Projecting hard sport climbs is a fantastic way to improve your performance. But without the right kind of awareness about the ways in which you are self-conscious, projecting can become for some climbers a deceptive way to evade facing your deepest weaknesses and fears. This paradox places sport climbers, mostly, in the predicament of having to question whether their approach is actually about experience and self-actualization, or if it’s just another way to sidestep negative emotions, like a fear of failure and other things that are holding you back, while giving yourself the cover to appear stronger and better than perhaps you currently are.

You see this dynamic play out most conspicuously with the Perpetual Projecting class—those who project one route for a loony amount of time. It’s important to understand that not everyone with a long-term project is part of this cohort. Also, you need not have an extremely long-term project to demonstrate the self-defeating behaviors I’m about to describe. But we all know someone like this: