CWA Blog Archive-Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Climbers

Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Climbers

Pdf Summary

This article adapts Sean Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens into a coaching framework for developing young climbers as both athletes and people. The author frames it through the lens of a coach's influence, noting that many of us underestimate the impact we have on each other, and that as coaches and instructors we're leaders in our climbing communities who get to influence the next generation's perspective in climbing and in life. The personal anchor is Mrs. Waldrup, the author's 8th-grade leadership teacher, whose class read Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens and had a fundamental, lasting effect on the author's outlook. Because coaches work with malleable minds, the article explores the Seven Habits through coaching to challenge youth to become more efficient climbers and more effective people. It details Habit 1, Be Proactive, which is about the attitude we choose. The coaching application: challenge climbers to think about what they can control in a problem that challenges their weakness, talk through what's controllable and what isn't, and urge them to carry the habit into everyday life by confronting a problem, identifying what they can control, and choosing their attitude toward it. The throughline is that climbing coaching is an opportunity to shape young people's character and life skills, not just their climbing technique, and the Seven Habits provide a proven framework for doing both at once. The article emphasizes the profound, often underestimated influence coaches have over impressionable young climbers, and argues that deliberately weaving life principles like proactivity into coaching helps develop not just better climbers but better people.

Asset Caption

This piece adapts Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens into a coaching framework, using climbing to develop young people as both athletes and people. Detailing Habit 1, Be Proactive, it has coaches teach climbers to focus on what they can control on the wall and in life, emphasizing coaches' profound, underestimated influence over youth.