A couple of weeks ago, I climbed the Full Exum on the Grand Teton with my oldest son. It consisted of around 20 miles (only about 6 miles of which was ‘normal’ trail), somewhere between 14-15,000 feet of ascending and descending, and 19 hours from start to finish. We started at 2:15am and finished at 9:15pm. After arriving back at the camp my son joked to his siblings, ‘I think I broke Dad.’ Yet what he did was push me to discover what I could do.
‘It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.’ Sir Edmund Hillary
The journey took us from sweating profusely in the cool dark morning hours, to finally breaking into the early morning sun after a couple of pitches in the shade, to simul climbing through clouds with thunder and lighting wondering if the lightening was going to come closer, and knowing there was no way to go but up in order to proceed down the more traditional route.
How do we know we can do ‘it,’ whatever ‘it’ is in your life? Sometimes the answer is, ‘I’ve done it before.’ At others it may be, ‘I don’t know that I can, but I have no choice.’ But do we believe we can go through whatever life throws at us and come out of it more resilient, more confident of what we are capable of, and full of a rich sense of accomplishment for what we’ve done, and thus hopeful of what’s ahead?
The narratives in our brains are always either allowing us to push forward, stalling us out, or causing us to literally give up. What narrative wins out depends on our past stories, our community/support, our dreams, our resilience (which we can improve), etc. And just like our bodies can be pushed to limits we didn’t know were possible (from mountain climbing to lack of sleep in our parenting), so can our narratives. Coaching is all about discovering what we can do, learning to live out dreams we may have always held on to or given up on, and discovering just how far we can go, day after day after day.
So no matter what your ‘mountain,’ what really matters is conquering whatever limits you place on (or allow to be placed on) your ‘self.’