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Performance as a measure of Self Worth (Read 6548 times)

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Performance as a measure of Self Worth
February 22, 2019, 10:36:23 am
I think Jerry talked about giving up climbing when it became apparent that he could no longer ‘improve’ or be ‘the best’. This dynamic is particularly evident in the great lo-fi film Stone Love. Where the act of bouldering is symbolic of and secondary to the relationships between the climbers and their pursuit of excellence. I’ve been thinking for a while about how the idea of self worth and particularly in sports and climbing where pursuit of excellence and performance seems to be put above all else. This is reflected in the climbing media and society at large where from a very early age we are taught that achievement is the gold standard by which we are judged, whether this be grades at school or how fast we can run.
The book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ describes the players motivations in terms of the types of game they play. It divides them into ‘good or perfection’ ‘social and friendships’ and ‘health and well being’ with various sub categories in each. Concluding that an inner game motivated by the desire for learning, health, and fun or enjoyment in the immediate activity are congruent with each other, only carrying the risk of falling into perfection based mind set of measuring ourselves up again. Recognising that the yard sticks by which we measure ourselves and the gap between current performance and ideal never diminishes in size, leading to the sensation of ‘feeding the rat’.
This led me to think about ideas of self worth, value and the worth of human beings in general and how this pattern of measuring ourselves up is visible in climbing. I think Dave MacLeod’s writings on the Keto diet and performance symbolised by the startling image of him stood under Practice of the Wild in what appears to be a state of starvation or the threads on here and elsewhere of climbers desperate to ‘decode’ Barrows essay on training or Tom’s Lattice program are reflective of this measuring up process. With the basic premise that the leaner, fitter and stronger I am the better I will perform and therefore rank higher or have more worth as a human being, this message is impossible to deny or avoid. From personal experience, following a specific training program with the sole intention of improving climbing led to one of the worst climbing years I’d ever had, both in terms of objective performance but also emotional loss. The desire to get better was driven by the idea that that success would make me a more happy and content human being, the result was exactly the opposite. By stopping this ‘good or perfection game’ and beginning a ‘learning and fun’ game I spent a year seeking out new climbing experiences, with a sense of adventure and humour, I stopped going to the climbing wall, still ‘training’ once a week at home, and never did anything I didn’t want to do, it had to feel at least enjoyable. This led to one of the best and most enjoyable 12 months I’ve had and despite challenging times in other areas of life this enjoyment was both reflected in and helped me through how other difficulties were managed. I’m not saying stop training, projecting or trying hard, but I do think its worthwhile considering when we feel unhappy whilst doing this, miserable pressured or anxious stood underneath a route, feeling bad about ourselves or good when we ‘send’ and measuring ourselves against our peers, it’s worth taking a moment to question what the fuck we’re doing it for. A good exercise can be to consider what we truly value in ourselves and other and contrast that against a list of things we measure ourselves up against- here’s mine.

What I Value- Honesty, loyalty, determination, empathy and understanding, warmth, humour, a sense of adventure, thoughtfulness and caring.

How I measure myself- Performance across all areas, social status, physical appearance, financially.

I wonder if the pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of value or self worth can be separated somehow and if this is possible just sometimes how would it feel?

tomtom

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All hinges on your own (ones own) personal description of excellence. Or in effect what your own goals are.

If they’re 9A or 9c then unless you’re in thea handful of elite climbers then you’ll be disappointed!

My ‘excellence’ is far lower, Flexible, and kind of depends what I feel like doing :)

I find it interesting reflecting on this though... in climbing, I find clips/videos of people doing amazing hard things really quite inspiring (apart from parkour plastic blobbery:) ). But in my professional life (as an academic) I can find it quite depressing seeing great things and discoveries my peers are making..... (I frequently toy with deleting my professional twitter account for that purpose). I’m probably more worried about failure in the latter than former...

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say the idea of excellence and the joy of that experience can be entirely  separated from measurement of performance

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I promise I willread thatwhole post later, when I have time.

But, if performance is a measure of self worth, I’m fucked.

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Good thread again Dan.

I recognize the picture you paint and I've definitely been there but I think it's possible to enjoy a persuit of perfection without attaching it to ones self worth.

There are many examples I can think of from my own experience (trying to get a top score in yahtzee, trying to beat my pb on the cube) but the one that I think demonstrates it well is surfing. I don't surf so this may be rubbish and won't apply to everyone but  nobody really sees if you catch the perfect wave, you can't really tell anyone about it or compare your wave to theirs it's just nice on a purely personal level.

