We definitely spend a lot of time watching movies that aren't related to climbing or but for you, like we do typical couple stuff we love going to see every superhero movie.
For you, fellow geek. Yeah, love to hear it. Welcome back friends to the Dave Crenshaw Success Project. In this episode, part two of two, I continue my interview with Ben may 4, his remarkable world class para climber who sponsored by Northface. And I just got so much out of this interview, I wanted to make sure you heard
the whole thing. Now remember, as you're listening to this episode, look for an action look for one thing you can do to make Ben may 4 Success Story, a part of your success story will now continue with part two, enjoy. You mentioned something previously that I want to go back to mental health is really, really important to me, you're probably not aware of this. But every year I post up a video where I talked about how I went through a really intense period where I was suicidal almost
continually. And what I did to get out of it and how I managed it, which for me, briefly is just viewing my brain is an organ, just like my heart. And there are certain things I would do to prevent issues with my heart. And I need to do the same things. I need a doctor, I need a therapist and I might need emergency medication, that kind of thing. So you mentioned bipolar. And I'm glad you brought this up, because this is something that I deal with. For
those who are unfamiliar. How does that bipolar disorder manifest in your life? What impact does it have? What's it like?
So I'm bipolar B, so I'm more depressive than manic, okay. So most of the time, I have a lower demeanor when the depression kicks in. And it can be very, very hard to get up and get moving. It also has a lot of ideation involved with it. Ideation of what suicidal ideation, okay, a lot of just taking every negative that comes forward and amplifying it. And that's a really hard thing to try and deal with when you're trying to physically climb through gravity, when your body's
already feeling very heavy. Wow,
it's such an interesting way to put it is your day winding up. At the same time that your body from a psychological standpoint is pushing you just trying
to keep you down and lay down. And so when I'm like going through that day to day, I'm like trying to manifest different positives, and manifest a routine in my morning to kind of make sure that I'm taking every step.
So when you say manifest that way, like the routine has some positives to it. So you can look at and say those are positive things that are helping you
Yeah. And so like, for example, I only make french presses in the morning, I try and make sure that I wake up with enough time to get up, make a French press, take my medication with some food, and actually take a little bit of time. And using that routine as like a baseline that routines, your baseline every day, you're going to do the same thing in a
very similar way. And take a shower in the morning, just about every morning, usually turn on the cold the last minute on my shower, to kind of put some resilience into me and to give the body a little bit of a shock. Yes.
Can I talk about that for just a sec? Yeah, because that's something that I learned I needed to do. When the brain starts to get hyperactive and overactive about what's negative, and what's wrong and beating you up like that. That's something that I learned my therapist taught me was to do something to shock the system, because it takes the brain away from all of this negative and goes, What is this? Yes, right.
So you take that cold shower, and the brain immediately stops feeling bad about yourself and says, This is not pleasant. It is not hurting you. You're not abusing yourself, but you're just saying, Pay attention to this for a moment and realize that you can survive it. And that you don't have to think about these other things.
Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of what I do in the morning to chain shock the system that way I'm alive, I'm awake, I'm ready to go to work or ready to tackle the day. Yeah, I make sure I have a list of things I need to do that specific day. And I slowly start crossing off the tasks in my list and I try and give them times. So like, this should only take me about 30 minutes. That should only take me about 15 minutes. If I'm exceeding that
time too much. I kind of break it down and was like okay, I'll return to this later. This needs more time. And so I'll find a good stopping point. to pause it and then return to it later in the next morning, or the next day?
