Why do you self-sabotage, and how do you stop the cycle? This is a step guide on how to become honest with yourself, stop self-sabotage and cut the b.s.
If you’ve you ever tried to achieve a goal e.g lose weight, get healthier or quit a toxic habit. But you notice from time to time, whatever progress you made was either lost or self-sabotaged.
They are called “self-sabotage” because we ourselves are the key drivers of these behaviors and fortunately can find solutions to solving these problems.
In the simplest terms – whatever patterns and habits you’re undertaking now that is hurting your tomorrow is self-sabotage.
How do you identify self-sabotaging behaviors?
You take the easy route and engage in self-sabotaging behaviors when you:
- Don’t listen to your guts
- Compare yourself with others.
- Become inconsistent and don’t show up daily.
- Network only with people instead of building real relationships.
- Become inpatient in life
- Refuse to work hard
- Sleep-in instead of getting up to begin a productive day after a full night rest.
- Eat junk instead of looking for Real & nutritious foods.
- Never seek advice/Coaching/mentorship from people ahead of you.
- Speak more than you listen – this is literally a backward move if you want to learn more from people.
- Spend more than you can afford.
This is not an all-inclusive list; but those are literally what is keeping you down.
This guide provides 10 steps to help you deal with self-sabotage so that you can overcome it. Understand the reasons behind why you might self-sabotage.
Discover how self-sabotage is an unhelpful coping mechanism that only makes our problems worse.
10 Steps to Dealing with Self-Sabotage:
1: Spot Self-Sabotage Before it Happens
Understanding the reasons behind our self-sabotaging behavior can help us to stop it.
Be proactive and take steps to prevent self-sabotage before it starts. Learning to recognize when we are self-sabotaging can help us stop it from happening.
The key is address the underlying emotions that trigger self-destructive behavior.
2: Look within
This involves being honest with yourself, listening to your guts and trusting the process.
Your self-sabotage behavior could be coming from an unresolved childhood trauma, an unhealed pain, one form of insecurity or another.
You need to sit with yourself to discover where it’s coming from then before you can go on to fix it. Only then can you stop self sabotage and running away from your problems.
I for example have been building my Ecommerce brand via paid PPC Google ads.
If you research or follow a Recommendation to follow a bidding strategy – your ad starts a process of ‘learning.’
It may take some time than usual to pick your budget and start generating results.
Sometimes to get perfect results, you might have to wait 3 months.
But if you refuse to trust the process and want to get quick results by changing your bidding strategy anyhow, the advertising system punishes you by decreasing your quality score further and charging you 2-3x more than usual.
3: Become Self aware of your thinking and behaviours
During self-sabotage, our thought patterns can cause us to go into a destructive patterns and we feel less in control of our lives.
To become more self aware – take the time to see how what you’ve done or are doing is leading you presently by slowing down and analysing things for yourself.
Become aware of moments you engage in beliefs and the story you tell yourself. Thoughts like:“ I’m not good enough, “I’m not worthy for love”
Also the thoughts you associate with certain actions. For example – Do you know when you’re leading with:
Fear vs courage or someone has to let you know?
Ego vs being solution oriented?
Are you letting your thoughts and feelings sabotage the way you show up in the world, for yourself and your business?
No self-awareness, no idea about your self-worth, the ego, or how it works and about self-sabotage itself.
4: Change the way you think
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
A changed mind will automatically act different, feel different, approach things differently.
Think through what you’re doing. And the results they’re bringing you.
For example, it’s easy as a leader to expect others to serve you. But if they don’t see the attributes of leadership including humility in you – no one would willingly serve you. And bad for your ego – you’d get mad.
Upgrade your thinking through self-reflection, books, courses and Coaches.
Trying to change as a person entirely (routine, habit) with the same technique we’ve been our ‘’old-selves’’ in for years or decades is a form of self-sabotage.
5: Decide to take the right actions aligned to your goals
Take specific, actionable steps to address your self-sabotaging tendencies by creating a plan to Overcome self-sabotage.
I had an extra year back in school. At first, I stopped caring about academics immediately I discovered i was more of an Entrepreneur than the “corporate type.”
But after so many years invested in school and the fact I never dropped out – I made a decision to place my academics as my utmost priority for that extra year.
At that point – “freedom from school” was more important than any ego.
There’s power in decisions like:
“Stop eating junk food even it were offered for free so I can live healthier.“
“Avoiding debt and make paying back a priority instead of giving excuses when you do?“
“Serving others instead of expecting to be served as a leader”
6: Stop Procrastinating to stop Self-sabotage
You know you’re avoiding the most important tasks because they feel scary and uncomfortable, and you might risk getting judged that’s why you’re not taking action.
If you can decrease the lag between thinking and taking action you could be far ahead in life.
There’s a period of building strategy but if taking action doesn’t follow right away – you set yourself up for failure.
When you don’t procrastinate or self-sabotage, you are guaranteed to move forward faster and more effectively in life.
7: Stop Comparing yourself with others
Do you.
Stop comparing yourself with others
The only person you should compare yourself with is who you were yesterday.
So decide to help yourself and instead of looking at what others are doing.
We don’t know the full story of the people we compare ourselves to most times.
They might be going through more pain in private while showing you a different side in public.
8: Think Long-term
When people sacrifice their businesses for short term gains you know they’re taking short-term approach which unfortunately many entrepreneurs do.
Progress is never linear but is always forward unless you QUIT!
Quitting is not a solution, as you know. It’s another form of self-sabotage.
9: Seek assistance or professional help
We may not in every situation be able to sit ourselves down to find truth.
Sometimes, we need someone to teach us the fundamentals of our mind and how to regulate our thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Whatever way works for you e.g. going for Therapy sessions, working with a Coach or family member.
They could provide help and accountability to help you get out of self-sabotage.
10: Stay Positive
No matter how life gets hard – don’t get swayed by the waves.
It takes same effort to focus on success than on failures.
Your mind grows with what you feed it.
Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and think of what could go right.
11: Bonus point: Let go of your self-doubts and limiting beliefs
“You can’t do that!” “you don’t deserve that!” “if you try you’ll just fail!”
Self-doubt is when we start to question ourselves, our beliefs our thoughts and is responsible for not accepting ourselves and procrastination.
How to use affirmations to eliminate self doubt and stop self-sabotage?
The Mom Coach Anna Maria Moro… recommends Affirmation to get rid of self doubt –
“You can overcome your self-doubt and sabotage with one simple easy tool!
It’s so powerful and effective, but most people won’t even try it!
Affirmations!!
When you form a positive mental image of yourself this activates the areas of the brain that actually experiencing these things we do!
Do Affirmations every morning to set your day off to the right start!
”I am growing and becoming.
I am enough.
I have all that I need within me now.
I am here for a purpose.
I love myself.”
CONCLUSION
The key to stopping self-sabotage is by preventing them, taking aligned actions and thinking long term.
Only when you learn to love yourself and have a relationship with yourself and God, can you start to appreciate ALL you have, stop judging and stop comparing yourself to others.
You gotta remind yourself every time you fall down and feel like giving up how you did not come this far just to quit.
I got attracted to tech from an early age getting close to my Father. Coupled with learning some high end skills i was able to build a 6 figure Ecommerce store a few years ago after graduating from Pharmacy.
The only way I have found to express myself as an introvert is through writing.
I’m convinced 100% that to build a 6-7-figure business and beyond you need to invest in yourself and your personal development.
The more you grow, the more your business will grow.
PS: I wrote a short book on why you don’t need more motivation and how to push through in such moments – get it here: