Lately I’ve been on a kick of “Just say, ‘Yes!’” when someone asks if I want to do something together. I have a fair amount of social anxiety, so it’s been a bit of a practice for me, to help me get outside of myself and get on with my life.
Recently, a guy I went to high school with, Dan, posted on Facebook, asking if anyone wanted to go do a via ferrata route with him at Nelson Rocks in West Virginia.
“What is a via ferrata,” you ask? It’s a sequence of what looks like giant staples, affixed to rock faces, that you climb, dangling off of rock ledges, attached by a couple of carabiners on a climbing harness, to a cable that is also attached to the rocks, often 100s of feet off the ground. Simple enough, right!?! lol
Dan had already gone once before, so he was comfortable with the whole thing. We’d talked about going one other time but was able to duck out of it before I actually had to pony up. This time, I gave my affirmative, that I would go. In my head, I knew I had about a 95% change of backing out on him because it stretched my comfort zone for high places far beyond the breaking point – from what I could glean, in this particular location, you would be climbing between 150′ and 200’ off the ground, with the “opportunity” to go as high as 280’.
This is when divine intervention played its hand. A friend I’d lost track of over the years, Dave, who is the keeper of my very best college memories, unexpectedly found a Facebook message I’d sent 3 years earlier, and responded to me out of the clear blue. Plans quickly formed for us to meet up again after 34 years, doing the via ferrata. Ok, high school friend, college friend, no way I was going to lose face on this one! So, I had to get serious, no chickening out!
Fortunately, I have an approach to this kind of impossibly-sized endeavor. I call it The Virtuous Competence-Confidence-Competence Cycle. Loosely, the theory goes something like this… you lay out a PLAN to methodically, incrementally, in a comfortably-uncomfortable fashion, increase your competence in a targeted arena of life, in this case, tackling soaring heights (lol – 280’ is soaring to ME!!). With each micro-improvement to competence comes a commensurate increase in confidence. This increase in confidence spurs additional attempts at greater levels of competence building, in a virtuous cycle of capacity building. Boundaries are nudged out consistently and continuously until you arrive at newer and higher levels of ability, what you will then experience as Your New Normal.
I was counting on The Virtuous Competence-Confidence-Competence Cycle to, literally, “Take me Higher.”
To continue on the journey with me, see Via Ferrata, Day 1: The Plan
Smarter-Not-Harder U 