How do you keep track of that? It seems like a lot of different parts that you're wrangling in your head, it is,
I have a slight Task Manager on my notebook, okay, that I use. So writing things down, and giving a few lines of space of like, if I had to stop and go, do something else, where I left off, and what I need to finish, so making sure I'm writing the notes of like, if I'm writing a training program, and I had some sort of emergency pop up, or had to go to work early writing, had to go to work early, left, on week, four, day five, finish day, six, and week, five, and six. Okay, the deal. But
all of this is part of managing your mental health, all
of its managing, because the more tasks that I do, and the more positive things
that I put forth in my life. So the more I'm investing in my life and doing the basic stuff, and making sure that I'm taking care of myself, in a holistic manner, not just the mental side, not just the fiscal side, but also taking care of myself in the economic side, the task management side that work side that, yeah, everyone has to do, because sometimes if you focus too much on the mental aspect, or the physical aspect, those other physical parts get left undone. And
I would add to that, too, sometimes your brain just isn't right. And when you're trying to figure things out, when your brain isn't right, when it's not functioning properly, you're not going to figure anything out anyway.
Like, why am I depressed? Why am I feeling manic? The answer is because you're not well, yeah, in this moment, so stop trying to figure that out, go do something else, productive or even distracting. And then you can come back to this later. Yes, you're more grounded. Yeah. And start trying to figure these things. And I've had that instance, I've talked with therapists before. And they're like, do you think you need to go into institution I was like, and put a pause on the
rest of my life. And the things that caused me anxiety more. Yeah, I was like, I need to take care of a couple of different tasks first, and then I'm going to return back to here. And that's just the reality of how you have to like, build a baseline is like, sometimes you have to take care of the simple things like doing laundry, taking care of bills,
don't underestimate the power of doing something easy. Yes, exactly. Sometimes when I talk to people, they're like, I'm overwhelmed. In fact, I just had this conversation with a family member. And they were overwhelmed with everything. They couldn't figure out the priority. I said, stop trying to think about the priority. What's easy. Do that. And then what's the next easy thing? Do that? And what happens to you start to compound all of these man, right? And then the hard stuff
will happen? Because now you've built up a good base?
Yes, exactly. And that baseline is pretty consistent. Yeah. And so I try and tackle that baseline pretty. Regularly, I try and take two mornings, or my week, where I'm doing the chores that I need to do around the house. It's been a little off recently, because I'm in the process of moving my leases up. So I'm moving to a new spot. So I'm trying to figure that out a little bit. Like even this morning, I woke up early to take some things over to my new place, and then came over here to do the
interview. So it's trying to figure out what is important and what is easy. And usually I go with the easy thing to start off with, because I'm like, I can reply to like these four emails and communicate with the people I need to communicate with and make a good baseline for the rest of the day.
Yeah, if I'm going to summarize everything you've said, we kind of mentioned this before, but it is control. It's easy to feel like you don't have control when you're dealing with mental health struggles. Yeah, it's easy to feel like the brain is controlling you. And doing all these things says no, I am in charge. I am not going to let this feeling or this thought dictate everything about my life. Yeah, I can do something, the thing that I can do, I'm going to do, and that just alone
shows. I'm in charge here. And I think those little steps are so important for anyone who's dealing with whatever mental health challenge that you have.
Yeah, and I think it's super crucial and the cold shower in the morning, that's completely to shock the system and prepare you for the unexpected. So That's the other thing. It's like, I found that when I was building so much of a baseline, that when something that was a curveball was thrown my way, it would just ruin my whole entire day. And that's not a way to live. That's not a good problem solving aspect. And I was like, Okay, what is something that I can do to prepare myself for the
unexpected and the unknown? And take control of that. And so that shocking the system with the cold shower in the morning, became my ritual for that preparation.
Yeah. And I want to add one thing in here, too. And maybe this is something you do, or maybe not, but you just said something that's so important. Practice your response? Yes. You practice over and over when I'm on this hold, then my next response is to go up to this holder, my next response is to take a break for a second before I move on, right? But what about practicing for the mental health challenges? And I've done this, my therapist helped me with
this. He actually has me imagine this is cognitive behavioral therapy. Imagine that someone did something that was highly disruptive in your day, imagine that you just got bad news about your career. What would you do? What are the feelings that you go through? In my case, it's, what I do is I go through the grieving process, the steps of grief, anger, right frustration, bargaining. And I actually allow my mind to practice that because
you can't skip it. But you can control how fast you go through it. So that I get used to acceptance. And by practicing that over and over when those things happen. I'm prepared. And it sounds like in a way, that's what you're doing. Yeah.
