First installment of "Lessons from the Mountain". by Jeff Justman

After one of the many storms we returned to Camp 1 at 19,000 feet to discover that all five of our tents were gone. No, they did not blow away. We just had to dig under nine feet of snow to finally uncover the very tops of the tents. Now I don’t know about you, but growing up in Wisconsin I still have nightmares of my mother making me go outside in the bitter January cold, while it’s still snowing and shovel our driveway. Needless to say, I HATE shoveling snow!

Mountaineers continually face Adversity. As a matter of fact, that is what climbing mountains is, facing and overcoming continual adversity. The question is, “how do you deal with tough situations.” In his book “Adversity Quotient: Turning Obstacles into Opportunities”, Dr. Paul Stoltz mentions three kinds of people in regards to adversity.

The first kind of person is the Quitter. When a tough situation arises the quitter does just that, they quit. Not able to face the difficulty, the quitter just turns and doesn’t set foot on the mountain. On Manaslu we witnessed one team quit their effort of potentially summiting after only three weeks of being on the mountain. The Quitter just doesn’t want to expend energy on facing, fixing and overcoming difficulties and problems. It’s simply too much work and in their mind, it probably won’t work out anyway!

Page Three

Jeff Justman, veteran climber, author and motivational speaker. To book Jeff e-mail

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