This is my second point.
I think you're projecting some of your own responses to climbing onto others. It's possible Jerry just didn't want to climb anymore. It's possible the line "I couldn't be the best so I stopped" is just a tale he's telling. If it were true he might have told a different story to protect his ego.

This would be a good question for Dave Mac to answer in his vlogcast thing.

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Cheers James, I think the post might have been a bit confusing. I’m in no way trying to point at others and say they are basing their self worth on performance. I am saying that performance in all areas of life, physical prowess, appearance, grades, money etc is the thing which we are judged by from a very early age and in this sense the thing by which we measure ourselves (some more than others). The example of Dave Mac’s apparently extreme weight loss could easily be replaced by thousands of other athletes losing those pounds to achieve the grade or in Sumo gaining those pounds :)

I did use my own experience and quite personal thoughts as a vehicle to show how this affected me over the years, in someways to exactly avoid that trap of projection. Projection would be if the problem of ‘low self worth’ was relatively unacknowledged and I went around implicitly or explicitly belittling others to the same degree as I felt about myself. E.g. watching someone on (say power band) continuously fail on the last move and saying ‘look at that useless
C🙄nt, he’s as weak as piss’ or alternatively watching someone do laps on it and saying ‘yeah, he’s got it wired but what’s he ever done on grit, the show pony’. There’s plenty of threads on here where that’s apparent, including the current debate about whether someone or another should be on the 8b+ list. Cos that is the way we measure our worth Jack 😉

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Ps - if Jerry didn’t enjoy the feeling of burning others off, then I’m not sure who did / does 😂

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There are a lot of interlinking but somewhat distinct things in your post, and i find it a bit tricky to work out quite what you're trying to say.

... and I went around implicitly or explicitly belittling others to the same degree as I felt about myself. E.g. watching someone on (say power band) continuously fail on the last move and saying ‘look at that useless
C🙄nt, he’s as weak as piss’ or alternatively watching someone do laps on it and saying ‘yeah, he’s got it wired but what’s he ever done on grit, the show pony’. ...

You can say/think those things whilst not thinking that whether they're a good climber or not affects their worth as a human (whatever that actually means). I think that I connect climbing performance with my own self-worth quite a lot, but I think I do it far less for other people than for myself - with others it's much easier to say "they're very good but who cares, they're still a knob", or "they're crap, but who cares, they're having a great time a being a nice person".

The anecdote about you not getting on with a training program  - including physically - seems rather by the by. If you'd got way better and come to the conclusion it wasn't worth it that would be more telling than not enjoying it and not getting better from it - in which case no wonder you preferred the other approach. One issue here is that it seems like there's maybe an assumption that you would only do the training or starving yourself for the boost in "self-worth" by doing the hard thing - but actually the process of being entirely obsessed with a goal is one of many people's favourite processes. It's possible to be "process orientated" where the process is heavily "goal oriented" if you get my drift...

My post now seems as wandering as yours, but maybe that's best ;)

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I think the vast majority of climbers are in the 'social and friendships' group as evidenced by the masses climbing severe at Stanage on a warm day, or the vast majority of routes at lead walls being <6a.

Are you interested in the pursuit of mastery in your climbing Dan? To me this seems to be aside from chasing grades and performance, and something not limited to climbing or sport, but a goal across many disciplines.

As an aside it sounds like you had a rubbish training plan  ;D

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Hey up chaps, Alex I get what you’re saying and I’m definitely not trying to say don’t diet or train. I’d say the opposite if that’s what you or anyone wanted to do that’s fair enough. I’d also say that it’s not about whether the training program was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ it was about the personal motivation to achieve success through performance and what that potential success was symbolic of. I would have ‘made the grade’. The point about getting better at climbing is important in that with this mind set the gap between current performance and ideal or desired performance is always remaining the same no matter how well you do. I’m not sure but maybe a few days or weeks after climbing 9a you might think to yourself ‘I can or need to do better than that’ and maybe draw comparisons between yourself and another climber who you feel is near your grade. For me beginning a training program based on a performance ideal e.g climbing 8b or 7C+ led to a constant striving or trying to hard, there was little or nothing enjoyable or natural about that process. However I do enjoy trying hard on a board and doing sit ups sometimes. Even if I had succeeded in my goal it still wouldn’t have been good enough based on that mind set.

