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The Mountain Is You by Brianna West

The Mountain Is You by Brianna West

by Parker · 220 things on Twos

Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery
Introduction
The objective of being human is to grow.
Species reproduce, DNA evolves to eliminate certain strands and develop new ones, and the edges of the universe are expanding forever outward.
Our ability to feel the depth and beauty of life is capable of expanding forever inward if we are willing to take our problems and see them as catalysts.
Everything in nature is imperfect, and it is because of that imperfection that growth is possible.
The mountain is often less a challenge in front of us as it is a problem within us, an unstable foundation that might not seem evident on the surface but is nonetheless shifting almost every part of our lives.
We often think that to face a mountain means to face life’s hardships, but the truth is that it is almost always because of the years we have spent accumulating tiny traumas, adaptations, and coping mechanisms, all of which have compounded over time.
Chapter 1: The Mountain is You
There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself.
If there is an ongoing gap between where you are and where you want to be—and your efforts to close it are consistently met with your own resistance, pain, and discomfort—self-sabotage is almost always at work.
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.
To truly heal, you are going to have to change the way you think. You are going to have to become very conscious of negative and false beliefs and start shifting to a mindset that actually serves you.
The first step in healing anything is taking full accountability. It is no longer being in denial about the honest truth of your life and yourself. It does not matter what your life looks like on the outside; it is how you feel about it on the inside. It is not okay to be constantly stressed, panicked, and unhappy. Something is wrong, and the longer you try to “love yourself ” out of realizing this, the longer you are going to suffer.
The greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you are unhappy with. It is to be able to state the problem plainly and in a straightforward manner.
Take a piece of paper and a pen, and write down everything you aren’t happy with. Write down, very specifically, every single problem you face. If you are struggling with finances, you need a very clear picture of what’s wrong. Write down every debt, every bill, every asset, and every bit of income. If you are struggling with self-image, write down exactly what you dislike about yourself. If it is anxiety, write down everything that bothers or upsets you.
You must first and foremost get out of denial and into clarity about what’s really wrong. At this point, you have a choice: You can make peace, or you can commit to changing. The lingering is what is keeping you stuck.
No matter what it takes, I will never accept my life getting to this point again.
Chapter 2: There's No Such Thing As Self-Sabotage
The habits and behaviors you can’t stop engaging in—no matter how destructive or limiting they may be—are intelligently designed by your subconscious to meet an unfulfilled need, displaced emotion, or neglected desire.
Overcoming self-sabotage is not about trying to figure out how to override your impulses; it is first determining why those impulses exist in the first place.
Self-sabotage is not a way we hurt ourselves; it’s a way we try to protect ourselves.
People have an almost superhuman way of doing whatever they feel compelled to do, regardless of whom it could hurt, what wars it could spawn, or what future would be put at risk. When you consider this, you begin to realize that if you’re keeping something in your life, there has to be a reason you want it there. The only question is why.
Success usually exposes you to jealousy and scrutiny. Successful people are not loved in the way that we imagine they would be; they are usually picked apart because envious people need to humanize them in some way. Perhaps instead of being “successful,” what many really want is just to be loved, and yet their ambition for success directly threatens that.
Here are some of the main signs that you’re probably in a cycle of self-sabotage:
Resistence
Resistance is what happens when we have a new project that we need to work on and simply can’t bring ourselves to do it.
It’s when we get into a great new relationship and then keep bailing on plans.
It’s when we get an amazing idea for our business and then feel tension and anger when it comes time to sit down and actually get to work.
We have to get clear on what we want as well as when and why we want it. 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.
Hitting your upper limit
When you begin to surpass your upper limit, you start to unconsciously sabotage what’s happening in order to bring yourself back to what’s comfortable and familiar.
For some people, this manifests physically, often as aches, pains, headaches, or physical tension. For others, it manifests emotionally as resistance, anger, guilt, or fear.
Uprooting
Uprooting happens when someone finds themselves jumping from relationship to relationship or changing their business website again and again, when they real- ly need to focus on confronting relationship issues when they arise or taking care of clients they already have.
First, recognize the pattern.
When the moment comes that you would typically flee, confront the discomfort and stay where you are. Figure out why you are uncomfortable getting attached to one thing or another, and determine what a healthy attachment would look like for you.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism holds us back from showing up and trying, or really doing the important work of our lives.
Don’t worry about doing it well; just do it.
The truth is that we actually do not accomplish great feats when we are anxious about whether or not what we do will indeed be something impressive and world-changing. We accomplish these sorts of things when we simply show up and allow ourselves to create something meaningful and important to us.
Instead of perfection, focus on progress. Instead of having something done perfectly, focus on just getting it done. From there, you can edit, build, grow, and develop it to exactly what your vision is. But if you don’t get started, you’ll never arrive.
Limited emotional processing skills
Healthy emotional processing looks different for everyone but generally involves these steps:
Get clear on what happened.
Validate your feelings.
Determine a course correction.
First, you need to understand why you’re upset or the reason why something is bothering you so much. Without clarity on this, you’ll continue to waste your time mulling over the details without really understanding what’s hurting you so much.
Next, you have to validate how you feel. Recognize that you are not alone; anyone in your situation would probably feel similarly (and does) and that what you feel is absolutely okay. In doing this, you can allow yourself a physical release such as crying, shaking, journaling about what you feel, or talking to a trusted friend.
Justification
Your life is ultimately measured by your outcomes, not your intentions.
When we have a goal, dream, or plan, there is no measure of intent. It is only whether you did it or did not. Any other reason you offer for not showing up and doing the work is simply you stating that you prioritize that reason over your ultimate ambition, which means that it will always take precedence in your life.
Start measuring your outcomes and focusing on at least doing one productive thing each day.
It’s no longer about wanting to show up for your friends; it’s whether or not you did. It’s no longer about the great ideas you had about how to change your business; it’s about whether or not you did.
Stop accepting your own excuses. Stop being complacent with your own justifications.
Start quantifying your days by how many healthy, positive things you accomplished, and you will see how quickly you begin to make progress.
Disorganization
By leaving our lives and spaces in disarray, we are not just mindlessly forgetting to take care of our surroundings. We are often actually creating distractions and chaos that serve an unconscious purpose.
A clean, organized space—both for work and for living— is essential to thriving.
To declutter and reorganize, start with one room, and if that is too much, try one corner, drawer, or closet. Work on that, and only that, and then implement a routine that maintains the organization.
It is very hard to show up as the person you want to be when you are surrounded by an environment that makes you feel like a person you aren’t.
Attachment to what you don't really want
Our inability to perform is not based in fear or lack of skill, it is based in an inherent knowing that this is not what we want for our lives.
We do not have to live the rest of our lives trying to achieve some measure of success we thought was ideal when we were too young to understand who we even were. Our only responsibility is to make decisions for the person we have become.
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.
Judging others
We all know that gossiping, or judging other people’s lives and choices, is not a healthy or positive way to connect with other people.
When we set up judgments for others, they become rules that we have to play by, too. By judging others for what we don’t have or because we envy them, we sabotage our own lives far more than we ever really hurt anybody else.
Many people say that you have to love yourself first before you can love others, but really, if you learn to love others, you will learn to love yourself.
Practice non-judgment through non-assumption. Instead of reaching a conclusion about a person based on the limited information you have about them, consider that you’re not seeing the whole picture and don’t know the whole story.
When you are more compassionate about other people’s lives, you become more compassionate about your own. When you see someone who has something you want, congratulate them, even if it feels hard at first. It will extend back and open you up to receiving it as well.
Pride
Instead of thinking that we need to prove to everyone around us how perfect and flawless we are, we can imagine ourselves more realistically: as people who, despite our weaknesses, are trying our best. In the end, it looks far worse to hold onto what’s wrong because you care about what others think than it is to let go because that’s what’s right for you. 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.
Guilt of succeeding
One of the biggest mental barriers people face is the guilt that comes with finally having enough or more than one needs. This can come from many different sources, but it ultimately boils down to feeling as though you “don’t deserve” to have it.
What you have to realize is that money and success are tools. They buy you back time and offer you the opportunity to help, employ, influence, and change the lives of others. Instead of looking at your success as a status differentiator—which will always make you feel bad and uncomfortable—see it instead as a tool with which you can do important and positive things in the world and your own life.
