Strong Mind: Recent Episodes
Hazel Findlay
Long-form adventurous conversations with experts in mindset, resilience, sport psychology, fear management, presence, attention, distraction, flow-state, performance psychology, well-being and more with professional climber and coach Hazel Findlay.
WARNING - we do talk about eating disorders in this podcast.
In this episode, Hazel speaks with Emily Harrington about her life as a professional climber from when she was a kid competing to now as a mother herself.
We talk about how she started climbing and how she fell into competition climbing. We talk about her struggles with having an eating disorder at a young age but how she recovered from it and how she thinks about it now. We talk about how she's stayed motivated throughout her climbing career and how she's managed performance anxiety and stress around big goals. We also talk about social media and external pressure. Then we finally talk about motherhood, how she's taken to motherhood so far and how she thinks about risk as a mother.
In this episode, I speak with Africa Brooke. Africa is a consultant, coach, strategist, and speaker with a unique focus: tackling self-sabotage and self-censorship. We talk about Africa’s path to working in this field, from her childhood in Zimbabwe and her journey with recovering from alcoholism. We talk about how to rebuild confidence, self-worth and self-trust even when you feel ashamed of things you’ve done in your past. We talk about taking personal responsibility and the difference between being a victim and victimhood. We talked about why self-censorship is such an important personal and social phenomenon right now and how insidious it is within the human psyche. We talk about social and emotional risk and the cost to self-trust when we lose our authenticity. Africa works with visible people in the public eye but I think that self-sabotage and self-censorship show up in all of us in different ways and each of us could learn a lot from this conversation.
In this episode, Hazel speaks with Allison Vest about her struggles and progress with mental training in climbing.
They talk about how she found competitions hard psychologically and how some of those struggles have carried over to outdoor bouldering which is her main focus. They talk about the gains she's made with her mindset recently and the work she still has left to do. They talk about her recent sends and the psychological tools she used for those sends. They talk about how to balance the desire for the outcome with being focused on optimal performance in the moment.
Join our new online course Performance Hacks: https://go.strongmindclimbing.com/performancehacks
In this episode, Angus Kille interviews Hazel about how to leverage mental training for performance and their upcoming course Performance Hacks.
The best way to learn more about the course and get first access when doors open on the 26th of June is to join the waitlist:
https://go.strongmindclimbing.com/early-bird
In this episode, we talk a lot about breath!
We look at the physical and mental benefits from 2 different perspectives with 2 experts in the field.
Join the waitlist for our new course Performance Hacks here
Dr. Michael Melnychuk is a neuroscientist and climber who has conducted seminal research on brain plasticity and how the breath and brain activity are interrelated. He has engaged in meditation and breathing techniques since he was a child, and his scientific work is heavily influenced by his practice. He has also been a rock climber for 30 years and suffered a near-fatal fall while free soloing, and because of this has a keen personal interest in Hazel’s methods which leverage the breath and mind control to overcome fear while climbing.
Dr. Sundar Balasubramanian is a cell biology researcher from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Medical University of South Carolina, USA, and is a renowned yoga researcher specializing in breathing exercises. He is the Founder & CEO of PranaScience Institute and the Yoga Specialist at the MUSC Health & Wellness Institute. Sundar’s Yoga research provided evidence linking salivary biomarkers and Yogic breathing (also called Pranayama). He studies how breathing practices could promote well-being in health and disease. His current studies include testing a Yogic breathing app for cancer survivorship funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has developed several tools to improve the practice of Yogic breathing for employee wellness, cancer survivorship, ageing, and scleroderma. Sundar is the author of four books and several book chapters and his popular TEDx talk has over 1 million views.
Resources:
Jiri Balas' fascinating study on hormonal response to potential fall distance (adrenaline, catecholamines, skipping bolts):
Kox's study of Wim Hof Technique on e-coli toxemia challenge; examines many of the same markers as Balas (above) and also cytokines (pro/anti-inflammatory markers):
Decreased blood lactate following respiratory training
Increased lactate (anaerobic) capacity with pranayama
Stuart Sandeman
Sundar's new app called Humma, for improving breathing with humming.
