The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training For Climbers by Arno Ilgner
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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.
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general. For most of us, when it comes to meeting challenges, our own worst enemy is ourselves.
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As climbers, we think of ourselves as adventurous people, yet we often react to challenges
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dialogue. We tend to be highly goal-oriented, and arriving at a performance plateau saps our motivation. Without even noticing, we become involved in an unconscious,
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Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego,
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"self." It is a mental construct, produced by socialization, which rewards and punishes us with feelings of self-worth. The Ego lives by comparison. It identifies with events in our past—our personal history—and then compares our history to the histories of others. This comparison leaves us feeling better than or worse than, but not equal to, others.
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Don Juan tells Castaneda that if you live by the Ego, then you can count on being offended or defensive for the rest of your life. You will constantly be tricked and trapped into doing idiotic things and wasting power. It took me until age 35 to go beyond the idea that I was better than others. I also realized we are interdependent, and each of us has a value which is not determined by comparison.
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We have been conditioned to believe that great accomplishments somehow make us more valuable.
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Does climbing 5.13 make us more valuable than an acquaintance who merely climbs 5.11? Few of us would answer yes when the question is put bluntly.
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A warrior is a realist. He realizes that, in an absolute and external sense, he is no more and no less valuable than any other human being.
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Yet achievement-motivation is tainted by the ploys of the Ego. In reality, it is the good feelings associated with achievement that inspire us. We will embark upon a process of striving indirectly for the external goals we may have. The Rock Warrior’s Way begins with breaking down our habitual, achievement-oriented mindset and placing our motivation on more solid footing.
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Some people climb at a standard far above ours with far less strength. When a climber runs out of strength, it’s usually because of the strength he’s wasted, not from an essential lack.
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The expert expects to find a way to climb through the hard sections so he quickly homes
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No. Authentic self-worth comes from an internal value system, not from simple achievement. Self-worth comes from the positive results of your effort. You may have learned something about yourself or gained the experiential confidence to attempt more difficult challenges. These effects are genuinely valuable. The achievement itself, however, is no reason for an elevated sense of self-worth. You might not have learned anything from your "success," or you could have learned something equally valuable by not meeting your objective.
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If you think about it, no matter how well you climb, tangling up your self-worth with your performance is a lose-lose situation. Instead of simply falling into this habitual self-worth mindset, analyze it. Focus your attention on it. Discover its logic, or lack thereof. In the light of consciousness, its hold on you will begin to break down. You will see that external achievement is not the root of anything really valuable that we can derive from a climbing challenge. So what is? What can we take away and really use? The answer: learning.
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If you want a more consistent and authentic source from which to draw a sense of self-worth and personal power, you will eventually need to reject external factors such as comparison and achievement. You must look inside and embrace learning.
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If, on the other hand, the self-worth you derive from your climbing is based on what you learn during the experience, then you are less concerned about the outcome of your efforts and able to focus more on the effort itself. What really matters when facing a challenge? What matters is learning. You want to test yourself, throw yourself into something outside your comfort zone and see what you’re capable of. Your true goal is not to conquer fifty feet of inanimate rock, but to expand your abilities through learning.
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To increase the power of your internal motivation and reduce your dependence on external factors, it helps to analyze what’s important to you and what you’re passionate about. Spend some time identifying the things you love about climbing. These may include the beauty of the rock and environment, the friends and companionship, and the many complex factors that relate to challenge and achievement. Beauty, friendship—these are ever-present in climbing. Our experience is improved by taking the time to appreciate them, and to remember that whatever happens, we are involved in these things we value. The last category, challenge and achievement, requires more careful analysis.
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The first power sink is self-importance. In an ordinary frame of mind, we constantly sink attention into unconscious, ineffective, Ego-promoting thoughts. The Ego’s sense of self-worth, as we have said, relies on petty comparison, being better than or worse than others. A warrior, in contrast, sees self-worth as a non-issue.
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Instead of valuing a personal identity relative to others, he values learning, growth, and situations that increase his personal power.