Fear of failing
When we fail out of negligence, we take a step back. When we fail because we are attempting new feats, we take one step closer to what will work.
Downplaying
When we downplay our successes in life, we are either trying to make ourselves seem less impressive so others do not feel threatened and therefore like us more, or we are trying to avoid the sense that we have “made it,” because we are afraid of peaking.
When we achieve one thing, we are better equipped for the future. Life tends to gradually get better as we keep working on it; it only gets worse if we accomplish something then shut down because we are intimidated by our own power.
Unhealthy habits
Define health on your own terms. What does a healthy life look like for you? How would it make you feel, and what would you be doing?
Figure out what makes you feel best. Decide what combination of healthy eating, exercise, and sleep is right for you, and stick to it.
Being "busy"
People who are constantly “busy” are running from themselves.
Being “busy” is not a virtue; it only signals to others that you do not know how to manage your time or your tasks.
Start with writing down your top 5 tasks that need to be done each day, and then focus on doing those and only those.
Does it make you feel more important than others? Does it give you an excuse to say “no” to plans or to avoid some people? You need to find healthier and more productive ways to cope with these feelings, such as finding genuine self-confidence in what you do by creating something you’re proud of, or getting better at calmly but clearly stating your boundaries and needs in relationships.
Spending time with the wrong people
Work on building a circle of people who support and inspire you, who have similar goals and enjoy spending time with you. You should leave a get-together feeling energized and inspired, not exhausted and angry.
Worrying about irrational fears and least likely circumstances
When you find yourself in a fear cycle, constantly repeating some strange, random, or unimportant one-off circumstance or situation that has a very low probability of becoming reality, ask yourself if you have any feelings about something related that is actually valid.
At the core of the things we most fear is a message that we are trying to send ourselves about what we really care about. If we can identify what we want to protect, we can find healthier and more secure ways to do it.
How to tell if you're in a self-sabotage cycle
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.
Instead of trying to incite war on yourself to overcome your overeating, spending, drinking, sexing—whatever it is you know you need to improve—ask yourself what emotional need that thing is filling. Until you do, you will battle it forever.
Your willpower is a limited resource. You only have so much in a day. Rather than using it to try to become good at everything, decide what matters most to you. Focus your attention on that, and let everything else slip away.
People only seem irrational and unpredictable until you understand what they are fundamentally committed to.
Once you start asking yourself what you really want, you’ll be able to stop battling the symptoms and start addressing the only issue that has ever really existed in your life, which is living out of alignment with your core needs and, therefore, your core purpose.
Why do I feel this way?
What is this feeling trying to tell me about the action I am trying to take?
Is there something I need to learn here?
What do I need to do to honor my needs right now?
To fully release those feelings once you are aware of them, try writing yourself a letter. Write something to your younger self or from the perspective of your future self. Write down a mantra or a manifesto. 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. Give yourself space to experience the depth of your emotions so that they do not control your behaviors.
We are not held back in life because we are incapable of making change. We are held back because we don’t feel like making change, and so we don’t.
We can actually train ourselves to prefer behaviors that are good for us. This is how we restructure our comfort zones. We begin to crave what we repeatedly do, but the first few times we do it, we often feel uncomfortable. The trick is being able to override that initial hesitation so we are guiding our lives with logic and reason, not emotionality.
All your feelings know is what you’ve done in the past, and they are attached to what they’ve drawn comfort from.
It is essential that you learn to take action before you feel like doing it. Taking action builds momentum and creates motivation. These feelings will not come to you spontaneously; you have to generate them. You have to inspire yourself, you have to move. You have to simply begin and allow your life and your energy to reorient itself to prefer the behaviors that are going to move your life forward, not the ones that are keeping you held back.
Chapter 3: Your Triggers are the Guides to Your Freedom
It is not about simply “getting over” self-sabotaging behaviors; it is about listening to what they are trying to tell us about our experience.
Anger is transformative, and it is often the peak state we reach before we truly change our lives. This is because anger is not intended to be projected onto someone else; rather, it’s an influx of motivation that helps us change what we need to change within our lives.
Sadness only becomes problematic when we do not allow ourselves to go through the natural phases of grief. Sadness does not release itself all at once. In fact, we often find that it happens in waves, some of which strike us at unexpected times.