That is how I kind of prepared for those circumstances. And I've had so many weird circumstances happen in so many unknowns, that I've had to take a step back and realize that I do need to prepare, and I do try and mourn those things before they happen. That way I can process that. I love them quicker manner.
I love the word mourn. Yeah. In that.
There's a process. For example, like, I've gone through what my retirement would look like from competition. I'm watching a fellow friend right now. battle with it. And continuously, she keeps saying it's gonna be your last year. And she's been saying that for a while. And this will be her 10th competitive year. And she's like, Yeah, I'm gonna retire this year. And I'm like, Are you? And she's like, Yeah, I
think I'm done. I was like, Oh, I do I get to the point where I know, I'm ready to retire.
Someday it's going to happen. Yeah, there's a shelf life to being an athlete. Yeah, there. There
is. Luckily, for climbing, climbing is a lifelong sport, you're not going to be able to competitively climb for a long time. But you can change those skills. So what I've done is started taking in other climbing skills, like learning how to become a actual guide, single pitch guide, and learning those skills. That way, I can continue my career later. And when you're not complaining, I'm
not competing. Yes, I've opened up a coaching business so I can take what I've learned over the years of competing, so I can coach other athletes to get through that process.
So smart. Yeah, the long term preparation and the awareness of that is really smart. Because you do not want to be surprised. Yeah, when that time comes,
and you don't want to be unprepared. And every step I've been taking over the last few years has been in preparation to make climbing and this lifestyle, a lifelong pursuit. It just takes time. You got to build off skills, you got to keep consistent. So making sure that you have that baseline, and then always pursuing more information has been kind of the big thing. I was like, Okay, I'm learning these skills. How can I build off of this skill type of deal? Sure. Especially with hard
skills and coaching skills. I'm always constantly reading or looking into new techniques for rope management, or looking even accidents that happen on the mountain and say, How can we learn from these aspects? How can we learn from these failures that other people have had and apply new things to our life? So it's a consistency of wanting to go and pursue more knowledge? Yeah,
I like that you're continually learning continually grabbing new knowledge, not just being content with what you've done. Talk to me a little bit about the North Face sponsorship. How did that come about? And what does that meant to your career?
Yeah, so Oh, my friend Mo, she asked me to apply for the Northface athlete development program, they have an athlete development program. And she asked me to do that in 2022. So I wrote out this big long application, they bring on, I think 10 athletes a year, to kinda like learn how to be a developed athlete. I was like, Okay, I filled it out. I made it through the first round. And I got a second round interview.
During my second round interview, I had just finished the World Cup in Innsbruck, which was my first gold in an IFSC event. Okay. And I did this interview, and they looked at my rap sheet, to Silver's, and World Championships and numerous metals in USA see events, active outdoor climber, and they looked at my actual physical goals, to hit certain grades and be the first pair climber in my category. And first pair climber in general, they hit some of these grades. And they really
liked that. And then I heard silence, like the ADP program had been chosen. I hadn't heard back from anyone, I reached out, and they were like, we're not going to offer you the athlete development program, we're actually going to offer you something else, just give us a little while. And all these conversations were happening. And eventually, I got an email back and they're like, Hey, Ben, we're actually going to bring
you on the team. We just need some time to deal with the legal stuff and see how much we're going to offer, we're gonna give you a standard first year contract and see how that works. At this point, I was at a high of my career, with getting to back to back golds, but also, I had some work issues. I wasn't working as much in my day job and didn't have as many hours and was generally struggling to
try and make it. But in my climbing career, I was getting all these opportunities to go to festivals to rep booths to have opportunities to teach. And the north face and a few of my other sponsors helped pay for these events, and pay me for them. After winning two golds, it was definitely a big help. And then I got my contract. And they gave me a travel budget, and a gear
budget. And that just helped me immensely, I was really struggling to figure out how to pay for all the competitions, like I was reaching out for grants, I was doing different nonprofit organizations and reaching out for them to help pay for certain aspects of the season, just so I can make it. And when I got on the north face, it was just like, all that hard work. And everything was finally being recognized. And it's a big deal. It's a huge deal. I put every blood, sweat
and tears into it. Even almost quitting climbing a couple times just because like all the stress and pressure was getting too much. Yeah. And finally, when I had somebody that I knew had my back, I was astounded at least a financial backing. Yeah, that's
great. And it was huge. And I remember when our athlete budget came, and I was on the website, and I was like, I don't want to go over my budget and everything and my fiance's like, what are the things you really wanted from the north face when growing up looking at him? Because they have some key iconic pieces of clothing and gear? And I was like, Okay, you're right, I should go for what I have always wanted. Because I finally have the opportunity to, and I did.