Lor Sabourin is a professional climber, mental training coach, and Training Leader for the Warrior’s Way, an organization that uses climbing-based mental training to optimize performance and improve mental health. Lor’s work is trauma-informed and they have just finished a Masters's degree in mental health counselling with an emphasis on somatic therapy and adventure-based counselling.
Hazel and Lor cover many areas with the main focus being mental training and Lor's work. They cover psychological risk, trauma, working with trauma and somatic therapy, resilience (and how climbing fosters resilience), how they define success in climbing and how we can change what success means to us, how to manage failure, self-worth, and self-love among many other topics.
This is the second part of a conversation Hazel had with Aiden Roberts about mastery, flow and motivation in high-level bouldering. Check out part 1 first if you haven't listened to it yet.
In this conversation between Hazel and Jeff Charno. Jeff is the founder and host of Being & Doing online conferences where he has interviewed more than 100 spiritual teachers, scientists, creativity gurus and thought leaders. They talk about awakening from our narrative egoic selves, spontaneity and connecting with an uncensored version of ourselves, flow, intuition, how we connect with our deeper freer selves and bringing awareness to how crazy our internal world looks sometimes.
In this episode, Hazel speaks with Cameron Norsworthy (PhD in Flow and director of the Flow Centre) about flow. This conversation is a little bit of a deeper dive into flow. Hazel gets Cameron to challenge some of the misconceptions and common doubts about flow. They also talk about barriers to flow, how flow differs from other areas of sports psychology, how we can access flow by learning more about it and whether accessing flow is more about upskilling or removing barriers to flow. How finding flow in life doesn't have to just be about performance but also more of a lifestyle or life philosophy.
In this podcast, Hazel speaks with musician, researcher and lecturer in philosophy of mind Lauri Jarvilehto. This is a more academic conversation but there are also practical takeaways.
They talk about what intuition is, how intuition isn't always correct, creativity and intuition, and the difference between system 1 (non-conscious mind) and system 2 (conscious mind). What processes in climbing require systems 1 and 2 and how expertise allows us to commit to system 1, the difference between skill and conceptualising that skill, how system 2 can distract us (choking in sport), flow and good performances in system 1, the differences and similarities between flow and intuition, pattern recognition, the difference between instinct and intuition, how to better access intuition and flow with this knowledge.
In this episode, Hazel talks to windsurfer Sarah Hauser. Sarah is one of the world's best windsurfers and has the record for the biggest wave ever surfed by a woman. In this conversation, Sarah talks about maximising intrinsic motivation, managing fear, mental management tools, hypnotherapy, and flow state among other interesting areas of psychology. If you already know a lot about windsurfing you could skip the first 20 minutes.
This episode was recorded live as a SHAFF (Sheffield adventure film festival) event, so it's a little different in format compared to our other episodes. Hazel talks to Adam about what makes a good climber, flow state, his childhood, motivation, mastery, processes, competitions, outcomes, the problem of under-eating in climbing, big goals and much more.
To check out more about what we do head to strongmindclimbing.com
In this episode, Hazel chats with Mike Weeks. Mike is a serial entrepreneur, coach and speaker, specializing in resilience and peak performance for emergency services, police, special forces and elite athletes. After a decade of climbing around the world in full dirtbag style he briefly flirted with celebrity, leading Jack Osbourne up El Capitan for the TV series, Jack Osbourne Adrenaline Junkie, in between climbing various E8’s and falling off of E9’s!
Mike currently lives in Bali, Indonesia, where he runs regenerative agriculture projects, restoring polluted rice paddies, cleaning river systems and developing a centre of excellence for farming. When he’s not rescuing far too many stray dogs (six and counting) he surfs whilst dreaming of rock and his next book. He is the author of three books, Un-train Your Brain (Vermillion), Resilience By Design (Wiley) and The little Speck of Life (self published)
In this episode, Hazel talks to former pro-climber Mason Earle about his journey with ME/CFS. Mason was living a life full of adventure before almost everything was taken away from him by a debilitating illness that he still doesn't fully understand. Mason is extremely smart and insightful and his story and perspective is a stark reminder that we shouldn't take what we have for granted.
