I used to be the queen of self-sabotage.  I still have my moments, but I’ve worked a lot on improving it.  Self-sabotage stems from expectations, which lead to fear, usually the fear of failure or, in my case, the fear of success.  Fear of failing makes sense, you don’t want to be embarrassed, feel shame, or, evolutionarily, be outcast. Fear of success makes a little less sense – who would be afraid to succeed? Well, what if you succeed, but it’s still not good enough?

We are able to plan ahead, create goals for weeks, months, years ahead of us, and we are able to commit to those beliefs and those goals and follow through on them. Healthy eating, running a business, running a marathon, having a family. All goals that we choose to commit to, and progress towards.  Yet so many of us set those goals, we make a start, and then bang – self-sabotage. Some of us self-sabotage by not setting any goals to start with.

Although we do this to ourselves, we feel we don’t have any control over it. As if it is happening to us, by us, but we can’t control it. We procrastinate. We find a dozen excuses. We suddenly want to do the ironing (actually, I’ve never got that desperate, I’ve found plenty of other excuses by then) ANYTHING to avoid doing the thing we once wanted to do. If it’s healthy eating, we’ll eat several biscuits. We hear all the time that the occasional treat won’t hurt, but we don’t acknowledge that we’re actually eating several biscuits every day.

So, if we define self-sabotage as creating unnecessary problems for ourselves, interfering with our own goals it’s a little easier to see what we are doing.  

That is exactly the shift that I want you to make – owning that self-sabotage is an action, a choice, and it’s one you are choosing so that you can feel differently.

Be prepared for boredom.

In the beginning of a new goal it’s still very much a novelty. New is easier.  New is different. It’s easier to see that your goal is going to become a habit that you’ll have for the rest of your life. If you’re anything like me, you’ll even have people encouraging you to just give up, telling you that you shouldn’t be doing it. Don’t listen. You know the old saying of misery loves company, well guilt and shame bring misery. Some feel bad that they have “failed” and to help ease their misery they want nothing more to be able to say “well so-and-so gave up too” as if it somehow absolves them from not being able to do what they set out to do.

All habits have a cycle.  

We have the trigger, the routine, then the reward.  This applies to habits that are good for us, and the habits that are bad for us.  The difference between the two is how quickly the reward happens.

Let’s start with a bad habit.  Eating biscuits…. The trigger could be being bored or tired at work, the routine is wandering to the kitchen to get a drink and, in this case a second trigger, seeing the biscuit jar.  Now this is where the reward comes in. This is where you need to choose. Eat the biscuit, enjoy a brief moment, then feel a bit down because you ate a biscuit (or five, and then possibly pizza) or resist the biscuit, fight through your sugar cravings, and hopefully feel good later that you didn’t eat the biscuit and hopefully had a healthy dinner.

Or a good habit.  I love to run, but I still sometimes really struggle to get out the door, especially after another stint of being unwell.  It takes a while for it to get a bit easier, to notice a change in your appearance, to want to get out of bed in the morning instead of hitting the snooze button (bad habit – quick reward) and then we get bored.  We are not feeling rewarded in the same way (instantly) that our bad habits reward us.  

So how do we get past self-sabotage and continue with our goals?  

Adjust some triggers. 

I don’t buy anything I shouldn’t be eating, but it’s everywhere at work.  Can you move these so that you have to actively look for them, instead of staring at you and calling your name (just me?).  

Tack one habit to another.  

I have to feed my cat every morning, so I put my running kit next to her packet of food. I then have to choose to not go out (and it does happen). I used to leave the kit out upstairs, but then I’d have to go back up, and once I’d done that I would just get ready for work.  

I want to do this.

Try thinking of it as a want to instead of a have to/ should do/ need to.

Turn the negative, to a positive.  

Going to the gym or for a run, you get sweaty, it takes extra time to shower, dry your hair, etc., but how about looking at it as spending time with friends, or getting time to yourself?  I live by myself so the motivation of getting time away from people isn’t effective for me as I get away from people by staying home, instead I consider it time I can get away from the devices that mean we can be forever switched-on. 

The five minute rule.  

You can do anything for five minutes. I can go out for a run for five minutes and if I hate it I’ll turn back (I don’t). I’ll be meant to be running for 30 minutes, but I’m not feeling it after 20.  Just five more minutes. Then it’s only five minutes left, so I may as well run that anyway. I now keep a stash of Rooibos tea, ginger and lemon, and a liquorice one in my drawer, when my sugar cravings hit I make a tea, give it five minutes and it usually deals with the craving. If it doesn’t? Go for a wander and try another five.

What are your current habits that you could attach something extra to?    

I’ll just quit. 

It’s not happening fast enough, so let’s just give up instead.  Even though we all know that won’t get us to our goals any quicker.  

Or, just not setting them.  The quintessential of self-sabotage: not planning your future. What a great way to avoid future self-sabotage, by sabotaging ourselves before we even think about it.

Not paying attention to self-sabotage

This was mine.  I was so busy trying to maintain as normal a life as possible with my illness, and focused on doing my job that I had a complete lack of awareness. I wasn’t even aware of my life enough to know I was doing it. I had to re-think my priorities and pay attention to my patterns of action, patterns of feeling, patterns of thinking.

Focusing on the past

Past-focused energy. Guilty of this, especially regarding running once I started back to it after my diagnosis. I was focusing on the things that I did accomplish in the past – how much faster I could run.  Or, it could be focusing on all of your failures from the past and using them as a reason not to move forward. 

When we have these beliefs about ourselves:

  • that we are capable or not of a certain thing, 
  • that we will or won’t achieve a certain goal,
  • we have doubt or frustration or discomfort associated with a goal,
  • not worthy of achieving the goal.

Then, the end result will be self-sabotage. We procrastinate, buffer, not show up, or quit.

How to fix self-sabotage

Start to pay really close attention to everything that leads up to buffering, and plan for: 

We need to become aware of what we’re feeling. We need to learn how to process emotion both positive and negative, and that the latter does not mean something has gone wrong, but we have momentum, and growth. Avoiding being uncomfortable in the short-term, extends it in the long-term.

The more we win, the more we want to win; the more we sabotage, the more we want to sabotage. This is the core of motivation.  

Ask yourself:

  • how you want to help yourself? 
  • what if you were someone else you needed to help?
  • would you sabotage someone else on purpose?  
  • what would life look like if you didn’t self-sabotage?

Everything is a learning opportunity. Keep moving forward. Show up for yourself. Why are we so brilliant at being patient with others, yet terrible at it for ourselves.  Stick to the plan you chose, you chose it for a reason.