The Mountain is You

our minds also go through periodic episodes of positive disintegration, or a cleansing through which we release and renew our self-concept.

When we can no longer rely on our coping mechanisms to help distract us from the problems in our lives, it can feel as though we’ve hit rock bottom.

this sort of awakening is what happens when we finally come to terms with the problems that have existed for a long time.

the part of you that is not aware of why you are still holding yourself back.

Maybe it’s a vague sense of anxiety, low self-esteem, fear, or a general discontentment that seems to bleed out onto everything else.

The mountain that stands in front of you is the calling of your life, your purpose for being here, and your path finally made clear. One day, this mountain will be behind you, but who you become in the process of getting over it will stay with you always.

In the end, it is not the mountain that you must master, but yourself.

THERE IS NOTHING HOLDING you back in life more than yourself.

Likewise, for many people, their fears and attachments are very often just symptoms of deeper issues for which they do not have any better way to cope.  

Self-sabotage is what happens when we refuse to consciously meet our innermost needs, often because we do not believe we are capable of handling them.

we sabotage our self-talk because if we believed in ourselves, we’d feel free to get back out in the world and take risks, and that would leave us vulnerable.

we sabotage our professional success because what we really want is to create art, even if it will make us seem less ambitious by society’s measures.

we sabotage our relationships because what we really want is to find ourselves,

a maladaptive coping mechanism, a way we give ourselves what we need without having to actually address what that need is.

Self-sabotage is also one of the first signs that your inner narrative is outdated, limiting, or simply incorrect.

criticism comes with creating anything for the public and isn’t a reason to not do it.

Gay Hendricks calls this your “upper limit,” or your tolerance for happiness.4 Everyone has a capacity for which they allow themselves to feel good.

Get angry, determined, and allow yourself to develop tunnel vision with one thing and one thing only at the end: that you will not go on as you are.

Self-sabotage is committing to a healthier diet and finding yourself pulling up to the drive-thru a few hours later. It’s identifying a market gap, conceiving an unprecedentedly brilliant business idea, then getting “distracted” and forgetting to begin working on it. It’s having strange and terrifying thoughts and allowing them to paralyze you in the face of important life changes or milestones. It is knowing you have so much to be grateful for and excited about and yet worrying anyway.

Self-sabotage is not a way we hurt ourselves; it’s a way we try to protect ourselves.

Self-sabotage is when you have two conflicting desires. One is conscious, one is unconscious. You know how you want to move your life forward, and yet you are still, for some reason, stuck.

Some people can’t figure out why they can’t seem to motivate themselves enough to create a new business to facilitate their goal of becoming significantly wealthier, perhaps not realizing that they have a subconscious belief that to be rich is to be egocentric or disliked. Or perhaps they actually don’t want to be super-wealthy. Maybe it’s a cover-up for wanting to feel secure and “taken care of,” or their real desire is to be recognized for their art, and as this feels too unlikely to ever happen, they fall back on a secondary dream that doesn’t actually motivate them.

Perhaps instead of being “successful,” what many really want is just to be loved, and yet their ambition for success directly threatens that.

Resistance is your way of slowing down and making sure that it’s safe to get attached to something new and important. In other cases, it can also be a warning sign that something isn’t quite right, and you might need to step back and regroup.

We have to identify unconscious beliefs that are preventing us from showing up, and then we have to step back into the work when we feel inspired. Wanting is the entryway to showing up after resistance.

Your life is ultimately measured by your outcomes, not your intentions. It is not about what you wanted to do or would have done but didn’t have the time.

When we let go of what isn’t right for us, we create space to discover what is. However, doing so requires the tremendous courage to put our pride aside and see things for what they really are.

People will respect you far more if you can acknowledge that you are an imperfect person—like everyone else—learning, adapting, and trying your best.

By not assuming you know everything or that you need to seem perfect, you can admit when you’re wrong, ask for assistance, and lean on others sometimes. Basically, you open yourself back up to growth, and your life is better for it over the long term.

This happens because of downplaying. The idea of having “made it” makes us afraid that we are reaching the pinnacle and therefore will fall off of it. If we acknowledge that we’ve arrived, what goals remain? It is a feeling akin to death, so we instead find another measure to work toward.

If the fear is that we are “peaking” too soon, we have to reform our idea of progress. We do not get better only to get worse again. We do not achieve one thing only to lose it and return to what we were before. That instinct is a self-sabotaging behavior, one that wants to keep us within our old comfort zone.

This is because being “busy” is not a virtue; it only signals to others that you do not know how to manage your time or your tasks.  

If you are doing “everything you are supposed to be doing” and yet you feel empty and depressed at the end of the day, the issue is probably that you’re not really doing what you want to be doing; you’ve just adopted someone else’s script for happiness.

Give yourself credit for everything you’ve overcome that you never thought you would, and everything you’ve built that you never thought you could.

For example, if someone has a core commitment to feel free, they may find themselves sabotaging work opportunities in order to achieve that.

The less that you feed your core need, the “louder” your core commitment symptoms will be.

If you are committed to freedom and therefore need a sense of autonomy, the less that you build a life on your own terms, the more you are going to sabotage opportunities and feel drained and exhausted when you “should” feel happy.

Overcoming self-sabotage is not just a matter of understanding why you’re holding yourself back; it is being able to take action in the direction that you want and need to, even if it is initially uncomfortable or triggering.

The thing about overcoming self-sabotage is that we don’t often need to be told what to do. We know what we want to do, and we know what we need to do. It is simply that we are being held back by our fear of feeling.

Then you have to reconnect to your inspiration or your vision for life. Get clear on why you want to take this action and make a change. When your motivation is the fact that you want to live a different and better existence, you’re going to find that a lot of the resistance fades because you’re being pushed by a vision that’s greater than your fear.

Remind yourself that you love yourself too much to settle for less, or that it is okay to be angry in unfair or frustrating circumstances.

The truth is that you can have a vision of what you want, know that it is undoubtedly right for you, and simply not feel like taking the action required to pursue that path.

This is an emotion that often comes up in the aftermath of a disappointment. This could be the loss of a relationship, a job, or just a general idea of what you thought your life would be.

Though we live in an age where people tend to tell us that we should be entirely self-sufficient, and to want or need another person’s presence, validation, or company is a sign of self-insufficiency, that is not an accurate portrayal of what it means to be human, and it severely overlooks the reality of human nature and connection.

In the same way, it is also important that we recognize we cannot meet every single one of our needs on our own.

THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Pushing people away.   WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You want people to love and accept you so much that the stress of it all makes you isolate yourself from the pain, effectively creating the reality you’re trying to avoid. Alternatively, needing solitude too often usually means there is a discrepancy between who you pretend to be and who you actually are. When you show up to your life more authentically, it becomes easier to have people around you, as it requires less effort.

THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Not promoting your work in a way that would help move you forward.   WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You’re not creating the best possible work you can, and you sense it. The reason why you’re holding back is a fear of judgment, but that wouldn’t exist if you weren’t already judging yourself. You have to create things you are proud to share, and when sharing them in a positive way that helps grow your business or career feels natural and authentic, you will know that you are doing the work that is at the best of your ability or potential.

There is a world-altering difference between using social media in a healthy way versus as a coping mechanism. Mostly, it has to do with how you feel after you’re finished. If you don’t put the phone down feeling inspired or relaxed, you’re probably trying to avoid some kind of discomfort within yourself—the very discomfort that just might be telling you that you need to change.  

SELF-SABOTAGE IS ULTIMATELY JUST a product of low emotional intelligence. To move on with our lives in a healthy, productive, and stable way, we need to understand how our brains and bodies work together.

The root of self-sabotage is a lack of emotional intelligence, because without the ability to understand ourselves, we inevitably become lost. These are some of the most misunderstood aspects of our brains and bodies that inevitably leave us stuck.

Dopamine, it turns out, is not the chemical that gives you pleasure; it’s the chemical that gives you the pleasure of wanting more.

