Naked at the Knife-Edge

What Everest Taught Me about Leadership and the Power of Vulnerability

Vivian James Rigney

• Publisher: Forefront Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781637630785
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Naked at The Knife-Edge, Vivian James Rigney's compelling and often harrowing true account of summitingEverest, offers a unique window into lessons on leadership and what it takes to succeed in any circumstance. Only a relatively small group of individuals has climbed the highest peak on each of the planet's seven continents. Known as the Seven Summits, it is a feat that typically takes years and an enormous amount of planning, training, and effort, in some of the most inaccessible places on earth. But Vivian James Rigney was determined to do just that. An executive coach and globally recognized authority on leadership and teamwork in business, Rigney relied on skills learned in the corporate world in addition to physical training to attempt these summits. Everest, his seventh and final peak, almost broke him. There, he and his team confronted wild storms lasting for days, near-vertical walls of ice, and a knife-edge ridge with fatal drops on either side. They endured avalanches, sub-zero temperatures, and tragedy unfolding around them. The roller coaster of pain, self-reflection, questioning, and above all, loneliness left Rigney with ego in tatters. It was then he discovered an awakening of what real purpose and legacy actually is. This unique and powerful journey reveals critical wisdom for individuals and leaders in any circumstance, including how to:

• Overcome the ego trap and get out of your head
• Triage what you can and cannot control
• Harness your intuition
• Create shared purpose and real followership
• Tap into the power of vulnerability and authenticity

In Naked at the Knife-Edge, Rigney uniquely combines the hands-on and reflective approach of one of today's most respected executive coaches with adventure and a raw and revealing personal story.

PART 1 FROM SKYSCRAPERS TO BASE CAMP

CHAPTER 1 AVOIDANCE

I LET OUT A ROAR and sat upright in my bed, eyes wide open and still half asleep. The sweat poured off my forehead. A searing picture ran through my mind: my bare feet on Everest, frozen solid, the paleness of the skin punctured by black rims of frostbite encasing all my toes. I could feel the cold and the pain as it reverberated up from my extremities.

I rubbed my face with hands shaking uncontrollably and walked into my living room. The relative quiet of the Manhattan skyline at 4:00 a.m. calmed me. In the guest bedroom, I gazed over my climbing and expedition gear, all neatly laid out and ready for final packing into duffel bags. I would be leaving for Nepal within forty-eight hours.

Everest, the seventh and final peak of the Seven Summits I’d faced—the highest peak on all seven continents of the planet. Everest, the culmination of fourteen years of expeditions and preparation. I had always said I’d climb six of the seven summits but never Everest. I innately believed Everest was beyond my capacity—too steep, too dangerous, too many obstacles that could not be planned for, not to mention the amount of time, training, and money needed to disappear from my work life for at least two months. Who was I to be climbing this mountain? I felt truly out of my league just thinking about it.

I was brought into the world of mountains by my father while growing up in Ireland. He was passionate about the great outdoors, and hitting the hills was his way to unwind after a long week at work. As a child, I didn’t share the same passion and preferred to be at home doing warmer things or spending time just being a kid and playing with friends. At Sunday Mass, while those around me were praying for the repose of souls and world peace, my little hands were firmly clasped together praying for rain. That was when my mother would put her foot down and overrule the excursions. It’s funny that once I grew up and left Ireland, those memories of being cold and uncomfortable were superimposed by memories of family, time spent with them and of missing them. In building my career around the world, mountains became escapes where I, too, could find space to unwind and appreciate who I was and where I came from.

It began when I was a young man living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa. I had a business trip to Tanzania coming up, and Mount Kilimanjaro was just a short hopper flight from Dar es Salaam. As an invincible twenty-six-year-old who didn’t know much apart from drive and ambition, I decided to give it a go, despite my severe fear of heights. The folly of youth. I made it to the top and experienced the invisible barrier of altitude for the very first time. I became acutely aware of the disconnect between mind and body—my mind and fitness level were ready, but my lungs and body had something else to say.

On that climb, soaring above the plains of East Africa, I met a group of other climbers from Europe who were talking about the Seven Summits. And so the idea took root: an intriguing way to push myself physically beyond my comfort zone and perceived capability as well as a unique excuse to travel to and experience all seven continents on the planet. My father had summited Kilimanjaro and Mont Blanc when I was a teenager, so if I am honest with myself, underneath it all, undoubtedly, was also an unconscious need to prove myself to him and my family: that I, the shy young guy who left Ireland when I was twenty years old, was capable of equally high achievement and even surpassing it. It’s these unconscious drivers from our childhood that control so much of who we are, if we allow them.

