Hey Square Readers,
We’re kicking off the third section of The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest, and so far we’ve covered why and how self-sabotage happens, and how to identify your emotional triggers. Now, let’s dive into Chapter 4, all about building emotional intelligence.
The author frames self-sabotage as a symptom of low emotional intelligence. While that may hit hard, it shouldn’t! Emotional intelligence is something that’s built up with hard work, and not having it isn’t a sign of weakness, but rather of growth opportunity.
“We need to understand how to interpret feelings, what different emotions mean, and what to do when we are faced with big, daunting sensations that we don’t know how to handle… The root of self-sabotage is a lack of emotional intelligence, because without the ability to understand ourselves, we inevitably become lost.”
The author breaks down some of the common ways and reasons that we tend to not fully understand and process our emotions. Being afraid of failure is a big contributor to self-sabotage and a lack of emotional intelligence.
“We resist doing the work that it takes to actually get [what we really want] because we are so afraid of not having it, any brush with failure makes us rescind our effort and tense up… When we are relying on some goal or life change to “save” us in some unrealistic way, any incident of failure will trigger us to stop trying.”
One way the author recommends to work through enacting change in a productive way is to take it slow with small habits, rather than jumping in to make sweeping changes all at once.
“A mind-blowing, singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A microshift is… It’s not radical moments of action that give us long-lasting, permeating change—it’s the restructuring of our habits… Making big, sweeping changes is not difficult because we are flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we are not meant to live outside of our comfort zones. If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them.”
A big reason for this is the phenomenon of Adjustment Shock, when the brain perceives even good changes as threats.
“Whatever is familiar is what we perceive to be good and comfortable, even if those behaviors, habits, or relationships are actually toxic or destructive… any accomplishments, achievements, or life changes, no matter how positive, elicit change. Change elicits stress… We often resist most deeply the things that we want most. This is because of adjustment shock… It is scary to receive everything we want, because it forces us to shift out of a survivalist, fear-based mindset and into a more stabilized one. If all we are accustomed to is doing what we need to do to survive, we are then confronted with the next phases of our self-actualization.”
Another is Psychic Thinking, where we think we know what’s going on around us. It could manifest as assigning meaning where there is none, thinking we know what someone else is thinking, assuming the worst, or that another life path would have turned out better.
“Psychic thinking detaches us from reality. In place of logic, we put emotions, ones that are often incorrect, unreliable, and wholly biased toward what we want to believe… Psychic thinking breeds anxiety and depression. It’s not just that something scares or upsets us; it’s that we believe that the thought must not only be real, but predictive of future events. Instead of feeling like we are having a down day, psychic thinking makes us assume we are having a terrible life… Psychic thinking is nothing more than a series of cognitive biases, the most prominent of which are the following: confirmation, extrapolation, spotlighting.”
Speaking of Anxiety, the author explains that it is a normal and good thing that protects us when things are stressful or scary. But it can have a dark side when you can’t work through to the logical conclusion that you will be safe.
“Anxiety tends to be the result of an inability to process acutely stressful and ongoing circumstances… You’re experiencing a logical lapse. You’re jumping to the worst-case scenario because you aren’t thinking clearly… When you experience a logical lapse, the climax becomes the conclusion. You imagine a situation, you figure that you would panic, and then because you’re scared, you never think through the rest of the scenario. You never think about how you’d get through it, what you’d do to respond, and how you’d eventually move on with your life afterwards. If you were able to do this, you wouldn’t be scared of it, because you wouldn’t think it had the power to “end” you.”
Getting through anxiety and the logical lapse takes work, mental strength, and emotional intelligence.
“Basically, you prove to yourself that you will be okay, even if something scary does happen… Mental strength is… believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does [go wrong]... So often in life, our biggest anxiety comes not from what’s actually happening, but how we think about what is happening.”
This is an example of Faulty Inferences, using real evidence to come up with a false conclusion.
“Faulty inferences… are when fallacies, biases, and incorrect assumptions are made from valid evidence. What’s happening in your brain when you’re very anxious is that you’re taking an often innocuous stimulus and extracting some kind of meaning or prediction from it… Rather than spending your time rehearsing how much you’d panic if such-and-such a situation were to come to fruition, imagine how a third party would handle it if they were in your shoes. Imagine getting to the other side of the issue, perhaps even treating it as an opportunity to create something you otherwise couldn’t.”
We’d love to hear your answer in the comments:
- When have you felt Adjustment Shock in your personal or business life, when you had a positive change but had negative feelings around it?
- What do you have the most Anxiety about in your business? What faulty inferences do you have about them?
Feel free to share any other thoughts you have about this book. We can’t wait to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Don’t forget to:
Happy reading,
Pesso