This is one of the many reasons that we deeply sabotage what we truly want. We know instinctively that “arriving” won’t really give us the ability to abstain from life; it will only make us hungrier for more. Sometimes, we don’t feel up to that challenge.

  If you’re stuck in life, it’s probably because you’re waiting for the big bang, the breakthrough moment in which all your fears dissolve and you’re overcome with clarity. The work that needs to happen happens effortlessly. Your personal transformation rips you from complacency, and you wake up to an entirely new existence.   That moment will never come.   Breakthroughs do not happen spontaneously. They are tipping points.

As writer and media strategist Ryan Holiday has noted, epiphanies are not life-altering.9 It’s not radical moments of action that give us long-lasting, permeating change—it’s the restructuring of our habits. The idea is what science philosopher Thomas Kuhn dubbed a “paradigm shift.” Kuhn suggested we don’t change our lives in flashes of brilliance, but through a slow process in which assumptions unravel and require new explanations. It’s in these periods of flux that microshifts happen and breakthrough-level change begins to take shape.

Think of microshifts as tiny increments of change in your day-to-day life. A microshift is changing what you eat for one part of one meal just one time. Then it’s doing that a second time and a third. Before you even realize what’s happening, you’ve adopted a pattern of behavior.   What you do every single day accounts for the quality of your life and the degree of your success. It’s not whether you “feel” like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.

If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them.

If you want to spend less time on your phone, deny yourself the chance to check it one time today.

Those who can’t help but create problems in their minds often do so because they have ceased creative control of their existence. They move into the passenger’s seat, thinking that life happens to them, rather than being a product of their actions.

But what most people don’t tell you is that adversity makes you creative. It activates a part of you that is often latent.   It makes things interesting. Part of the human narrative is wanting something to overcome.   The trick is keeping it in balance. Choosing to exit your comfort zone and endure pain for a worthy cause.

Antifragile things need tension, resistance, adversity, and pain to break and transform. We get this by deeply communing with life and being part of it, rather than fearing our emotions and sitting on the sidelines.   You can’t stay there forever, nor do you really want to. Embracing the grit of it all was what you were made for. Lean in and start living.

The truth about your psyche is this: Anything that is new, even if it is good, will feel uncomfortable until it is also familiar.

We often resist most deeply the things that we want most.

If all we are accustomed to is doing what we need to do to survive, we are then confronted with the next phases of our self-actualization.

If we are no longer worried about basic survival, our minds are free to turn to the bigger questions in life: What is our purpose? Have we lived meaningfully? Are we who we want to be?

The truth is that you do not change your life when you fix every piece and call that healing.   You change your life when you start showing up exactly as you are. You change your life when you become comfortable with being happy here, even if you want to go forward. You change your life when you can love yourself even though you don’t look exactly the way you want to.

You change your life when you start doing the truly scary thing, which is showing up exactly as you are.

When you start showing up as exactly who you are, you start radically changing your life.   You start receiving authentic love. You start doing your best and most profitable and effortless work. You start laughing; you start enjoying things again. You start realizing that you just needed anything to project all this fear onto, so you chose the most vulnerable and common issues in life.

You declare to the world that you will not only love yourself when it sees you as worthy.   You will not only have values when you have everything you could ever need.   You will not only be principled once you get where you want to be.

You are showing up as you are today and taking what’s yours, not what belongs to some imaginary version of yourself. Not what you think the world thinks you’re worthy of. You, here, now. That is the true healing.   In fact, the universe does not allow perfection. Without breaks and gaps, there would be no growth. Nature depends on imperfection. Fault lines make mountains, star implosions become supernovas, and the death of one season creates the rebirth of the next.

You get stuck when you try to make something that’s wrong for you right. When you try to force it into a place in your life in which it doesn’t belong.

You can fall in love with potential as opposed to reality.

Because the truth is that we do not want what is not right for us; we are simply attached to it. We are simply afraid. We are simply stuck in the assumption that nothing better will replace it, that its absence will open up a well of endless, infinite suffering for which there will be no solution. We do not want what is not right for us; we are just scared to let go of what we believe will make us secure.

