Did you know you may have an undiagnosed condition?
It’s one that tens of millions of other people the world over suffer from too. It’s not diabetes. Nor is it high blood pressure. Or any stress related maladies. It’s repetitive self-sabotage syndrome.
You’ve not heard of it before? Well before you go checking out symptoms on Google there’s a reason you’ve not have come across it previously. I made it up! The name that is, not the actual ‘condition’.
Self-sabotage shows up when we reach a point of attempting to be better or happier, richer or re-visiting a scenario that we failed at or upset us before. Rather than soar and excel, we unconsciously (i.e. we’re not fully aware that we do it) trip ourselves up. This can be through poor self talk telling us not to bother. It can be through reminding ourselves how badly it went before. Or the classic sign of self-sabotage -procrastination. Ah, got it now??
Yep, we’ve all put the blocks on ourselves at one time of other. Even Tom Cruise has. Well kinda.
A trickle to a flood.
Cole Trickle is an up and fast coming young NASCAR driver. His career is on the up until one day at Daytona he is involved in a serious racing crash. When his racing adversary and now friend Rowdy Burns is then also found to need brain surgery Cole re-evaluates his racing.
He is given a chance to get in a car again but he’s a shadow of the old fearless kid who won races such a short time before. After one race where he retired the car, his chief car builder Harry sees that Trickle deliberately blew the engine. His accident and his pal’s health worry got in his head. He self-sabotaged himself.
But you see, as in this film, life often makes us face ourselves again. In his final chance race at the Daytona 500, Cole is trailing last. His short career seems over. Then there is a big smash on a turn, exactly like the time he was hospitalised in the same such incident. Cole slows down, the self-sabotage begins. But Harry breaks into his head space and tells him he can do it, he can get through this.
Cole listens and trusts, and powers up and through the wreckage, and defeats his demons. He goes on to take victory. I know it was only acting from Tom Cruise, but the manner in how he played that character, I’m sure he has suffered from self-sabotage himself in the past. Yes, really!!!
Maybe you are beginning to recognise it in yourself now?
In your mind how the past keeps coming back to haunt you in certain situations? Or that your business ideas or big plans never seem to get off the drawing board again and again?
It feels like a mountain to climb to get anywhere. But YOU are that mountain!!
The Mountain is you.
The art of self-sabotage is one many of us have perfected.
So adept are we at it that we put ourselves in situations that look like mountains to get out of. We end up stuck, blocked, isolated, alone, or trapped and blame it on these very mountains holding us where and how we are. But, WE are the mountains. We are the very thing in our way.
In her ground breaking book about this, ‘The Mountain is You’, Brianna Wiest reveals all the schemes and thoughts we construct to then pretend we would move forwards, upwards, into money, into love, and into freedom if we didn’t have too much to climb to get there.
She magnificently wrote, ‘ The mountain is often less a challenge in front of us as a problem within us’, and that, ‘There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself’.
Where Cole Trickle destroyed the engine to avoid facing an old fear, we do the same through inner beliefs and insecurities that rise up like Everest.
- We start a business idea but leave it sitting there because we think we are not good enough to make it work. Or that being successful means things can only go downhill from there.
2. We don’t have any true committed relationships because once we get close to a partner they will see we are flawed and not worth loving.
3. We don’t allow ourselves to ever explore having more money because we have the warped idea that wealthy people are hated and users.
Recognise some of these echoed in your repeat struggles? Now you can perhaps start to see that the only thing keeping you from you desire is your self-sabotage hijacking it.
No rock, no hard place.
In each occasion of our own just like those above (read Brianna’s book to discover yours!!), we open up our inner mountain and stick it slap bang in our face. We can no longer walk our path, or win our race be that to be an artist or to win Daytona. I’m asking you now to face your self-sabotage skills and finally see when and where you have always used it. Your missing career, life partner, financial success etc will be where to find it. Where you always put it when a shining life can be won. Your mountain instead of your mojo!
Just make sure you don’t end up like Cole with a glittering future ahead of him but so held back by what’s in his head he says, ‘You got me here, now what?’ Don’t be someone who blames everything and everyone else any more. Don’t look up at mountains that are not there.
It’s time to no longer be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Photo attribution – Pixabay.com – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-man-stress-mistake-8993806/ by Graphixmade under free use content license.
References – Days of Thunder – Paramount Pictures 1990.
The Mountain is You – Brianna Wiest – Thought Catalog Books.
