Mountain Metaphor Intervention

An active way to help you and your clients climb obstacles and achieve goals

Draw a picture of a mountain.

At the top of the mountain write down a goal you want to achieve

Every small step you take helps you to reach the top.

Imagine you are at the bottom of the mountain and describe the problem.  Draw yourself in proportion to how big you think the problem is.

Imagine you have achieved your goal and you are at the top of the mountain.
Visualize your life without the problem.  What would it look like?  What would you think, feel and do differently?  How would others respond to you?

Success Sign Posts

Ok, what action do you need to take?  Write down five key things you need to do to reach the top of the mountain and your goal.  Write the first thing near the bottom, third thing near the middle and last thing near the top etc.  These are your sign-posts to success along the way.

What are the tools you need?  These are resources you need to climb this mountain?

What resources do you have?

What ones do you need?

Who can help you?

How can they help?

Slippery slope

Let’s take a look at the slippery slope.  What are the potential problems?

What is likely to cause you to slip-up or lose your footing?

Ask the ‘what if’ questions that occasionally worry you and remember to answer them.

What if I slip up?

What if I make a mistake?  Ask the questions but don’t forget to answer them.

Remember too that if you stumble and fall that you won’t fall all the way back to the bottom, it might feel like that but you’ve still made progress and it’s important that you remember this.

Rewards

Let’s look at rewards, in life we often punish ourselves for our mistakes.  Our self-talk can be quite negative and dismissive of our achievements. This is natural but we don’t have to put up with being ‘hard on ourselves’. Instead we can also reward ourselves for our efforts and our achievements.  Think about some nice rewards you can give yourself for reaching each of your success sign-posts.

Imagine you have already reached the top, how will you know your problem is solved?

What will you do that will be different?

What will you think that is different?

What will you feel that will be different from the way you feel now?  How will others know that the problem is solved?

Now that you have decided on the action you need to take how big do you think the mountain is?  Now you know what to do and you have the tools to do it, does the mountain still loom so large?