The funny part is there is nothing that makes us more insecure than hanging around what isn’t right for us.

  What is not right for you does not remain with you because you don’t want it, and so you don’t choose it. You step away when you are ready, you let go when you are able, and you realize, all along, that all you were really in love with was a little trick of the light that made you feel safe.

healing? It’s about getting to a place where you prioritize nothing over the quality of your one, short

. Your future self can step in and remind you of all that is possible and empower you to live with certainty, clarity, and grace.

We are acquainted with the versions of ourselves that our current life requires. We know who we need to be at work, at home, or in love. But we are often unfamiliar with the person we need to be in order to move our lives forward.

Your purpose is a dynamic, evolving thing. Most of the time, it is at the intersection of what you are interested in, what you are good at, and what the world needs. Having a clear vision of what you want to create and accomplish is essential to finding your inner power. You will not feel strongly about a dream that is not part of who you most essentially are.

To be a truly powerful person, you need to have complete, unwavering conviction about what you want to create. To do this, you have to shift from a “live for the moment” to a “live for the legacy” mindset.

Validating the way someone else feels is an exercise in radial empathy. It is starting the conversation with: “It is okay to feel this way.” Because when we point out how wrong someone is to feel the way they do, they shut down. And they shut down because they feel shame.

Validating other people teaches us how to validate ourselves. And when we learn how to validate ourselves, we become stronger. We see that our emotions are no longer threats, but informants. They show us what we care about, what we want to savor, and what we want to protect. They remind us that life is fleeting, and challenging, and gorgeous. When we are willing to accept the darkness, it is only then that we find the light.

When you have life problems, you need life principles.

More money does not solve money problems. Different relationships do not solve relationship problems. New work does not solve work problems. Your future life will not solve your life problems.

This is because money does not make you good with money.

Love does not make you love yourself.

Work doesn’t make you good at your job or capable of work/ life balance.

Someone who makes $500K can be as seriously in debt and struggling as someone who makes $50K, and in fact, this happens more often than you would ever think.

You can be just as unhappy in your ideal job, with your perfect hours, at your most desired pay rate, if you don’t know how to ration your time, relate to others in your workplace, or move your career forward. People who are “living their dreams” and “following their passion” can be just as unhappy as people who are not.

If you don’t have principles, your life is not going to get better. Problems are only going to follow you and get bigger as your life does.

The good things that happen to us in life are like a magnifier. They show us where we still need to grow.

WHAT IS A PRINCIPLE?   A principle is a fundamental truth that you can use to build the foundation of your life. A principle is not an opinion or a belief. A principle is a matter of cause and effect.  

Keep overhead costs low, get out and stay out of debt, live beneath your means, or save for a rainy day.

The point of having principles is that it shifts you from short-term survival to long-term thriving.

This means that if we are committed to the principle of eating good food each day, we will inevitably reap the benefit of better or improved health. If we write a sentence each day for many, many years, we will inevitably write a larger piece of work. If we commit to paying off a portion of our debts each month, we will inevitably clear our balance. If we invest consistently and wisely, we will eventually see a return.

Little things, done repeatedly and over time, become the big things.

Perhaps you value travel and freedom, and so by principle, you are going to start working for yourself and always prioritize being able to work remotely or make your own schedule.

When you start thinking that you don’t know what to do with your life, what you really mean is that you don’t yet know who you are.

Your purpose is, first and foremost, just to be here.

Without you, absolutely nothing would exist just as it is right now. This is important to understand, because if you start believing that your whole purpose in being alive is just a specific job or role you take on at home, what happens when you quit or retire, or when the kids grow up and you’re no longer a parent?

You’ll sink because you will falsely think that was your only reason for being.

When you realize that you are always impacting the world around you, you start to realize something: The most important thing you can do to live meaningfully is to work on yourself. To consciously become the happiest, kindest, and most gracious version of yourself.

Knowing your purpose also doesn’t necessarily mean your life will henceforth be easy or that you’ll always know what to do. In fact, when you are genuinely on your own path, the future won’t be clear, because if it is, you’re actually following someone else’s blueprint.

