Your Everest Goal Will Take You To New Heights — You Need To Be Prepared Mentally

This is the second in a month-long series where I’m sharing my tips for helping you meet the big, audacious goals in your life. To start at the beginning, click here!

I never had Everest as a goal … until I did. Even after climbing mountains for years, Everest was not on my radar. I had not been intentionally working up to it, and it certainly was not the result of a lifetime of planning. The same can be true of any big goal in your life. It doesn’t need to take decades of dedication and meticulous planning — but once you zero in on your goal, it does take focus, determination, appropriate preparation, and the proper resources.

Once you have a deep understanding of your motivation for accomplishing your own Everest Goal, you’re ready to begin the real work: Planning and preparing for how you’re going to meet the challenge, and persevere in the hardest of times.

Tip #2 - Prepare Your Mind and Body

How do you prepare yourself for all of the trials and tribulations you will inevitably face along the path toward accomplishing your Everest goal? Let’s look at what it takes to prepare for an actual climb of the tallest mountain in the world.

No one should ever approach Mt. Everest as their first mountain. It comes with unique challenges — mental challenges and physical challenges.

Everest will try to break your spirit at one point or another, and your mind and body must be ready. Chances are you’ve never been walking along a ledge where one wrong move can send you plummeting. And you don’t want the first time you have that experience to be at 28,000 feet.

Though you may never be climbing above the clouds, your Everest goal will inevitably take you to new heights that will stretch you mentally and physically.

After researching and talking to successful climbers, business professionals and artists, it is clear that the successful people prepare both their minds and their bodies for sustained peak performance.

Mental

Mountaineering is 80% mental. At work and home, the importance of your mindset is even greater. Chances are, accomplishing your Everest goal will require strong mental fortitude and resilience.

Mental training involves putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and understanding how your mind reacts in those environments. You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You must train your mind to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity, focus with great intensity on the task at hand, and be resilient in the face of the unexpected.

What are your strategies for training your mind for sustained peak performance? Do you routinely find ways to get outside your comfort zone and develop the mental strength and courage required to do so? Do you consistently find ways to experiment and explore new domains? Do you seek information that challenges your most deeply held beliefs or your own status quo?

Your mental strength grows like any other muscle in your body. As you stretch, strain and challenge your mind, it bounces back with increased strength to take on life’s most challenging goals.

Physical

Climbing mountains requires a high level of physical fitness. Mt. Everest, for example, involved six weeks of intense climbing with long days and nights on the mountain. Climbers must have the strength to climb steep vertical slopes and the stamina to sustain 15-hour days at high altitude.

At work or in your personal life, you may not be scaling vertical slopes or making decisions at altitude, but the physical endurance and stamina required to thrive with busy schedules, intense travel demands, and long days and nights is quite similar. And it requires its own focused physical training.

For Everest, climbers routinely train for years leading up to the expedition. This training includes strength and endurance training, time spent developing your skills on other smaller mountains, and time at altitude to understand how your body will react to the lack of oxygen.

To accomplish your own Everest goal, whether it be at work, at home, or on the side of a mountain, chances are you will need to train your body to sustain high levels of performance over time. You can be the smartest and most skilled, but if your body cannot sustain peak performance over time, your Everest goal will always be in the distance.

For some, it will be strength and endurance training. For others, it may be mindfulness practices such as yoga and meditation. Through your diet, you will nourish your body with energy. And to ensure proper recovery, nearly everyone should aim for a minimum of 7 hours of sleep each night to sustain high levels of performance.

Though you may not be a professional athlete, you are professional — and professionals prepare physically to sustain their performance.

Once you’ve prepared your mind and body, it’s time to take your first step. In my next post, I want to explore the importance of each and every step you take, and how identifying your Base Camp on the way to your goal will be key to success.

In the meantime, I encourage you to write down the mental and physical resources you’ll need to accomplish your goal and start to gather them together.