The Mount Everest Mindset: One Step at a Time

Why do so many people give up on their biggest goals?

In this episode of Brave Moves, Julie DeLucca-Collins uses the powerful analogy of climbing Mount Everest to explain why focusing on the summit can leave us discouraged—and why lasting success comes from taking one intentional step at a time.

Julie also shares two attention habits that can help you stay focused, make consistent progress, and recover quickly when life inevitably knocks you off course.

In This Episode

•  What Mount Everest teaches us about achieving goals 
•  Why breaking goals into small actions reduces overwhelm 
•  The power of habit stacking and systems 
•  The airplane autopilot lesson for staying on track 
•  How course correction leads to long-term success 
•  Why consistency beats intensity

Transcript

0:01

If you've ever watched a documentary about climbing Mount Everest, you probably heard of something called the death zone. And above 8,000 meters, there's so little oxygen that your body literally begins to, deteriorate. Every step requires a tremendous effort, and every decision really matters. Now, imagine trying to climb that mountain while constantly looking up at the summit. It would overwhelm you and might even break you. The climbers that make it to the top don't spend every moment staring at the peak. They keep their heads down. They take the next step, and then the next. And I think there's some of the greatest lessons we can learn about pursuing our own goals. And before we dive in, if you're enjoying Brave Moves, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review, and share this episode with someone who's chasing a big dream but feeling overwhelmed by how far they have to go. And stay with me till the end, my friend, because I'm gonna share two attention habits that can completely change the way you approach your goals and help you make progress without burning yourself out. Now, most of us don't quit because we are not capable. Big goals, again, can become very heavy, and it's not about our capability. We quit because we keep looking at how far we still have to go. When I went on the Camino de Santiago, the first day is the hardest day. We have to climb the Pyrenees Mountains, and my friend Melissa and I, we'd kinda worked out and kinda trained. Kind of is the operative word. And when we got into these mountains, we took an alternate route because the main route had been washed out from the rains And as we kept going, it was so hard, and we got to a place in which you could almost see the peak, and I kept looking and I thought, "Oh my God, thank God. We're almost to the top, and then we go down." And every time I kept looking up and I got to that spot which I thought was the top, the mountain was lying to me. There was another switchback that I needed to go up on. And I kept going up, and the same thing. I would look up and I thought, "Okay, we're almost there," and I would be disappointed because that was not the top. And I became so overwhelmed and so tired, and then it started to rain, and it was cold and I was hungry. And I just threw my backpack down, sat on the ground and started to cry because I was so tired and overwhelmed. And now, there was nowhere really for me to go, honestly, 'cause I was in the middle of the mountain. And I knew that I needed to keep walking, but at that moment I was giving up. I was giving up on myself. I was giving up on climbing this mountain, getting to the destination, having a nice dinner, dry clothes, a bed. And all of that happened because I kept focusing on the future, not the right now. We obsess over the finish line, the promotion, the business, the book, the weight loss, and Maybe the financial freedom or the stage that you're going to be on, and the distance between where we are and where we want to be feels enormous. Our brain starts to say things like, "You're never gonna get there. This is taking too long. What's the point?" My brain on that mountain kept telling me, "What the hell are you doing here? You'll never do this. You have 700 kilometers in front of you. Good job, Julie. Another thing you're failing at," right? And my brain just went into overload. But here's the thing, the climbers don't climb Mount Everest by focusing on the summit. The same thing started to happen to me. As soon as I started to focus on the right here, right now, my next step, I just kept myself going. And they climb Mount Everest, these, these, uh, ultra hikers and mountain climbers by focusing on the safety of their next step. Now, let's turn ambition into actions because one of the biggest things we can do is stop treating our goals as one giant event. And that's usually how we transition into thinking of goals. We think, "Oh, that big thing I'm gonna accomplish, my life is gonna be perfect when I get there." And instead, let's break them into next actions and pause, then the next action and pause. And that's how ambition becomes achievable, friend, because your brain isn't overwhelmed by climbing a mountain. It is simply taking one more step. You know the habit that changes everything? People often ask me this: "What's the most important thing that I should build?" I don't think it's one specific habit. I think it's definitely the habit that changes the way your life is designed, the habit that makes the other good habits easier. Maybe it's planning tomorrow before today's end. Maybe it's reviewing your calendar every morning. Maybe it's walking every afternoon. Or perhaps it's going to bed 30 minutes earlier. One habit often becomes the foundation of everything else. For me, the one habit that helps me design my life is when I open my eyes in the morning and my feet hit the floor, I look out the window and I always say, "Hey boys," talking to my dogs, "it's gonna be a great day today." That's the one habit that is the foundation for my day because I remind myself it doesn't matter what's coming up ahead. And I know that it might be a hard day coming ahead, but I remind myself that it's gonna be a good day because I have the power to make that happen Now, there are two habits that I wanna talk to you and I want you to think about today. The first is focus on the next step, not the entire mountain, just today. What is the one thing that moves you forward? The second is the correct your course often. If you've ever flown, you know that when the pilot, when we reach that cruising altitude, the pilot says, "Oh, it's safe to now unbuckle your seatbelts," the pilot, uh, is entering the destination into the flight computer, and much of the flight is then guided by the autopilot. But here's really something that is incredibly fascinating. Planes don't fly in a perfect straight line. You know, the winds are going to shift, the air pressure changes, and the weather moves them slightly off course every time, and the autopilot is constantly making tiny adjustments to bring the plane back to the intended destination and path. And life works in the same way for us. You don't need to be perfect. You don't need to notice when you're drifted, and gently just come back, right? Missed a workout? Come back. Skipped this writing thing that you're trying to do every day? Come back. Write one page a day. Don't feel that you're sticking to the budget, or you are making your all-over-the-place purchases? Well, start again. Start with the next purchase and remind yourself, "Do I really need this?" Progress isn't perfection. Progress, my friend, is course correction. And as I look back at my own journey, whether it's writing a book twice, building my business, stepping onto a TEDx stage or launching this podcast, none of those have happened because I obsessed over the finish line. When I started this podcast, it was sort of this thing that I set out that I was going to do a podcast for one year every day, and I think that even after the one year is up, I will probably keep going. Why? Because I am not focusing on the three hundred and sixty-five days. I am focusing on the next show that I'm planning, the next show that I'm recording, the next show that I'm publishing. I'm thinking and breaking all these tasks into smaller, manageable steps. And all of the things that I've accomplished, they happened because I kept asking this simple question: "What's the next right step?" Not the one hundred step, just the next one. You don't reach extraordinary goals by making extraordinary leaps. You are going to reach them by making ordinary decisions consistently. And here's your brave move for today, my friend. Take the one goal that feels super overwhelming, and instead of writing the entire goal to the top of your page, write this question: "What's my next step?" Not next month, not next year, today. Then do that one thing, and when you finish, pause. Celebrate it, and then ask the question again tomorrow, because mountains aren't climbed by one heroic effort. They're climbed by one deliberate step at a time. And my friend, don't let size of the mountain stop you from taking the next step. Don't confuse distance with the impossible, and don't mistake being slightly off course for a failure. My gosh, if all the people that have done great things thought that every time they got off course they were a failure, we would all be nowhere. So just like the airplane, keep course-correcting your path. Just like the climber, you can keep putting one foot in front of the other, and the summit will come, but only if you keep moving. And that, my friend, is your brave move. Now, don't forget, go confidently in the direction of your dreams, and remember, I love you so much.