#045 Lessons from Everest | Jeannette McGill

Jeannette McGill, guest · [03:40]Yeah, the route I took took me to the deepest point on the African continent. So instead of nature conservation, I studied zoology, but then I also studied geology. And it was that geology studies that saw me get a scholarship initially to go and study at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. And then through that, I started working on the gold mines of South Africa. And this was in the, the late 1990s where it was still actually illegal for women to work underground full-time. There were two ways that women could work underground in South Africa. The first was if you were a nurse or had to support some event that required some health assistance underground. And the second way of getting underground was as a geologist, because you worked a part shift underground. So women couldn't study mining engineering because that would have meant a whole shift underground. But as a geologist, we would map underground and then come to the surface. And so instead of studying mining engineering, I studied geology, and that gave me a pathway to working on South African gold mines. And yes, I was the first technical woman to work on all the mines that I've worked on, and then I also pursued and got a underground blasting certificate as well. So definitely grew up, took that challenge that I had in the outdoors, in the real mountains, and I put that back underground.

Jeannette McGill, guest · [10:41]You know, a picture of my Everest journey has been really sort of an interesting one for me, and I guess I call it my my Steve Jobs journey insofar as we all know that Steve Jobs said you cannot, you know, look at the dots going forward, and, you can only connect them looking backwards. And my Everest journey is one of those things. Insofar as back in 1995 when I was studying at Rhodes, this competition came out in the Sunday Times newspaper, and it was asking for women to apply to be part of a competition that would select a woman to join already pre-selected men as climbers to be the first South African expedition to Everest. And, needless to say, that became the 1996 season, which has been well represented in the the press and the public sphere, and people can go look at that. And it was during that process that I really had to ask myself, is this something that I wanted to do? And I thought it was People had said you well experienced in the outdoors, but I also knew of the people that probably were more connected than me at the time and probably stood there for just through their connections, had a better chance of being successful. And I was studying, I was doing my honors at the time, and it was this decision. I remember tearing up the newspaper in my, my res room and saying, no, you know, I'm just going to follow my career. But actually my dream had sort of, the seed had been planted back then, but I just buried it. And then I continued with this corporate career and my mountaineering, you know, I used it recreationally very much so. And, and then, you know, as, as one develops in the mountaineering space, I'd done the Kilimanjaros and then I wanted to see if I can get to 6,000 meters. And when you get to 6,000 meters, you want to see if you can get to 7,000 meters. And naturally we decide, you know, I wanted to know if my body can work up at 8,000 meters because funny enough, In people's bodies, there's a natural ceiling. Not everybody can get to these exceptionally extreme altitudes. And it was only when I'd had some of this pre-existing experience climbing 8,000 meter mountains. I'm the first South African woman to do some mountains and the first South African in totality to climb some mountains. It was only then that it almost went full circle where I went, you know what? I actually wouldn't mind trying Everest. I kept the goal quite quiet from people because I find Everest can be quite polarizing in the public space. And I did have two attempts at Everest and for various reasons they didn't work out. And eventually I had to be quite outspoken and I had to own that goal. I found it was really easy to encourage others to lead through their goals, but I had to take this, you know, this path to be able to really be standing up about my own personal Everest goal, and, I was very happy to summit this year in 2025, which basically means my Everest journey has been a path of resilience and self-belief that's taken a good 30 years to reach fruition.

Jeannette McGill, guest · [16:07]And there's probably three main, misnomers around Everest. The first one definitely is the lines. And I was very fortunate enough, based on my experience and based on my logistical setup, I was able to summit just myself and my Sherpa. And, but the interesting thing is people do, they condemn the lines on Everest, but if you go and you look at a race like trail running, the UTMB race in Mont Blanc, they have 10,000 people over one weekend. We have 700 climbers on Everest over six weeks, and so I think that Everest is often taken out of, you know, context there. The other big thing, of course, is people say there's bodies on Everest everywhere. And one of the interesting things that I look at as well is there's been about 354 deaths on Everest. But if you look at a sport like the Ironman, the full Ironman, since the inception of Ironman, 250 people have died running the Ironman. But It's not really well known, and so I do believe that things like lions, things like deaths are the, the challenge that we have to be able to create a positive perception around climbing Everest, but obviously some of the real challenges do talk to things like climate change at the moment.