Hey Tim, I think I am interested in Mastery as you describe it and I also think that there is a constant tension between that as an ‘ideal’ and a performance ideal. I’m not sure I agree about the vs punters on Stanage these days. They seem in the minority when compared to the honed yoga bods roaming round the depot measuring up against their mates, other customers and the colour of the problem. How many purples did you flash etc

petejh

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A lot of what you're talking about is discussed by (among many others) Prof Steve Peters. I gained a lot of awareness from reading and listening to his descriptions of the neuroscience underlying the emotions underlying the experiences you're describing.

I like many climbers used to be caught up with seeking performance for unhealthy reasons such as comparing myself to others or reaching a grade level.

Whether naturally through ageing, or through educating myself, I've reached a stage where I think I've pretty much cracked the riddle for me of why I climb and how I see myself relative to others.
I don't take notice of what anyone else is doing anymore, and I'm happy with just focusing on what I'm doing. I'm not some zen person - I have to take the avoidance approach. I ditch viewing facebook timelines, 8a.nu and other online content because it just does my head in. Some people can trawl other people's shit all day everyday without it bothering them it seems. I can't. 
Although now I can look at that stuff a little bit more than I could, before feeling a bit jaded, a bit fed up of people talking about themselves and having those unhelpful feelings of comparison creep in.

Learning values and truths is very useful for this sort of question. One truth that helps is 'I can always do my best and no more'. Simple and twee. But actually a very powerful concept when you dig into it and unpack it to undertand what it really means in day to day life including performance in climbing.

Perfectionism another common trait I come up against. Manifested in climbing by grade chasing etc. Again connected to self-worth and answered with the same simple truth as above.
Anecdote - people probably aren't aware how close all existing files for the N.Wales Limestone guidebook came to being thrown off the top of the little orme right after I'd finished it and before sending it to printers. Perfectionism and not wanting to fail meant I seriously contemplated taking 4 years of really intense hard work and destroying it! Glad I didn't though, Andy B would have killed me!
« Last Edit: February 22, 2019, 10:01:38 pm by petejh »

Doylo

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It’s a personal mission, stupid to compare yourself to others. Plenty of others don’t work and/or weigh 8 stone (scumbags). And as for seeking performance for self worth, isn’t it just that feeling at your best is a good feeling and fun?

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It could be more insidious than that tho man. Like the negative or self critical chatter or sense of disappointment when we don’t reach a previous best. We might not consciously say to ourselves I need to climb x to feel good about myself. But the measurement of performance as value is still there because that’s what we’re conditioned to do, pretty much from birth. Some people are blessed through genetics and nurture with a more stable and secure sense of self while others are anxious, fearful and uncertain about their identity or place in the world. For them it would be stupid not to measure themselves as it keeps the idea of what they otherwise might feel at bay.

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Cos that is the way we measure our worth Jack 😉

Sorry was merely adding to a list which I saw had some names missing possibly fitting the criteria. Wasn't measuring anyone's worth or whatever.

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Haha I wasn’t having a dig, just pointing out that a bunch of blokes working out who’s worthy or not of being on a list like that is a good example of making value based judgements on performance. In a way this doesn’t always have to be a negative thing. After watching you climb in the cave when we made that pilgrim vid, I had nothing but jaw dropping admiration both for the execution of the climb and clear skill and determination it must have taken to get there.

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Glad Doylo is here to lay down some common sense in this thread. I reckon if your of an anxious and uncertain nature it's possibly because of measuring yourself against others. As Doylo says its a personal journey man, nobody really cares how hard you climb except yourself ( obviously your mates will be pleased for you ).

I always think there's two different types of climber, those who feel like they have something to prove and those who don't.

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Right, I am not 100% what type of response you are after Dan, but this is something I really struggle with, so I will give a bit of a personal account to hopefully generate some discussion (obviously at risk here of sounding like an absolute case worth but I will be totally honest if my feelings and thoughts)

So this is something that I feel really effects my climbing and performance.  Trying to separate performance and my own self judgement. I really struggle to turn off internal chatter,self criticism and self worth. Sometimes I will get to the crag to try a project and be so anxious and frustrated before I get their that I can’t function. Obviously there is an element of comparing yourself against others, I feel that’s pretty much human nature, however, I don’t really think that is what drives me and I would very much say I don’t feel that I have anything to prove.

Where it’s comes from? I don’t really know, maybe it’s a product of childhood, always struggling in school (adhd/dyslexia) and been continually told I was under achieving, not good enough?!? Thus, I don’t really have a rational emotional response to failure!