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The second power sink is generated by the Ego and involves self-image. The Ego goes to great pains to maintain the fiction of a constant, unchangeable self. This is a manifestation of the Ego’s hunger for security. Just as the Ego likes to brag about its achievements, showing it is better than others and thus worthy of value and survival, it likes to cling to the past and create a complex, detailed identity out of past events. The warrior literature calls this element of the Ego, personal history. Identification with personal history creates this power sink.
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These highlights add to the richness of our experience, but they come with excess baggage. Many elements of personal history are not landmark moments in our lives, but rather oft-repeated, self-limiting ways of being, frozen at some early stage of learning. These fossilized responses are the habitual you. The maintenance of a fixed self-image requires energy. We are constantly and sometimes strenuously reframing new experiences to fit our old concept of ourselves. This requires power that could be directed towards facing challenges in the present.
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That’s my personal history. That personal history makes me feel special and separate from others. Separation, however, leads away from learning and understanding.
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So how does that personal history affect me when I climb in the present? If others are watching me climb, I tend to worry that I won’t live up to the bold image I’ve identified myself with. I end up shunting energy trying to maintain an image, when I should be using that energy for problem-solving on the climb.
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Instead of acting on my negative thoughts, however, I simply watched them from the Witness position. I didn’t really do anything, like fight the thoughts or chastise myself for lack of boldness. I simply listened quietly to the negative self-talk but delayed acting it out. After the fifth pitch I began to feel more confident.
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Climbing is full of subtleties, and we constantly overlook them. Take, for example, balance and poise. Intellectually, we understand that these are important elements of technique, yet we constantly botch the subtleties. Here’s a typical scenario: A climber arrives, fairly pumped, at a clipping stance on a sport climb. He is ten feet out from his last bolt and very anxious to get clipped in. He’s tense, over-gripping, and out of balance. Gritting his teeth, close to falling, he finally makes the clip—and instantly relaxes. Immediately he finds another good handhold within reach. A sloping foothold he mistrusted suddenly feels very adequate. He shifts body position slightly and finds he can stand at the clipping stance almost effortlessly. Before he clipped the bolt, he felt he could pump out and pitch off at any instant. After clipping, he was at ease. The stance was the same, but his use of it was quite different. Does this sound familiar? It is ironic that we are least likely to demonstrate poise in the situations that demand it the most.
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They will help you turn a struggle into a dance of balance and efficiency. Photo: Jim Thornburg A friend of mine experienced the importance of subtleties during the first free ascent of a very difficult climb called Fiddler on the Roof in Fremont Canyon, Wyoming.
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Proper posture says you own the space you occupy, no more and no less. You aren’t cowering and apologizing for the space you’re using, nor are you jutting out aggressively into space you don’t need.
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Climbers often grimace during exertion, but exertion need not be painful or uncomfortable. If you grimace during exertion, you cast a mood over your effort that triggers specific reactions in the bodymind. Grimacing is defensive, a form of recoil.
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Another word that a warrior doesn’t use is worry. Worry is a passive form of fear, which comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning "to choke or struggle." You don’t want to choke or struggle. So don’t worry. Be actively concerned. Better yet, be curious.
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That is the challenge: to notice these subtle details and act instantaneously with power, not simply to try. Do not hold yourself to the habitual old standard of mental effort. Instead of saying he’ll try, a warrior states he’ll do it. His intention is to give his best effort, but he doesn’t put a limit on that effort.
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Slowly but surely, we develop the unconscious conviction that our own safety is someone else’s responsibility.
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Ego, too, plays a role in our shirking of responsibility. The Ego is constantly equating our self-worth with our achievements and performances. We have an innate need to feel good about ourselves. When our Ego is in charge, we tend to protect ourselves by transferring responsibility for a poor performance to someone or something else. The Ego is shrewd and will try to appear objective and rational when it blames, but its logic serves a single goal: boosting an externally derived self-image. This defensive tactic saps our power to respond effectively to challenges.
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By not accepting the maximum amount of responsibility we reduce our ability to respond and therefore our power. Learning how to respond to tough challenges in a way that increases power is one of a warrior’s most important tasks.