02.26 | Reminiscing on climbing
03:36 | How his illness has made him a better person
04:15 | What is ME/CFS where he is right now with his illness?
6:52 | Cranial traction improving his symptoms
12:00 - 16:00 | How it started and how the nightmare unravelled
16:21 How does Mason endure so much suffering, how does he keep fighting
18:52 | Was the fear that this was ‘forever’ always there?
How does he weigh the consequences of his actions having this health condition
21:00 | Does his climbing experience help him manage the consequences in his illness?
24:00 | Where he gets his feel-good chemicals from these days
25:50 | What is his view on gratitude?
31:27 | How does his illness affect his sense of identity
How does he deal with his health condition
36:14 | How much responsibility can he take over getting better?
42:50 | Is he still climbing?
44:41 | How does he maintain his personal relationships?
48:00 | Toxic positivity
49:30 | Mental health and its importance for everyone
54:03 | What has he learned in the past four years?
In this episode, Hazel and Angus Kille chat about fear of falling.
They talk about
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what fear of falling is and discuss some nuances and misconceptions around it
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how fear of falling holds back so many climbers
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how culturally we've neglected to address this in the right ways
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how easy it is to get fall practice wrong and how this has given fall practice a bad reputation
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self-awareness as the missing ingredient to effective fall practice
If you'd like to learn more about fear of falling join the waitlist for Strong Mind's upcoming course and we'll send you 6 free videos in fall practice training. GO.STRONGMINDCLIMBING.COM
In this episode, Hazel speaks with climber, ex-base jumper and all-round adventurer Tim Emmett. They talk about Tim's relationship with all the risky activities he gets up to and what attracts him to sports with consequences. They talk about the extra risks in base jumping and how he has justified those risks in the past. Tim talks about being ready to walk away and focusing on controlling every controllable. Then they talk about why he eventually gave up base jumping. They then spend the final portion of the podcast focusing on Tim's recent process of trying to climb his hardest sport route which he hasn't yet done. Tim has been sharing a lot about this journey on social media which has been really positive but it has also added external pressure. He talks about how he's managed that and how he's tried to stay positive despite having not done the route.
Show Notes
0:00 | Intro
4:52 | Conversation Start / Catching Up
7:38 | Is Tim an adrenaline junkie or is he chasing flow?
9:48 | Why do all these risky sports such as base jumping, climbing, mountaineering and free-diving?
13:09 | The common thread between all these sports is that they all have consequences
18:49 | Talking about his experience on Meshuga
19:50 | Closing his eyes as a way to focus
28:05 | Tim’s closest calls base jumping and climbing
31:04 | Witnessing a fatality on Tim’s first-ever time base jumping
32:54 | How Tim justified the risk - "I’m different"
36:45 | Fatalities in base jumping
39:58 | How to walk away when it doesn’t feel right.
49:28 | Why has Tim gravitated towards so many diverse activities
52:39 | Talking about flow in sports
55:06 | Accessing flow in fast sports
58:21 | Wim Hof breathing
63:12 | Era Vella (his recent 9a project) - the overall story and why he picked this route
66:22 | How sharing the journey has been really fun but also added pressure
69:32 | How his positivity has been tested during this process
70:15 | The use of positive affirmations to bring positivity and psyche
71:49 | Tools he’s been using in the moment
81:47 | How sport climbing made him cry when all the other terrifying stuff he’s done didn’t make him cry*
83:37 | Everything he’s done to manage his psychology during this process*
88:57 | Whether he’ll go back
91:44 | Tim’s lucky mantra
95:18 | Focusing on what you can control
96:49 | Why he wants to go back
103:03 | Outro
In this episode, Hazel speaks with race car driver coach Ross Bentley about how he uses psychological tools and strategies to help drivers perform at their best.
