Leadership Lessons from the Peak: Part 1
About a month ago a good friend called me up with a proposition. The charm offensive began in earnest, “Christian, with all the transformation you’ve brought into your life, you’re the one guy I know who’d be up for a new challenge”. With my ego suitably stroked, I replied, “of course, what do you have in mind?” (Ignoring the knots in my stomach as I said it).
Two weeks later I found myself in Snowdonia, North Wales, climbing the UK’s most dangerous peak. So, there I am, a man who’s climbing experience hadn’t advanced further than taking the stairs in a typical corporate office, navigating my way up the treacherous rise of Crib Goch, a notorious approach to Snowdon, standing just under 1000 meters in height and infamous for it’s fatalities.
The approach was a mass of wet, slippery, vertical rock and the peak is half a mile of long thin, jagged rock, with sheer drops of 900+ meters on either side. One slip, as unfortunately many have found, and it’s over.
For my virgin climb, I was in at the deep end.
I have never felt fear like it. As we got ever closer to the peak, ever cell in my body screamed at me to go back. It isn’t possible because the ascendency to the peak of Crib is so vertical that once you’ve scaled it there isn’t any going back, not for a novice like me, and anyway, going back is not a choice I’ve ever made in my life, so whether it was courage or plain stupidity, I had to go on.
It’s in the experiences of our lives that we truly evolve, and there were many profound lessons on this 8-hour jaunt. The most profound of all was how we allow our current perception, which is always based upon the boundaries of our existing comfort zone, to feed the fear within us that we then allow to prevent us from becoming more that we currently are.
It struck me, as I clung to the rock with the wind howling through my hair, how many of us live our lives imprisoned by our false perception of the feeling of fear.
Of course, there are times when fear is there to protect us, and it’s motives are not entirely unreasonable when scaling dangerous heights, however, the same emotion applies whenever we attempt to do something different in our lives. It’s our perception of fear that defeats us. We perceive it’s telling us we can’t or shouldn’t do something, when in fact, in the vast majority of experiences in life, it’s simply telling us that we’re about to grow, about to do something we haven’t done before.
It’s with increased awareness and understanding that we can distinguish between the fear that is preventing us taking measures that risks our lives, and those which alert us to our growth. It’s the latter that we misinterpret, and that’s why Zig Ziglar described fear as False Evidence Appearing Real.
