Bruce Mayhew has helped many people who struggle with self-sabotage. The Toronto-
based coach and mentor shares his insights and tactics on how to deal with this destructive trait. If procrastination is your issue, see Bruce's earlier article.
By Bruce Mayhew
What exactly is self-sabotage?
Self-sabotage is mostly an unconscious response. The approach I take is that it's is usually driven by our ego and or fear of change or the unknown.
Why do we self-sabotage?
We all want success. But what if our chance to realize our dream means we:
Have to quit our job and lose the pension and seniority we’ve acquired for the last eight years?
Are promoted to lead the team we’ve been part of the last few years? Now instead of being ‘us’ our promotion would mean we become ‘them’ the leadership team.
Have to move away from our family and friends to live in a part of the world where we don’t know anybody?
Just by reading those examples you may feel your own saboteur at work.
Self-sabotage excels at seeding worry, doubt, and fear
When our saboteur is healthy and active, it will begin to unconsciously throw worry, fear and self-doubt at us.
Everyone experiences resistance at some point, even the most successful people. The thing is, successful people learn to recognize their saboteur and not let it rule them.
Our saboteur will work hard to keep us safe from challenges that might trigger feelings like vulnerability, disappointment, foolishness, or many other embarrassments by getting us to sabotage the opportunity. Most of the time we are unaware our saboteur’s active and how it keeps us from becoming the best version of ourselves.
Stopping ourselves from growing
By keeping us isolated, our saboteur also keeps us from growing.
If we are not growing in this always-changing-culture we begin falling behind. Ironically, this is quite the opposite of what our saboteur wanted - our saboteur wanted to keep us safe.
A way of making excuses
Interestingly, once we begin to recognize our saboteur we will notice 'it' is also very smart. It always blames something or someone else – never us. For example, we will start recognizing it will blame:
The timing it isn’t right
Our parents are not well and need routine
Doing X may make us look vulnerable
Our boss is mean
We don’t have experience
The conditions are not perfect.
Like procrastination, there are many reasons why people destroy opportunities. Most of them deal with fear, however we often see self-sabotage isn’t fear of success, it’s fear of failure.
Dealing with self-sabotage
Like procrastination, subduing our saboteur takes much the same approach. And this starts with having to be self-aware of what we are thinking and feeling so we can watch out for our saboteur.
After that:
What is the saboteur trigger (what type of work or event triggers our saboteur)
What do we feel when we are being triggered and want to avoid?
What do we do when we self-sabotage?
Then we have to choose – do we listen to our saboteur, or do we take some steps forward?
We can never destroy our procrastinator or our saboteur. We have to get to a point when we know self-doubt will always be there. But, because we are watchful we are able to overcome our resistance to being vulnerable and focus on the success we want.
We have to learn to trust and embrace change and see that change is paving the way to new opportunities and experiences. And, all we have to do is allow ourselves to be uncomfortable at times and to have confidence in our network and most importantly . . . in our beings as an intelligent, creative, resourceful, thoughtful people.
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