Strong Mind

The conversation dives into leveraging mental training to enhance performance, particularly in climbing. Key topics include the power of visualization and self-reflection in optimizing physical skills. They discuss the concept of flow and the significance of a strong mindset for achieving peak performance. Insights into a comprehensive climbing performance course reveal its inclusive design, integrating mental techniques for climbers of all levels. Additionally, there's excitement for an upcoming performance psychology course, offering structured support for personal growth.

Dr. Michael Melnychuk, a neuroscientist and climber, discusses his research on brain plasticity and the relationship between breath and brain activity. Dr. Sundar Balasubramanian, a cell biology researcher, specializes in breathing exercises and their impact on well-being. The podcast explores the benefits of breathing practices, the convergence of Eastern and Western traditions, and the physiological, cognitive, and emotional benefits of meditation and breathwork.

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, 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 windsurfed 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, Resilience By Design and The little Speck of Life. We talk about Mike's upbringing, how he got out of a poor socioeconomic background through climbing, his TV work with the Osbournes, NLP, placebo, the power of the mind-body connection, sub-conscious processing, hemisphere differences and many other less-discussed areas of psychology.