I Got to the Top of the Wall and Couldn't Jump

I was thirty-five feet up the wall, looking down, when I realized I couldn't make myself jump.

I'd joined the climbing gym that morning – something I'd been telling myself I'd do for more than ten years and kept finding reasons not to. Part of it was exercise and getting out of the house. Part of it, if I'm honest, was a fear of heights I'd been quietly carrying around and figured I should finally do something about. A nice woman at the front desk checked me in and ran me through the training. Turned out we were the same age, which was its own small relief – I'd half-expected a room full of twenty-two-year-olds who were already in great shape. She showed me the harness, showed me how the auto-belay works, watched me clip in once to make sure I had it right, and then she walked off.

She wasn't there to cheer me on. She didn't hang around to make sure I made it up the wall. She watched me get the harness on, said it looked good, and left me to it. So I started climbing, alone, wishing the whole way up that somebody was standing down there keeping an eye on me.

If you've never used an auto-belay: you climb to the top, then push yourself back off the wall and basically jump. The line catches you, slows you, and you swing back in and settle to the floor. Simple. I watched videos of people doing it a dozen times before I signed the waiver. I understood it completely.

And then I got to the top – I'd climbed the whole thing in about a minute and a half, faster than I had any business doing – looked down, and my heart was going a mile a minute. I can't do this. I cannot jump off this wall. It hadn't once occurred to me, on the way up, that getting up was the easy half. My anxiety was through the roof. I climbed back down until I was maybe five feet off the ground, and from there, finally, I let go. It was genuinely terrifying to me.

It's good that she walked away

That was a week ago, and I've been chewing on it since. I've been back. I'm still climbing, and now, jumping. But two things have settled out of the reflection.

The first: it's good that she walked away.

I wanted someone there so badly in the moment, and I've come around to thinking the absence was a gift. Because when you're at the top of the wall, nobody can jump off it for you. Nobody can climb back down in your place. I had to meet that on my own, and I did, and I'm glad it happened that way instead of with a friendly voice talking me through it. Some things don't transfer. You either find out you can do the thing, or you don't.

The second thing took longer to see: I hadn't done the work before I ever touched the wall.

The discipline happens before you put on the harness

Here's what changed. That first Monday, I got to the top, panicked, and spent the rest of the session jumping from a third of the way up. By Friday – four days later – my goal was simple and specific: climb to the top, jump off, three times. I made it twice. The third time my arms were shot and I didn't get all the way up. But I did better, and the reason I did better had nothing to do with my arms or my grip.

It was that I'd spent the days in between rehearsing it in my head. I'm going to climb to the top. I'm going to jump. I've used this harness, I know the system works, and I'm going to discipline myself and do it. Then yesterday I went back and climbed to the top and jumped off six times.

I'd read, before I ever set foot in the place, that a big part of climbing is the mental discipline of it. We're nearly all afraid of falling from a height – it's a completely reasonable fear – and the work of getting past it doesn't happen on the wall. It happens before. Before you put on the harness, before you clip in, before you climb. If you want to actually make it up and make it back down and be safe doing it, that's where the real preparation lives.

I'm not a climber. A week ago I'd never been on a wall. But I've spent more than twenty years around leadership transitions, and it's the same pattern.

The first eighteen months are always the hardest

There's a study I read years ago that has stuck with me: the first eighteen months in any leadership role are the hardest, no matter how much experience you bring to it. Doesn't matter how many teams you've led or how many times you've done it before. You step into a new organization, or you get promoted, and for roughly a year and a half it's hard. It's hard to build trust. It's hard to even figure out everything that needs doing.

And what bothers me the most is that people tend to quit management jobs eighteen to twenty-four months in. They go through the whole brutal climb, and then bail right before it gets easier. It gets easier precisely because of the time and effort they put in to build the trust, get the team working together, and learn what the job actually is. They do the hard part, and they walk away one move from the top of the wall.

You already know how to prepare for hard things. You build the deck before the board meeting. You rehearse the talking points before the conversation you're dreading. You run the pre-mortem before the launch. You're good at it. The trouble is that all of that preparation is aimed at the work – and almost none of it is aimed at you. Nobody preps for the eighteen months. Nobody sits down ahead of time and says: this is going to be hard, and it's only going to be hard for a while, and I'm going to come out the other side of it and make something good with these people.

That's the step that gets skipped. And when you skip it, the anxiety spike comes and it takes you completely by surprise, thirty-five feet up, with nobody nearby. Do the work beforehand and the spike still comes. But you've already decided who you're going to be when it does, and you can stay calm enough to get your feet back to the ground.

That's my reflection this week. I climbed six times on Monday, and I feel good about it. Friday I'm going back – I go Mondays and Fridays now – and I'm shooting for seven. Just a little bit better every time. That's the whole goal.

I hope that can be your goal too this week. Just a little better every time.