What does it take to flash El Cap? Babsi and Jacopo talk pressure, expectation, motivation, fear, failure and flow.

In this episode, I sit down with Barbara Zangler ( Babsi) and Jacopo Larcher to learn more about their ascent of Freerider on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. They both shared the same goal of flashing the route, however, only Babsi managed to achieve this, making her the first person to have ever flashed El Capitain. Hearing the story from both sides was interesting and unique. We discuss their motivations for climbing this route, what the road to get there looked like and what they both learned from the experience.There is a movie about their ascents on the Black Diamond website, you can follow this link to check it out! Link to video If you want to join our Thought of the week, follow this link.We also have a free performance psychology webinair you can sign up for today, just follow this link.- Timestamps - 00:00:00 - Intro and updates.00:06:24 - When did you both decide to commit your lives 100% to climbing?00:14:53 - Partnership and their climbing journey.00:21:27 - Strategic approach to climbing throughout the year.00:24:10 - Struggles of the first time climbing in Yosemite.00:34:04 - When did flashing freerider become a goal for you?00:41:25 - Did this goal have more meaning to you compared to others?00:48:46- How did you manage the pressure?00:54:15 - Jacopo’s fall on the boulder problem.00:57:25 - Babsi’s flow experience on the boulder problem.01:01:10 - Jacopo on supporting Babsi and managing his emotions after he failed.01:06:34 - Jacopo’s inner critic vs. practising self-kindness.01:09:50 - Babsi’s reflections after the climb.01:14:46 - Is happiness tied to achievement?01:19:27 - What lessons have you both learned from this journey?

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 course Performance Hacks. 🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here

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 https://go.strongmindclimbing.com/early-bird 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. Jiri Balas' fascinating study on hormonal response to potential fall distance (adrenaline, catecholamines, skipping bolts): https://repository.derby.ac.uk/download/c8973104899db7691ac8c30cf3465bbb48d572e7c222b8ec1eb529873b142ab7/209907/Balas_2016_Hormonal_response_during_climbing_accepted_manuscript.pdf 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): https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1322174111 Decreased blood lactate following respiratory training: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Urs-Boutellier/publication/13199745_Decreased_exercise_blood_lactate_concentrations_after_respiratory_endurance_training_in_humans/links/02e7e52cb02331649b000000/Decreased-exercise-blood-lactate-concentrations-after-respiratory-endurance-training-in-humans.pdf Increased lactate (anaerobic) capacity with pranayama: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321338797_Effects_of_yoga_Pranayama_on_lung_function_and_lactate_kinetics_in_sedentary_adults_at_intermediate_altitude 1. Mr. Feelgood magazine's recognition as seen here: https://mrfeelgood.com/articles/the-worlds-leading-breathwork-experts
 2. Our new app called Humma, for improving breathing with humming: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranascience.humma

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.