Does this play a role in other parts of my life? Yes, on a daily basis.

Is it a mental health aspect rather than a climbing/performance issues? Most probably.

Is it worth it? Why do I do it? Yes I think it’s totally worth it, I have learnt so much about myself through climbing and utilised lessons learnt in other aspects of my life. I think having motivation and drive is also really important, and climbing facilitates that which I then use in other areas of life.

I would be really interested to hear people opinions, thought and strategies. (I have tried seeking advice, but the usual channels are pretty expensive).



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I would be really interested to hear people opinions, thought and strategies. (I have tried seeking advice, but the usual channels are pretty expensive).

The issues you mention are explained pretty clearly I think by Steve Peters, a professor of psychiatry who developed a model of the brain he calls the chimp model. He's employed by various UK sporting bodies to help elite sportspeople manage their minds in a performance context. Interestingly he's also a world champion athlete in over 65 category.
He's created a really good online resource -  if you search Steve Peters / chimp model / Troop you'll find lots of helpful resources that explain this stuff. If you prefer to read up on the subject he's written two books on how the brain operates in the sort of scenarios mentioned in this thread. 'Chimp Paradox' and 'Silent Guides'.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 11:59:24 am by petejh »

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Dan, do you think the anxiety and self worth issues are separate or the same? I recognise the feeling of anxiety before a redpoint that makes it hard to perform at my limit and there is lots of sports psychology focused on this. But I don’t feel that my self worth is lessened by feeling anxious before or redpoint, even if I attribute failure to this.

Edit: I understand it could be an issue if it constantly feels like a cause for underperformance, that a sense of low self worth could arise from it.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 05:17:52 pm by monkoffunk »

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I find this subject matter fascinating and have well and truly suffered at the hands of my own mind when it comes to reaching my potential or otherwise.
I often think this is linked to conflating my own value / self worth with achievement or performance.
 I think a lot of climbers are afflicted by this problem.
Arno Ilgner has written about this quite a bit and had strategies for overcoming anxiety in certain climbing situations.
It seems that having an internal locus of evaluation is the key (i.e. don't give a fuck about anyone elses opinion) , but this is super hard to maintain.
Was it John Redhead who banged on about how important it was to have authentic motivation for climbing? That also seems to ring true.
This topic is definitely relevant to mental health.

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Some great responses there guys, I’ll do my best to answer. Moo I know what you mean and agree with you and Doylo that it is a personal thing and no one really cares but your mates. Funnily I was just having that chat with rocket man along the same lines this afternoon.  But, saying there’s two types of people/ climbers is painting a very dichotomous picture and is something we usually fall back on when our views are challenged in some way. As well as not acknowledging the complexities of being a human being. I’m sure from a confident and secure position we can point to someone struggling and say there is ‘no sense’ to that they must be climber type B. You know the insecure neurotic ones. Deeper belief systems tend to be quite dichotomous and in people struggling often there is a lack of integration or balance in these. I’m either winning or I’m losing, I’m either loved or unlovable. So I’d argue that putting climbers into two camps is a pretty unbalanced view. 

Hey Dan, that’s a very personal post so good on you for sharing that and sticking your neck out. Much respect man. I wasn’t really after any answers in my post it’s just something I’ve been working with currently with sports people and mental health, so thought I’d share some ideas.
Firstly I think you describe an incredibly tough schooling where your particular difficulties were not understood and you were met with what sounds like pretty awful criticism which made you feel bad about yourself from an early age (this is a very common thing). ‘Significant others’ including parents, teachers and peers have a lot to answer for.
From a theoretical point of view I guess you could say we start forming ideas about ourselves and our identities maybe even before we are born, and certainly from those initial minutes of nurture. E.g. why the importance of skin to skin contact with parents is well recognised in newborns.
It is also recognised that we are born with a particular temperament and that parts of our personality development are hereditary e.g. anxiety sensitivity, obsessional tendencies and perfectionism. So a baby or child who has an anxious, obsessional, perfectionist temperament who is met with hyper critical parenting or schooling from an early age is pretty vulnerable to feeling shit about themselves.
Bowlby the famous psychiatrist / analyst who developed attachment theory described the way we begin to form ideas about how we see ourselves in relation to others and the world as the ‘internal working model’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_working_model_of_attachment
Everybody has one of these and some areas of therapy call it different things, e.g core beliefs in cognitive therapy or the unconscious content of object-relations of psychoanalysis. Take a common internal working model belief of ‘I’m not good enough’, this is a pretty fixed and solid idea of ourselves that may be developed and in turn lead to the coping strategies of frequent negative self appraisal and trying extra hard to achieve or make the grade to be recognised as ‘good enough’ both by ourselves (internal or moos ‘personal journey’) and others (external self - other comparison). You could say that we unconsciously learn to beat ourselves as a defence to others getting there first e.g. ‘no one can be as hard on me as I am on myself’
The internal working model is closely linked to how we form relationships and bonds with others (attachment style) which for approximately 40% of the population is anxiously, with the other 60% either being secure or literally not caring at all (non anxious avoidant). Probably best as another discussion.
Anyway the question of how we change this picture is a big one, while the internal working model is not necessarily fixed it is quite solid and tends to be our ‘go to’ sense of self (unless our sense of self is really disrupted e.g in emotionally unstable personality problems). So how do we address it? I’d say slowly, through insight and self compassion, positive ‘corrective experiences’ in relationships (most important), developing a secure base with someone through which to explore alternative ways of thinking and being / behaving. Not an easy but definitely an achievable thing which naturally tends to get much easier with age.

