The confidence - values link
I listened to an amazing podcast during lockdown (in fact I listened twice).
Professor Steve Peters is a psychiatrist and famous for supporting British Cycling and key people like Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton to victory. Steve Peters developed the Chimp Management Mind model (first written about in the Chimp Paradox and since then the Silent Guides and The Hidden Chimp - the latter two aimed at parents and children).
In a nutshell the Chimp model looks at 3 different parts of the brain:
Chimp system (frontal): This is the oldest part of the brain and what we share with our hominid ancestors. It is responsible for our feelings, emotion and impulses.
Human system (limbic): We develop this part of our brain when we’re about 2 and we start to ask why. It’s responsible for reasoning and logic. It is also 'who you are'.
Computer system (parietal): This starts out as an empty hard drive when we're born. Over time we start to feed habits, beliefs and behaviours into the computer.
It is natural for every system to be working at some point, the key is to identify which and when, particularly important when we’re climbing (or in fact in any challenging situation in life). The chimp is both our best friend and our worst enemy. It cannot hide because the human system hears everything (interestingly this is one of the reasons we can sometimes feel better after a night’s sleep - because the human and chimp speak to each other). The model suggests we must nurture our chimp; allow it to exercise, process emotions and have a conversation.
It’s much easier for the chimp to be calm when we take time to relax, but what happens in challenging situations?
Where things can go awry is when the chimp runs the show. We’ve all been there and it’s very evident when children have tantrums but as adults it’s also the case when we’re flooded with emotion. Conditioning and life experience are different for everyone, meaning the human system has to work harder for some later in life to learn how to reason and we can learn how to better nurture our chimps (we’ve certainly all got one!!). Over time our computer may have downloaded habits, behaviours and beliefs that are simply untrue, unhelpful, faulty and even destructive. So we need to program our computer with new helpful circuits and they must be reinforced until they are circuits that will run.
How do we do this?
The problem is that the chimp chases success. And this never ever ends. It’s a very fine line to tread, because if we base all our esteem on what we do and achieve, we may risk catastrophe for the chimp and even if we do achieve what we set out to do we just immediately chase the next thing. It always happens when we climb our hardest thing to date, we instantly question ‘what next’. Guilty!! The outcome: our confidence sits on a seesaw. There have been times in my life when, if I’m honest I’ve attached my self esteem to the level I’m climbing. We kind of know it when it’s happening. On an aside I watched a brilliant Taylor Swift documentary ‘Miss Americana’ (not really a big fan normally, but she’s a very interesting person) on Netflix. She talks in depth about the double edged sword of basing her esteem on the success of her music, which she did for the early part of her career. Yes it led to success, but there was a cost.
One way to dramatically affect our confidence and reprogram our habits, beliefs and behaviours is to put time into understanding our values. Values are the way that we get peace in ourselves. Steve Peters makes the point that we like our friends for who they ARE, not for what they do. We value their honesty, kindness, humour and so on. I’ve come to know I value peace of mind and will now do what I can to live my life more aligned with this (for instance, I set clearer boundaries, I think carefully what I want out of a climbing day, I make sure I get a good night’s sleep, I’ve vitually stopped drinking all alcohol (yes actually!) and take joy in clearing my house of junk regularly (!) and so on - these are all better habits and behaviours that in the end support my climbing). And of course when I have peace of my mind, my climbing tends to go well! So it makes sense, that if are really in touch with our values, that we measure our progress according to how well we respect and meet our values, our confidence will grow and this has a knock on effect on our climbing.
It’s a fascinating podcast. Here it is.
Steve Peters: Managing your mind
So why not sit down with a pencil and paper and figure out your values (the podcast talks through it in more detail). What is important to you? Do your behaviours and habits support your values? If you get honest about your values, would this change some of your habits and behaviours? This is not an easy task - especially as your chimp may have a lot to say in the matter - but it is something that will lead to greater happiness and wellbeing. And those two things ALWAYS manifest well in climbing.
PS I recommend many of the podcasts on this brilliant BBC series called ‘Don’t Tell Me The Score’ with Simon Mundie. They are a series of interviews with famous sports people and how the lessons they learnt in sport can be applied to life in general (Alex Honnold is on there with the theme of ‘fear’).