Other people can never make us feel as embarrassed as we make ourselves feel. When you are truly and completely confident that you are doing the best you can with what you have in front of you, you stop feeling embarrassed all the time.
If you want to know what you truly want out of life, look at the people who you are jealous of.
Other people are under no obligation to live up to our ideas of them. In fact, our only problem is that we have an unrealistic expectation that someone was meant to be exactly as we think they should or love us exactly as we imagined they would.
Other people are not here to love us perfectly; they are here to teach us lessons to show us how to love them—and ourselves—bette
Regret isn’t actually trying to just make us feel bad that we didn’t live up to our own expectations. It is trying to motivate us to live up to them going forward. It is trying to show us what it is absolutely imperative to change in the future and what we really care about experiencing before we die.
The only true way to get over chronic fear is actually to get through it. Instead of trying to battle, resist, and avoid what we cannot control, we can learn to simply shrug and say, and if that happens, it happens. The second we are able to shrug, laugh, or even just throw our hands up and say, “Whatever, it will be fine,” we instantly take back all of our power.
The truth is that when we stop being afraid of what we cannot control and know instead that nothing can possibly ruin our lives more than we are ruining them with our negative, distracted, and irrational thinking and focus, we are completely freed.
The things that are bothering you most right now are not external forces trying to torture you for the sake of it— they are your own mind identifying what in your life can be fixed, changed, and transformed. If you continue to not take action, the siren will only get louder, and if you never learn to listen to it, you will probably just disassociate from it and then be a victim to it.
You already have the answers. You already know what you’re here to do. You are here to create everything that would make you happier than you can imagine. It is only a matter of quieting your mind enough so you can feel all of the unlimited potential that is begging you to be used.
No outward accomplishment is going to give you a true and lasting sense of inner peace, and your discomfort, despite your accomplishments, is calling your attention to that.
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: Eating poorly when you don’t want to. WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You are doing too much, or you’re not giving yourself enough rest and nourishment. You are being too extreme. This is why your body is requiring that you continue to fuel it. Alternatively, it could be that you are emotionally hungry, and because you are not giving yourself the true experiences you crave, you are satisfying your “hunger” another way.
T H E W A Y Y O U A R E S E L F - S A B O T A G I N G : Not doing the work you know would help move your career forward. WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You might not be as clear as you think you are on what you want to be doing. If it isn’t flowing, there is a reason. Instead of trying to push through and continually hitting the same wall over and over again, take a step back. Maybe it’s time to regroup, restrategize, or seriously think about why you’re trying to take the steps you are. Something needs to change, and it’s probably not just your motivation.
THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Overworking. WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: You do not have to prove your value.You do, however, have to stop running from the discomfort of being alone with your feelings, which is very often the reason that people overwork. There is a difference between being passionately committed to something and feeling obligated to outperform everyone else. One is healthy; the other is not.
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 K N O W : 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.
THE WAY YOU ARE SELF-SABOTAGING: Mindlessly scroll- ing through social media as a way to pass the time. WHAT YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND MIGHT WANT YOU TO KNOW: This is one of the easiest ways to numb yourself, because it is so accessible and addictive. 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.
Our thoughts change our feelings. Our thoughts do not change our instincts. What you naturally gravitate toward or away from is your instinct. It’s not something you feel or interpret; it’s something you naturally do.
Your instinct doesn’t exist to ensure you feel comfortable and ecstatic at all hours of the day. It moves you toward what you’re meant to do, because it shows you where your interests, skills, and desires intersect.
Feelings do not inform you of the right decision to make. Right decisions create the right feelings.
You begin experiencing feelings of peace and joy in your life when you condition yourself to take repeated daily actions that facilitate clarity, calmness, healthfulness, and purposefulness, not the other way around.
Your brain was built for nature. Your body was designed to survive in the wild. You have an animalistic form trying to navigate a highly civilized, modern world. Forgive yourself for having these impulses, and at the same time, understand that your choices are ultimately yours. You can feel something and not act on it.
Your first reaction to something is very often the wisest reaction, because your body is using all of the subconscious information you have logged away to inform you about something before your brain has an opportunity to second-guess it.
