This is the Twenty-First Lesson in “My 21 Lessons in 21 Years” Series

To celebrate 21 years in business, based on what I have learned from working with accountants, bookkeepers and tax advisors over 21 years I am sharing my journey and some of the lessons I learned along the way. I hope you join me on this journey and maybe learn something along the way too.

LESSON 21: THE UNDERGROUND MOUNTAIN THAT DETERMINES YOUR SUMMIT

21/21: What My Psychologist Tom Dalton Taught Me About Finding Your True Self – And Why Most People Will Never Reach Their Potential

I’ve worked with Tom Dalton since 2016.

He’s my psychologist. And if that word makes you uncomfortable, good. Sit with that discomfort for a moment. Because that discomfort might be the very thing stopping you from reaching your potential.

I believe in realising my true potential. To do that I need guides to help me on my journey. I need a coach, a psychologist and consultants to help me realise my true potential and the true potential of my business.

Tom has helped me dsciover many things about myself and the programmes I run in my head and he teaches me many things but one of the key things he has shared with me is his model called “The Way of the Mountain.”

The concept is beautifully simple. And devastatingly confrontational.

As we traverse the contours on our journey up the mountain of life, as we rise toward our potential, we have to go down. Down to what Tom calls the underground mountain. Down to face the challenges, the flaws, the cracks in our foundations. To examine the failings of the mental programmes we are running based on our childhood, upbringing and life experiences. To apply some open loop Black Box Thinking to our lives.

Every contour line going up has a corresponding contour line going down.

You cannot ascend without descending first.

And here’s the thing that stopped me cold the first time Tom said it: most people refuse to go down. So they never really go up.

THE GRAVEYARD WHERE IT BEGINS

Tom does walking retreats where he brings you up the mountain for a day.

But here’s where he starts.

Not at the trailhead. Not with an inspiring view of the summit.

He starts in a graveyard. An old church cemetery with headstones so weathered you can no longer read the names. The inscriptions have faded into nothing. The people buried there – once alive, once with dreams and fears and businesses and families – are now completely forgotten.

He starts there because that’s where we all end up.

Dead. Buried. Forgotten.

That’s not morbid. That’s honest. And Tom is radically honest.

He makes you stand there and face that reality before you take a single step up the mountain. Because here’s what he knows: if you can’t face your own mortality, you can’t face the reality of the rapid transitioning nature of our lives, you can’t face the underground mountain. And if you can’t face the underground mountain, you’ll never reach your potential.

You’ll spend your whole life climbing a hill while the mountain watches, waiting for the courage you’ll never find.

POTENTIAL VS. PERFORMANCE

Here’s what Tom said that rewired my thinking:

“I’m not really interested in getting your performance right. Because there’s a difference between performance and potential. I can meet a lot of people who are performing at a really high standard, but they’re miserable.”

And then he asked the question that haunts me:

“What’s the point in that?”

I’ve spent 21 years chasing performance.

Better revenue. More clients. Bigger events. Higher profile. The metrics that everyone can see and measure.

But Tom doesn’t care about any of that. What he cares about is potential. Not what you’re doing, but who you’re becoming.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: you can perform at a very high level while completely missing your potential.

You can build a successful business and be miserable.

You can hit every target and still feel empty.

You can be winning the game everyone can see while losing the game that actually matters.

Performance is about output. Potential is about becoming.

They’re not the same thing. And too many of us sacrifice the second for the first.

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND THAT RUNS YOUR LIFE

Tom talks about the unconscious mind in a way that stopped me in my tracks.

“Your life has already been taken over,” he told me. “Not by artificial intelligence. By your unconscious mind. And not to know what’s in it is dangerous. Because it will bring you where it is programmed to go.”

Think about that.

You drove your car this morning without consciously thinking about every turn of the wheel, every press of the brake. That’s your unconscious mind at work. Useful.

But that same unconscious mind is also running programs about who you are, what you’re capable of, what you deserve, how you respond to stress, how you deal with success, how you sabotage yourself when things get good.

