Mental training requires finding ways to regularly challenge the status quo, so we don’t fall victim to the mind’s comfort-seeking tendency. In the book Synectics, William JJ Gordon investigates the creative process. Creativity, by definition, is transcending traditional ideas to create meaningful new ones. So, creativity can help us think and act in new ways, challenging the status quo, to develop mental fitness. 

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Gordon states: ”When we live with the familiar system without questioning it, we lose our awareness of the unfounded assumptions which underlie the system and our acceptance of it.” One way that he suggests to access the creative process is by making the familiar strange. He says that “Making the familiar strange and sustaining that strangeness involves new ways to ask old questions.” One way that he suggests finding new ways to ask old questions is by playing with words. 

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We can describe climbing to locate particular descriptive words. Then, we can play with the words to create new meaningful ideas to help us be creative. For example, we can begin by asking a question: What’s familiar about climbing? What’s familiar is we climb by pulling with our arms and pushing with our legs. Next, we make the familiar strange by finding new ways to ask the question. We could ask: “How can we challenge this assumption of pulling with our arms and pushing with our legs?”

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The learning process cycles between order and chaos. We investigate the chaotic unknown and then return to the ordered known. The creative process takes us into the chaotic unknown. How we usually climb is ordered; we’ve developed habits of how to climb so we’re in balance and efficient. We upset that order by picking one familiar assumption, from the new question we asked, to create chaos. We identify the words we want to play with. In this case the words are “push” and “pull.” 

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We make the familiar strange by reversing what we do with our arms and legs; we push with our arms and pull with our legs. Climbing this way reveals new ways to climb. We may find that we need to heel-hook with one foot on a high hold, so we can pull with our leg. This automatically requires us to mantle with our opposite arm on a lower hold. We may feel stressed and inefficient climbing this way, but the point of creating chaos isn’t to climb more efficiently. It’s to climb differently than our status quo to find new movement patterns. 

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Next, we create order again by incorporating some of the movement patterns we learned. In this case, we incorporate heel-hooks and mantling with the opposite arm, creating balance between them. Our new familiar way of climbing includes opportunities to pull with our legs and push with our arms, rather than restricting arms to pulling and legs to pushing. 

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Finally, we continue our learning by cycling between order and chaos with other words, such as “slow,” “fast,” “static,” “dynamic,” “relaxed,” “tense,” etc. We create chaos in our climbing, learn important elements that can help us, and then incorporate those elements into a new level of order. 

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Mental training requires a constant awareness of the mind’s comfort-seeking tendency and intentionally creating chaos to challenge it. One way to do this is making the familiar strange on a regular basis. We play with words, so we can play at higher levels in our climbing.