They really helped me propel my career I've done so many speaking engagements for them recently, have went and done festivals with them. And they've given me ample opportunities to go out in do teaching clinics, which like is one of my big
passions. I love giving back to my community and love giving back to the people that have impacted my life and giving back to the adoptive community and giving back to other people and talking about my whole entire experience of why parrot climbing, changed my life for the positive has just been one of the coolest things. And I've gotten to go all over the world just to go and represent USA and the north face. That's
fantastic. Ben, that's great. Your fiance has been a topic. You've brought up a lot and the influence that she's had on you. The challenge that sometimes people have when they're married or they have a girlfriend or relationship that does the same thing they do is you have a hard time, not always talking about that thing. And it's Sometimes it's tough to build a relationship outside of
work. What do you to do to make sure that you have other things that you talk about and other things that you do so that you have more balance in your life. She's
ADHD. So her focus can be very hyper focused. Okay, we're very all over the place. So she has a lot of different interests, that we're able to connect on, and work on together. We just try and spend time together outside of climbing, like, still inside the mountains and inside of the outdoor industry, but she asked me explore different aspects of the outdoors that I don't typically, like perience hiking, okay, not a big hiker, for obvious reasons. Yeah. But I do enjoy it. I do enjoy taking my
time in nature. And she's definitely one of those people that likes to take her time through everything. And I'm normally the person that needs to get things done immediately. Okay. And so we kind of talk about, like, what's it like to take time with things? We definitely spend a lot of time watching movies that aren't related to climbing, or good for you. Like we do typical couple stuff. We love going to see every superhero movie. For you,
fellow geek. Yeah, we recently went and saw Aquaman, she loves going into movie theaters. I know that's not a popular thing nowadays, but at least and she's from Slovenia. So it's different. It's different. The shopping mall, and the movie theater scene is still a thing in Slovenia. It's changing with more online shopping. But people still like going to actual physical shops and going into an actual movie theater, we make sure we hit the nostalgia
button. It's a lot of values, we really kind of keep it in tune with our values and what we actually value in each other, whether it's taking time to do things, or she loves to cook. So she'll cook and I'll go in and chop vegetables for her and keep an eye on things while she's getting other things prepared. So it's a lot of that type of stuff.
I'm glad to hear you guys are taking that time because it's so critical to the success and everything else. My last question is, what's ahead? What's next for you? In your career? What's the goal you want to accomplish?
I have a couple. What I'm trying to get done by May is doing three v 10s. In 24 hours,
what is the V 10?
A V 10 is a bowler grade. It's like the first starting aspect of elite Elite climber, okay, is climbing the time, especially for paragliding. It's only been done a few times. And most of the time it's been done by amputees, it hasn't actually been done by someone born with their disability. So, okay, I'm actively trying to complete that. But do not just one but do three of them in a day. Wow. I'm working on trying to claim 514 By the end of November next year, which is, it's a rope
grade. The 514 I'm trying to climb is called Southern Comfort. Each route is given a name and a grade difficulty. And I'm really trying to focus in on those harder grades that other people born with their disability haven't accomplished. But I'm also trying to bring in other pair climbers in the things I'm starting a film project this year called limping around the world.