Over the next ten years I climbed five more of the peaks.

I attempted Aconcagua in Argentina (South America) in 2004, but I failed to reach the summit. On Day 17, pounded by 200 kmh (125 mph) winds and with food and tents destroyed around us, we had to retreat down the mountain with the peak in sight.

Elbrus (Europe) involved a two-week trip to the Russian Caucasus region in 2005—as much a geopolitical adventure as a physical one. The ascent was strenuous but steady, apart from a very cold summit day. We witnessed some other teams with badly prepared and ill-equipped climbers suffering from exhaustion and frostbite, which was a disturbing experience.

Denali in Alaska (North America) the following year was in effect a mini-Everest in terms of technical and weather-related challenges. My fear of heights was truly challenged here. We withstood a long and punishing 55-degree headwall (an almost vertical wall of ice) with fixed lines, unstable ice fields, and crevasse valleys, together with highly exposed knife-edge ridges.

In 2007 I summited Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia (Oceania), a highly technical climb involving rock-climbing skills, which I learned and honed in the Catskill Mountains near New York City. At one section, an earthquake years before had broken off part of a ridge, and we had to attach ourselves to a rope and, in an upside-down and flat position, pull ourselves across the gaping hole and 500 meters (1,650 feet) of air below.

Vinson Massif, in Antarctica, was a wonderous two-week adventure in 2008 to one of the most extreme and hard-to-reach places on earth. A small plane dropped us off on an exposed glacier from where we pulled 70-kilo (150 pounds) sleds for three days, carrying our full supplies to get to Base Camp for the climb. Weather-impacted travel delays and an explosive storm at high camp pinned us down for days.

In 2009, I made a second attempt at Aconcagua. The weather gods were with us; this time we reached the summit in just ten days. I had been stretched beyond my limits on each of the summits, and each mountain represented uniquely different challenges. My fear of heights was ever present and created much discomfort both leading up to and during the expeditions, where I had to face it. I had dug deep and learned to live with the fear while trying to balance the energy it sapped in the process. I believe a fear of heights is real and something you are born with. It does get better through resolute practice in calming the mind, but once you are back in normal life the fear resets itself, and you have to start all over again during a new climb. But that fear did not stop me from climbing another mountain.

So what was truly holding me back in attempting Everest? I had gained confidence from my experiences and had broken through many mental and physical barriers. But Everest was beyond comparison with the other summits—a vertical ultramarathon with wildly steep and exposed sections, innumerable obstacles and uncontrollables, topped off with an ever-increasing list of failed expeditions and deaths that numbered in the hundreds. My intuition told me that Everest was its own force—a mountain not to be reckoned with but rather one to be negotiated with, the climbers representing the subservient party.

Still, maybe, just maybe, I would consider it. While in Antarctica I had met Scott Woolums, a guide who was planning an expedition from the south side of Everest through Nepal in 2010. This would be Scott’s fifth summit of Everest—a level of achievement that induced multiple questions of curiosity around the what, how, and when. His answers were consistent with my thinking: that it’s a highly challenging mountain with great risk. He was clear that the expedition he was planning would be small in number but nimble and agile, and he would be handpicking his climbing team. I could tell he was a man of detail and process—harder to discern was how he would lead a team under the unique pressures of Everest.

Life seems to be a river of challenges and opportunities, and one way to handle them is for the human mind to get busy so you don’t have to think too much. This busyness is a great anesthetic for not having to come to terms with doing something you fear or that causes anxiety. Within a few weeks of returning from Antarctica I was in touch with the climbing company, Mountain Trip, through which Scott would be leading the expedition. I completed the paperwork and wired my hefty deposit for the 2010 Everest expedition. It was a classic case of ambition superseding reason and intuition.

The next fourteen months were mostly about training and getting fit.

