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to believe that great accomplishments somehow make us more valuable. It may be true that success in business makes us valuable to the nation’s economy. It is inaccurate to compare a high-volume producer/consumer with an actualized human being. What about our true self-worth? Is our essential value as a person defined by our potential to generate cash or, for that matter, to climb difficult rock? Obviously it is not.
    Achievement, as a primary motivating factor, is a self-limiting trap. Our value systems have been shaped to equate our own deepest sense of personal worth with achievement, but the light of logic casts serious doubts on this mindset. Is a poorly educated or disadvantaged person intrinsically less valuable than a business executive? Does climbing 5.13 make us more valuable than an acquaintance who merely climbs 5.11? Few of us would answer yes when the question is put bluntly. Yet, this system is deeply programmed into the average person, and it controls his sense of self-worth. The more we think about it, the more misguided a pure achievement-orientated value system becomes.
    A warrior is a realist. He realizes that, in an absolute and external sense, he is no more and no less valuable than any other human being. Outside factors, such as other people’s opinions, change capriciously in response to complex agendas. They are not reliable sources of self-worth because they are here one day and gone the next. A warrior knows that the functional, day-to-day value of life and of acts must be decided personally, internally.
    The point is, a value structure tied to the Ego is an unconscious habit, logically flawed, and is out of tune with reality and our own natures. Ironically, not only is this value structure flawed, but it actually damages our ability to achieve those goals on which it is based, in our case, specifically, the goal of climbing harder and better.
    We face a paradox. We want to climb harder in part because of our desire to achieve. Yet achievement-motivation is tainted by the ploys of the Ego. In reality, it is the good feelings associated with achievement that inspire us. We will embark upon a process of striving indirectly for the external goals we may have. The Rock Warrior’s Way begins with breaking down our habitual, achievement-oriented mindset and placing our motivation on more solid footing.
    Breaking Habits
    Our habitual mindset feels comfortable, since it is familiar, but it draws from a shallow well. Once you carefully examine your adopted beliefs and achievement-oriented self-worth, their power begins to dry up. They lack the heart and the force that accompanies a true inner guidance system. One of the warrior’s first tasks is to establish an internal value structure that taps into deeper reservoirs of motivation. This structure will increase the power available to respond to challenges, in climbing or in any other aspect of life.
    Developing a new, internal value structure requires increased awareness, but the process of becoming aware feels threatening. New beliefs and new ways of thinking—by definition—threaten the comfort zone we build around ourselves through familiarity. This comfort zone is complex and full of defenses. It is composed not only of self-limiting habits, but of unconscious mechanisms designed to protect those habits from the harsh light of objective self-examination.
    Habits protect themselves by staying hidden or unconscious, but once noticed, their cover is blown. We begin to feel foolish for indulging in them. Once we’re aware and suspicious of them, self-limiting ways of being cease to be unconscious habits that produce automatic—and often negative—results and responses. They become part of consciousness, subject to revision and change. The mental energy that old habits once required is liberated, and the components of the old value structure become raw material for a new and powerful mindset.
    Prepare yourself to be challenged and to be uncomfortable