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Most of us participate in some sort of justification scheme like this to excuse ourselves from the rigors of our supposed beliefs. The average person is quite creative with the little justifications he can think up to deceive himself that his actions are not out of line with his purported beliefs. If we confront ourselves point blank with our words and actions, however, we know that we are lying. Scrupulous honesty is required to realize this. Removing small lies from our day-to-day life cleanses the whole system. If you stop lying to yourself about postage stamps, you stop lying to yourself about climbing, why you aren’t stretching, or why you turned the lead over to your partner. You come to grips with reality, and reality is a more effective teacher than illusion.
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As we accept these responsibilities, we grow to accept a great truth: life is difficult. Once we fully accept difficulty as natural and normal, we cease to be offended or daunted when we encounter a struggle or a test. We can embrace these tests as opportunities. Difficult experiences are the way we learn, and they also are the way we can appreciate ease.
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In general, we are socialized to have a receiving mindset. Driven toward the imaginary American Dream, we are not encouraged to be appreciative and grateful for what we do have. We’re conditioned to think we will be happy when we obtain: that new car, that promotion, our lottery check. The same mentality appears in our climbing. We think we will really enjoy climbing when we get something: stronger forearms, more free time, the redpoint on our project.
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If we have not currently attained our goals, that is fine. We should not, however, interpret that to mean we have received less than our "entitlement." The warrior rejects the very concept of entitlement.
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If you find yourself becoming frustrated, take it as a symptom that you are out of alignment with your goals. If you really want an easy success, find an easier climb. If you want a real challenge, you’ve found it. If the Ego is asking for a trophy to use in its externally oriented game of self-worth, look the Ego dragon
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Paradoxically, taking risks actually increases our safety and comfort. Sudden danger lurks everywhere—losing our jobs, being struck by a car, contracting a mortal illness. A cowering, protective approach to life doesn’t reduce the peril. It only serves to make us slaves to fear and victims of constant anxiety.
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Choices are not right or wrong, good or bad. Life would be a bit boring if it was so simple. You never know the full, long-term ramifications of a choice. Conscious choices are more like tests of our knowledge, providing opportunities for concrete lessons on the ever-wandering path of knowledge.
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day self-rescue. A small mistake one day prevented a big mistake on another day. "Bad" choices often teach you something and become more valuable than the "good" choices. The warrior knows this and foregoes the "good" and "bad" designations altogether.
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A possibly dangerous choice should not be made carelessly. It must be aligned with a person’s innermost predilections, stripped of the dangerous and superficial trappings of the Ego and self-delusion. Love-based motivation creates a situation without regret. When you make a choice, you choose to live life the way you most want to live it. Only when you’re functioning in such a mode can you summon the near-magical power of 100-percent commitment.
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Neither of these approaches is an effective strategy for creative risk-taking. Attention is distracted, minimizing the empowering aspects of the experience while maximizing the actual danger. In contrast, the warrior’s choice-making involves impeccable use of attention.
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He falls into a destination-oriented mindset to escape the fear, fighting toward the end of the climb. Lethargy, fear, and a struggle to "get it over with" are not aligned with the true warrior goal: learning.
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The following methods will help you improve receptivity to intuition while climbing:
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Early in our lives we are taught to be competitive and value achievement and results. We are encouraged to "make something of ourselves" or to "get ahead." The emphasis is on a future destination, for which we will sacrifice the satisfaction of the present. Ironically, once we arrive at a destination—landing that sought-after job, climbing that 5.12 grade—we find it’s not a final destination at all. We aren’t satisfied to stay there. We may even look back nostalgically to the passion we possessed when we considered that destination a magical promised land, before we realized it was simply the end of a journey. Inevitably we begin a new journey, and a new one after that. In fact, our entire lives are spent journeying. The warrior is the ultimate realist. He knows that life is a
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journey, and rather than rushing blindly toward the next destination, he appreciates the journey itself and consciously lives within it.
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Our attention has moved out of the challenge and into the future. If we could remain focused on climbing—the journey—then we wouldn’t sabotage our effort with anxiety about the distance to a destination.
