What Book Are You Reading Right Now?
- Bridie
- Nov 15, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 4, 2023
The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Wiest, Brianna available here.
I saw this book recommended EVERYWHERE online as a book to read in your twenties, in your thirties, if you are going through therapy or working on your self-development. After a year of seeing it recommended I finally spotted this book in a local charity shop and decided to give it a go. For 50p you can’t really go wrong! Self-sabotage has held me back for most of my adult life and a big theme for me in 2023 has been overcoming my self-limiting beliefs and behaviours so that I can succeed in other areas of my life.
This is a book about self-sabotage. Why we do it, when we do it, and how to stop doing it—for good. Coexisting but conflicting needs create self-sabotaging behaviours. This is why we resist efforts to change, often until they feel completely futile. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our own way and into our potential. For centuries, the mountain has been used as a metaphor for the big challenges we face, especially ones that seem impossible to overcome. To scale our mountains, we actually have to do the deep internal work of excavating trauma, building resilience, and adjusting how we show up for the climb. In the end, it is not the mountain we master, but ourselves.
At the time of writing this post it has a 4.1 star rating on Good Reads. Going through the reviews there it seems that some people have found this book enlightening and transformational, whereas others have said it seems to have been written to “be quoted on Instagram” or “as a mesh of social media quotes”.
I am still in the early days of reading this book so I’m not sure what to think of it just yet, however even in the first section it has already called me out on some of my distorted thinking and given me something to think about. At the same time I can see where the writers of some of the reviews are coming from; much of the content is similar to what I have seen all over social media over the past couple of years. We are in an era of self-development, self-improvement and pushing ourselves to be more.
At the end of the day, I don’t expect miracles from any book, but I do hope they help me to learn and encourage me to think in new ways. It will be interesting to see whether any changes come as I continue to read.
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