I have always been fit, so I amped my regime up about 20 percent to stretch myself without risking any training injuries. This entailed a mix of gym work, running, and swimming. One of my good friends, Dan McHugh, is an ultramarathon runner, and I was particularly lucky to train with him in Central Park on weekends. He has incredible drive, focus, and, above all, discipline. Dan broke down his training into a system of priorities combined with consistency. Even though physically I knew I would be ready, it’s rarely fitness that carries you through Everest. Everyone on my team would be committed, disciplined, focused, and in great shape. The reality is that 70 percent mental focus versus 30 percent physical focus is what allows you to be in a position to attempt the summit.

I was navigating an exceptionally busy work schedule. I had come to the United States and as an entrepreneur started my own executive coaching consulting business just three years prior. Eighteen months after I arrived, the financial crisis of September 2008 hit. I rapidly had to rethink and reinvent my offering in line with the massive fault lines appearing in corporate America. The job market cratered while corporate restructuring went through a seismic transformation. It was a period of immense challenge, and the delicate economic recovery in 2010 was still very much a work in progress.

One operations leader at a large client, an American multinational bank, laid it all out: “Vivian, let me be raw and blunt with you; we are in turmoil right now. Amid the economic chaos, we have restructured and layers of management have been stripped out. The surviving executive leaders and managers have much larger responsibilities and expectations to deliver, without the resources and with demotivated teams. More burden on the shoulders of fewer leaders—the pancaking effect. Add in the immense new scrutiny from regulators on every aspect of our business, past and present, and we are at risk of leaders either giving up and fleeing or being unable to make decisions, like deer in the headlights. Our demise is a real possibility.

“Why you are here is that we believe this is a transformation opportunity, a must-change path. We believe in our leaders and we need them to believe in themselves and to act, lead, and execute. We are investing in executive coaching to give them support and head space to internalize this, each to their own needs. If you deliver results, we will remember you. If you don’t, we will never work with you again.”

The message was stark but authentic. And I respected it—a lot. This typifies the work I do and the people I work with. They are smart, driven, ambitious, and most often, lonely. Sitting high on the hierarchy, responsibilities lie on their shoulders and they have few people with whom to share their worries, concerns, and insecurities, so they tend to internalize their burdens, stresses, and vulnerabilities. Since intellectual energy is a finite resource, any unnecessary drain or waste can have exponential impact on decision-making, reading situations, and managing people effectively.

My training was a healthy distraction from this environment and helped me focus on what was physically awaiting me. It also put things in perspective: success on Everest meant avoiding death and coming home alive. A binary but sobering reality. It was a careful balancing act to carve out the time and pull myself out of bed to train well before dawn most mornings, but the resulting endorphins and fitness transformation sustained my intellectual energy levels. Running alone in Central Park under the streetlights also provided lots of time to think and solve—driving me to be more creative, more challenging of the status quo, and more open overall to my work as an executive coach.

The months passed, and the more people became aware of my ambition, the more they asked about it. I resolutely avoided going into details. In fact, I could feel myself beginning to block out the questions in my own mind. Friends and clients started referring to movies and documentaries on TV about Everest expeditions and asked whether I had seen them. My answer was always “not yet,” which must have created a head-scratch about how nonchalantly I was approaching the trip. Here’s a guy going to climb a scary mountain and he hasn’t even bothered to watch anything or read up on it.

The truth was very different though—I was terrified just thinking about how I would handle the heights and get through it. I knew of the famous book Into Thin Air by John Krakauer, which describes in graphic detail the disaster of the 1996 Everest season when a violent storm on a packed summit day killed some of the world’s most experienced guides and their climbing clients. There was also a slew of Discovery Channel–type documentaries about the mountain, again highlighting the ever-present danger and risks involved through the eyes of actual climbing teams. I didn’t want my subconscious mind to start spinning around the dangers, so I simply blocked it out. Fear suppression was maximized with impressive efficiency. I limited my mind aperture to believing that I would be fit and driven enough to handle the obstacles—taking them one day at a time on the mountain. Avoidance and denial can take you only so far. It’s something I had become good at—ploughing ahead fearlessly toward my goals and avoiding anything that might raise concerns or detract from them. When I was younger, it didn’t matter as much—sheer drive paid me back in spades, and achievement soon followed. Yet for Everest, where the scale of the goal was so large and the risk so high, my avoidance of any books, video clips, or reports about the climb itself was a poor and ultimately futile strategy.

One incident punctured this cocoon of compartmentalization. One month before leaving New York, I was sent a form that required me to sign waivers ahead of the climb. It was titled “Body Disposal and Repatriation” and stated the following:

If you die on the mountain above 7,800 meters (25,590 ft), your body will be left at that location.

