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This post is all about how to stop self sabotage.

“Your worst enemy is yourself“.

Have you been trying to achieve a goal, even the smallest of them, or a dream of yours, and no matter how many times you have tried to achieve it, you never succeed?

Why is that is happening? What is stopping you from achieving your objectives and dreams?

Well, the answer is YOU.

When things don´t go our way, especially when we are working towards achieving our goals, we easily fall into the habit of blaming the people, circumstances, and environment around us.

But what if it were actually ourselves the ones holding us back from success? What if it is our thoughts and limiting beliefs the ones stopping us from living the life of our dreams?

What does self sabotage mean?

Have you ever heard the phrase “you are your worst enemy” or “get out of your way” and wondered what it meant?

Because what does self sabotage even mean? And how is it even possible that I might purposefully sabotage my success and my biggest dreams when I long so much for them? Or do I….?

To explain what self sabotage is, I want to share with you this very simple definition explained by Alyce Conyn Selby, who says:

“Self sabotage is when we say we want something and then go back and make sure it doesn´t happen”.

If you are still thinking how impossible this is, you´d be surprised at how often we sabotage our dreams and success.

For example, do you ever get distracted at work? You might have started doing something but suddenly you find yourself checking social media or even staring mindlessly at the wall.

Have you ever put yourself down in front of other people? Have you ever deep down thought that you don´t actually deserve to be successful and happy?

Well, all of these behaviors are actually self-sabotaging. Because in the end, that is what self sabotage is.

It´s a behavior that becomes sabotaging and harmful when it starts creating problems and obstacles in our path to success and achieving long-term goals.

But why does it happen? Why do we setting ourselves up for failure?

Why do we self sabotage ourselves?

In Gay Hendricks´s book “The big leap” you can find one of the best explanations as to why we self sabotage ourselves.

“We have limits to how much love, success, and creativity we will allow ourselves to enjoy. And when we reach that limit, we end up self-sabotaging”.

We only believe we are worthy of so much and when fear and insecurities and limiting beliefs come in they end up activating this behavior which makes sure that we fail in our “efforts” to succeed.

Have you ever been in an incredibly good place in your life, where you were happy and everything went your way and you thought to yourself: “Is this real? It seems too good to be true”.

And suddenly all these thoughts about how things will start to go wrong poison your mind because we don´t think we deserve to feel this good.

This is how self-sabotaging starts and as soon as these thoughts begin we start falling back into old habits that push us to stay in our comfort zone or even worse we do something that sends us back to the starting point.

We do this with everything in our lives: relationships, goals, careers, life-changing opportunities…

In his book, Hendricks also explains the four reasons why you could be sabotaging yourself:

1. You feel like you´re flawed and are not deserving of good things. You don´t believe yourself good enough.
2. You fear others abandoning you because success brings change
3. You believe that success will make you a burden to others.
4. You don´t want to outshine others with your success.

In the end, all of these reasons are limiting beliefs and thoughts that need to be challenged and eliminated from our minds.

But how can we do just that? How can you break the cycle and stop self-sabotage?

Related posts- Change your mindset to change your life

How to stop self sabotage?

So far we´ve understood what sabotaging ourselves means and why we self-sabotage. And now it´s time to discover the 3 life-changing tips and techniques you need to try to stop self sabotage.

So grab a pen and notebook and get ready to take some notes:

Two important decision

Once you decide to stand up to your self sabotaging behaviors you need to make 2 decisions. The first one is making the decision of acting like an adult thus accepting the responsibility for your own thought and actions.

When something goes wrong, do you know what the first response people have is? Blaming others. We love playing the blaming game every time we make a mistake. We automatically jump and start blaming the people around us and our situation victimizing ourselves.

But the truth is that success doesn´t depend on your situation or your environment, these are excuses we use to avoid the feeling of failure because success depends entirely on people.

And, however hard it may be to accept, in most situations we are the ones to blame or to carry part of the blame. 

However we are not prepared for the possibility that we might have failed or made a mistake or be anything other than a human, so we turn ourselves into victims and lie to ourselves.

But to overcome sabotaging yourself and achieve your biggest dreams you need to accept responsibility for your actions and your thoughts. You need to stop lying to yourself and being a victim and accept that sometimes we make mistakes and sometimes we fail. Only we accept responsibility for our thoughts and actions we can “wake up” and start recognizing our self sabotaging behaviors and habits.

Now I am going to let you on a little life lesson: do you want to know the secret to turning a failure into a success?

Learn from your mistakes. A failure will never be a failure once you learn from your mistakes, instead, it will become a teaching and it will represent a very important lesson you needed to learn in order to succeed, because that´s how humans learn, through trial and error.

So don´t let failures make you quit, instead change your mindset around them and see them for what they really are, a teaching method and a lesson we needed to learn. Don´t allow society’s misperception of failure to prevent you from achieving your dreams.

The second decision you need to make if you want to stop self sabotage is to decide what you want to concentrate on in every situation. And to help you do this I want to share with you the following questions to overcome self sabotage I found on Lauracontense´s Blog:

1. What am I responsible for in this situation?
2. What would I do and think about in this situation if I looked at it from my grown-up point of view?
3. What would I like to focus my attention on?
4. What would I like to do?

Recognizing self sabotage and becoming aware of your thoughts

The second technique I want to share with you, and probably the most important one, to end the cycle of self sabotage is to recognize when you self sabotage yourself because to solve a problem we first have to be aware that we have it and know when it happens.

Have you ever wanted to start something that you should be doing but suddenly find yourself checking Instagram, your inbox, or doing something completely different from what you intended?

As we already know this is a self-sabotaging behavior and one thing you should know about self-sabotaging is that it is a very sneaky enemy that takes advantage of every opportunity it has to make us fail.

Did you know that the moment between when we start an action and our self sabotage behaviors kick in is just a split second?

A split a second in which our beliefs and thoughts convince us of procrastinating the task at hand. But what if I told you that that split second is enough to stop self-sabotaging behaviors?

But Sofia, how can I do this? By becoming aware of our thoughts so that we can recognize the self-sabotaging actions and stop them before they happen.

The problem is that we are so used to living in autopilot mode that we aren´t even aware of what we are doing. 

So to help you raise awareness over your thoughts and turn off the autopilot mode I want to share with you two techniques that enormously helped me stop self-sabotaging myself:

1. Write your thoughts in a journal. Keeping a journal where I can write my thoughts in it even if it is just once a week has greatly helped me become aware of them because when journaling I automatically have to actively be aware of what I am thinking.
2. Practicing mindfulness.

Want to learn the art of living life consciously and how you can incorporate it into your life? 

Once you start becoming aware of your thoughts, you´ll gain the power to control your thoughts and actions so that as soon as an unwanted thought enter your mind you can stop it before happening and ask yourself if this action is self-sabotaging or self-improving. 

Change your limiting beliefs

As we say mentioned earlier this toxic behavior holding us back from success is triggered by our limiting beliefs, thoughts, fears, and insecurities.

Because in the end self-sabotaging is not the problem, it is the symptom. Self-sabotage is simply the mechanism our mind uses to keep us in our comfort zone where we are safe and protected.

So in order to eliminate this behavior once and for all, we have to eliminate it from the root, meaning we have to change our limiting beliefs and overcome our insecurities.

Now, I know this is easier said than done, so I want to share a couple of key steps with you:

If you want to learn more about limiting beliefs, how they affect our mindset and lives, and how can you reprogram your subconscious, make sure to read this in-depth article on the topic!

-Once you start to incorporate the second technique we talked about (recognizing when you try to sabotage yourself) I want you to write down these situations so that later on you can reflect on them and ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is the best thing that could happen if you achieve the goals/objective you were trying to sabotage?
2. What is the downside/price you will pay for achieving this goal? Meaning what is the worst thing that could happen if you were to achieve this goal?
3. What are you secretly afraid would happen if you achieved this goal? 
4. What is your self-sabotage behavior/s? soft addictions, avoidance behaviors, resistance, procrastination, habitual lateness, perpetual overwhelm,over-commitment, patterns of drama, “busyness”, hiding out, perfectionism, making excuses (money, time, family, I don’t know how…)]
5. How do you protect yourself by sabotaging this action?

The goal with this question is that you can find the limiting beliefs, insecurity, fear, etc. that are making you act this way.

So once you identify and define this, the next step would be challenging and eliminating these negative ideas and fears that are holding you back from success. 

To achieve this there are several methods with which you can neutralize limiting beliefs and overcome fears and insecurities. The methods you need to use depend on how strong it is printed in your subconscious. Feel free to investigate the matter and the different options and methods that exist.

 Here is an example of a very simple technique you can try today:

• The first step of this method is to write down on paper the limiting belief, fear, and insecurity you have identified.
• The second step is changing that negative thought into something positive, and useful, and changing it around.

As an example, let´s say you have identified a negative thought that is that you don´t believe yourself deserving of good things in your life.

We could turn around that belief by saying instead: “ I am deserving of love, happiness, success, health, and peace”.

• The third step is to internalize and change that belief/thought/fear. Every time that you catch yourself saying that limiting belief, stop and instead repeat to yourself the positive affirmations you changed that belief into.

So instead of letting ourselves think that we don´t deserve good things, we say to ourselves “ I am deserving of love, happiness, success, health, and peace”.

Affirmations

Last but not least I want to talk about affirmations and how you can use them to help you reprogram your subconscious.

Affirmations are sentences used to reprogram our subconscious mind. They can also be used to make us believe certain things about ourselves and the world or environment surrounding us.

With the repetition of this method, you can voluntarily create thought habits in your subconscious that favor your efforts to create the life of your dreams.

So once you identify limiting beliefs, fear or insecurity you can try to reprogram them by using empowering affirmations every time these unwanted thoughts poison your mind.

Here´s the thing though, the tricky part of this method is that it´s not enough with reading these motivational sentences. Because for a thought to record in the subconscious, it MUST be accompanied by a strong emotion. This means that when we read our affirmations out loud, we need to combine them with a feeling.

Don´t be scared, this is fairly easy to do. You simply have to read your affirmations and think about the emotions and feeling they evoke in you, let yourself be carried away by these feelings, by how they make you feel, how they influence your life…

Remember to read out loud your affirmations at least once a day, preferably in the morning to start the day with an empowered and successful mindset, and to always always combine your affirmations with emotions for them to successfully record in your subconscious.

Take away on how to stop self sabotage

Self sabotage is harmful behavior through which we create obstacles in our daily life that hold us back from success and achieving our goals.

There are many reasons why we might be sabotaging ourselves, but they all come down to our limiting beliefs, insecurities, and fears which trigger these toxic actions.

To overcome this self sabotaging cycle you have to make two 2 important decision-the first one is to take responsibility for your actions and thoughts instead of falling into the toxic habit of blaming so that we own and take responsibility for our mistakes. The second decision is to decide what you want to focus on in each situation.

The second method to stop self sabotage is to become aware of our thought (by practicing mindfulness for example) so that we can become aware of and recognize our self sabotaging actions and stop them before they happen.

Another important action we can take is to change our mindset. Remember that self sabotaging is not the problem or the cause, it is the symptom. The root of the problem is the beliefs, fears, and insecurities that trigger the self sabotaging behaviors. Therefore to eliminate these behaviors once and for all we have to change these unwanted and negative thoughts.

And lastly, no matter how many times you fail to avoid self sabotaging behaviors, NEVER give up, ever.

Thank you so much for investing your time in this article. I hope the tips and exercises in this article will help you stop self sabotage.

Always remember that you are worthy of even your deepest and wildest desires!