The False Summit: Why What You Thought You Wanted Doesn’t Always Feel Like Home

When Something Works, But Nothing Really Changes

I think one of the strangest human experiences is realising that something worked, but didn’t change how we thought it would.

You do the thing. You make the choice. You reach the point you’ve been moving towards for a while. From the outside, it all looks reasonable. On paper, it adds up. It would make sense to feel different now. More settled. More confident. Maybe even relieved.

And yet, internally, nothing really shifts.

What I’ve noticed is that people don’t tend to talk about this openly. They feel it quietly. Almost privately. As if naming it would sound ungrateful or somehow wrong. So instead, they move on quickly. They keep going. They assume the issue must be something about them rather than the expectation they were carrying.

I sometimes wonder where we learned the idea that arrival should equal resolution. And what we do with ourselves when it doesn’t.

The Idea of the False Summit

There’s a term in mountaineering that I’ve found myself coming back to. It’s called a false summit.

A false summit is the point on a climb that looks like the top from a distance. It’s convincing enough to carry hope and effort. But when you reach it, you realise the mountain continues. What you thought was the end is just another stage of the ascent.

What strikes me is that the problem isn’t the climb. It’s the assumption that effort guarantees completion, and that completion guarantees some internal shift.

I think a lot of us live our lives moving from one false summit to another. We tell ourselves that when we get there, something inside us will finally settle. And when it doesn’t, we quietly turn that confusion inward rather than questioning the story we were told about how change is meant to feel.

What Acclimatisation Teaches Us About Change

When people talk about climbing Mount Everest, they often focus on the summit itself. What gets talked about less is how long climbers spend acclimatising. Weeks of moving slowly between camps. Going up, coming back down. Letting the body adjust to less oxygen. Learning how to breathe differently.

It’s not about toughness. It’s about physiology.

I think this matters psychologically. We tend to imagine belief and identity as decisions. As if once we understand something, the rest of us should catch up immediately. But the way I see it, belief isn’t a switch. It’s a process of adaptation.

Our nervous system needs time. Our body needs evidence. Our internal story needs repetition before something new feels real rather than aspirational. Readiness isn’t just cognitive. It’s embodied.

I think a lot of frustration comes from expecting ourselves to live at an altitude we haven’t yet adapted to.

Formation, Not Delay

There’s another image I often think about, though it’s usually told in a slightly simplified way. The butterfly emerging from the cocoon.

What’s actually happening inside the cocoon is not gentle growth. The caterpillar dissolves and reorganises itself entirely. And when the butterfly emerges, the effort of breaking out is part of what allows the wings to expand and function properly.

I don’t see this as a metaphor about suffering for its own sake. I see it as a reminder that formation is active.

The cocoon isn’t a delay. It’s where the work is happening.

In the same way, the climb isn’t an inconvenience on the way to the summit. It’s the only thing that prepares us to stand there. When we try to bypass that process, we don’t arrive sooner. We arrive without the capacity to live where we’ve landed.

The Anticlimax That Actually Makes Sense

This is why the false summit feels so disorienting. We reach the place we thought we wanted and notice that the feeling we imagined doesn’t arrive. The calm. The certainty. The sense of being finished.

Often, it’s not dramatic disappointment. It’s more subtle than that. A quiet sense of, “Oh. Is this it?”

The way I see it, what we wanted was rarely the thing itself. It was what we hoped the thing would resolve. A sense of safety. A feeling of being enough. The idea that something inside us would finally settle.

But those shifts don’t arrive as rewards. They’re shaped slowly, through the process of becoming.

When the Self Hasn’t Caught Up Yet

Sometimes we arrive somewhere externally before we’ve arrived there internally.

Not because we’ve done anything wrong, but because identity doesn’t move at the same speed as action. Psychology points toward this again and again. We are not fixed selves collecting milestones. We are shaped by experience, interpretation, and meaning over time.

I think this is where we confuse progress with speed. We ask the destination to do the work of the journey. And when it can’t, we feel let down.

But perhaps the problem isn’t the summit. Perhaps it’s the timing.

What the False Summit Is Quietly Showing Us

I’ve come to think of the false summit not as a mistake, but as information.

It shows us where we might be trying to skip readiness. Where we’re confusing desire with need. Where we’re hoping an external change will complete an internal process that still needs time, attention, and care.

This is often where coaching, at least as I see it, becomes less about direction and more about staying. Staying with the confusion. Staying with the anticlimax. Letting it teach us something rather than rushing past it toward the next peak.

Meaning Takes Shape Over Time

Sometimes the work isn’t about setting a higher goal or finding a better summit. Sometimes it’s about recognising that you’re still acclimatising. Still learning how to breathe at this height. Still becoming the person who can live where you’re trying to go.

The false summit doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

I think it means you’re in process.

And perhaps that’s not something to correct or fix too quickly.

Perhaps that, quietly, is the work itself.

Kindest thoughts,

Isaac Davis.