The Rostrum, Yosemite Valley

Take a minute to analyze your fear of falling. Many students tell me they aren’t afraid of falling per se, but rather they are afraid of letting go. Once they are in the air, they feel resigned to the fall and the fear disappears. Others say they aren’t afraid of falling but are afraid of injury. They are afraid of what will happen after the fall, even if they don’t logically believe the fall is dangerous. These two kinds of fear are slightly different.

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Fear of letting go is a fear of losing control. Once you fall, you cannot control what you’ll hit, how long the fall will be, or how the belayer will respond. Your mind resists leaving the comfort of being in control. Once the mind is forced to give up that comfort, it shuts down and goes into a habitual passive mode.

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When you’re climbing a crux at your limit, you can’t control whether or not you’ll fall, but you can control how you breathe, where you look, how you relax, and how you hold onto the rock. You can also control these elements when you fall. You can’t control the fall, but you can continue to breathe, look down, stay relaxed, and maintain proper falling form. Making this shift from having attention focused externally on the fall and what you cannot control, to internally on these elements and what you can control, keeps you active in the process and helps you respond.

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The nagging fear of injury is created when your mind misinterprets the fall consequences because it does not have a base of experiential knowledge. Perhaps you have been injured taking a fall, which further distorts how your mind interprets falling consequences. One fall that caused an injury is not enough experiential basis for assessing falling consequences.

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If you allow your mind to assess the fall consequences without any falling experience, you will likely determine it to be either safer or more dangerous than it is. You cannot determine the fall consequences accurately from intellectual knowledge; you must have experiential knowledge. Your mind’s conception needs to be grounded in actual experience. Many kinds of falls can be taken in relative safety. Experiential knowledge of such falls is necessary in order to focus your full awareness on challenging climbing. Obviously, there are true no-fall situations where it’s best to stick to intellectual knowledge–you don’t want to be practicing these! However, you can gradually work through many types of falls, expanding your experiential knowledge and your comfort zone.

Learning converts intellectual knowledge into experiential knowledge. Learning also converts something stressful into something comfortable.

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Learning can only take place if stress can be processed into comfort. If there is too much stress, you will revert to habitual behaviors and contract in the face of the stress. If there is too little stress, you’ll act out your current behaviors with no need to change. You convert current behaviors into more effective ones by processing through stress. Finding the balance between too little and too much stress allows you to take appropriate risks, allowing you to learn while keeping risk of injury to a minimum.

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To find this balance, you need to diminish your mind’s interference and tune in to signals from your body. These signals will let you know how well the stress is being processed and when it is time to add more. This approach will keep attention in your body, making you become aware of how well it is adapting.

One critical aspect of appropriate decisions is they must create a learning experience and not an injury experience. Many climbers never determine if it’s safe or not to fall on a climb. They engage all climbing situations by doing all they can to avoid falling and don’t push themselves to the point of purposely taking a fall. When they do fall it’s an accident, due to a hold breaking or getting suddenly pumped, and little or nothing is learned. To learn and improve, however, you must intentionally push beyond what your mind thinks you can do. To do this, though, you must learn to distinguish between no-fall zones and yes-fall zones.

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Remember, even in “yes-fall” situations you can never make a risk totally safe or eliminate every possible negative consequence. All you can do is diminish the consequences by creating an appropriate risk, meaning one you fully understand and accept. You may be willing to risk a skinned knee from bumping the rock but not a sprained ankle from hitting a ledge. You may be willing to take a clean 15-foot air fall but not a 30-footer. Whatever the specifics, the key point is that you have a clear understanding of what you are committing to.

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Yes-fall zones are not just places where it is “safe” to fall. They are places where it is appropriate for you to risk a fall. An appropriate risk pushes you a little outside your previous experience level (with falling) but not too far. You must be able to fully process the experience and learn.

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No-fall zones seem self-explanatory: places where you shouldn’t fall because a fall could cause injury. But a no-fall zone might be one where a fall would scare you. Being a little scared is fine—-you can probably process that level of fear and stress. If a fall scares you too much, however, you’ll resist engaging a similar situation, stifling the learning process.

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Therefore, don’t just look at the objective consequences of a fall, but weigh the consequences against your experience taking such falls. I suggest practicing falling frequently and intentionally. This will help you distinguish between no-fall and yes-fall zones. The process for doing this will be outlined in future lessons. Only with falling experience can you properly determine no-fall and yes-fall zones. This determination is critical, because you engage these zones differently.