In 2014 I found myself, a very ordinary person, standing on the summit of Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa and the tallest freestanding mountain in the world.

On summit night, after a couple of hours of fitful nervous sleep, we leaned in together (before strangers, by now a team) and exchanged a few words of encouragement. Just before midnight we took our first steps on that brutal, relentless zig-zag climb. It was pitch dark and very, very cold.

I will never forget the electricity of thirteen excited adventurers huddled heads-together at base camp, all of us aware there were no guarantees that we each had it in us, individually, to make it to the top, exhilarated for this final push, but depleted after five increasingly gruelling days.

It still chokes me up to think about that snapshot. It was a pure, raw moment of connection and togetherness, although each of us painfully aware we were also alone in our challenge. Our leader then said something which will stick with me for life. “Every one of us uses the metaphor ‘to climb a mountain’ often. We talk about ‘a mountain of paperwork’, or say we feel like we ‘have a mountain to climb’. But by the end of this day,” he said, “We will each of us know what it actually is ‘to climb a mountain’.” I embodied the conquer-a-mountain metaphor that day, breaking on to the ledge hours later in a splutter of tears and emotion. But it has permeated my soul for reasons which were not at the time, obvious.

So, I humbly offer to you the truths which that adventure revealed to me. No doubt you will recognise and be reminded of these axioms as principles witnessed also in your own life.

You know this. You know that the toughest situations of your life, where you were called to stretch uncomfortably far, have revealed you to yourself, and strengthened you against the future. The crucible of your character has been the hardest stuff you have faced and conquered. You were forged in fire.

I am all for the comfortable life, but it is only when we are tested that we experience the true depth of our capacity, and we lay the bricks of our future resilience. I am not a clinician, and of course not all trauma is healthy or helpful. Everyone will, however, at some point take on a challenge or situation voluntarily because we sense within it there is some kernel of self knowledge which must be experienced to be fully claimed. The fine edge between certainty and chaos is the cutting blade for your growth.

To meet a challenge forthrightly wins you permanent self trust.

We rarely find ourselves in situations where our need to push through is untested and unbounded, but when we do and we greet that circumstance with faith and courage, our success will validate that self belief. Each victory stores up trust in ourselves and fortifies our self respect.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

This is important of course because there will inevitably be involuntary situations which confront your life, and that deep sense of our capabilities once stretched never rebounds. You have enclosed your smaller self within a bigger one, and you have earned it.

I add an important footnote to this insight. In 2017 I trekked to Everest Base Camp. The scenery was again breathtaking, the company life-changing, and the climb arduous. The terrain was different, I was less fit and the 9 day slog triggered an old hamstring injury that I thought was going to blow my ascent. I made it to Base Camp, ticked the box proudly and then helicoptered back (what a view!) to avoid the downhill trek. I’m not sure I would have made the same decision without the previous formative experiences and a feeling of nothing to prove. I hold not one ounce of regret for that decision. Resilience sometimes looks like self-compassion, knowing when to walk away, and exerting boundaries to protect yourself. Trust yourself to know the difference.

You only need to see the next few steps on the path, and cover those. It adds up. Repetition compounded by time. It’s that simple.

I didn’t ‘climb a mountain’, I took 270,000 steps, or 4 million steps, I honestly couldn’t tell you, and eventually I was there. To see the summit miles away (and miles up) was overwhelming and hard to grasp in reality, but it happened one uneventful step at a time.

Be awed by your goals, but do not be discouraged by their distance. You need only concern yourself with the next step. A compelling goal will propel you forwards. Besides, each act of forward momentum will strengthen you for the next. You may not be the same person when you arrive. You will most definitely be stronger.

Many, many times in my life since, have I recalled and noted the similarity between the actual physical act of climbing that mountain and the seemingly less glamorous but no less majestic acts of consistency, perseverance and grit which life often demands of us on a daily, monthly or indeterminate basis. I use the mantra ‘consistency plus time achieves all valid goals’ as a personal affirmation, because I know it in my body and believe it in my heart. Reminding myself of the significance of consistency strengthens my fortitude. Ten thousand hours happens an hour at a time.

Before Kilimanjaro I learned a valuable lesson about savouring the moment which instructed me to treat this journey differently. Trekking the Samaria Gorge in Crete on my backpacking walkabout as a young, competitive female I bet myself I could make it in record time. I did. And then I realised I had been so focussed on the head-down march that I had almost no recollection of the beautiful scenic landscape. I was disappointed. I’d achieved the target (which no one was measuring) but set the wrong aim for the journey, so it was ultimately a meaningless goal. I had cheated myself.

