Erwin Visser’s Post

Mount Everest Summit (8848m / 29,031ft) at May 24th! We lucked out with a beautiful day on the mountain. After spending 8 weeks in the mountains in Nepal I'm very happy and grateful to be back with family and friends in the US. There is still a lot for me to internalize and share about this adventure. I trained 9+ months for this expedition and although I was fully prepared it would be hard, I did not have the full comprehension of the scale and intensity of Mt Everest. The fast majority of my time in Nepal was spend at altitude, at Everest Base Camp (5400m, 17,500ft) or above. Humans are not built to live at these altitudes, it drains energy and there is almost no recovery, so staying physically and mentally healthy is arguably the biggest challenge. To support my mental health and resilience I leveraged 3 techniques that were really helpful for me: First and most critical is positive thinking. During an 8 week period you are going to have bad days. Also, your immunity system is impacted due to the altitude, and I personally got hit by both a GI/Stomach bug as well as a respiratory infection during the expedition. Have the deep confidence that you will be able to deal with setbacks, and keep a positive and optimistic mindset, helped me to get through these tougher days. There is a ton of research / books on how positive mindset supports mental resilience and the ability to pursue long-term goals - happy to share some resources if you ping me. Second technique I leveraged to support my mental health and focus was visualization. I mostly applied visualization at night in my tent to virtually practice for the next day. The visualization could be focused on the steps / actions to get ready for an Alpine start (1am) to climb to the next camp or to visualize the climbing route and mentally anticipate the challenges. Especially these alpine starts can be overwhelming, getting ready at midnight after a few hours sleep in the cold dark and often windy conditions. Visualization helped me to "train" myself and improve my feeling of preparedness. Last technique I like to share is goal setting. When you see Mount Everest for the first time it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the challenge as the summit towers over everything. What I found really helpful is to focus my attention on daily and even hourly goals. You climb a mountain step by step, you don't jump to the summit :-). Although I kept a small part of my focus on the end-goal and tracking my readiness, the majority of my attention was focused on the task at hand. Especially when you are physically exhausted (which happened a number of times), it helped me to focus my mind on very short term goals (next break, next rope anchor, next 10 steps..) and create a feeling of accomplishment by reaching it. Last, really glad I was able to show my gratitude to Microsoft Partners at the top of the world :-) #microsoftpartner #microsoft #microsoftpartners