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In a risk situation in climbing, you constantly enter the unknown. So much new information comes in that it’s impossible to complete one task before beginning another. Most of us don’t have skills to deal well with such chaos. When our normal, step-by-step mode doesn’t work, we tend to panic or rebel. When we encounter chaos, we try to get rid of it rather than go with it. The warrior knows that’s not possible, and seeks to find internal harmony in the midst of chaos. Purposely seeking out risks allows us to practice dealing
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The destination mindset is also responsible for "failure" and "success" anxieties. Success and failure are in quotation marks here because a warrior doesn’t use these terms. He doesn’t see the result of his effort as success or failure. Making it up a climb may be his provisional goal, but the higher goal is learning. The warrior does not know what end result will yield more learning.
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In both success and failure anxiety, you lose focus. By over-valuing the outcome and under-valuing the process, you focus on the destination. Once you do this, climbing is pointless. You close yourself off to the present moment and you do not learn. You simply want your body to catch up with your mind, which is already in the comfort zone at the top of the climb or back on the ground basking in glory.
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As I walked the last mile or so, I had a conscious realization that this experience, so rich and rewarding, was almost over. It would then drift into memory and slowly fade away. I realized then I wanted to feel all the pain, discomfort, and everything that was happening at the moment. I wanted to feel it fully without trying to escape it. The experience would be over all too soon, and I wanted to feel it in its entirety.
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The goal shouldn’t be to redpoint a climb but to stay focused on the effort so that a redpoint ascent will manifest. You’ll find that your climbing makes a lot more sense. And it’s more fun.
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Accept the journey. Be at peace in it. Watch it. When you can be at one with the difficulty and the chaos, then you transcend it. You simply walk your path, being observant, paying attention, learning and growing in your understanding of who you are and what is possible for you. Approached in the warrior’s way, the rock will teach you.
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Updated: Apr 19, 2021
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.
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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.
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The following are basic tenets of the Rock Warrior’s Way mental training approach: 1. Our performance is greatly affected by the subconscious, hidden parts of our minds. 2. Improved performance occurs through a process that is fundamentally one of growth, which, in the mental sphere, we also call learning. You learn best by focusing your attention on the situation, in an attitude of problem solving. 3. Motivation is a key ingredient in performance, and the quality of that motivation, not just its quantity, matters. Performance is improved by moving away from fear-based motivation and toward love-based motivation. 4. There are two types of fear: survival and illusory. The former is healthy and helpful while the latter is not. It is important to be able to distinguish between the two fears. 5. Death is our "advisor." In other words, awareness of our mortality is a helpful reality check. It reminds us that every action matters, and thus directs our actions toward what’s really important, valuable, and purposeful in our lives. Death reminds us that we have no time to waste.
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Outline of the Program: the Seven Processes 1. Becoming Conscious. In the first process, you improve observation skills to become more self-aware. You direct awareness onto your inner dialogue. You examine the grounds of your self-worth. You detect gross attention leaks. 2. Life is Subtle. Attention is collected and centered. You direct awareness onto sensations in the body (breathing, posture, etc). You speak to yourself deliberately, rather than listening to the regular chatter of the inner dialogue. 3. Accepting Responsibility. Here, you focus on being responsible for the situation, rather than assigning blame, wishing that the situation was otherwise, or hoping for magical deliverance. Blaming, wishing, and hoping take power out of your hands. Accepting responsibility comes to terms with the objective information you gather about the risk. 4. Giving. Here you adopt an attitude of power: you ask what you can give to the performance, rather than what you might receive if you "succeed." You focus your attention on options and possibilities. This process collects the subjective information about the risk and comes to terms with it. 5. Choices. This is the transition phase, the moment of truth. You choose either to direct attention away from the risk or into the risk. Declining to take the risk is not failure. Many, many risks are foolish and taking them could kill you. The key to the warrior Choices process is to be absolutely decisive. If you’re going to back off, you do it without misgiving. If you go forward, you do so with your full being, without looking back. You set an intention to act with unbending intent, which produces 100-percent commitment. 6. Listening. This process guides you as you act out the risk. It helps you stay on course, in the risk, rather than falling into a control mentality that will divert attention and rob you of power. You are in action now, in the unknown; you need to learn something. "Listening" to the situation and the route facilitates the learning process. This is a very intuitive process. In Choices, you accepted the possible outcomes of your effort and made the leap; now you must trust in the process. 7. The Journey. Once in the chaos of risk, you focus on the journey, not the destination. When you’re stressed, you are tempted to rush through the stress. Yet, if you have prepared well, this stressful situation is exactly why you came here in the first place. It holds the rhyme and reason for your climbing. When you’re stressed, you are in prime territory for learning. A journey mentality helps you align your attention forward into the climbing process instead of letting attention wander to the destination, or to self-limiting thoughts that won’t help you solve the problem and learn.
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As climbers, we think of ourselves as adventurous people, yet we often react to challenges in unadventurous ways. After we’ve been climbing for a while, we tend to lose the open-mindedness and quick learning that characterized our early climbing experiences. We fall into patterns and habits that limit our learning. When faced with a challenge, we become distracted from the immediate situation and fall into some sort of ego game or useless inner dialogue. We tend to be highly goal-oriented, and arriving at a performance plateau saps our motivation. Without even noticing, we become involved in an unconscious, repetitive, habitual spiral, and our power declines.
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You can feel pretty worthless at times because reward and punishment have molded you. When you did something that was considered good by your caregivers, you were rewarded, and when you did something that was considered bad, you were punished. Your caregivers associated your worth with your performance—your behavior. Then, as you grew older, your caregivers’ expectations became embodied in the Ego, which took over the job of rewarding and punishing. Your caregivers’ expectations were supplemented or replaced by the expectations of society at large, the expectations of a peer group, or the expectations established by a set of beliefs you adopted with little critical thought. Regardless of the source of the Ego’s expectations, the result is the same: we are slaves to externally derived influences, rather than being the masters of our internal, mental environments. We generally have adopted established beliefs rather than formulating our own. Society, of course, encourages such conformist behavior. We may be competitive or compassionate, radical or politically correct, sport climbers or trad climbers. These orientations too often derive from a deep unconscious attempt to align ourselves with people we admire or to get others to like or admire us. Though we may hold these beliefs close to our hearts, they do not come from our hearts. They come instead from that insidious mental monster called the Ego.
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The Ego is a mental entity, a crude and ruthless ghost masquerading as our "self." It is a mental construct, produced by socialization, which rewards and punishes us with feelings of self-worth. The Ego lives by comparison. It identifies with events in our past—our personal history—and then compares our history to the histories of others. This comparison leaves us feeling better than or worse than, but not equal to, others.
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In order to reclaim the energy that the Ego wastes, we must usurp its power and dethrone it. In exchange for the Ego, we call upon the Higher Self. The Higher Self isn’t competitive, defensive, or conniving, as the Ego is. It sees through such petty ploys. The Higher Self derives self-worth not from comparison with others, but from an internal focus that is based on valuing growth and learning. As you advance along the path of warriorship, you will increasingly replace Ego-based behavior with behavior that is under the guidance of the Higher Self.
The expert expects to find a way to climb through the hard sections so he quickly homes in on that way. He expects to be able to rest, and he finds rest positions. We, on the other hand, home in on the difficulties, the obstacles, and the certainty that we will become exhausted. The expert knows there may be difficult moves, but is confident he will find a way, and that he has enough reserve for a climb of this difficulty. We balk at the hard moves because we fear we won’t make it unless we do them exactly right. We fear the moves will exhaust our reserves, and we won’t be able to cope with what follows. These are mental habits produced by our image of our abilities. This image, not our lack of strength or technique, is our most limiting factor.
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That’s my personal history. That personal history makes me feel special and separate from others. Separation, however, leads away from learning and understanding. So how does that personal history affect me when I climb in the present? If others are watching me climb, I tend to worry that I won’t live up to the bold image I’ve identified myself with. I end up shunting energy trying to maintain an image, when I should be using that energy for problem-solving on the climb.
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The difference between the free ascent and countless efforts involved a three-inch shift in the position of the hips.
