PDF Summary:The Mountain Is You, by Brianna Wiest

Achieving your goals and becoming a better person often seems impossible. However, Brianna Wiest explains that the only thing standing in your way is you—and your self-sabotaging behaviors. Wiest explains that you self-sabotage when you desire a change—in yourself, your lifestyle, your career, and so on—but are too afraid to act. This internal conflict creates a barrier between who you are and who you want to be. In The Mountain Is You, Wiest explains that you can overcome this barrier by identifying, understanding, and eliminating the self-sabotaging behaviors that hold you back.

This guide will explain Wiest’s concept of self-sabotage, how to recognize your self-sabotaging behaviors, and what you can do to overcome them. We’ll supplement Wiest’s recommendations with advice from other self-help books like Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, and The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal.

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Next, identify your ME deficiencies by connecting each of your fears to a mental or emotional skill that you would need to overcome it. For example, to overcome a fear of failure, you need to improve your self-confidence. To overcome a fear of being alone, you need to improve your ability to be independent—that might mean working on self-confidence, self-love, and other skills to fulfill your emotional needs independently. To overcome a fear of commitment, you need to work on self-trust and self-confidence.

(Shortform note: In The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz cites four skills that allow you to face your fears. First is the ability to maintain a positive mindset and let go of negative past experiences. Second is the ability to understand other people. Third is the ability to understand and act according to your conscience. And fourth is the ability to think and act confidently, even if you don’t feel confident—essentially, fake it ‘til you make it. If you let your fears control your behavior and engage in self-sabotage, it’s likely that you’re missing one or more of these skills.)

Step #2: Strengthen Your Mental and Emotional Skills

Once you’ve identified your self-sabotaging behaviors and the ME deficits that are causing them, Wiest explains that you must take active, and sometimes uncomfortable, steps to overcome them. First, you must strengthen your ME skills by learning how to follow your instincts and effectively interpret, process, and respond to your emotions. Once you’ve improved your ME skills, you must identify your ideal self and life purpose and take steps to achieve them.

Action #1: Follow Your Intuition and Release Your Fears

Wiest explains that you can overcome your self-sabotaging behaviors by listening to your intuition (your instinctive understanding of how to act) and differentiating it from your fears. This is because while self-sabotaging behaviors are driven by your fears, productive behaviors are often driven by your intuition. If you learn how to get in touch with your intuition, you can consciously override self-sabotaging behaviors and replace them with actions that bring improvement and progress toward goals.

(Shortform note: Wiest argues that listening to your fears is bad because it causes self-sabotage. However, in The 10x Rule, Grant Cardone argues that listening to your fears is beneficial and might even help you get in touch with your intuition. Fear can be an indication that you’re on the right track because you’re pushing yourself outside your comfort zone—an activity Wiest also says is necessary for growth. Additionally, the more you get comfortable understanding and facing your fears, the more you will be able to grow.)

To follow your intuition rather than your fears, recognize when your thoughts or feelings are driving you toward a certain action or behavior, and take a moment to reflect. Wiest explains that we’re often subconsciously driven by our fears because they’re louder and more prominent than our intuition. Fears tend to manifest when we think we know what will happen in the future, worry about something, panic, have an emotional reaction like getting angry or jealous, or feel pumped up with adrenaline. If you find yourself being driven to act based on any of these factors, take a step back and acknowledge that your fears are pushing you toward self-sabotage.

(Shortform note: In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown adds that our fears often override our intuition because we’re programmed to avoid uncertainty. Rather than following our subtle gut instincts blindly, we try to predict outcomes and choose the path of least resistance. Adding to Wiest’s recommendation, Brown notes that we can avoid following our fears and focus more on our intuition by having faith—adopting the mindset that things will work out fine in the end, even if you’re uncertain of how that will happen.)

Wiest notes that in contrast to fear, intuition is the quiet, internal responses you get when you’re in tune with the present moment—they often manifest as moments of clarity (for example, determining that you enjoy or dislike something) or peacefulness (feeling content, happy, or inspired). To get in touch with your intuition, focus on the present moment rather than the future—reflect on how you’re currently feeling and respond to what’s currently happening.

For instance, if you feel content and peaceful doing something, you should probably find a way to engage in that activity more often—recognizing what brings you contentment may even lead to uncovering your life purpose. Likewise, if you don’t feel content or happy doing something, you should probably spend less time engaging in that activity.

(Shortform note: In 10% Happier, Dan Harris refers to the idea of focusing on the present moment and your current feelings as mindfulness. He elaborates that another important component of mindfulness is emotional detachment—acknowledging feelings and sensations but not letting them control you. This will allow you to understand the emotions that you’re feeling without permitting them to hijack your mind and cause self-sabotage.)

Action #2: Effectively Interpret and Respond to Your Emotions

To listen to your instincts rather than your fears and avoid self-sabotage, Wiest explains that you must also learn how to effectively interpret and respond to your emotions—emotions (like anxiety or discomfort) are what trigger fears that cause self-sabotage. When you’re able to recognize the emotions you’re feeling and understand why you’re feeling them, you’ll be better equipped to determine whether they stem from intuition (the gut feeling that something’s right or wrong) or fear.

Wiest explains that the first step in accurately interpreting your emotions is to identify what you’re feeling and accept it. For example, if you’re feeling angry, acknowledge the emotion and let yourself feel it. If you try to stifle your emotions rather than letting them run their course, they’ll just build up inside you, make you feel worse, and contribute to more self-sabotaging behaviors.

(Shortform note: Wiest advises identifying the emotion you’re feeling so you can accept it, but she doesn’t provide specific advice on how to do this. Many people struggle to identify how they’re feeling or misidentify their emotions due to a poor emotional vocabulary. To accurately label the emotions you’re feeling so you can effectively process them, experts recommend first broadening your emotional vocabulary. This includes learning how to differentiate an emotion like anger from other emotions like frustration or contempt. Second, the next time you feel a strong emotion, rate how strongly you’re feeling it from one to 10. Finally, make it a habit to write out the emotions you’re feeling. This will help you identify them more easily in the future.)

Next, interpret your emotions by pinpointing why you’re feeling them. Emotions usually indicate an action we need to take. Wiest explains that anger usually indicates what we care about and encourages us to act to achieve it. Jealousy usually indicates something that we want but don’t have. Resentment usually indicates that someone hasn’t lived up to our expectations of them. Regret usually indicates that we missed out on something in the past.

Once you uncover why you’re feeling an emotion, you can consciously determine the best course of action to avoid self-sabotage and instead take actions that will improve your life. For example, if you feel resentment toward someone, you can have a productive discussion with them about the problem rather than acting poorly and ruining your relationship. If you’re feeling regret after passing up a job opportunity, you can use that feeling to guide you by seeking out job opportunities that are similar to the one you passed up.

How to Interpret Emotions

Determining why you feel a certain way and what to do about it can be difficult. However, in Awaken The Giant Within, Tony Robbins presents a concrete method to help you do just that.

Robbins explains that when you feel a negative emotion, you need to either change the beliefs that are causing you to feel that way, or change your actions to avoid the negative feeling in the future. To determine what needs to be done, ask yourself: What do I want to feel instead? What belief is causing me to feel this way? What can I do to resolve or prevent what’s causing this pain? What can I learn from this situation?

For example, when another driver cuts you off, you may feel angry due to a belief that their behavior is caused by selfishness. However, you might prevent feeling and acting out of anger by instead considering the other driver’s needs and leaving extra room for them to merge into your lane. A potential lesson is that empathy and attention to others’ needs can preempt anger for both you and others.