If you were to think of exercise, like most people you would probably imagine some physical activity.
And with that perhaps a sport or definitely some exertion on the body.
Very few would ever first link to exercise with the mind. Nor would they ever believe that the best exercise we could do for ourselves isn’t physical, it’s mental. And yet, developing the mind is the prime way to begin powering up almost every area of your life. One day it could serve you very well indeed.
Hugh Glass needed an incredibly fit mind. Why? Because his body was almost totally out of action.
Glass was a frontiersman and trapper working on a trail up the Missouri River in 1823. One day when scouting for game near where the Grand River forked he surprised a mother grizzly bear with her cubs. Protecting her brood the bear attacked and mutilated Glass so badly internal body parts and bone were visible. His fellow trappers eventually left him for dead believing it was impossible for him to survive even for a short time.
But what the body is incapable of, the mind can be alive as ever and incredibly capable. Waking from unconsciousness with no weapons or equipment he realised he was abandoned in the freezing wilderness. Plus he could hardly move.
Death seemed inevitable.
The mind can go far.
Glass knew his only hope was to crawl and keep crawling. For all the extreme pain that flooded his body, he set his mind at making it back to civilisation and life. And that he did. He famously crawled inch by aching inch some 200 miles and even crafted a makeshift raft so he could float downstream to Fort Kiowa.
Six weeks after his seemingly fatal attack, Hugh Glass reached the fort and a place in the history books. It’s also the story behind the Hollywood Oscar winning movie, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
This story typifies that physical effort was not enough. Pure mental fortitude and willpower was required to have any chance at all. Luckily that is what he possessed in bucket loads. How many people today could honestly be able to achieve the same feat with their minds???
One type of person in modern life can experience such mental toughness. The ultramarathon runner. They can typically run hundreds of miles in events on all types of terrain and face every type of weather. The Moab 240, for example, is a 240 mile (386km) ultra event with over 31,000 ft of elevation through the baking heat of Utah where daytime temperatures can hit over 100 degrees and with night time drops to below freezing and even snow.
How do runners cope with such punishment?
Champion ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter has developed a mental exercise called her ‘pain cave’ to push through immense exhaustion and various bodily ailments in her 100+ mile runs. When she can’t physically take another step she goes to a space in her head and makes that space bigger in her vision. This space is where she has the determination to keep going.
It works because this one time biology teacher when she started ultra running has won pretty much every prestigious ultra race there is and set course records everywhere in doing so.
Which leads me to this question.
Do you exercise your mind….at all?
I would wager two truths now.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘No’.
- That virtually everyone will say, ‘I don’t know how’!
It’s common as I’ve already noted that exercise = physical movement in some form to the majority of us. Trouble is that some of the best and highest achievers of all time haven’t been Olympian athletes except in their mental work. And you can join them starting NOW! Here’s how with a mini starter list on how to exercise your mind –
a) Read more. Not social media posts but plain old books. This will cause your mind to start whirring into action imagining the scenes, the characters, the plot and what can happen etc. It’s the first great place to start mental movement.
b) Read more mental books. Follow on from that by reading books on the mind by the best writers. Not meditation books but ones on better thinking, greater focus, developing ideas etc. Check on that genre on Amazon or in your local bookstore. There’s plenty their to feed your mind.
c) And rather than include a slew of other suggestions I’ll simply add the following – practice imagining better for yourself, push yourself to learn a new skill, make your future plans and create ways to develop them, try crosswords in the paper, commit to one hour in the morning and one in the evening dedicated to progressive thinking and positive expectation as but a few.
The world has gotten very comfortable with making physical exercise an integral part of its daily lives. But it plainly fails in the mental department when that very effort to develop the mind shifts life in major style.
That’s not the bear on the trail, it’s the elephant in the room. We need to be fit and strong in the head not purely for good mental health, but for the sheer power it injects into our life to improve ourselves, believe better and higher, and to generate new possibilities. The mind is the seed and our life is was it feeds.
So start your mental exercise regime today.
Then you will lose the weight off your mind and be dripping in mental muscle that will wow everyone.
References – www.brittanica.com – Hugh Glass.
Wikipedia – Hugh Glass.
www.bbc.com – Courtney Dauwalter – Step inside the pain cave.
www.destinationtrailrun.com – Moab 240.
Photo attribution under free use content license – https://pixabay.com/illustrations/ai-generated-man-strong-gym-8706770/ by Hansuan_Fabregas.
