Strong Mind
Hazel Findlay
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Top 10 Strong Mind Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Strong Mind episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Strong Mind for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Strong Mind episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
10/03/22 • 77 min
Hazel talks to Sue Jackson about flow, mindfulness and performance and how they all relate. Sue is a psychologist, researcher and mindfulness practitioner. She has a phD in flow and carried out the first in-depth qualitative investigation of the experience of flow by elite athletes. She studied under Csíkszentmihályi, who first coined the term flow and carried out the first research into flow as experienced by everyday people. Sue and Csíkszentmihályi wrote a book together called 'Flow in Sports' which was the first book addressing flow state in sport.
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in climbing, sport and life in general. Check out strongmindclimbing.com for more information on our coaching and online courses.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
07/24/23 • 70 min
WARNING - we do talk about eating disorders in this podcast.
In this episode, Hazel speaks with Emily Harrington about her life as a professional climber from when she was a kid competing to now as a mother herself.
We talk about how she started climbing and how she fell into competition climbing. We talk about her struggles with having an eating disorder at a young age but how she recovered from it and how she thinks about it now. We talk about how she's stayed motivated throughout her climbing career and how she's managed performance anxiety and stress around big goals. We also talk about social media and external pressure. Then we finally talk about motherhood, how she's taken to motherhood so far and how she thinks about risk as a mother.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
07/10/23 • 73 min
In this episode, I speak with Africa Brooke. Africa is a consultant, coach, strategist, and speaker with a unique focus: tackling self-sabotage and self-censorship. We talk about Africa’s path to working in this field, from her childhood in Zimbabwe and her journey with recovering from alcoholism. We talk about how to rebuild confidence, self-worth and self-trust even when you feel ashamed of things you’ve done in your past. We talk about taking personal responsibility and the difference between being a victim and victimhood. We talked about why self-censorship is such an important personal and social phenomenon right now and how insidious it is within the human psyche. We talk about social and emotional risk and the cost to self-trust when we lose our authenticity. Africa works with visible people in the public eye but I think that self-sabotage and self-censorship show up in all of us in different ways and each of us could learn a lot from this conversation.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Mind Games - Allison Vest
Strong Mind
06/27/23 • 57 min
In this episode, Hazel speaks with Allison Vest about her struggles and progress with mental training in climbing.
They talk about how she found competitions hard psychologically and how some of those struggles have carried over to outdoor bouldering which is her main focus. They talk about the gains she's made with her mindset recently and the work she still has left to do. They talk about her recent sends and the psychological tools she used for those sends. They talk about how to balance the desire for the outcome with being focused on optimal performance in the moment.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Performance Hacks Bonus Episode
Strong Mind
06/13/23 • 34 min
In this episode, Angus Kille interviews Hazel about how to leverage mental training for performance and their course Performance Hacks.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Breathing - Science and Tradition
Strong Mind
06/12/23 • 73 min
In this episode, we talk a lot about breath!
We look at the physical and mental benefits from 2 different perspectives with 2 experts in the field.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Dr. Michael Melnychuk is a neuroscientist and climber who has conducted seminal research on brain plasticity and how the breath and brain activity are interrelated. He has engaged in meditation and breathing techniques since he was a child, and his scientific work is heavily influenced by his practice. He has also been a rock climber for 30 years and suffered a near-fatal fall while free soloing, and because of this has a keen personal interest in Hazel’s methods which leverage the breath and mind control to overcome fear while climbing.
Dr. Sundar Balasubramanian is a cell biology researcher from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Medical University of South Carolina, USA, and is a renowned yoga researcher specializing in breathing exercises. He is the Founder & CEO of PranaScience Institute and the Yoga Specialist at the MUSC Health & Wellness Institute. Sundar’s Yoga research provided evidence linking salivary biomarkers and Yogic breathing (also called Pranayama). He studies how breathing practices could promote well-being in health and disease. His current studies include testing a Yogic breathing app for cancer survivorship funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has developed several tools to improve the practice of Yogic breathing for employee wellness, cancer survivorship, ageing, and scleroderma. Sundar is the author of four books and several book chapters and his popular TEDx talk has over 1 million views.
Resources:
Jiri Balas' fascinating study on hormonal response to potential fall distance (adrenaline, catecholamines, skipping bolts):
Kox's study of Wim Hof Technique on e-coli toxemia challenge; examines many of the same markers as Balas (above) and also cytokines (pro/anti-inflammatory markers):
Decreased blood lactate following respiratory training
Increased lactate (anaerobic) capacity with pranayama
Sundar's new app called Humma, for improving breathing with humming.
Working With The Mind - Lor Sabourin
Strong Mind
05/28/23 • 83 min
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.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
05/01/23 • 45 min
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.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Spontaneity
Strong Mind
04/17/23 • 91 min
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. You can check out more of what Jeff is up to here.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Competition, performance and fear
Strong Mind
11/28/22 • 50 min
In this episode, Hazel and Angus speak with Emma Wood, one of the great minds working in the space of psychology in our community. We talk about sports psychology for competition, what we can all learn from how competitors manage their mindset and attention under pressure, problems with how we approach psychology in climbing, how our community could be better at educating, understanding and welcoming psychological concepts, why don't instructors and guides get any training around psychological concepts (?!) trying hard, effort and how this can be trained, winning mastery and competition and how to balance them all, process versus outcome, self-awareness and psychological tools to manage stress, fear and pressure and much more. Emma is always a joy to speak with and one of our most trusted thought leaders working in this space.
🧠 Watch our FREE Performance Hacks training here
Show Notes
00:00 - 2:24 | Podcast introduction
3:24 | Emma’s introduction.
4:05 | What is hypnotherapy, and how compares to coaching
8:28 | Training as a psychologist, how to work with a climbers' mind
11:40 | Psychological research in climbing and in fear
14:10 | The distinction between rational and irrational fear and why it’s not that useful
17:00 | Why don’t instructors and guides have any training around psychology?!
21:51 | Mental health crisis training, trauma, ingraining fear and getting fall practice wrong
28:09 | Competition climbers and their psychological challenges
30:29 | Youth comp climbers what do pushy parents look like these days
32:55 | Shifting a competitor's mindset - mastery over winning, process over outcome
36:00 | How to balance the desire to win with a learning mindset
37:09 | Do external motivations help you try harder or not?
41:00 | Motivations that distract us and the role of desperation
42:00 | Trying hard as a skill
45:56 | Healthy and unhealthy competitiveness
47:55 | The relationship between confidence and performing well under pressure
For the second half of this episode visit https://www.strongmindclimbing.com/podcast and become a podcast community member for $8 a month.
In the second half we talk about: Mindtools and psychological strategies Emma teaches competitors to prepare them for the unknown of comp routes, managing confidence, and visualisation. Angus talks about his visualisation practice for trad routes, strategies for introverted competition climbers, self-awareness, how life stressors affect our psychology, reframing fear as an opportunity, fear as a performance aid, public speaking
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FAQ
How many episodes does Strong Mind have?
Strong Mind currently has 22 episodes available.
What topics does Strong Mind cover?
The podcast is about Climbing, Mindset, Podcasts, Self-Improvement, Education, Fear, Sports and Mindfulness.
What is the most popular episode on Strong Mind?
The episode title 'Social Risk and Self-trust With Africa Brooke' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Strong Mind?
The average episode length on Strong Mind is 71 minutes.
How often are episodes of Strong Mind released?
Episodes of Strong Mind are typically released every 14 days.
When was the first episode of Strong Mind?
The first episode of Strong Mind was released on Oct 3, 2022.
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