Most people come into awareness of their purpose not because they are effortlessly clear on what their talents are and how they can best utilize them, but because at some point, they find themselves lost, depleted, exhausted, and with their backs against the wall.

controlling your emotions involves becoming more conscious of how you feel. You are aware that you are angry, sad, or aggrieved, but you are choosing what you do about it. It is not really that you are controlling your emotions, but your behavior.

Albert Camus once said: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

your happiness has never come from things being perfect on the outside, but from you being present and open and connected to yourself and to the moment.

Overthinking disconnects you from the moment. When you are consistently sidelined from your own anxiety, it’s because you don’t have a plan regarding the thing that’s making you scared.

Social media has likened us all to mini-celebrities in our own circles: We become convinced that everyone around us is disproportionately concerned with the minutiae of our lives.   In a number of decades, you will be gone. Your home will be sold to a new family. Your job will be taken by someone else. Your kids will be adults. Your work will be done. This isn’t supposed to depress you; it is supposed to liberate you.   Nobody is thinking about you in the way that you think they are thinking about you. They are mostly thinking of themselves.

When you feel self-conscious for going grocery shopping in your sweatpants, please know that nobody cares and nobody is looking. When you feel anxious about your accomplishments or lack thereof, please know that for the most part, nobody cares and nobody is looking. This is true of absolutely everything in life.

Stop trying to predict what you can’t know, and start putting your energy toward building what you can. You and your life will be better for it.

There are some things in life that are outside of your control. If you focus on them, you will miss something really important: the majority of your life is the direct result of your actions, behaviors, and choices.

You are not supposed to feel happy all of the time. Trying to feel happy all of the time is not the solution; it’s the problem.   Instead of the ability to sustain positivity at all times, mental strength requires that you develop the ability to process complex emotions such as grief, rage, sadness, anxiety, or fear.

The most effective and healthy way to change your life is slowly. If you need instant gratification, make the goal the tiny step you take each day. Over time, momentum will build, and you’ll realize that you’re miles from where you started.

When you’re struggling, the most insulting and difficult thing that someone can tell you is to “just relax” or “just enjoy yourself.” When you’re in survival mode, the last thing you can possibly think about is just sitting back and rolling with the punches. This is the most important part of learning how to enjoy your life again: When you’re in a place of trauma and pain, you can’t try to force yourself to be happy. First, you have to step back into neutral.

True happiness is embracing the little joys in life: the sunrise on a warm summer morning, your cup of coffee, or an amazing book. It is being grateful not only for when big things happen, but also for the small satisfactions that you can find every day.

Those disliked jobs and stale relationships aren’t problems, they are symptoms, and at the root of all of it is where you allow your mind to run. When you give your energy to certain thoughts, they gain life. There’s a saying that the wolf that wins is the one that you feed, and when it comes to the quality of your life, you need to be extremely careful of what you allow yourself to think. It will soon become what you feel, then what you believe, and then how you behave, and sure enough, the way you live.

SCHEDULE TIME TO DO NOTHING   Happiness is an active pursuit as much as it is a passive one.

Happiness is refusing to fill your schedule to the absolute brim so you can wring the most you possibly can out of every second of your life. It is also taking time to embrace the mundanity of everyday moments. It’s sitting back and reading a book, talking over dinner with someone you love, or just enjoying the small things each day. Taking this time won’t happen on its own; you have to plan for it.

When we were kids, all we did was imagine and play. Our lives were our canvases, and we inherently understood that we could make believe absolutely anything and spend the day living it out.   The same is true in adulthood,

Mastery is to realize that we are equipped with the exact traits we need to overcome the mountains before us, and in fact, doing so is the ultimate calling of our lives. We are not only capable; we are destined.

Mastery is to finally understand that the years of discomfort you endured were not some sort of purgatory you had to just get through. They were your deepest inner self informing you that you are capable of more, deserving of better, and meant to transform into the person of your dreams.

If we want to change the world, we change ourselves. If we want to change our lives, we change ourselves.

Your life is just beginning.   One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.   That is the point of the mountain.