0:00 | Intro
4:24 | Intro to his career as a race car driver and now a coach
8:17 | Explains the challenges of race car driving and what it feels like
13:52 | What does it mean to perform well as a race car driver - what does that look/feel like
18:39 | Analysis versus intuition
25:42 | What are the hurdles to performance - self-belief
30:36 | What is intuition and his concept of ‘driving stupid’
37:53 | Managing competition - focusing on your own performance over results and the results of others
41:46 | Use of ques to keep on task
45:57 | The use of ‘sensory input sessions’
49:54 | The concept of trying too hard and what’s wrong with it
58:17 | The concept of ‘letting it happen’
59:31 | Trust
1:06:37 | Motivation and why extrinsic motivators can be dangerous
1:15:30 | Motor racing as a macho sport that historically hasn’t valued coaching and psychological training (remind us of anything?)
1:20:54 | Outro
In this episode, Hazel and Angus speak with Emma Wood, one of the great minds working in the space of psychology in our community. We talk about sports psychology for competition, what we can all learn from how competitors manage their mindset and attention under pressure, problems with how we approach psychology in climbing, how our community could be better at educating, understanding and welcoming psychological concepts, why don't instructors and guides get any training around psychological concepts (?!) trying hard, effort and how this can be trained, winning mastery and competition and how to balance them all, process versus outcome, self-awareness and psychological tools to manage stress, fear and pressure and much more. Emma is always a joy to speak with and one of our most trusted thought leaders working in this space. If you're already a member please go to the members-only RSS feed to listen to the whole conversation. Head to https://www.strongmindclimbing.com/podcast to become a member!
Show Notes
00:00 - 2:24 | Podcast introduction
3:24 | Emma’s introduction.
4:05 | What is hypnotherapy, and how compares to coaching
8:28 | Training as a psychologist, how to work with a climbers' mind
11:40 | Psychological research in climbing and in fear
14:10 | The distinction between rational and irrational fear and why it’s not that useful
17:00 | Why don’t instructors and guides have any training around psychology?!
21:51 | Mental health crisis training, trauma, ingraining fear and getting fall practice wrong
28:09 | Competition climbers and their psychological challenges
30:29 | Youth comp climbers what do pushy parents look like these days
32:55 | Shifting a competitor's mindset - mastery over winning, process over outcome
36:00 | How to balance the desire to win with a learning mindset
37:09 | Do external motivations help you try harder or not?
41:00 | Motivations that distract us and the role of desperation
42:00 | Trying hard as a skill
45:56 | Healthy and unhealthy competitiveness
47:55 | The relationship between confidence and performing well under pressure
For the second half of this episode visit https://www.strongmindclimbing.com/podcast and become a podcast community member for $8 a month.
In the second half we talk about: Mindtools and psychological strategies Emma teaches competitors to prepare them for the unknown of comp routes, managing confidence, and visualisation. Angus talks about his visualisation practice for trad routes, strategies for introverted competition climbers, self-awareness, how life stressors affect our psychology, reframing fear as an opportunity, fear as a performance aid, public speaking
In this episode, Hazel speaks with free-ride world champion Lorraine Huber about her journey to win. At first, Lorraine had a lot of anxiety around competing and focused all her attention on the podium. Through mental training and mindset shifts she learnt how to find flow and joy during competition and which enabled her to ski at her best. Lorraine is a true testament to how important the mind is in sport and also that we are all capable of training and changing our minds.
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in climbing, sport and life in general. Check out strongmindclimbing.com for more information on our coaching, online course and upcoming membership programme.
