My Relationship with Outdoor Bouldering
12 Feb 2025
Beautiful snow-capped mountains and purple sunset skies became the norm for four days in Bishop. My relationship with outdoor bouldering is still a conflicting one. The fear that comes with possibly dying from a foot slip three meters above the ground is immense. Still, I can feel myself growing more comfortable with every trip. I was excited to be out in nature again and to see Andy psyched to work on more classic problems.
Climbing outdoors made me realise just how powerful it is to get used to something. Stepping onto a tiny rock once felt terrifying. But after five tries, I managed to hop onto it a little and realised I wasn’t going to fall. After five more, I could put my full weight on it without needing support from my other limbs. Five more, and it felt like standing on solid ground. Everything in life comes with some risk, and instead of running from it, it makes a lot more sense to take active steps to reduce it. Honing a skill and getting better at things you never imagined yourself doing was such a fulfilling feeling.
That said, I did do Buttermilk Stem with a stack of three crash pads. For those unfamiliar with outdoor climbing, the more pads you stack for this climb, the easier it gets. You’re supposed to be able to do it with just one, but I’m not going to beat myself up over it. As much as I want to improve, I don’t want to lose sight celebrating the little checkpoints along the way.
Sophie, River, Butter, Mavis, and Cookie were just a few of the adorable dogs we met over the past few days. The sunsets from the Milks were stunning. Even when it was cold and windy, it was nice to hide under a rock and cheer on a friend trying Bowling Pin. Eating a packed pasta meal at the crag, sampling new potato chip flavours wherever we went, long car rides, and good conversations made me realise there is so much more to climbing than just going up a rock.
Bishop was the last of three climbing trips I embarked on during my three months in California. Now that I’m back in Singapore, I’ve returned to climbing indoors, and I’m not complaining. I can see myself improving in terms of grades, but more importantly, problems feel less intimidating. I’m more excited to try things I’m not good at (essentially anything that isn’t a jug) rather than immediately telling myself there’s no way I could do it. If I learned to trust smearing on outdoor surfaces two meters above the ground, I can definitely stand on that volume above an extensively padded gym floor.
Ending off with a quote from the man who climbed El Capitan with no harness or rope.
“I've done a lot of thinking about fear. For me the crucial question is not how to climb without fear-that's impossible- but how to deal with it when it creeps into your nerve endings.”
― Alex Honnold
Till next time California! (Oh yes, and I now know how to plug a punctured tire. )
How fear motivates behavioural change
4 May 2025
With elections and rallies happening around me, fear is something I've been thinking about more often lately. It’s clear that fear can be a powerful way to influence emotions. It tends to focus on everything that could go wrong and everything we should avoid. It’s easy to highlight what doesn’t work, but much harder to offer a meaningful solution that actually addresses the problem.
A clear example of this can be seen during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Around the world, public health messaging leaned heavily into fear. News headlines, government briefings, and social media were saturated with warnings of worst-case scenarios. While this successfully captured public attention, it led to panic buying of tissue papers, misinformation, and even discrimination towards certain communities. It showed how fear alone often fails to create the kind of collective, constructive behaviour one desires.
This doesn’t mean there’s no value in understanding ones fears. In fact, that’s the core of good research and competitor analysis. We need to examine what others have attempted, both their mistakes and their successes. This helps ensure that we are building on the bank of knowledge generated by those before us, rather than getting stuck in our own worlds. The problem is often asking what’s next.
Fear can be effective at first. It grabs attention and creates urgency. But without a clear plan or meaningful action to follow it up, its positive impact fades quickly. It’s similar to goal setting in many ways. People often begin the year with strong intentions, only to lose momentum because they don’t have the right systems or rewards in place to sustain their efforts.
We can see how fear is used in design through Singapore’s cigarette packaging. The graphic images showing the long-term consequences of smoking are disturbing and impossible to ignore. They’re meant to shock and deter. Still, I often wonder how much the design of the box alone can shape public sentiment if it's not reinforced by a broader system. Reduced smoking areas, concealed product displays in stores, and strengthened public education programmes all contribute to the drop in smoking rates. This success comes not only from fear-driven imagery, but from a well-coordinated campaign where fear is just one component in a much larger process.
In the end, maybe we need to accept that maybe the glass is both half empty and half full. There is no doubt that fear is a great mechanism to motivate behaviour change, but it takes seeing the glass as half full to keep that motivation and work towards long-term productive impact.