How Not to Die | How Alex Honnold Trains His Mind to Stay Calm 3,000 Feet Above Ground
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais
Dr. Michael Gervais
4.7 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2025
⏱️ 114 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you stay calm and focused when you’re 3,000 feet off the ground — with no ropes, no safety lines, and no room for error?
Legendary climber and free soloist Alex Honnold returns to The Finding Mastery Podcast for a raw, insightful conversation about mindset, being great with fear, and what it means to live at the edge of human performance.
Alex is best known for his historic, ropeless ascent of El Capitan — captured in the Oscar-winning film Free Solo (which you should watch if you haven’t seen it yet). But in this episode, we go far beyond climbing.
We explore:
- How Alex manages fear, consequence, and risk with rare mental clarity
- What it takes to perform under pressure — and when to walk away
- How fatherhood and loss reshaped his relationship with ambition and danger
- The underrated power of optimism and framing hard moments as growth
This isn’t just a conversation about climbing. It’s about the psychology behind pushing your limits, the skill of regulating your mind under stress, and how to chase a bold, purposeful life — even when the summit feels out of reach.
Whether you’re an athlete, entrepreneur, or anyone seeking mastery under pressure, Alex’s honesty, humor, and hard-earned wisdom deliver lessons for all of us.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Finding Mastery is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, |
| 0:05.9 | focus thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've |
| 0:11.7 | been using the Remarkable Paper Pro, a digital notebook designed to help you think clearly and work |
| 0:17.7 | deliberately. It's not another device filled with notifications or apps. |
| 0:21.8 | It's intentionally built for deep work. So there's no social media, no email, no noise. |
| 0:27.0 | The writing experience, it feels just like pen on paper. I love it. And it has the intelligence |
| 0:32.5 | of digital tools like converting your handwriting to text, organizing your notes, tagging files, and using |
| 0:38.8 | productivity templates to help you be more effective. It is sleek, minimal, it's incredibly |
| 0:45.0 | lightweight, it feels really good. I take it with me, you know, anywhere from meetings to travel |
| 0:49.9 | without missing a beat. What I love most is that it doesn't try to do everything. It just helps me do |
| 0:55.8 | one very important thing really well. Stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. |
| 1:01.8 | If you want to slow down, if you want to work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. |
| 1:07.5 | Visit Remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. |
| 1:12.6 | In my case with free-souling, the consequences are almost always death. Like for the most part, |
| 1:16.3 | if you fall off, you're going to die. We understand the psychology of excellence, and we understand |
| 1:20.8 | what a great mindset means and how to be great with fear. And then there's Alex Honnold. |
| 1:26.8 | Welcome back. Or welcome to the Finding |
| 1:28.8 | Mastery podcast where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your |
| 1:33.6 | host, Dr. Michael Jervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist. Now, the whole |
| 1:38.4 | idea behind these conversations, it's pretty simple, to sit with the extraordinarily and learn |
| 1:43.3 | about how they work from the inside out today's guest is a |
| 1:47.3 | legendary climber Alex Honnold best known for his free solo ascent of El Capitan |
... |
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