Skills You Can Learn While Alpine Climbing

Climbing teaches you to focus completely on yourself, you're out in the fresh air and you're doing something good for your health - including your mental health. Health has become a megatrend, and not without reason: it influences not only our performance in sports, but our entire everyday life.

Alpine climbing allows me to grow beyond my limits and get to know myself in a completely different way. I can still remember my first alpine climbing tour quite well: mental cinema, little confidence in the equipment and rope salad at its best.

Three intense years later, I can say that alpine climbing is an experience for life.

1. Learning about and pushing boundaries
2. Discipline and perseverance
3. Dealing with setbacks
4. Trust in your own abilities
5. Keeping calm
6. Trust in your partner
7. Concentrate on the essentials
8. Valuing security
9. Remain humble

Especially on alpine tours, I reach my limits from time to time; but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. On the contrary, if you know your limits, you can push them if you stick to them - and that doesn't just apply on the mountain.

Everyone who tries alpine climbing will sooner or later realize: If you climb up, you have to climb back down. But I've also applied that to my everyday life.

When I start a task, I finish it and don't stop in the middle. That makes my everyday life a lot easier and is also great for my professional career.

Whenever I have a motivational hole, I say to myself, "You can do that on the mountain. Then you can finish your tasks at home just as well under simplified conditions." For me, that works wonders.

But this attitude was quite wrong, as it turned out. The real strength and greatness in alpine climbing lies in being able to recognize dangers and also to turn around sometimes.

Reckless action is out of place here, at least if you want to live a long time. It is not always easy to cancel a tour - and unfortunately not always possible.

However, you learn to assess the dangers, to make a decision, and most importantly, to be at peace with that decision.

I used to think that turning back was only for the weak. But now I listen to my gut feeling: it's better to turn back once too often than never to come back at all.

But sometimes it's just your head going crazy and whispering to you, "You can't do it!" That has happened to me often enough.

Over time, however, you learn to properly assess your skills and ability and decide if you really should abandon a route or if you are fooling yourself.

By the way, this also applies to everyday life: You build confidence in yourself and your abilities. That way, you can better master daily tasks and hurdles and also sometimes say, "You can't do it!" and get help.

The key is not to panic and to keep a cool head. However, that's often easier said than done: at first, I found that extremely difficult. Even in situations that I had actually mastered, it was all over me.

My heart started racing, tears welled up in my eyes, and I started to panic. The only problem is that this will not help you in any situation.

I had to start having a dialogue with myself, "Okay, it's critical right now, but I can use my skills to get out of this situation. I need to stay calm." Then I take a deep breath first, try to assess the situation, and look for possible solutions.

I do the same thing in everyday life: I don't lose my nerve as often, no matter what it's about. I breathe deeply. And I keep calm and look for solutions.

Of course, you can also benefit privately from this built trust - I speak from experience. The shared experiences, the hurdles overcome, strengthen the relationship and also help in everyday life to master problems and to be able to count on the other in every situation.

I can now apply this filter quite well in everyday life. I manage to block out everything else and concentrate only on the essentials.

Well, sometimes during the tour I think to myself: "I should have stayed at home. But in the end I'm always happy when I've completed an alpine climbing tour.

The mountains set the tone; we ourselves can only see that we act to the best of our knowledge and conscience, adapt and call on our experience so that we can be as safe as possible on the road.