The Art of Making it Look Easy

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When we hear about hyperfocus, it is often described as an extreme form of attention given to something, at the expense of anything else. 

Conversely, business and well-being gurus are producing huge amounts of content with tips and advice on how to access “flow” as a positive state of mind - creating success and wellbeing. Whatever trend we choose to listen, it seems there’s common ground in believing there are moments when all our mind resources are focused on a single job and that feels pretty awesome. 

‘Being in the zone’ is a lot more than mindfulness: there is also awareness of the goal and certainty that every step is a valuable learning experience. It’s worth reminding ourselves that today’s performance has a significance in the future podium or specific result we envisage. That’s what some may call ‘focusing on the process’. 

It would be impossible for me to live in a perennial state of flow: to keep all my goals clear, all of the time, and to consider every action will be rewarded in experience and success seems very unrealistic to me. Sometimes failure feels like a crushing force against my motivation. Frustration turns into anger and, shortly after, the end result is most likely sadness. These are hardly the ideal conditions to remain focused on anything, let alone a specific goal. 

My focus often feels like being in a dark room with a head torch. This doesn’t happen when I’m climbing: with every move the light becomes brighter and everything looks sharper and clearer. To fail helps me ‘see’ what needs to be done: hyper focusing on problem solving each individual issue. More often than not, to achieve a particular type of climb, it requires some extra training and preparation and over the decades that seems to be fine with me. 

Motivation often exceeds individual abilities, so there’s a particular hunger to continue getting better and maximise performance - even as the years weigh me more than when I was firing in all cylinders. Feedback from failure is crucial, but it is also very important to continue learning how to go through frustration in order to increase resilience. 

When I heard Erin McNeice say that “everyone should climb, or at least try it”, I understood her point of view: to really try is to accept where we are today and then work purposefully to unlock the next level of complexity. The better we get, the more we can handle - physically and mentally. 

Erin’s genius has been to remain focused in becoming stronger in both physical and psychological skills, no matter how long that could take. Her grit and determination are truly outstanding. It would be too simplistic to say she’s hyper focused; I’ve had moments I doubted she was really human. Surely, no one can do so much work, always ready for the next session/comp/opportunity to grip the wall. 

In my humble opinion, Erin is a person who has achieved a certain wisdom that makes her an outlier - with exceptional results. She climbs in her own space and time, no distractions other than the occasional thought that creeps in when the stakes are high. In other words, Erin is definitely human, but a slightly different kind than the rest of us. 

One of the most repeated comments we heard when training at various walls was: “you made it look so easy”. It’s probably fair to say we invested many hours practicing exactly that: how to flow through the climb with the certainty of the next breath. By mastering the physical skills, we were paving the way to enable the mental space to think of the bigger picture: the goal, how to train better and remain colder than a polar bear’s toenails when it’s time to perform. 

Climbing is an activity where flow will happen for those who are willing to try: through purposeful practice, one day as we chalk up and clean our boots, the moves will ‘appear’ in the mind before you even get to the starting position. When the climb becomes a performance of time-bending, multi-verse space of individual bliss, the mind is calm and utterly confident. 

When you can’t have all your ducks in a row, climbing could be an option to not give so many ducks and focus on trying to ‘make it look easy’, no matter the grade of the climb. Anyone should feel like a hero throwing shapes on the wall, the mind totally calm whilst cruising to the top. The feeling of elation that comes after each effort (including the training, failures and frustrations) is most definitely worth experiencing.  I agree with Erin: everyone should really fucking try to climb their best, because the rewards of the process will develop your resilience and give you glimpses of flow in everyday life.