Jeannette McGill, guest · [17:42]It really helped me own my experience. I didn't realize that I would be that, but I do enjoy studying. I like numbers, I like data, and so having been somebody who does have access to the Himalayan database, it was out of curiosity to check back from a South African perspective to see who had done what when. I'd learned that the oldest South African so far to summit Everest is is a guy who's 55 years old when he summited. the previous oldest, South African woman, she summited when she was 49. So, the reality is is that whilst, you know, it's a it's a nice thing to say about it, from a actual climbing perspective, it meant that I had to own the age. The ageism is quite rife in the mountaineering space and, really being able to own why I'm there in my experience. But at the flip side, I do believe that older women in particular are really strong when it comes to an endurance perspective. When we're able to put our heads down and just keep going and keep going. You can see this in sports like marathon mountain biking as well as, you know, the trail running races and things like that. And so for me, being an older climber meant that one, I could really own the experience that I had. It's blatant when you can look at the ice wall on Everest. You can see who's got the experience and who hasn't. And then just being able to keep that experience in my pocket such that I could manage my logistics, my health, my mental health, all of those things as well. So it actually really differently supported my summit. I think that younger people, they summit, they might summit first time out of the gates, but I think sometimes it's by a bit of luck and obviously a supportive The, the Sherpa community.

Jeannette McGill, guest · [27:23]Yeah, I really sort of break this path down into three main points, and I agree. It Everests can be very personal, they can be public, and could be a challenge that you're taking on for one moment in time, or it can be something that you're going to take a couple of years to achieve. And for me, I'd break this leadership path and getting to your personal Everest down into three distinct steps. And for me, the first one is commitment. You actually have to commit to yourself, let alone others, that this is what you're going to do. It happened on my Everest journey. I played it safe, I played it quiet for the first attempts, and then I had to commit to myself, and then I was able to have the freedom to set up my entire lifestyle around what I wanted to do. So if you have a goal, you've got to commit to it, because then you can lead yourself through to that point. But once you've committed to that goal, you do have to put in the work, and that work comes around consistency. And so the same way we might fill in a dot on a calendar to do whatever you want to do, you've got to do it. And I firmly believe in the little things actually add up to the big things. And I know that when you joined me last year, the training that you did was part of that consistency. You saw the big elephant of a, you know, a 25-day odd trekking trip and broke it down and was just tackling it on a consistent basis. And then the final aspect That I would share after the commitment, the consistency is then courage. You do have to just simply have that courage to be able to back yourself, to stand up against naysayers, to share it with family, to share it with friends, and that courage will then support the self-belief to be able to take on your own personal Everest.

Jeannette McGill, guest · [29:37]I'd probably want to share from a, a leadership perspective, especially, you know, we'd spoken earlier that I've been on the forefront of some of the, the gender challenges that we defined in the female space as leaders. And because we are now women that were often at the forefront of leadership when we were younger, and we are able to pull people along behind us means that, that's been great. And I've been able to watch those full circle moments. But at the same time, we're still pushing barriers and boundaries. And one of those things comes to women being older in the leadership space without having ageism push against us, as well as some of the, you know, the challenges that we have as we enter our later lives. And for me, what I would share then is around that fear and the self-leadership is a muscle. And it's a muscle, like any muscle which you've got to take to the gym, it's a muscle that needs to get stretched. If you haven't run or walked around the block for a while, you've got to go and start slow. And I think as women, especially we get older, we stop to stretch our fear muscle and how we talk and how we do things the older we get. And so probably the last thing is just to encourage everybody to keep stretching your fear muscle. It doesn't have to be going all the way to 8,000 meters in the top of the world. It doesn't have to be four kilometers beneath the surface of the earth either. But whatever it is, you know, go out there, go and experience new things, do new things, read new books, see new people, and keep stretching your fear muscle as we get older.