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If you find yourself becoming frustrated, take it as a symptom that you are out of alignment with your goals. If you really want an easy success, find an easier climb. If you want a real challenge, you’ve found it. If the Ego is asking for a trophy to use in its externally oriented game of self-worth, look the Ego dragon in the eye and draw your sword. Then pay attention, give your best, and enjoy the ride.
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A small mistake one day prevented a big mistake on another day. "Bad" choices often teach you something and become more valuable than the "good" choices. The warrior knows this and foregoes the "good" and "bad" designations altogether.
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The following methods will help you improve receptivity to intuition while climbing: • Observe yourself. By separating and observing yourself from the Witness position you will recognize intuitive messages more readily. • Breathe continuously. Breathing continuously helps dissipate anxiety and also keeps you in the moment. When you’re in the moment, intuitive information can flow more easily. • Be open and curious. If you’re closed and clinging to fixed beliefs, you don’t allow information to flow into your awareness. In The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker tells us that "curiosity is the way you answer when intuition whispers." • Find your center of gravity and keep it in balance. The average person’s center of gravity is about one inch below the navel. Keep that center in line with the arm you’re hanging from, the foot you’re standing on, or poised equally between your various points of contact. When you are out of balance, your attention is distracted by the need to deal with that unbalanced state. When your center of gravity is balanced, attention is available to notice subtle intuitive messages. • Be nonjudgmental. A judgmental attitude ignores or discredits intuitive information, making it difficult to recognize. Gavin de Becker suggests that a dog’s keen sense of intuition is partly due to its inability to judge. You can produce a nonjudgmental state by focusing on options and possibilities instead of opinions and evaluations. • If you speak to yourself, speak in questions. When you ask a question, in a sense, you send a demand to your subconscious to supply an answer. It answers through your intuition. • Finally, follow your eyes. Intuition operates through your eyes to direct your movements. In The Power of Silence, don Juan states that intent is summoned with the eyes, and in The Fire from Within, he relates that your eyes are the keys to entering into the unknown. Your body naturally wants to be in balance. Your intuition, through your eyes, will direct your movements to find a balanced position. Your body has knowledge. Pay attention to how your eyes direct your movements and trust them. (The level of balance and efficiency of this direction may depend on your level of climbing knowledge and experience.)
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Early in our lives we are taught to be competitive and value achievement and results. We are encouraged to "make something of ourselves" or to "get ahead." The emphasis is on a future destination, for which we will sacrifice the satisfaction of the present. Ironically, once we arrive at a destination—landing that sought-after job, climbing that 5.12 grade—we find it’s not a final destination at all. We aren’t satisfied to stay there. We may even look back nostalgically to the passion we possessed when we considered that destination a magical promised land, before we realized it was simply the end of a journey. Inevitably we begin a new journey, and a new one after that. In fact, our entire lives are spent journeying. The warrior is the ultimate realist. He knows that life is a journey, and rather than rushing blindly toward the next destination, he appreciates the journey itself and consciously lives within it.
In a risk situation in climbing, you constantly enter the unknown. So much new information comes in that it’s impossible to complete one task before beginning another. Most of us don’t have skills to deal well with such chaos. When our normal, step-by-step mode doesn’t work, we tend to panic or rebel. When we encounter chaos, we try to get rid of it rather than go with it. The warrior knows that’s not possible, and seeks to find internal harmony in the midst of chaos. Purposely seeking out risks allows us to practice dealing with chaos, but often our reaction is to mentally "leave the scene." We passively wish for the chaos to simplify and resolve itself. In fact, when we stay relaxed and stop wishing and hoping behavior, we maximize our effectiveness to function amid chaos. The key is to accept the chaotic nature of the experience and give it our full attention. We accomplish this acceptance with a journey mindset. The destination mindset is also responsible for "failure" and "success" anxieties. Success and failure are in quotation marks here because a warrior doesn’t use these terms. He doesn’t see the result of his effort as success or failure. Making it up a climb may be his provisional goal, but the higher goal is learning. The warrior does not know what end result will yield more learning.