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Episode 03: Self Compassion in Climbing

Author – Allegra Maguire

It’s not uncommon to hear talking about mental abilities for climbing like grit, perseverance and mental toughness.  But self-compassion is almost never mentioned, despite being incredibly useful.

What is self compassion?

Self-compassion is defined as “An accepting, supportive, and non-judgmental attitude toward the self and all of the accompanying perceived shortcomings, mistakes, imperfections, and limitations”.

If you’d like to have an idea on your levels of self compassion, try doing this questionnaire!

Self-compassion questionnaire

This questionnaire you just did can give you an idea of your general trait-level self-compassion. The higher you scored, higher is your level of self compassion.

 

How does it benefit us?

Self kindness involves extending support and understanding to the self during setbacks, experiences of failure, or other challenging times, as opposed to engaging in excessive self-criticism.

This is also why I say that self-compassion is linked to self-discipline. It is often the case that self-discipline is achieved via excessive self-criticism. It has been shown many times that self-compassion is a much more constructive coping skill.

Common humanity is the recognition that making mistakes, experiencing failure, and encountering adversity are part of the shared human experience.

 

Finally, mindfulness involves keeping thoughts and feelings in a balanced awareness.  Rather than trying to control them through rumination and overidentification, or ignoring such thoughts and feelings entirely. Thus, when mindful, one is neither suppressing nor exaggerating, but rather viewing and accepting the experience for what it is.

 

Nurture or nature?

Self-compassion is considered to be both a state and a trait.  (State = felt in a given situation; trait = part of an individual’s personality, a predisposition due to personality traits, the influence of parents, and experiences). You can have it as a general tendency.  But, for example, at the same time you might feel the lack of mindfulness in specific contexts, like in competitions.

Children with secure attachment tend to have higher levels of self-compassion, but peers, friends, coaches and sport psychologists can influence its levels as well.

When applied to sport, self-compassion showed to be negatively associated with social physique anxiety, objectified body consciousness, fear of failure, and fear of negative evaluation.

This is also why both men and women athletes with high self-compassion have lower levels of rumination, pessimism, and perfectionistic concerns, which are maladaptive patterns of thoughts for wellbeing and performance.

Overall, there is no study yet that demonstrates directly that having high levels of self-compassion is linked to better performance.  But it is for sure a great coping skill to have in your pocket to climb harder, be safe and healthy.

If you’d like to see a concrete example of what self compassion might look like in climbing, check out my analysis on Stefano Ghisolfi here:

Stephano Ghisolfi and self-compassion