Dierdre Wolownick, Oldest Woman to Climb El Capitan and Mother of Free-Soloist Alex Honnold

Dierdre Wolownick (0:00)

The objectives of all parenting should be to allow your child to discover what your passions are, what drives them, what makes them the happiest, and to create an environment where that can happen, where you can take and explore that. And the job of every parent, 100%, is to make yourself obsolete.

Michael Gervais (0:36)

All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade in training, a sport and performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. Now the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who just have dedicated their life efforts to understanding the nuances of their craft or the things that they're most interested in, whether that be relationships or what they do or how they organize their life. And so these folks are rare. And because of that, they hold insights and they hold understandings that with just the right way to understand what they understand, we can maybe share that with everybody. And that's what the design of this podcast was meant to be.

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Okay, this week's conversation is with Dierdre Wolownick, the mother of legendary adventure rock climber, Alex Honnold.

You may recognize him as being the principal of this year's Academy Award winning film Free Solo, where he became the first person to ever free solo El Capitan in Yosemite. He was a previous guest on the podcast, episode 108, and I wanted to speak with his mother for a couple reasons. First, Alex was one of the more challenging interviews on the podcast I've ever had. Everything just seemed so matter of fact, nonchalant to him, even though he operates in a highly consequential environment. One thing I hope you've noticed from listening to these conversations is how much one's upbringing —their parenting, their structure, their environment—influence who they become and why they do what they do. So I thought, who better to have follow up on this conversation with Alex than his mother?