I love it. What a great title.
Where I'm visiting my friends that I've met through pair climbing competitions around the world, and visiting them at their home, outdoor climbing area, or their home crag and telling a little bit of their story and a little bit of like what climbing has done for them. But also, while we're enjoying each other's company and the other person's actual main climate. So that
sounds like a great project. Yeah, I think we'd all love to see that.
Yeah, it's a very big dream of mine to have this small mini series. So I can't get all that shot all in one year. So I'm trying to do like two to three mini episodes a year over the next four years. Awesome.
Well, I hope that happens. I hope we can all watch it. That would be fantastic. We should. Okay, so here's the part where I wrap up the conversation with action items, because someone listening to this might say, well, that's just been may 4, that's not me. I'm not able to do it. And what I want to do is I'm going to choose three actions that Someone can take as a result of what they heard, because my goal is to help someone hear this and make your success story a part of their
success story. So they may have thought of 1012 different things, but we're just going to highlight a few. And then I'd like you to add one at the end. Sounds good. Okay. All right. So, boy, I had a big list, it's hard for me to choose just three, but I'm going to start with resourcefulness. From the very beginning of your story to everything that you're doing now, Ben, you are extremely resourceful. You use what you have, and you maximize the heck
out of it. And I want someone who might be thinking, Oh, I don't have what I need, I don't have the money, I need to have the career I need, I don't have the connections instead to say, what do I have, and make an inventory of those things and say all of these things can be useful, they can help me succeed. So that would be the first suggested action item. The next I would say is, find your community. I think a big turning point in your career came when
you went to that festival. And you started meeting with people who were accomplishing the same things or accomplishing things you wanted to accomplish. And we all can be more successful when we start to associate with people who are trying to do what we want to do really powerful. So someone listening to this can pause and think, Where can I go? Who can I reach out to? Who is accomplishing or wants to accomplish what I want to accomplish? And how can I build a relationship with that person.
And then the last one that I'm going to say is we talked about it a lot, the power of positive rituals. And we're identifying a positive ritual as something that you are aware of that you're conscious of that you control, rather than the ritual
controlling you. So if there's something that you want to accomplish something you repeat, come up with something small, like the clap and smile, to help ground yourself and remind yourself of the principles that you believe in the values that you have, so that you can succeed. I really enjoyed hearing that part about your success. All right, Ben, what would you add is one additional action that someone could take today, ie
consistent, especially with those positive rituals, be consistent with your positive rituals, try and do them every single day. And those positive rituals, even when you're not wanting to do something, or when the intensity of your feelings is too much. If you are consistent in showing up and getting your work done. Everything else will fall into place.
Yeah. And as it builds up over time, I found that if you can do that for years, it really starts to pay off. It might not feel it right now. But it really pays off over time. Ben, I really want to encourage I've got a lot of people who work in Fortune 500 companies, I want them to consider you as a speaker, I think you'd be a fantastic speaker at events to share your story. What's the best way for them to get in contact with you and to follow you.
You can follow my two Instagrams May 4 May, LLC, or you can follow my main one, which I post more on. It's crushing underscore, Benjamin. Okay. And if you want to reach out, you can email me
at crushing.benjamin@gmail.com Okay, fantastic. Ben, thank you for being so generous with your time we went longer than we expected. I'm so grateful that you were willing to do that. No worries, Dave. I had a great time. Yeah. And thank you, everyone for listening. Remember, it's not about the knowledge you receive. That's important. And it's not about the stories that you heard, which were great and entertaining. It's about the
action that you take. So do something about what you heard from the lesson of Ben may 4, and then you can make his success story, a part of your success story. Thanks for listening. Thank you.
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