0:00 | Episode Start
0:06 | Intro
2:14 | Conversation Start
3:34 | Her Ski Career
6:49 | Social Media and Professional Skiing
11:33 | Describing the freeride world tour
15:44 | Visualisation
18:13 | Dangers
21:47 | How she used to get very anxious when competing and focused entirely on the podium and let external stressors affect her
24:18 | How she learned to focus on the process
28:56 | How she emotionally let go of the goal
31:48 | How she found flow by creating the right challenge level
32:48 | How winning became a bonus
34:35 | More advice on how she let go of the desire to win especially for young people at the start of their careers
37:19 | The benefits of big goals
39:35 | Mantras “I’m here to learn, grow, find flow and enjoy the process’
43:56 | The essence of mental training
46:24 | Fear-based motivation
47:13 | Managing attention
49:55 | Pull vs Push
55:26 | Confidence
56:22 | Self-kindness and being a good inner coach
1:06:43 | Deliberate practice
1:09:33 | Self-awareness, being an observer and distancing from thoughts
1:11:36 | Tools to use in the moment to stay in flow such as keywords
1:18:46 | More on visualisation
1:24:22 | Analysis vs letting go
1:26:09 | Pre-performance rituals
1:28:12 | The body is the pro athlete
1:31:47 | Why we neglect the mind in sport
1:39:05 | End Conversation
1:39:10 | Outro
This is the first part of a long conversation with Aidan. We mostly focus on mastery, goals, motivation and direction in climbing. To access the second half of the conversation where we further explore mastery, discuss flow in bouldering and talk about how Aidan focuses become a Podcast Community Member at strongmindclimbing.com/podcast
0:00 - 6:54 | Intro and chat about the Strong Mind Podcast Community
6:59 - 11:00 | Chit chat
11:01 - 13:58 | Aidan and Hazel’s routine
13:58-19:13 | Pro climbing and balancing time
19:13 - 33:17 | Game theory and Instagram, body image and objectification
33:17 - 39:02 | Podcasting
39:02 - 41:21 | Aidan's goals, motivations and finding his limit
41:21 - 46:42 | Burden of Dreams
46:42 - 50:00 | Gravitating towards a style niche versus being a broadly accomplished climber
50:00 - 58:44 | Mastery in climbing - what is it and do Aidan and Hazel have different conceptions of mastery
58:44 - 1:03:55 | Collective mastery and the difference between mastery and difficulty
1:03:55 - 1:05:16 | Exposing weaknesses
1:05:16 - 1:06:13 | Enjoyment and preferences in climbing
1:06:13 - 1:08:16 | Tools to understand where your motivation comes from
1:08:16 - 1:11:39 | Aidan’s aversion to extrinsic motivations
1:11:39 - 1:14:57 | Authenticity
1:14:57 - 1:24:45 | Psychological traps in goal setting and the projecting process
1:24:52 - 1:28:29 | Outro
In this episode, Hazel speaks with professional free diver Miguel Lozano. Free diving has to be one of the more psychologically uncomfortable sports you can do and Miguel has learnt a lot from his time mastering depth and holding his breath!
Start > 8 mins - talking about parenting
8 mins > explaining freediving
16 mins > dangers of freediving
18 mins > how to equalise the ear
21 > managing the urge to breathe, mental training and similarities between free diving and climbing
23 > dissociation and hypercapnia as the urge to breathe, diaphragmatic contractions
26 > knowledge, adaptation and physical training as sources of confidence
29 > matching psychological discomfort and physical ability
32 > passing out, blackouts and death in freediving, managing risk
34 > managing external pressure and the desire to beat the record
48 > mental training tools, visualisation, connecting to sensory information
50 > how to relax as much as possible, only using the muscles that you need
52 > breathwork
58 > flow state and focus
60 > negative thoughts
63 > progression in freediving
65 > mental preparation before a dive
69 > how has what you’ve learnt in free diving helped you in other areas of life?
74 > learning from other sports
Hazel talks to Sue Jackson about flow, mindfulness and performance and how they all relate. Sue is a psychologist, researcher and mindfulness practitioner. She has a phD in flow and carried out the first in-depth qualitative investigation of the experience of flow by elite athletes. She studied under Csíkszentmihályi, who first coined the term flow and carried out the first research into flow as experienced by everyday people. Sue and Csíkszentmihályi wrote a book together called 'Flow in Sports' which was the first book addressing flow state in sport.
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in climbing, sport and life in general. Check out strongmindclimbing.com for more information on our coaching, online course and upcoming membership programme.
Welcome to The Strong Mind Podcast. Join pro climber and coach Hazel Findlay as she delves into adventurous long-form conversations with interesting people. Conversation topics include anything related to psychology, sport psychology, well-being, resilience, fear management, flow state, mindfulness and performance in sport and in life.