I think we are all able to stretch that metaphor to apply it, less literally, to the journey of life. Don’t be attached to the outcome. That epiphany has served me very well in all manner of life experiences. Just show up and let life offer you unimagined surprises. Be a child to it. That’s where the awe is, and where joy manifests and connects you with the infinite for a moment. We don’t need to control everything, all the time. That’s hubristic, especially when it comes up in relation to something massive occurring in your life. You’ll miss out on the thrill of discovery. Trust that the experience contains lessons for you. Be a director of the trip, by all means, but be a passenger on the journey.

I remember exiting the dinner tent in our night’s campsite nestled safely between the cliffs of that day’s descent into the valley and the next morning’s clamber up the Barranco Wall. I looked up to the sky and literally gasped as the Milky Way was revealed to my eyes like a National Geographic photograph. The depth and nuance visible in impossible detail being this far above the clouds.

I remember that final night, snaking up the mountain with all the other climbers’ little headlights twinkling like guiding stars revealing the way ahead. I felt I was on a pilgrimage at that moment, and perhaps I was. Each of us a tiny speck, the true frail humility of the individual reinforced and enveloped by nature, the great mother earth and her elements. It was strangely comforting.

When I turned up at the airport (and that was an event in itself, but that’s another story) I knew one person. A week later the same characters were some of the most important people who have ever graced my life. I discovered a word a couple of years later – sonder – (from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows) which illuminates perfectly that transformation from the banal to the colourful with nothing but shared experience creating the shift in perspective. He describes the word as the revelation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, and you too are an extra in someone else’s story. Think about that for a moment. A tapestry of 8 billion living lives, interwoven with 100 billion more which have passed before us. Just imagine the richness, the complexity, the opportunity contained within that fact. And that perspective shift, that resource, is at your fingertips, always.

That trip was nothing without the people I experienced it with. Playing ninja during an impromptu recovery break. Describing our fantasy last meals as we meandered through a valley heading towards the next steep bit (by day 4 the porridge was watery and the altitude made everything taste like cardboard). Buddying up to fill our packs with painful ice cold water. Play fighting with hiking poles for lightsabres. Witty banter followed by explosions of giggles piercing the birdless mountain silence. And the singing! Climbing Kili comes with its own tradition of rousing anthems, which by the final day are familiar, distracting hymns. An unknown hand reaching out in the dark to rub my back as I heave-cry-groan-sobbed at the exertion on summit night. Snotty, tearful cuddles of relief and elation as we reached the ridge. The people were everything. And half of them flew from 4 corners of the world to be at (or in) my wedding 5 years later. We call ourselves a family now.

Neurologically, the human brain is evolved to laser in on targets, advancing with positive affirmation or frustrated by delaying obstacles. On completion of a goal the directional framework for that specific event collapses, having served its purpose. This is how we are wired.

It’s an experience we have all had. A great achievement or event completes, then… crickets. The deflation the day after the party. The struggle the week after the promotion. The post-holiday blues. Just stood there, hollow, looking at the next coal face to surmount.

We need to help our brains out, to hard-wire and reinforce the joyful memories and valuable takeaways once each task is complete. Celebrate. Reflect on your achievements with gratitude. Journal, write, paint, compose songs or simply meditate for a moment on the value of your great wins. Reward yourself. It is not selfish, it is not proud, and it is not arrogant to respect and affirm your own distance covered. Share the lessons you have learned too and decant the truths extracted, that they might guide the way for others.

If we don’t take a moment to breathe and fully acknowledge our successes, the next goal just overwhelms the previous cycle and negates the triumph of the final pinnacle, as we look ahead prematurely focussed on the next peak. In that case, we have felt all the anticipation, the labour, the struggle along the way, but failed to congratulate ourselves on the overcoming in itself. Turn around and look back to see the magnitude of the whole trail, and the psychological journey between your beginning and your finale.

And here is one further trick. You may have heard of a BHAG – a ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal’ (Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras), or pondered Jordan Peterson’s exposition on the divinity of the ‘transcendent goal’ and striving for the ideal, which he reflects on in his public lecture series. These are both expressions of ‘stretch goals’. And it may now be more clear why they are useful to our brains. When you set your target far above your expectations – not in a punishing way, but as a bonus flourish – if it’s a well structured and meaningful goal that resonates with you as a purposeful and worthy aim, you will never run out of motivational juice, and you just might astound yourself with what you’re capable of when you set your vision high.

It is clear to me as a coach that these insights, extracted as personal lessons from my own experience, resonated so potently with me at the time because they distil down into some basic truths. The coaching discipline itself has collated solutions from the fields of psychology, therapy, philosophy and neuroscience and parsed these into coaching tools which work to help mentally healthy people to optimise their thinking and habits to best serve their highest potential. We recognise epiphanies as fundamental truths when everything lines up and speaks to our intuition. With grace, I leave you with my Kilimanjaro revelations.