Moving Mountains
hi everybody
my name is caroline leon and it’s such a
pleasure to be here with all of you
even though it’s virtually um so thank
you for having me
and i hope that you gain a little bit of
insight
uh from my story and what i have to
share with you today
so firstly i want to tell you a little
bit about who i
am i have been living in the middle east
and particularly dubai for the last
11 years and i’ve gone through many
trials and tribulations here lots of ups
and lots of downs
um and my story is a little bit
tumultuous
i am a business owner here in dubai i
own a company called the life of
education
and i’m also an avid mountain climber
and last year i embarked on a guinness
world record attempt
to summit all of the mountains in the
middle east in
30 days and five years ago
i had a really severe rock climbing
accident
and i stupidly climbed an
outdoor rock climbing wall and then the
peg came off and i fell all the way down
and i broke most of my body
and i ended up in a hospital in dubai
and i had 23 blood transfusions
and i had 14 surgeries and i had my
whole body reconstructed so i had my
feet reconstructed because they smashed
i had my pelvis reconstructed and i also
had it attached
to the other side of my body because it
when i landed it went like this
um and i had part of my spine replaced
which
exploded in the accident so i spent
a good two years um undergoing lots of
surgeries and going in and out of
hospital
and really learning what it
feels like to be at rock bottom
because trust me when i say i was at
rock bottom
and uh really difficult and challenging
circumstances
and the reason that i bring that up
because to me
it really showed me that
actually our everyday heroes they
certainly do not wear capes whatsoever
our everyday heroes are the nurses that
looked after me
or the friends and family that come and
visit you when you’re really in need
so i mentioned to all of you that i am a
little bit of an
amateur mountain climber and after my
accident
i um it took me a really long time to
to recover and to learn how to walk
again and like
little bit by bit i started to get this
idea in my mind
that i wanted to do something that was
going to really transition me out of
being
in a wheelchair and on crutches and
being broken
and being reconstructed and i wanted to
to do something that was within reason
kind of
and to really like push myself forward i
wanted to
to push myself through something where
once i did this i was no longer a victim
of my accident i had i would have
transcended that and
in my mind i was looking for something
that was just a really clear line
and i remember getting this idea that i
wanted to
to climb a mountain and all of a sudden
it kind of spiraled and i ended up
climbing
a lot more mountains than than is
reasonable
and for any person and um
on one of the mountains that i was
climbing it’s the highest volcano
in the middle east that has volcano in
asia
it’s in iran and it’s called mount david
and this volcano is quite an active
volcano it has like
a little um sulphur that comes out from
the summit
and it is 5 62 meters so it’s
it’s a higher altitude mountain and i
remember the first day on the summit it
was like oh this is so beautiful
i just loved being in iran it was such a
beautiful country
and the walk was gorgeous and day two
it was a little bit colder and um my
lips were cracking
and my hands were a little bit colder
and by day three when we were
above four 000 meters i started to get
all of this doubt in my mind i was like
what am i
thinking like am i absolutely crazy to
do this
and i had literally just finished
climbing another mountain before i was
in turkey climbing mount ararat
so i finished climbing mount ararat and
i flew straight to iran
i changed all my clothes and went
straight onto the summit
and halfway through being on the summit
in iran
i literally thought i was crazy i
couldn’t believe that i was doing
something like this i thought it was
ridiculous and i thought i’d totally
lost my mind and what was i doing a
disabled person trying to climb the
mountain
and i started to really feed on the
doubt
and it was really funny because i had
these kind of like this battle in my
mind going on
it was like you’re here
you can do this like you can do this
you’re almost there
you’re really close you’ve got one day
left to get onto the summit
and the other other part of my mind was
like i’m
crazy there’s no way i can do this and i
kept looking at the donkeys
and the donkeys were carrying people’s
like cargo up and they were carrying
food and firewood and all this stuff
up the mountain and i kept looking at
the donkeys going oh my god maybe i
could pay
one of the the um the people to to put
me on the donkey and carry me off the
mountain like that’s how
desperate i was to find a way out of
this because
i put myself in a situation where i just
had so much doubt
and then we get to summer night and
summer at night
we left at like two in the morning and
it is freezing it’s literally
minus it was minus 11 on the summit so
it was -11
and i’m leaving my tent and my fingers
are freezing and
it’s pitch black and i start following
my guide
mariam up this mountain and we’re taking
one step at a time
and when you’re climbing a mountain it’s
literally like
and every step that i was going through
in my mind was just like
darkness darkness it was like what am i
doing here i wanted to get off i wanted
to run away i didn’t think i could do
this
i was crazy but i kept going
and i just kept following marion all the
way up and
literally 12 hours later so this is now
2 p.m we’re still summiting the mountain
and we’re about 200 meters away and the
mountains full of sulphur smoke and so
it’s
even harder to breathe and now you’re at
5
500 meters with literally only 60
to 100 to 200 meters to go and i could
see this summit
and i was like oh and for some reason i
got in my mind that it was 200 meters
like a flat wall but it was actually
only 200 meters in elevation but then we
actually had about
30 minutes left of walking maybe a
little bit more
and those last 30 minutes were
horrendous for me
they were filled with like this complete
battle and i knew i had to push through
so the reason that i’m telling you this
story and before i tell you anything
else
i did get to the summit i managed to get
through but
literally by the hair of my chin um i
got to the summit i started
crying my eyes out because it was the
hardest
battle that i’d ever gone through it was
literally a battle within my mind
