Self-Sabotage
I’d love to share with you a deeply personal but helpful story. My book, Think Again, is predicated on how I grew up and how my thinking had to change in order for me to really come into my full self. Iif you want a free copy, go grab a pre-registration copy here!
Even when I started my own business, I would keep flipping and changing the business model every 12 to 18 months. I was consulting, then I was a coach, then I was a trainer, then I was an agency. For a long time I felt like I wasn’t reaching my true potential and I didn’t know why. After a lot of soul searching, I realized I was engaging in a lot of self-sabotage. Everyone has a different reason why they self-sabotage. Maybe they are afraid of success, maybe they’ve been taught to shun or not rely on self-confidence. I grew up in a very religious environment. I knew the Bible like the back of my hand and one thing that I took to heart in the Bible was that if you felt really proud of yourself, it wasn’t actually a good thing. You would be punished for being proud instead of modest. Instead of even feeling healthy amounts of accomplishment, any time I would succeed at something, I would stop myself and become anxious that I shouldn’t feel good about myself because it was morally wrong.
To combat my shame of pride I would make a mistake at work. I would make mistakes in my relationships. I had internalized so deeply the feeling that I was not worthy enough to be proud of myself that I had entered into a vicious cycle of self-sabotage. If you are going through something similar, if you’re finding that you may be in a good relationship and all of a sudden you just become really sad about it, maybe you are self-sabotaging, too.
It makes me sad to think all the opportunities that I lost because I had so deeply ingrained into my myself and in my mind and my heart and my soul that I wasn’t good enough. Because I believed it. I wasn’t good enough for anything, I made that my reality. Thankfully, because of an amazing support system and the determination to see myself as more than I was yesterday, I have worked hard at pulling away. Now, I know I am good enough and I can be proud of myself.
I’ve made some really great inroads into stopping those cycles of self-sabotage. But it takes a long time to get rid of that kind of way of thinking. I want to challenge you: if you find yourself moving around a lot, whether it’s in relationships or in your career, ask yourself why. Where does that come from? Are you moving because you’re trying to get ahead of rejection? Are you trying to kill something before it hurts you first?
I appreciate that this is a deeply personal topic and it will be hard to read and hard to process. If you feel that this conversation has helped even a little, it might be worth considering reading my book and seeing how I took myself from the deepest depths of self-sabotage and brought myself up to where I am now. If I can do it, you certainly can, too. I hope you guys are enjoying a wonderful day. If you want to know more, please let me know.