In response to monk, you can try and ask yourself what it is you’re anxious about and in what context does it happen, e.g. malham on a busy day. It might be little to do with self worth like you say. Anxiety or anxious arousal is usually a response to feeling threatened by something either internally e.g  ‘I can’t cope with this feeling of pressure’  or externally e.g. I’ll get scared and fall then look like an idiot.

Phew hope that makes sense 😬

Moo

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I didn't say there were two different types of people/climbers, I said there was two different types of climbers, which definitely relates to redheads statement about authentic motivation. I quite like that quote as I think the reason for doing something is as more important as the act itself.

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That’s still bollocks, even if the ‘mad clown’ himself did say it 😉

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I don't think it's bollocks at all, Moffat was very open about his competitivness and desire to be the best, that's what drove him and I think most people respect the fact he was honest about it. Fred Nicole seems to have very different reasons for climbing  and people respect him too.

What matters is that both have been honest about their approach to climbing, that's what I'm taking 'authentic motivation' to mean.

As far as trying to determine 'self worth' by climbing a piece of rock with an arbitrary number attached to it, that is complete bollocks.

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In that case I completely agree with you, if ‘authentic desire’ (to climb) in this case is about being congruent with our core beliefs. You can almost guarantee that anyone climbing to burn others off is doing so to maintain a fragile sense of self worth. Which I think was the point of Grimer’s fantastic ‘Boy’ film.

On the second bit, that is the point of the original post distilled.That determining self worth based on performance is a bollocks waste of time.

I had a look for ‘Boy’. You used to be able to watch it on bmc tv. It’s a shame it seems to have disappeared. I can remember Grimer as the dad saying ‘cmon boy! Try harder boy, your useless boy etc’ and Jerry rolling around in distress because he couldn’t get up that desperate 6b at Burbage north 😂
« Last Edit: February 24, 2019, 02:02:51 am by Dan Cheetham »

monkoffunk

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I doubt that anyone sits down with a calculator and works out their self worth based on previous achievements or non achievements. An awareness of how certain things make you feel probably means you can modulate how your self worth develops, however I think it’s likely that someone who puts a huge amount of effort into performance and progressing their personal limits will almost undoubtedly have some modulation of their own sense of self worth by what they do or fail to do. This may be for better or worse. I’m not sure it can just be dismissed as bollocks, it’s probably just something that just happens despite you, rather than because you’ve decided it defines you.

Hopefully it will be just one of many elements from life that define your sense of worth, so maybe you’ll make it up in other areas when you aren’t doing so well in climbing. Possibly it becomes a problem with climbers in particular who maybe tend to obsesses and overemphasise the importance of something pointless and arbitrary. Recognising this might help use it as a positive tool.

For example I can draw positives from my last failed session trying to redpoint current project, because I made a tiny bit of micro beta progress and had a great day out with friends, doing lots of moves on rock. Even though my primary goal of the day was the redpoint, and that failed, by choosing to focus on the positives of the day it becomes something that will in some small way improve my self worth, although it’s not something I ever actively set out to directly change or measure (if you ever could).

Sorry, another rambling post but hope it makes some sense..)
« Last Edit: February 24, 2019, 09:24:15 am by monkoffunk »

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This article makes some good points and advice on the subject:

https://www.brianmac.co.uk/mobile//articles/scni38a6.htm

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Good topic, I like it.

This sort of discussion is why I always bang on about "chase the route / problem / experience rather than the grade".  Of course then the route / problem / experience can be pretty damn challenging and require a lot of focus and effort and training.....but I'm sure it's easier to be motivated and maintain the focus when you're driven by that 'authentic desire'. Making that desire as personal and "true to self" as possible is key too, in my experience.


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I like this topic too. I remember Nick Dixon going through a phase (many years ago) of struggling with the feeling that his climbing was too driven by eqo; that is desire was becoming inauthentic (he may talk about this in The Power of Climbing?). I've always felt ego was a natural and even positive part of all human character.

I was terrible at sport at school - weak and clumsy - and it was genuinely a surprise when I started to realize I could be quite good at climbing. I used to say that if I'd ever climbed anything hard then it was largely by accident, in the sense that I was never that focused in setting and pursuing goals etc. I largely just climbed things I wanted to climb. But I would be stupid and disingenuous to pretend that there were never any psychic or emotional rewards from peer recognition etc. Like I said, we all have an ego. Its keeping them balanced that matters.

I think it helped that I was almost always climbing people who were much better than me, so I was never really under any illusions. Second, I think I was lucky in my childhood, it left me pretty secure in myself. I think I largely have my parents to thank for that, even if can't really point to what it is that they did.

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Great posts Monk  / Andy I totally agree. without our ego we’d be missing a conscious mind, it must have become related to the word egotistical over time and have developed negative connotations. After all ‘egos must be like arseholes, everybody has one’. The self - worth thing is a bit misleading. I’m not sure it’s a decision someone consciously makes to measure themselves, but an unconscious reinforcement of a pre conditioned sense of worthlessness or not being good enough. The strive for achievement would be a coping strategy to deal with that. Although I can think of that character in catch 22 that is constantly weighing up himself and others in terms of ‘black eyes and feathers in his cap’

On another note I quite like this classic poem:
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.
 

tomtom

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Larkin was a miserable c*nt though...

Bradders

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I think when you dedicate yourself to something it's only natural that you form part of your identity and, therefore, self-worth around both the activity itself and your level of success in it. In fact I would say doing so is a healthy and positive step, in the sense that performing at your best requires a certain level of inate personal drive; I.e. if your goal is to climb problem X and you convince yourself that you are capable of doing so you stand a much better chance of doing it than if you think it's impossible!

Personally I've often felt a sense that I can only describe as 'I'm not the climber I should be', which really translates as 'I've not done the things I believe I'm capable of'. I view this as a good thing; it's my subconscious telling me I need to try harder!

Where it becomes a problem is when your expectations of yourself become disconnected from reality, and that's why comparing yourself to others is such a bad idea.

It’s a personal mission, stupid to compare yourself to others.

I wish I could say I always have this attitude to climbing, but I don't and it's something I've really struggled with.

The most stupid example I have was whilst trying a boulder called Vicious Streak at Caley last winter, a problem which was right at my limit at the time. I'd got some beta from a friend who'd tried it with one or two others recently but otherwise it hadn't really had any attention for years. I started trying it, mentioned it to a handful of people or others saw me at the crag trying it and before I knew it it had seen 3/4 ascents in the space of a few weeks. I felt like I'd been robbed! The fact that the others who'd done it were all both friends and far superior climbers meant little to me, I just felt totally jealous and frustrated at my own inability to get it done. I didn't want to burn anyone else off, I just wanted to do it!

This was an example of my self-drive and value being clouded and intensified by comparison to others, and it wasn't helpful at all. I've since gotten a lot better at separating these things out but it's still an issue. The main two strategies I've used for this are 1) getting really focused about what I want to do, I.e. sticking with the problems that I care about as opposed to just going to try the latest thing on Instagram, and 2) just trying to be genuinely happy for other people when they get things done, and turning that into inspiration for my own endeavours!

All that said, I do think comparing yourself to others can have some positives. As Dave Macleod points out in 9/10 climbers, if all your mates climb grade x then you probably will too.

Of course, none of that has anything to do with how you define yourself as a person in the round, which is surely taking it a bit far. I mean climbing for me has innumerable side benefits in terms of health and fitness, amongst other things, but I think that's where it's really important to have other things in your life beyond your chosen activity which help you define yourself, e.g. job, family, spouse, other interests, etc.

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Interesting stuff Bradders, I believe it does link to how a person defines themselves in the round. Particularly the higher level the ‘athlete’ the bigger the correlation between sense of self and performance.

 

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