and i was crying and crying and taking
videos so eventually i could post them
on social media and just like
proclaim that i managed to get there
even though
the whole process was so hard but the
reason that i’m telling you this
is because this is something that i’ve
drawn from my experience of climbing
like amateur mountain climbing is that
when you climb a mountain particularly
some at night
summer night is dark and it’s cold and
you literally sometimes can’t see the
end in sight
but at the end of the day at the very
end of summer night
if you persevere so if you push
through all of that darkness and all of
the failure
and you keep going keep going through
that tunnel
at the end of the tunnel is the light
and on mountains it’s almost like
you keep going you keep going and you
don’t give up and you don’t give up and
eventually
you get to the summit and most the time
if you’re lucky summit comes
also with the rising of the sun and you
see
just so much light and you see the arc
of the earth and the clouds underneath
and everything just kind of goes into
perspective because you can
see the bigger picture of of some of
these really challenging events
and the reason that i’m explaining you
this story
is that life sucks
sometimes there are situations that are
really really hard
and sometimes there’s situations that we
have put
on ourselves and uh sometimes the
situation’s completely out of our
control like
covert but the point is is that the
situation
itself is what makes us
molds us into the better version of
ourselves
if we allow ourselves to do that so
for me it was i was either going to
succumb to the darkness of my own mind
all of those thoughts that i couldn’t do
this
i could have easily spoken to my guide
and asked him mary
please get me off this mountain let’s go
down on a donkey
and that would have been it and i would
have not persevered and i would have let
the negative voices in my mind win
but what i want to share this story with
you is that
if we let our light win and we
turn down the volume of all of those
dark noises
all of the the voices that say to us
that we can’t do this that we can’t go
any further that it’s too hard
that this is the situation is
insurmountable
if we keep going and we take one step
at a time and keep pushing through
eventually we’re going to push
through that darkness that tunnel and
we’re going to come
out the other end and if we allow
ourselves to
then that situation itself is going to
mold us into
something stronger it’s going to mold us
into
a better version of us and so my lesson
here
and i think i’ve said this before to
many many people so
sorry if i’m repeating myself is i
remember listening to this nursery rhyme
when i was little
and the nursery at night rhyme goes you
can’t go
over it you can’t go under it you have
to go through it
which to me it means that you can’t hide
from a situation right none of us can
hide from covid
and we can’t run away from covert that’s
for sure because we’re stuck we can’t
travel
um but what we can do is go through it
with our best foot forward and we can
persevere
and if we take one step at a time and
listen to the light inside us the
the part of us that’s like you know what
i can do this
i can i can be the best version of
myself in this situation
and i turn down the volume to that
darkness to all those noises of doubt
and we keep going then we’re going to be
able to
come through the other end and
an interesting quote that i really love
is this quote about
um about life and really challenging
situations revealing to us who we really
are and we have to give ourselves the
opportunity
to reveal that actually there’s really
good inside of us
and we want to reveal the best part of
us so
one of my favorite books is a book by
naseem talib called
anti-fragile and something that i
learned from this book and i really like
a nugget of gold lesson here
so nasim talib explains what it means to
be anti-fragile
and to be anti-fragile it means that i’m
going to be
robust enough that i don’t break
but i’m also going to change
so i’m not going to break but i’m going
to transform
and that’s what it means to be
anti-fragile so what’s the next
situation
so the next situation is that i have an
object and this object might be like a
book
and i dropped the book on the floor
again and so the book doesn’t break
which means that it’s not fragile it has
a certain amount of robustness to it
but it also doesn’t change the floor
doesn’t make it stronger
the floor doesn’t make it wiser the
floor
does nothing to change its essence the
essence of the book
and that means the book is robust but it
doesn’t have the ability to evolve
and we don’t really want that either so
let’s think about the next situation
right
and now imagine that i have you know one
of those play-doh balls those really
like
rubbery balls and i i drop that onto the
floor
and it doesn’t break but when i pick
that ball up i
notice that something’s different about
it it has maybe an indentation or it has
a mark or something
in that ball is actually making it
stronger it’s making it evolve
and that’s what it means to be
anti-fragile
it means that i am robust enough not to
break
but that i also learn some really
valuable lessons from the situation
and i grow and i change and
to me naseem’s book really epitomizes
what we all want to aspire to which is
we want to aspire to
being like robust and unbreakable and
brave and strong and all of those
those beautiful words that we hear when
we think about
heroes and when we think about people
that we aspire to be like
and then in addition to that we also
want to let situations
like situations like covert make us
stronger and
make us more resilient to life and make
us see
the bigger picture because sometimes
when we’re in that dark tunnel
like i have been many times through my
accident and through all my mountain
climbing expeditions
you get into this mode where you just
literally
see only the darkness and you’re you’re
not able to take yourself
out of that and see the bigger picture
and the bigger picture really
is is that inside all of us
we have the ability to evolve
to change and to be that hero
and we really just have to get out of
our own way
and allow ourselves to rise to the
occasion
and like dr phil said situations do not
make us hero they reveal to us
who the heroes are and i wanted to leave
you with that as a final thought because
i know
inside all of you there is a hero inside
you so get out of your
own way and rise to the occasion
thanks