. Can they create a series of movements that are possible for a particular audience?

Consider how we take information on the internet or shared in programming as truth without critically thinking about whether it is perhaps not actually true. I hear these "truisms" all the time in climbing.

• You cannot ground fall after the second clip.
• Double wrapped belay bars are safer that single wrap.
  
• The Petzl Gri Gri is safer than a passive belay device.

The real answer is that with each of these truisms, there are circumstances when the statement is not true. But to understand the real truth requires more depth of understanding about lead falls, the forces, and weight differences, anchors, friction, and mechanics. We are moving perilously close to math with these conversations and to have this conversation requires time. Humans do not like uncertainty, preferring absolutes and easy answers. It creates a false sense of certainty and reduces our anxiety. It also absolves us of responsibility.