Stop Self Sabotage

 And Be the Success You Want to Be

  “You can’t do that!” “That’s way too difficult!” “If you try, you’ll probably just fail anyway.” Have you ever said these things to yourself?

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

It’s the night before a big deadline which is looming in your business—but instead of doing the work needed, you’re scrolling through your social media feed.

Or maybe you set a goal to start eating more healthy foods, but can’t seem to resist stopping for fast food every day for lunch or reaching for that bag of chips.

Or how about you’ve put yourself out there and gotten the clients you thought you wanted only when it comes time to start working with them you make excuses.

Or maybe you’ve had a fight with a family member. Instead of staying home and working it out you find yourself shopping. You mindlessly fill your cart with items you don’t need but can’t stop yourself from buying them anyway.

If you’ve found yourself having these negative thoughts or in any situation like these repeatedly, you may be struggling with self-sabotage.

Self-sabotage often comes from having low self-esteem. It can be a result of the way you were raised or circumstances that have happened to you.

No doubt it’s something many people have struggled with at some time or another. The good news is that you can beat it. In this guide, we’ll look at what’s causing you to have self-sabotaging behavior and ways you can counteract it.

What is Self-Sabotage?

Before we get into how to stop your self-sabotaging behaviors, we need to know what self-sabotage is.

“Behavior is said to be self-sabotaging when it creates problems and interferes with long-standing goals. The most common self-sabotaging behaviors are procrastination, self-medication with drugs or alcohol, comfort eating, and forms of self-injury such as cutting.” Source: Self-Sabotage | Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/self-sabotage

Self-sabotage is often an unconscious thought or behavior that is in direct conflict with our desire to succeed. Self-sabotage is the act of doing a particular behavior that goes directly against what we need or want to do. It can be what stops us from achieving our goals and dreams. It can often come in the form of that inner critical voice, telling us we can’t do something.

That critical inner voice refers to a pattern of damaging thoughts toward ourselves and others. The “voices” that make up this internalized dialogue enemy foster distrust, self-criticism, self-denial, addictions and a withdrawal from goal achieving activities. The critical inner voice affects every part of our lives including our self-esteem and confidence, our relationships, and our performance and accomplishments at school and work.

Now that you know what self-sabotage is, you need to understand why you do it and how it can affect everything you do. We’ll dig deeper in how to recognize when you are doing it and how to make gradual changes.

Why Do You Have Self-Sabotaging Behavior?

If you want to succeed, why do you sabotage it with your behavior? Bad habits, negative self-talk and other ways we mess things up for ourselves can come from many different sources. Self-sabotage is when part of your personality acts in conflict with another part of your personality.

Self-sabotage is used as a way to coping in difficult situations or when we feel like we are not capable enough.

Here are six reasons for self-sabotaging behavior:

1. Being familiar with failure. It could be you are used to situations that always fail or don’t work out. You are around dysfunctional or negative people that pull you down. You are afraid to try something different because you might fail or others will tell you it won’t work. In other words, your comfort zone. This is where you are comfortable, so why change it?
2. Any bad habits like excessive drinking, smoking, uncontrolled anger or overeating can cause you to stick with what is familiar. You tell yourself you can’t change these habits so why try.
3. Listening to your critical inner voice. This voice is formed from experiences early in our lives. We internalize the attitudes of others directed toward us by our parents or others of influence in our lives. They may have seen you as lazy so you grow up feeling useless. Your self-sabotaging dialogue might tell you not to try. For example, “Why bother? You’ll never succeed anyway.”
4. Internalized negative thoughts from our parents or others toward you. For example, you grew up with a parent who always saw the negative side of everything and worried about what could go wrong or how they looked to others. You could take on a similar attitude without even knowing it.
5. Unconsciously needing to be in control. If you feel something is bound to fail or too good to last, you might find a way to make it fail, thus we are in control because we caused it to fail.
6. A feeling of being unworthy. This can come from low self-esteem, causing you to feel like you don’t deserve success or happiness.

As you can see, self-sabotage is often due to a poor self-esteem, low self-worth, no self-confidence, and lack of self-belief. We can suffer from this type of behavior pattern because we can’t effectively control our emotions. We react to circumstances or people in ways that prevent us from reaching our goals.

The Most Common Signs of Self-Sabotage

Did you know that you can unconsciously be self-sabotaging? If you aren’t aware of it there are several ways you might be doing it. How do you know what the signs and symptoms that you are sabotaging yourself with are?