The Mountain Is You summary

Once you’ve identified your self-sabotaging behaviors, you can discover what they’re really saying about you. Uncovering the hard truths about bad habits can reveal your true needs.

Let’s take overworking, for instance. Yes, you can be passionately committed to your career but neglecting the rest of your life to be in the office isn’t healthy. If that’s what you’re doing, it could mean you’re uncomfortable being with your own feelings. Be honest about what you’re hiding from and deal with that instead of working another late night.

Gut instinct is more than a saying. It’s real.

Your gastrointestinal system, or your gut, can actually store information. The vagus nerve delivers this information to your brain faster than your conscious mind can recall it, and voilà, you have gut instinct.

Just because you can recognize your self-sabotaging behaviors doesn’t mean you can stop them. Humans are resistant to change.

Your brain regulates thousands of bodily functions without you even knowing it – from big, muscular movements like breathing and heartbeat, to the release of thousands of chemicals into your billions of cells. As your brain controls all these moving parts, it’s also keeping them in balance. This creates a physical comfort zone which is good for your body. Your brain also tries to maintain a balance but staying in your mental comfort zone isn’t always good for you.

Don’t think about pink elephants.

You just thought about a pink elephant, didn’t you? That’s okay, it’s only natural. That’s why it doesn’t work to just not think about the bad habits and negative feelings that you’ve been using as coping mechanisms. If you can’t not think about something silly like a pink elephant, how are you going to not think about your deeply rooted behaviors?

Nice job, you’ve made it. You’ve identified your self-sabotaging behaviors, learned from them, ignored the false realities of feeling, faced your faults honestly, and made incremental changes until you’ve become the best version of yourself. You’ve climbed the mountain. It should be all easygoing from here, right?

Well, not so much. Life doesn’t suddenly become easy for successful people. They don’t stop having needs. They don’t stop having emotions that can distort reality. But they know how to satisfy their needs in healthy ways. They know how to sit with their emotions, how to feel them without reacting impulsively, and how to interpret their messages. They also know they need to continue the inner work of studying their habits and being honest about what they see, or else they’ll fall back into negative patterns.

You’re your own worst enemy and your greatest teacher. You sabotage yourself with behaviors meant to satisfy your unmet needs, but those behaviors also hold the key to reaching your fullest potential, if you can learn from their messages. They’re deceptive and can take many shapes, so look carefully.

These self-sabotaging behaviors that block your way are your own personal mountain. Climbing that mountain and changing your pattern of behavior takes hard, honest work. The going will be slow and the footing can get treacherous. It won’t be comfortable, but it will help you change your life.