Action #3: Identify and Take Steps Toward Your Ideal Life

Once you’re able to overcome self-sabotage, follow your instincts, and effectively respond to your emotions, Wiest explains that you’ll have the ME skills necessary to become your ideal self and achieve your life purpose. There are two major steps in this process: First, identify your goal—ask yourself what you want to do in life and who you want to be. Second, develop principles that will guide your actions in life and help you take the steps necessary to achieve your purpose.

Step #1: Identify Your Purpose and Your Ideal Self

Wiest explains that you should strive for two goals: achieving your life purpose and becoming your ideal self. Your life purpose isn’t just a hobby or the job you do. Rather, it’s the point where your talents and passions converge with the needs of society—an activity that inspires and fulfills you but that’s also something that you can make a career out of. Your ideal self is the most powerful, successful, happiest, and productive version of yourself that you can imagine. Wiest offers two exercises to help you identify your life purpose and ideal self.

To identify your life purpose, Wiest recommends answering the following questions: What are you willing to work for, be challenged by, or even feel pain over? If you weren’t concerned about others’ approval, what would you choose as a career or aspire to do? What skills or activities come naturally to you or do you find yourself regularly engaging in? What would you do on an ideal day without considering work or obligations? What skills, values, or traits do you want to be remembered by?

How to Identify Your Purpose in Life

In The Success Principles, Jack Canfield agrees that defining your life purpose is crucial to feeling fulfilled and adds a few steps to Wiest’s recommendations:

• List the times in your life that you’ve felt most happy. Determine whether these instances share any characteristics and how you might be able to make a career from them.

• Write down 30 things you want to be, 30 things you want to have, and 30 things you want to do before you die. This step also might help you answer Wiest’s last question—what do you want your legacy to be?

• Brainstorm what areas of your life are important to you and what you want them to look like so you can make sure your life purpose accomplishes them. For example, what kind of relationships do you want, and what characteristics they should include? You can consider other areas like finances, leisure, or community as well.

To identify your ideal self, Wiest recommends engaging in a meditation with your future self. First, find a quiet place, sit down with a pen and paper, take deep breaths to center yourself, and release any fears or negative emotions. When you feel totally relaxed, visualize the highest version of yourself sitting across from you. Then, take note of how they look, behave, speak, and communicate through their body language; what are they wearing, how are they feeling, and what do they do every day?

Next, listen to the advice that this future self wants to give you, even if it’s something you might disagree with at first. This advice should be uplifting, caring, and helpful. Now, imagine the particular aspects of this person’s life that allow them to live their purpose—where they’re living, what job they’re doing, the relationships they have, their daily tasks, their habits, and so on. Finally, imagine them giving you the key to that life—their life, routines, behaviors, and skills are now yours. This final step will put you in an “action” mindset that encourages you to enact the tasks and behaviors necessary to become your ideal self.

The “Future Self” Method

Wiest’s recommendation to identify your ideal self by meditating with, observing, and seeking guidance from your future self is gaining traction in spiritual communities and the field of psychology. However, as this trend gains popularity, people are realizing that the “future self” method might be flawed—it can cause you to develop disempowering behaviors and ways of thinking about your current self.

In The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal adds scientific context to this argument, explaining that the “future self” method can be ineffective because people are often imagining a stranger when they envision their “future self,” not simply a better version of themselves. This causes a disconnect between your self-image and the image you’ve imagined. And contrary to Wiest’s claims, McGonigal says that this disconnect makes you more likely to engage in behaviors and impulses that are immediately gratifying, like self-sabotage, and less likely to engage in activities that will help you become your ideal self in the long term.

To avoid this disconnect and make your future self an inspiring and motivating force, McGonigal adds two steps to the “future self” method that Wiest discusses:

• Use the imagined emotions of your future self to guide your present actions. When you’re facing a real-life decision—like whether you should go for a run or hang out at home and watch TV—imagine how your future self would feel about your choice. Would they feel empowered or thankful? Or, would they feel disappointed and regretful?

