Excerpt: Why do we self-sabotage? How can we heal? Where do we start? These Brianna Wiest quotes from The Mountain Is You will help (tremendously).
“When you reach the peak of it all—whatever that may be for you—you will look back and know that every step was worth it. More than anything, you will be overwhelmingly grateful for the pain that led you to begin your journey, because really, it wasn’t trying to hurt you as much as it was trying to show you that something was wrong. That something was the risk of your potential remaining untapped, your life spent with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, and wondering why you never felt quite right. You life is just beginning.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 239)
“You cannot avoid all pain, but you can absolutely avoid a lot of suffering by staying focused on your internal growth.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 235)
“Happiness is your natural state. That means you will return to it on your own if you allow the other feelings you want to experience to come up, be felt, be processed, and not resisted. The less you resist your unhappiness, the happier you will be. It is often just trying too hard to feel one certain way that sets us up for failure.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 231)
“The greatest gift that life will hand you is discomfort. Discomfort is not trying to punish you! It is just trying to show you where you are capable of more, deserving of better, able to change, or meant for greater than you have right now. In almost every case, it is simply informing you that there is more out there for you, and it is pushing you to go pursue it.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 229)
“Triggers are not random; they are showing you where you are either most wounded or primed for growth. If we can see these triggers as signals that are trying to help us put our attention toward some part of our lives that needs healing, health, and progress, we can begin to see them as helpful instead of hurtful.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 228)
“The only time you’re going to really hold onto the past is when you haven’t fully learned from the past. When you have, you can apply those lessons to the present moment and create what you wanted to experience then.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 226)
“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.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 225)
“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.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 221)
“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. Relationships don’t make you good at relationships. Work doesn’t make you good at your job or capable of work/life balance. Problems don’t inherently make you a stronger person unless you change and adapt. The variable is you.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 194)
“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. Truly powerful people absorb what has happened to them and sort of metabolize it. They use it as an opportunity to learn, to develop themselves. This type of inner mental and emotional work is non-negotiable if you want to be truly powerful.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 187)
“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?”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 184)
“Remember this: The next time you’re trying to craft a glow up story that is compelling to others, ask yourself why you are still waiting for their approval. The answer, almost always, is that you still do not have your own.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 173)
“The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 170)
“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 we hold onto fear and pain after something traumatic has passed, we do it as a sort of safety net. We falsely believe that if we constantly remind ourselves of all the terrible things that we didn’t see coming, we can avoid them. Not only does this not work, but it also makes you less efficient at responding to them if they do.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 168)
“Nothing will save you, and so you must begin the work of saving yourself, which is the entire purpose of your life.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 167)
“Your emotional backlog is like your email inbox. When you experience emotions, it’s as though you’re getting little messages from your body stacking up one at a time. If you don’t ever open them, you end up with 1,000+ notifications deep, totally overlooking crucial information and important insights that you need to move your life forward.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 158)
“There is nothing that makes us more insecure than hanging around what isn’t right for us. There’s nothing that will collapse faster. There’s nothing that will bring us inner turmoil quite like it.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 153)
“What isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, though you can pretend for a while. You can play games with yourself, you can justify and make ultimatums. You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. The truth is that what is right for you will come to you and stay with you and won’t stray from you for long. 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.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 151)
“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 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.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 147)