How Do You Sabotage Yourself?

Does this sound like you?  You have found your dream, something that you really want to achieve.  Maybe you have even converted your dream into a goal, and worked out the first actions that you need to take to get you there.  Then something happens…

If you decide to get fit – it is raining in the morning or you accidentally cut yourself the night before – so you don’t start.  If you decide to spend a day studying so you can get great marks at uni – you suddenly find that you have so much housework to do and no-one is helping you, so you angrily decide that you can’t possibly study today until you get it all done. You have finally decided to confront the person who has been rude to you for weeks, but then you think – maybe I need to read one more book about dealing with difficult personalities before I have that conversation. Perhaps you literally make yourself sick – a migraine comes on or a bad cold.

How many times do we let the “something” stop us from moving towards our dream?  Guess what – the something is really our own fear and most times we draw the situation to ourselves that stops us. 

We all live in comfortable bubbles of experience we call our comfort zone.  We know what to expect from ourselves and our lives within this bubble.  It may not be terrific, but at least we know what to expect. 

When we decide to try and push out the walls of our bubble into new territory, we trip the fear wire.  This brings up all the fears about ourselves – maybe we are not good enough, we don’t really deserve success, people may laugh at us, if we do succeed maybe people won’t like us or if we are too successful then maybe we will need to make the choice about our relationships that we have been avoiding.

When we trip the fear wire and have all the adrenalin surging through our bodies, our mind goes into survival mode – it wants us to return to what is safe and comfortable.  So what happens?  That deep part of your mind causes you to self sabotage.  Think about it – every time you fail, you are looking after a part of you. 

So if you find yourself repeatedly failing or self sabotaging ask yourself:

• How is this failure protecting me/looking after me?
• What decision am I avoiding as a result of this failure?
• When do I self sabotage most?
• Why don’t I want to succeed?

If you can’t find the answers to these questions – talk with a trusted friend or executive coach.  Sometimes they can see part of your behaviour that you can’t.

Once you are aware of what you do to yourself, your challenge becomes to stop the sabotage - to choose a different way of behaving and being.  As you do this, the walls of your bubble will expand and you will live a freer and fuller life.

Ingrid Cliff is a Brisbane based Business Development and Human Resources Consultant to Small and Medium Businesses with her company Heart Harmony www.heartharmony.com.au.