Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

6 8 BRIANNA WIEST
We are not held back in life because we are incapable of
making change. We are held back because we don’t feel like
making change, and so we don’t.
The truth is that you can have a vision of what you want,
know that it is undoubtedly right for you, and simply not
feel like taking the action required to pursue that path.
This is because our feelings are essentially wired as comfort
systems. They produce a “good” feeling when we are
doing what we have always done—staying in familiarity.
This, to our bodies, registers as “safety.” In other cases, the
accomplishments or changes that we are very happy about
are those that we also perceive to offer us a greater measure
of safety. If the achievement potentially puts us at
risk in any way or exposes us to something unfamiliar, we
aren’t going to be happy about it initially, even if it is a net
positive for our lives.
However, we can actually train ourselves to prefer behaviors
that are good for us. This is how we restructure
our comfort zones. We begin to crave what we repeatedly
do, but the first few times we do it, we often feel
uncomfortable. The trick is being able to override that
initial hesitation so we are guiding our lives with logic
and reason, not emotionality.
Though your emotions are always valid and need to be
validated, they are hardly ever an accurate measure of what
you are capable of in life. They are not always an accurate