Aside from your own basic security, your needs are to be nourished, to sleep well, to live in a clean environment, to dress appropriately, and to allow yourself to feel what you feel without judgment or suppression.
Chapter 4: Building Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to your emotions in an enlightened and healthy way.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to interpret the sensations that come up in your body and understand what they are trying to tell you about your life.
Dopamine is not the chemical that gives you pleasure; it’s the chemical that gives you the pleasure of wanting more.
When we are so scared that we are going to lose something, we tend to push it away from ourselves first as a means of self-preservation.
If you have spent the majority of your life in a state in which you are “just getting by,” you are not going to know how to adapt to a life in which you are relaxed and enjoying it. You are going to resist it, feel guilty, perhaps overspend or disregard responsibilities.
It is difficult to acknowledge the ways in which we are so deeply inclined to self-validate, so we end up standing in our own way out of pride. It is even more difficult to acknowledge that very often, the things we envy in others are fragments of our deepest desires, the ones we won’t allow ourselves to have.
We have to use our minds to practice discernment. We have to use our supreme intelligence to decide where we want to go, who we want to be, and then we have to allow our bodies to adjust over time.
We cannot live being governed by how we feel. Our emotions are temporary and not always reflective of reality.
Breakthroughs are what happen after hours, days, and years of the same mundane, monotonous work. But a mind-blowing, singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A microshift is.
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.
You may not think what you did this morning was important, but it was. You may not think that the little things add up, but they do.
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.
What we fear most is what our minds identify as the least likely threat that we cannot control. If the threat is highly likely, we don’t fear it—we respond to it.
The human mind is something called antifragile, which means that it actually gets better with adversity. Like a rock that becomes a diamond under pressure or an immune system that strengthens after repeated exposure to germs, the mind requires stimulation in the form of a challenge.
The cultural obsession with chasing happiness, shielding oneself from anything triggering, and the idea that life is primarily “good” and any challenge we face is a mistake of fate are what actually weaken us mentally. Shielding the mind from any adversity makes us more vulnerable to anxiety, panic, and chaos.
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.
Your big life change is going to force you to level up in every way imaginable, and the way to overcome the initial fear of stepping into the unknown is to familiarize yourself with it, to make it a part of you, one that you are certain you are prepared for—and that you deserve.
Psychic thinking is assuming you know what somebody else is thinking or what they intend to do. It is assuming that the least likely outcome is the most viable outcome, because you feel it most strongly. It is believing that you have missed out on “another life,” a path you did not choose, that you were possibly more meant for. It is believing that the person with whom you have the most electric connection is your most ideal life partner.
“This moment is not my life. It is a moment in my life.” - Ryan Holiday
If we are so easily defeated and exhausted by the idea that we will never get over our problems, then we make it more likely that we will hang onto them instead of logically trying to resolve them, for a lot more time than is necessary.
Everyone thinks that the world revolves around them. You are thinking about you and your own interests all day, every day. It can be challenging to forget that others are not thinking about us with such intensity; they are thinking about themselves.
Instead of trying to use your intelligence to hack what’s next, try to get better at where you are currently. That’s what’s really going to change the outcomes of your life.
Rumination is the birthplace of creativity. They’re controlled by the same part of the brain.
Worrying sensitizes us to an infinity of negative possible outcomes. It shifts our mindset to expect, seek out, and create a worst-case scenario. If a crisis were to occur, we’d start panicking, because our brains and bodies had been preparing for this epic war for a long time. Had we not premeditated these fears so excessively, we wouldn’t be as impacted were they to actually happen. We’d see the situation for what it is and respond accordingly.
Rather than spending your time rehearsing how much you’d panic if such-and-such a situation were to come to fruition, imagine how a third party would handle it if they were in your shoes. Imagine getting to the other side of the issue, perhaps even treating it as an opportunity to create something you otherwise couldn’t.
Stability and wholeness, health and vitality are your birthright. You are allowed to have everything you want. You are permitted to be at peace.
Chapter 5: Releasing the Past
Right now, you are being called to release your old self: your prior afflictions, past relationships, and all of the guilt from the time you spent denying yourself what you really wanted and needed out of life.