If you die on the mountain above 5,300 meters (17,390 ft), your body may be put in a crevasse and possibly marked with a rock or cairn in a respectful manner by an expedition team member.

If you die lower on the mountain, it may be possible to get your body down, where it could be cremated by the locals. This will cost several thousand dollars, including the cost of recovery labor, transport and body preparation, wood, and appropriate donations to the local monastery. This cost is usually between $5,000 and $10,000. It will not be possible to bring your ashes home due to the cremation process.

If you die lower down on the mountain or on the trek to Base Camp, it may be possible to get your body down for repatriation to your country of residence. If you elect repatriation of your body, it would be via helicopter and would be quite complicated and expensive, and might take several weeks.

Climbing tall mountains is inherently dangerous. It’s not that climbers don’t think of bad things happening and the risks associated with the sport—of course we do. But it is an implied risk, one that comes to the fore in real time when negotiating a knife-edge ridge, encountering a rockfall, or sharing experiences with fellow climbers on the mountain. This single document blew all that out into the open in a brief but unnervingly direct statement of scenarios. These facts had to be processed and understood by me alone before making my choices.

Anxiety flooded my conscious mind for the first time since signing up for the expedition. What would I want done with my body? What would be the impact on my family and my loved ones? What would I leave behind if something happened to me, and what would my legacy be? This theme would open up dramatically on the mountain, spinning me into dark and unfamiliar places. But I didn’t know that then. I checked my preferences, signed, and returned the document, my busyness still a lifeline to distraction.

I had plenty of other things to occupy my mind. Taking a sabbatical from my own business for two months was unfamiliar territory for me; it felt like the game Whac-A-Mole in the week leading up to departure. There was a lot of contingency planning and client communication to ensure the company stayed on track and people were looked after. After that restless night the day before departure, with bags finally packed and zipped, I took one last walk through the city I loved. It was a perfect spring day in late March, and unseasonal warmth brought New Yorkers out of their apartments to fill the green expanses of Central Park. The leaves were not yet on the trees, but people had ecstatic looks on their faces, aware that winter was finally in full retreat and summer was beckoning. I strolled through the lawn in the Sheep Meadow. All these people were experiencing their structured day-to-day lives, which would continue for the next two months, whereas I was embarking into the abyss on an adventure that had limitless uncertainty and unknowns.

I felt a deep sense of appreciation marred only by a hint of loss in leaving my grounded life. I was unable to fully visualize (and internalize) what was ahead. Busyness had proven a highly effective distraction for me. But this strategy would return to haunt me over a month later when I faced the mountain and, above all, myself.

CHAPTER 2 DISCOVERING THE TEAM

I WAS FINALLY ON MY WAY. I had hauled two massive duffel bags, a large backpack, and a carry-on into a cab and taken one final glance over my shoulder at Manhattan slowly fading into the distance as we passed over the Queensboro Bridge, the iron struts and metalwork whizzing by.

As I waited for my flight at JFK, I opened my email and saw a message from Mountain Trip about one of our Everest guides, Heidi Kloos. Heidi had been a guide on my expedition to Antarctica just over a year before. She was inclusive, decisive, resourceful, and empathetic—innately knowing when to push and when to support—representing some of the key qualities for a mountaineering leader.

According to the email, she had set out from her home a few days ago for an afternoon ice climb, accompanied by her dog Menke. When she didn’t return the following day, friends alerted Search and Rescue, who found her dog, her backpack, and one ski amid a mass of avalanche debris. An avalanche had killed her fiancée ten years before, and Heidi was known for having a very conservative approach to moving in avalanche terrain. As night fell, the rescue party had to descend the mountain, but her dog refused to leave with them and remained at the site overnight. The following afternoon they recovered her body, buried under several meters of snow. The north-facing slope where she was located was largely known to be safe and unexposed. It’s believed she was ascending on skis when an overhang of snow and ice from a cliff above broke off and she was encased with debris.

The news stunned me. I could still hear her voice and infectious laugh in my head as I recalled the almost three weeks we spent together in Chile a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: From Skyscrapers to Base Camp
• Part 2: Face-to-Face with Everest
• Part 3: The Summit Reckoning
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• About the Author
• Glossary
• Copyright