• Write to your future self. McGonigal recommends using sites such as futureme.org to write emails to your future self and schedule them to be sent on future dates. This way, you can hold yourself accountable for following through on the activities and behaviors that help you become the ideal self you’ve envisioned.

Step #2: Develop Life Rules To Achieve Your Purpose and Ideal Self

Once you’ve identified your life purpose and the person you’d like to become, Wiest says you must create life rules that will help you achieve and maintain these goals—Wiest calls these principles. These rules should represent personal commitments that you believe in and that will shape your life in the long term. For example, if you have a life rule to cut ties with people who regularly make you feel bad, you’ll live a life surrounded by positive people who encourage you to be your best self.

Life rules will help you make hard decisions and face difficult or triggering situations, encourage you to continually pursue your goals, and help you overcome barriers that may cause you to stray from your intended path. Living by your rules will ensure that you’re happy and always progressing toward the best version of yourself.

Principles Aren’t Always Accurate

While Wiest suggests creating personal principles to guide your actions and decisions, the philosophy of moral particularism suggests that this might not always be the best way to promote personal growth. The theory asserts that moral principles are too black and white to accurately guide your actions in every situation. While the theory specifically refers to moral principles, the same fundamental assertion can be applied to Wiest’s claim about personal principles—sometimes, there will be delicate nuances and heterogeneous situations where the best decision is not the one that your principles would suggest.

Consider the personal principle mentioned above—to cut ties with people who make you feel bad so you can live a happy life surrounded by positive people. While this might be a great principle to live by in most situations, following it blindly might actually hinder personal growth.

For example, maybe you feel bad around someone because of your own underlying belief, not because of something they’re doing wrong. In this situation, cutting ties with that person might be a form of self-sabotage that lets you perpetuate the negative underlying belief and causes further negative emotions in the future. Instead of following your principle to cut ties with them, maybe you should confront the underlying belief that’s causing you to feel negative emotions around them.

Ultimately, moral particularism suggests that you should consider all the nuances of a situation before blindly following your principles.

To create life rules, Wiest recommends making a list of things you value and genuinely care about, a list of feelings you want to experience regularly, and a list of things that make you uncomfortable or produce anxiety. Create rules that will help you reach the things you value, experience the feelings you desire, and manage the things that cause you anxiety.

For example, if you value travel, want to feel inspired throughout your life, and feel anxiety around financial issues, you can create the following life rule: “I’ll set aside money every month so I’ll be able to travel without having to worry about the financial burden of it. I’ll spend an hour each week researching travel locations to gain inspiration and foster my love for travel.”

Ultimately, Wiest explains that these rules should pertain to every area of your life that’s important to you—this can be anything from finances to skill development, relationships, career building, communication, and so on. Most principles won’t result in immediate gratification, but over time, they’ll pave the path to achieving your life purpose and ideal self.

How to Create Principles That Work

In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown agrees with Wiest that your principles must be based on the things that are most important to you and applied to all areas of your life. She adds a few recommendations that can supplement Wiest’s advice and make your principles more effective and actionable:

After creating your list of values, Brown advises choosing the two most important items on your list and prioritizing them. This is necessary because having too many values may restrict your ability to commit to the things that are most important. You can apply this to Wiest’s recommendations by prioritizing the two items on your list of values that will most effectively produce the feelings and manage the anxieties you’ve compiled on your other lists. Then, make sure these two values are represented in each principle you create.

Next, Brown recommends making these principles actionable by brainstorming how you can implement them in real life. First, compile a list of actions that support your principles—for example, if your principle is to set aside money to travel, you could read about investing or create a travel fund. Next, compile a list of behaviors that go against your principles and that you should therefore avoid—for example, don’t pull from your travel fund to pay for weekend getaways if your real priority is a month-long trip abroad. Finally, recall a moment when you lived by your principle. This will motivate you and remind you what to strive for.