Hey Square Readers,
We hope you had a great time reading The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest with us. We had some really great discussion threads, and a wonderful live video chat discussion! Thank you all for participating and making the Square Readers Book Club a welcoming and helpful place.
So we’re here now to bring it all together with a full book and discussion summary, with the parts that you all found to be the most important. And if you didn’t get a chance to read the book, here’s a chance to get the shortened version. Let’s dive in!
Book Summary
The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest is all about self-sabotage: the big and little ways that we prevent ourselves from doing and getting what we want. It dives into uncovering the reasons why, and working to change so we can break through them, in order to live a better life and run a better business. While not all of the book is directly about running a business, it is very applicable to business owners and can help improve our relationships with our businesses.
Discussion Summary
We used our Book Club discussion threads to take the theories from the book and see how you all put them into practice in your businesses.
We kicked things off with a baseline conversation, before reading the book, about your own experiences with self-sabotage. We had some great conversations ranging from avoiding doing certain important tasks to ruinous empathy.
Next we laid the foundations of the book by covering the basics of what exactly is Self Sabotage, and beginning to self assess to figure out why it’s happening.
Then we dove into identifying our Emotional Triggers, and discovering that the triggers aren’t the problem but rather a signal and opportunity to learn about what we’re feeling and truly need.
From there we touched on the important skill of building Emotional Intelligence. She covers how low emotional intelligence can lead to self sabotage, through things like fear of failure, psychic thinking, adjustment shock, anxiety, and more.
After that, we moved on to some of the practical steps you can take to release the past and build a new future. This takes confronting and letting go of past traumas, and envisioning and focusing on the future life you want to build.
Then we put everything all together into making the shift from Self-Sabotage to Self-Mastery, through being in control of your emotions, finding inner peace and lasting happiness, and building mental strength.
And finally we finished off our discussion threads by talking about the impact that implementing strategies from the book has had on you and your businesses, with folks sharing the benefits they’ve felt.
Live Discussion
We held our Live Discussion on Tuesday August 27th. It was a really great discussion, and thanks to everyone who joined us! We kicked off with general thoughts about the book, with sellers sharing what resonated and what didn’t.
Watch the video recording:
We kicked off with our initial thoughts about the book which covered what sections we felt relevant to us and which we didn’t. We touched on the author’s background as a writer & researcher rather than a counselor, and the reminder to take everything with a grain of salt and seek professional mental health help.
A few of us felt that the book really came at the right time in our lives and helped us be more aware of and successfully navigate challenges as they came up. Sometimes using the strategies from the book directly helped, and others it inspired to seek more professional help.
We touched on the author’s explanation that little things can lead to trauma and not all trauma are massive events. This helped us make a distinction between smaller lower-case-t trauma and capital-T Trauma, and validate our responses to smaller traumas.
We mentioned the fact that some of this material felt new in a way, and discussed some potential reasons and theories as to why we never learned or talked about this before in our own lives.
Overall, it was a wonderful call, and we hope to see even more folks in the next one!
Next Book
We’re starting our next book, Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk, on Tuesday September 3rd. We hope you read along and see you in our discussion threads!
Your Thoughts
I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this book and overall the experience of our Square Readers Book Club!
- Was this book helpful? What did you get out of it?
- What are you looking forward to with the next book?
It’s never too late to jump into any of our discussion threads and join in on the conversation!
Paying it Forward
If you’re all done with the book and are looking for something to do with a copy you bought, I highly recommend paying it forward. Give it to another local business owner, or donate it to a local used bookstore, community center, library, Little Free Library, or anywhere else, so someone else can benefit from it.
Thank you so much for all of your participation and discussion throughout the last two months! A big shoutout to some of our most active members: @CareyJo, @DinaLRosenberg, @bonny, @BrianaJo, @Bronze_Palms, @TheRealChipA, @Smellthis1919, @LukeNieuw, @MudFire_Dex, @Doran, and more!
We hope you read the next book with us, Day Trading Attention by Gary Vaynerchuk!
Can’t wait to read more with you,
Pesso
