What Is Your Motivation Totem?

This picture will forever remind me that I can achieve whatever I set my mind to.
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It was taken from atop a rocky mountain that I climbed by bare hands, with ZERO experience in climbing and ZERO equipment. I never climbed anything before, as an example, even going on the top of a bulk bed would be a something I would avoid...

The climb was vertical and filled with sharp pointy rocks, so from a safety point of view where I could have easily fallen and broke a limb or worst, and by not being in any shape or form athletic, this climb meant that for the following week every muscle of my body, even those I did not know I had, hurt.

​Hands down, it's one of the craziest and most irresponsible thing I've ever done on the spur of the moment.

Looking it up from the ground it did not look "that high". It wasn't too long later that I changed my mind. This was tall AF!  
I initially gave up 3/4 of the way through, scared by the danger and my ineptitude, with my heart pulsing out of my eyes and ears, throat and everywhere I could feel. My face wasn't red. It was purple. My hands shook at every step, and I realized my energy was already gone. To make things worse, the sun was soon going down. 

Looks can be deceiving!

​ Initially, I gave up 3/4 of the way through, scared by the danger and my ineptitude, with my heart pulsing out of my eyes, ears, throat and everywhere I could feel. My face wasn't red, it was purple. My hands shook at every step, and I realized my energy was already gone. And the sun was soon going down. 

"I'm done" - I thought, as I sat uncomfortably on a pointy rock watching younger and fitter people passing me by, even though they all confirmed they had underestimated the difficulty too.​

I sat there for a good twenty minutes. My husband had kept going towards the top with the promise of getting some pictures of the view.
As my heartbeat was returning to normal and I had stopped sweating like a cartoon character, I looked up and started to listen to that little (crazy) voice that  kept telling me: "Go, you can do this!!"

​Step after step, rock after rock, slowly I climbed to the top. 

I don't know what made me happier at that moment, whether it was my husband's expression of surprise or the view that I had almost missed.  

Either way, that day I learnt a valuable lesson and I took that picture to remind me that I CAN do whatever I set my mind to.