I was once at the scene of a very distressing top out after a friend of mine was at the top of a really hard and difficult route. A route that still puts the fear of god into me even hearing its name, Even more now after Caff dragged me up the route and it started to rain as I was seconding the top final and utterly desperate in the dry top pitch.
The route was VOID, and the distress was that my friend was in floods of tears because they had fallen on the route, and seemed to think that it was a personal indictment of their inability to climb anything hard. It was as if the world had for lack of a better metaphor, shat all over them. They were in the words of Bill, in Kill Bill: Vol 2, inconsolable.
I have seen this a few times in climbing, and feel that some people no matter how good or bad they are really take failure badly. When I say badly I am talking ex-girlfriend killing your cat, then smashing your car before returning to your house to cut off one arm and one leg from every piece of clothing you have. Another climber who is fairly well known was great at having proper hissy fits, and quite literally throwing all there toys out of the pram, or off their harness and into the undergrowth at the bottom of the crag.
Hopefully you don’t take any failures as badly as the above examples, however your interpretation of any failure is important. In a way it comes down to looking at these failure through different perspectives. At its worse it can be that failure on the route is seen as failure in live and everything else that you do or say. In this case the isolate failure to that route, on that day, in those conditions has become an inappropriate metaphor of your life. In other words we can distort the reality to be universally applied to everything we do.
On the complete opposite of this spectrum is the person who sees the failure as one of those things, it only happened on that route, on that day and in those conditions. It has no reflection on them or their life. Whilst our first example is the archetypal pessimist, the other is the Eternal Optimist. Whilst being extremely optimistic is perhaps less troublesome for day-to-day living, it still has it pitfalls.
For instance if you are always optimistic and see problems as coming from external sources and are just one of those things, then maybe, just maybe you are missing the point that you might well have a weakness in your performance. As such you may be totally blind to it, and it you are how can you possible address it, and improve your performance.
It is of course not as bad as someone who sees’s a climbing failure as exploding out across his or her whole life and existence. There is a basic framework in counseling that can explore how to breakdown this global failure. So you might think that you are a complete failure in climbing because you fail on the route that you really wanted to, hope to and even dreamt for months of on sighting. So that failure means that “ALL of my Climbing, and LIFE are USELESS”. This form of response is seen as transferring one part of your life’s experience across to ALL of your life experiences.
If this remotely covers how you have felt or feel at times, then consider throw that assumption back at you as a form of question “ALL of My CLIMBING and LIFE?”. Now try and answer that question, is it really ALL and EVERYTHING? The chances are that it is not, it is something specific, and not general.
For me though failure is something, it is a lesson that I can learn from, as I have often found that mistakes and failures tell you a lot more about you actual performance than success. In fact I love to fail on routes, it means I am actually trying and trying hard. If I can be rational and look within that performance on a route, and ask not how I failed, but why then the lessons become even more powerful. I personally would hate a world where I successfully climbed every route. After all what would the point be if I knew I was going to be success 100% of the time.
So just remember if you find yourself saying everything about my climbing, all my climbing or any other phrase that globalizes the performance to every aspect of your climbing to throw that statement back at yourself in the form of a question, and answer it!
Similarly, it might not just be one of those things, it might be something that effects a part of your climbing. What you need n both cases is a rational approach to failure. Often when we fail we are literally too close to the failure emotionally, as such if we ask a friend or a coach about that performance we can get that rational and consider response without either our positive or negative emotions becoming involved.