Programs you didn’t install.

Programs that were put there by your parents, your environment, your culture, your trauma, your experiences.

Programs that are running right now, beneath your awareness, determining the trajectory of your business and your life.

Tom calls it the default mode network. The part of your brain that’s operating when you’re not consciously thinking.

And here’s the terrifying part: that default mode network has no self-awareness. It can’t change itself. It just produces what was programmed into it.

So if you came from a background where you absorbed the message that you’re not good enough – and let’s be honest, most Irish people did – that program is still running. Right now. Underneath every business decision you make, every client interaction, every moment of self-doubt that you can’t quite explain.

The program doesn’t care whether it’s true. It just runs.

THE RADICAL HONESTY THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING

Tom keeps coming back to the same theme.

Radical honesty.

“If you’re going to do this journey,” he told me, “you’re going to have to be radically honest. And you’re going to have to allow me to make you look at certain things you don’t want to look at.”

This is what Tadhg Furlong was talking about in Lesson 20 yesterday. You can never lie to yourself.

But Tom goes deeper.

It’s not just about being honest about your current performance. It’s about being honest about why you are the way you are. The programs running in the background. The patterns you keep repeating. The underground mountain you’ve been avoiding.

Tom told me once about working with a senior executive. High-powered job. Flying between New York and London. Living what looked like an exotic, successful life.

But he couldn’t have a relationship with his wife. He suffered from depression. And eventually, he admitted he sometimes had thoughts about ending it all.

Here was someone performing at the highest level. And completely missing his potential for a life worth living.

When Tom started exploring his story – not his achievements, but his actual story – it turned out his father was a successful businessman but also a chronic alcoholic.

Tom wasn’t interested in labelling him as “son of an alcoholic.”

He wanted to understand how this man’s brain was working. How his mind was programmed. What patterns were running that were creating the depression, the relationship difficulties, the dark thoughts.

“I want to know how we can get this person’s mind to work for them rather than against them,” Tom said.

That’s the work. Not performance improvement. Mind transformation.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY YOU’RE ALREADY ON

Tom introduced me to the concept of the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell’s work on the patterns that appear in every culture throughout human history. I had cone across the Hero’s Journey before from a marketing perspective as it is the story arch of every best selling movie and book.

The call to adventure. Leaving the ordinary world of mediocrity. Crossing the threshold. Facing trials and challenges. Descending into the abyss.

And then – only then – transformation.

Tom uses The Shawshank Redemption as his example. Andy Dufresne, an accountant, wrongfully convicted.

What struck me about Tom’s analysis is that Andy admits he killed his wife. Not literally – he was innocent of the murder. But metaphorically. He says, “I was such a boring person that I drove her to have an affair.”

That’s radical honesty. That’s looking at the underground mountain.

And here’s the image that stays with me: Andy’s escape route doesn’t go over the prison walls. It goes through the sewer. Through the waste. Through the darkness.

“If you want to develop a mind of excellence,” Tom said, “you have to face the sh*t. To avoid it is dangerous. To transform it is, after a while, very uplifting.”

Every single one of us has enough of our own material to work with.

The question is whether we’re willing to crawl through it to get to freedom.

THE THREE THINGS THAT ACTUALLY WORK

Tom taught me a sequence that has become my operating system.

When you get stressed, there are three things you need to do. And you have to do them in this order:

First: Regulate.

Don’t think about your stress. Don’t try to solve the problem. Move. Get the energy out. Walk. Run. Swim. Whatever works for you.

This calms down your amygdala – the part of your brain that’s creating the panic and anxiety. You can’t think clearly when your amygdala is firing. So you have to calm it first.

Second: Relate.

Go to someone you trust. Talk to them. Not for advice necessarily. Just for human connection.

We find safety in human connection. Not in isolation. Isolation creates threat. Connection creates safety.