You start to let go on the day you take one step toward building a new life and then let yourself lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and cry for as many hours as you need.
You can only move on if you start building something new.
When we try to force ourselves to “let go” of something, we grip onto it tighter, and harder, and more passionately than ever before.
Take one step today, and another tomorrow, to rebuild a new life for yourself. Piece by piece, day by day.
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 are principled about money and love and relationships, when you treat strangers as well as you do your CEO, and when you manage $1,000 the same way you would $10,000.
You change your life when you start doing the truly scary thing, which is showing up exactly as you are.
Most of the problems that exist in our lives are distractions from the real problem, which is that we are not comfortable in the present moment, as we are, here and now.
We must be brave and confront our discomfort, sit with it even if it churns our stomachs and pinches our faces and makes us certain we will never find a way out. (We will.)
What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life.
The truth is that when something is right for you, it brings you clarity, and when something is wrong for you, it brings you confusion.
Trauma is what happens when something scares you and you do not get over that fear. If you do not resolve or “defeat” it, you get into, and remain in, a sustained state of fight-or-flight, which is essentially the human panic response for survival.
Stop meditating to feel calm; start meditation to just feel.
The point of meditation is to sit idly as you experience all of those feelings come up: the rage, the fear, the sadness, the overwhelming mind chatter...and in spite of how alluring or triggering it may be, you learn to stay still and not respond to it. You learn to allow these thoughts and feelings to come up and then pass by virtue of you not reacting to them.
Mental health and self-mastery is the ability to see and feel and experience a thought without responding to it. The response, or lack thereof, is where we regain our power and reclaim our lives.
You realize that nothing will save you, and so you must begin the work of saving yourself, which is the entire purpose of your life.
Fear is not going to protect you. Action is. Worrying is not going to protect you. Preparing is. Overthinking is not going to protect you. Understanding is.
When you heal completely, you realize that there is nothing more important than being able to enjoy where you are, right here and right now. Whatever obstructions are in the way of you being present and savoring your life are the challenges you have to face.
What if you were more concerned about whether or not you gain self-respect, real relationships, emotional freedom, mental clarity, a job you appreciate, work you respect, a kinder and more empathetic disposition?
Nobody is looking at you the way you think they are. Nobody is thinking about you the way you wish they would. They are looking at themselves. They are thinking about themselves.
Chapter 6: Building a New Future
The work now is to envision who you want to be, connect with the most powerful version of yourself, design your life through your daily routine, and uncover your true purpose for being.
Aside from what you imagine your future version of yourself telling you, pay attention to what they look like, how they behave, and what their facial expressions communicate. You want to clearly envision the most ideal version of yourself so that you know how your own life needs to grow, shift, and change. See what they wear, how they feel, what they do each day. These will be the keys to your own becoming.
Everyone is traumatized in one way or another, but it is how we respond to it, how we ultimately grow and develop self-mastery from it, that determines the course of our lives.
The first step to becoming your most powerful self is to literally envision that person. Don’t take yourself out of your current context, either. Begin to ask yourself: What would the most powerful version of me do right now? What would they do with this day? How would they respond to this challenge? How would they move forward? How would they think? What would they feel?
Once you have a clearer image of what your most powerful self is like, you then need to evaluate what habits, traits, and behaviors are actively holding you back from fully embodying that person.
To be a truly powerful person, you must be willing to be disliked. There is no path in life that you can take that will be free of resistance from others, and so it is important that you not only become okay with being disliked, but you anticipate it and act anyway.
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.
You will not feel strongly about a dream that is not part of who you most essentially are.
To do your inner work means to evaluate why something triggered you, why something is upsetting you, what your life is trying to show you, and the ways you could grow from these experiences.
You have to work on simplifying your life, talking less about your ambitions, and showing more of your accomplishments once they are completed. Gradually make health improvements. Assume that everyone, and everything, has something to teach you. Become comfortable with vulnerability, as vulnerability precedes almost every significant part of your life, and intentionally design your daily routine.
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. They already know it’s not right to feel the way they do. If you start the conversation by heightening someone’s defenses or making them panic and suppress even harder, you make the situation worse.
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.
Little things, done repeatedly and over time, become the big things.
What do you value? What do you genuinely care about?