If you head to the climbing wall and watch the climbers, you’ll quickly find someone who is just starting out. You won’t have to ask them, you’ll see it a mile away: hunched shoulders, drooping head, a slightly nervous disposition. That’s not a criticism, merely an observation that any new activity, possibly none more so than rock climbing, can be overwhelming for those first few sessions and for those people, they will probably be doubting their own ability.
Now look around the room and you might see someone else who is easy to spot: the cocky climber. This one will probably have been climbing for a few years and will be walking the walk and talking the talk, whether they actually know it or not. Often it’s not one of the old guard, who tend to be a tiny bit more withdrawn, this will probably be someone who has risen rapidly up the grades and outperforms many around them.
Their body language is different too: cocksure, tall and proud, this guy is more than confident, they’re arrogant. If there’s a climb they can’t do, it’s poor or undergraded, it’s not their fault. No, they are cock of the walk and they want you to know it, even if they doesn’t realise it themselves.
These two examples sit at opposite ends of a spectrum: the DCBA Scale and it’s all to do with mentality. Ironically, they both have a similar likelihood to succeed too. So what are the other letters? And how do you find success?
A Quick Note Before We Begin
All of these resources are provided to you completely free of charge. I’m a big believer of helping people however I can. Sadly, they are not free to create, often taking a substantial amount of time and research to create. If you would like to help support me, you can Buy Me A Brew, with whatever donation you wish by clicking the button here.
Self Efficacy and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
This article has been on the website for some time but has hitherto lacked any sort of evidence-based research to back it up. So it has been quite nice to go back through and back it up. That said, with the answers lying with two of the most well-known psychological theories, it is a little frustrating I didn’t do this the first time around. Perhaps it was actually me being a bit arrogant…
Doubt and Confidence: Self Efficacy – Albert Bandura
The theory of Self Efficacy is incredibly well known. Originally proposed by Albert Bandura in 1977, Simply Pschology define it as:
a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation
Whole textbooks are written on this subject, so it’s not something I’m going to delve into too deeply here. Suffice it to say that success on a specific challenge is inherently linked to their confidence in their own abilities.
If we twist that slightly, if a person is lacking in confidence – in other words, if they doubt their own abilities – the likelihood of success will go down.
And we can see this in action. A climber attempting a dyno that they doubt they will make may often not actually give it their full effort; thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Doubt kills your chances of success.
Arrogance: Yerkes-Dodson Curve
Of course, there is a limit to the amount of confidence one should have. Go too far – generally referred to as overconfidence, or the “mother of all biases” – overestimating abilities can lead to a lack of required effort and thus, lower performance. However, in order to create a nice little abbreviation, I’m referring to ‘overconfidence’ as ‘arrogance‘.
A study by Vancouver, Thompson, Tischner and Putka (2002) actually linked self-efficacy with what I’m terming ‘arrogance’ by saying “self-efficacy led to overconfidence and hence increased the likelihood of committing logic errors during the game”. While they’d be hard pressed to extrapolate this out to every incidence of self-efficacy, it certainly highlights my point: too much confidence leads to decreased performance.
And we can see this happen for real: not generating enough force for a big dyno because it’s ‘too easy’; not reading a route for the same reason; lack of concentration; I could go on.
The DCBA Scale
That leads us nicely into the scale. I’m sure by now you’ve noticed that the D on the left stands for Doubt and I’ve stated the A on the right is for Arrogance. So what are the other two letters?
The C represents Confident. A confident climber is one who will throw themselves at a climb, confident they have a good chance of success.
The B means Belief. These climbers won’t just be confident of success, they will whole heartedly believe they are going to succeed. It isn’t a question of being sure, it’s a matter of being certain. Any failure to this climber knocks them slightly and makes them think: what went wrong? Why did I fail? Because I wasn’t supposed to fall off this climb and I’m sure as hell not gonna fall off it again.
Both of these attributes have their drawbacks. Too much belief and you can be closed off to new ideas, not enough and you won’t really be giving your all or crippled by indecision. Ideally, we want to be sitting somewhere in between the two – a balance between Confidence and Belief.
As we’ve seen, both Doubting and Arrogant climbers face a bigger change in mentality to reach that optimum point in the middle of the scale and thus realise true success by their own standards. Neither of them will actually be trying their all, although for different reasons (the doubters because they don’t think they’ll succeed regardless and the arrogant because they don’t think they need to).
A Note For Coaches
It is one thing to adjust our own mentality but it is a different beast to adjust the mentality of someone else. The first question should certainly be: do I need to?
Some people are obvious. A climber who is continually backing off climbs could probably do with building some confidence (check out Bandura’s Self Efficacy Theory, readily available on Google). Meanwhile, someone who is clearly incredibly cocky could probably do with bringing down a peg. But it can be difficult to know and can be quite damaging if done incorrectly.
Possibly the most useful studies for you as a coach relates to people’s inability to make an accurate self assessment of their own abilities. As someone not emotionally invested in their climb, you are ideally placed to offer an impartial opinion.
But again, it is important to proceed cautiously here. Remember that climbing is an ‘activity with a risk of injury or death’ and artifically inflating confidence past the B in the DCBA Scale may potentially run the unintended risk of creating an injury (even indoors). Likewise, lowering someone’s confidence may simply kill off their ability to perform; many a hard climb have been completed by someone who has believed in themselves enough to get through a dangerous situtation and placing even a small doubt in their head would be ill advised.
It’s a balancing act and not an easy one. But hopefully, the DCBA Scale will give a little structure when working with your charges.
Summary
It is widely established that self-efficacy is crucial to success. Self-efficacy leads to confidence in one’s own abilities, removing those tentative moments and hesitant pauses.
But go too far and we end up back where we started. Overconfidence – or in my abbreviation, arrogance – can also lead to a lack of effort over overstating one’s own abilities. In essence, not trying hard enough when one doesn’t think that much effort is necessary.
I could’ve argued that it is less a case of mentality and more a case of an accurate calibration of one’s abilities but instead, let’s keep things simple: Doubt leads to reduced performance; Arrogance leads to reduced performance; but in between is a sweet spot.
Somewhere between having Confidence and Belief lies just the right amount of effort level for the task at hand. Finding this right mentality might just be the key to your next climbing session.
If You Enjoyed That…
All of these resources are provided to you completely free of charge. I’m a big believer of helping people however I can. Sadly, they are not free to create, often taking a substantial amount of time and research to create. If you would like to help support me, you can Buy Me A Coffee, with whatever donation you wish by clicking the button here.
References/Further Reading
Bandura (1977) Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioural Change. Pyschological Review. Vol. 84, No. 2, 191-215
Lopez-Garrido (2025) Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory Of Motivation In Psychology. Simply Psychology.
Moore (2018) Overconfidence: The mother of all biases. Psychology Today
Vancouver, Thompson, Tischner and Putka (2002) Two studies examining the negative effect of self-efficacy on performance. Journal of Applied Psychology. 87(3). 506-516