This is why high-trust groups matter so much. Why the right partnerships matter. Why surrounding yourself with people who can be radically honest with you matters.

Third: Reason.

Only after you’ve regulated and related can you reason effectively. Only then can you gain insight into what’s actually happening and what to do about it.

This sequence – regulate, relate, reason – is what builds resilience.

Most of us try to skip straight to reason. We try to think our way out of stress while our amygdala is still firing and we’re isolated and overwhelmed.

It doesn’t work. And then we wonder why we keep making the same mistakes.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED ON MY OWN MOUNTAIN

Tom has been my guide up the mountain for nearly a decade now.

The path hasn’t been straight. There have been times I thought I was going up only to realise I had to go down first. Times I resisted the descent. Times I thought I’d found my summit only to discover another peak above.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

The resistance I feel when I’m stuck – that’s a signal. That resistance, that discomfort, that thing I don’t want to look at – that’s exactly where the growth is.

The patterns I keep repeating – the growth drama’s and the cash crises, the partnerships that don’t work, the same mistakes wearing different clothes – those aren’t random. They’re programs running in my unconscious. They’ll keep running until I find them and rewrite them.

The programs weren’t installed by me. They were installed by my upbringing, my culture, my experiences. That means I don’t have to feel ashamed of them. But I do have to take responsibility for changing them.

Potential is natural. It’s always trying to realise itself. The question is: what’s blocking it?

And the transformation happens not by adding something new. It happens by removing what’s in the way.

THE QUESTION THAT REMAINS

Tom asks a question that I’m still sitting with:

“If you don’t change direction, you’ll probably end up where you are going.”

The Buddha said that two and a half thousand years ago. The neuroscientists are confirming it today.

Your brain is looking at the present through the eyes of the past. It’s repeating patterns. Running programs. Taking you toward a destination that was programmed in years or decades ago.

Unless you become aware of it. Unless you face the underground mountain. Unless you’re willing to do the work that most people refuse to do.

Tom gave me a framework. He gave me language. He gave me tools.

But more than anything, he gave me permission.

Permission to look at my flaws without shame.

Permission to face my underground mountain without pretending it doesn’t exist.

Permission to believe that potential is natural and that the only thing stopping me is the programs I haven’t yet rewritten.

Permission to do Black Box Thinking and make progress by embracing my flaws as opportunities to learn and using open look thinking and feedback to failings from the past into the foundations of my future as I realise my potential on the mountain of life.

THIS IS THE LAST LESSON – BUT NOT THE END

Twenty-one lessons. Twenty-one years. Twenty-one days.

Tomorrow, I’m going to share something different. Not a lesson. A reckoning.

The One Reckoning that ties all of this together.

Because here’s what I’ve realised over these 21 days of writing and reflection: the lessons don’t mean anything unless you do something with them.

You can read about partnerships and cash flow and time management and mental health and all of it. You can nod along and think, “That’s interesting.”

But unless you face your own underground mountain – unless you’re willing to be radically honest about what’s really going on beneath the surface – nothing changes.

The programs keep running. The patterns keep repeating. And you keep wondering why you haven’t reached the potential you know is there.

Tomorrow, I’ll share how I’m approaching that. The framework that brings all of this together. The practice that turns lessons into transformation.

But for now, I want to leave you with Tom’s question:

Are you willing to go down before you go up?

Are you willing to face the underground mountain?

Are you willing to be radically honest about what’s running in the background of your mind?

Because the mountain has been waiting for you.

The only question is whether you’ll answer the call.

Your Turn:

What’s the underground mountain you’ve been avoiding?

What program is running in your unconscious that you didn’t install – but that’s determining where you end up?

What would change if you got radically honest about what’s really going on beneath the surface of your business and your life?

And who do you trust enough to be radically honest with?

Let me know what you think. You can connect with me on social or directly via my linktree – https://linktr.ee/desoneill

Tomorrow: THE ONE RECKONING – Black Box Thinking and the Practice That Changes Everything