So, what are the takeaway lessons from a realllly bumpy day?
When you’ve laid out a competence-confidence plan for yourself, to tackle something new, something that has the potential to chuck you way wide of your comfort zone, there are going to be times when you don’t judge the situation correctly, when you OVERestimate what your next stretch goal should be. This is the larger, more potentially damanging error, to your continued progress, over making too small of stretch.
Biting off too much is one of the worst things you can do for your overall success. Your ego might push you into pushing yourself too far. You may not have enough experience or knowledge to gauge what is too great a leap.
The problem is, if you attempt more than you can manage, you risk causing yourself problems, and potentially, ultimate failure! You can hurt yourself and have to stop your progress, cold! You can wear yourself out to the point that you can’t continue. You can cause yourself so much stress that you now no longer enjoy the activity and its pursuit. And the worst, you risk blowing out your comfort zone sooooo badly, that you can’t make yourself get back up on that horse and continue to ride!!
In my case, I didn’t know that the next logical step, by the nature of it, was just too big of a leap – ignorance is ANTI-bliss! Sometimes you can’t know that is the case until you immerse yourself into your next micro-objective. This is when it becomes absolutely critical to adapt your plan, on the fly.
When you realize you’re in over your head, when it no longer feels that your next step is falling within your comfortably uncomfortable range, and that you risk your forward progress and momentum if you don’t pare back your next target, it’s time to stop, step back, and reassess your plan.
The goal is always to make your next micro-target goal one that stretches you slightly, in a comfortably uncomfortable fashion. I’ll be dissecting this further in a future post – just know that it’s necessary to find ways to chunk down a large step into smaller pieces, so that you can then attack those systematically, and continue to rack up wins for yourself.
It helped to have Dylan help me out of my jam, to talk me through calming down and to have a strategy for figuring out my “one next move.”
It led me to thinking that one of the things I could have done to bridge the gap for myself would have been to have gotten a guide to assist me the first time through that section, someone exactly like Dylan! Also, the next day when I was climbing, I figured out how to test out my next move before committing to it. I implemented a strategy of having a backup plan in place before I started my next move, in order to hedge my bets if things went south on me.
I, too, kept thinking, it would have probably been a good idea to go to a climbing gym ahead of time and fall off the wall repeatedly, in a controlled environment, to get myself comfortable with just the sensation of falling and coming to trust the equipment.
It’s necessary to think creatively of ways to overcome obstacles with small, often tiny, learning experiences, that allow you to build the compentence and confidence that you’re missing that will allow you to bridge your way to the next stretch goal.
Now, onto the upside of conquering your terror – EUPHORIA!!!!!!! This segment really pressed my comfort zone, almost to the breaking point – I was right on that razor’s edge of having blown it out so bad as to not be able to continue. If I had to do again, I would have stopped, regrouped and reformulated my plan in light of the enormity of my next challenge. I’ll likely recognize these potential failure points a little sooner in the future. Having tackled it, though, was then EUPHORIC!! I received the commensurate bump in confidence from having faced, and conquered, that wall!! What I knew myself to be capable of, after that, was increased MASSIVELY!!
And here’s my last takeaway for the day… The interesting, mindblowing thing is, when you start stretching yourself in one arena, like heights, you, unexpectedly, start seeing yourself in a new light and start stretching yourself in other profound ways – I’m now traveling by myself again, staying in places, alone, by myself, going and doing things by myself, not leaning on the hubby to help me get out the door and into the world – I have to figure out where I’m going, talk to people, go get my own groceries, get myself checked into my AirBnB, get things worked out.
And, it is a virtuous upward spiral, because as I then tackle those new things as well, my sense of myself grows even more, to include more and more activities that, also, used to be outside my overall comfort zone. The ramifications for this leveraged, compounding advantage are enormous!! What a sweet side-benefit!!
Onward… to Day #4 of dangling off’a stuff!! See: Via Ferrata, Day 4: Triumph!!
Smarter-Not-Harder U 