Why Do I Sabotage My Success?
Are you constantly sabotaging your success? You know that you want love, success, joy, and all the good things in life but all your actions are working against that? Despite knowing that you want good things, you still tell yourself negative thinks, engage in destructive behavior and constantly engage in actions that dig you deeper into the hole of despair and self-sabotage.
Unfortunately, this happens to many of us, and the best of us. You self-sabotage by thinking that you don’t deserve success and good things and you don’t belong to the happy side of the population.
How can you stop self-sabotage? How do you stop telling yourself one thing and doing the complete opposite?
Try to find the root of this sabotaging behavior
If the people around you constantly told you that you are not good enough, you don’t deserve good things and you will not succeed, these kinds of statements can get to you and influence your thoughts. You internalize this negativity and believe it.
I have discussed how we need to unlearn some of the thoughts and beliefs we learned from society. This is the first step towards reparenting yourself. For you to correct current behavior, you must get to the root of where it all started.
Forgive yourself
Self-destructive behavior and self-sabotage come from believing you don’t deserve good things. Such beliefs are born from living our past mistakes and letting regrets and shame take over our lives.
If you did something wrong in the past, and this makes you beat yourself up and sabotage your happiness, you need to forgive yourself. Moving past guilt and past mistakes is a crucial step if you need to construct a happy future.
Don’t be too hard on yourself and celebrate small wins
Do you ever resolve to do things then feel overwhelmed and drop them all? If you set goals such as; ‘I will start working out tomorrow, I will start eating healthy tomorrow, I will organize my life tomorrow’, rarely will you accomplish all these things at once.
When you don’t realize the change, you can become disappointed in yourself and result back to destructive behavior. This is why you need to be easy with yourself. You cannot transform your life in a day. It takes time to incorporate good habits into your life and to make them stick.
Don’t be too hard with yourself if you miss a day of exercise. Instead, celebrate small wins. Be thankful that you did something positive towards your goal today and promise yourself to start again tomorrow. Appreciate the baby steps and be proud of them.
Practice positive self-talk and affirmations
Self-sabotage comes from negative self-talk such as;
- I don’t deserve this
- I am not good enough
- I will screw this up so why bother
- I failed at this, I can’t do anything right
You know something, why don’t you take all this energy you use for negative self-talk and turn it into positive self-talk?
Use some positive affirmations on yourself. Tell yourself things that make you feel good about yourself. I made a list of affirmations that you may find helpful for positive self-talk.
Be kind to yourself and love yourself
When you think you don’t deserve good things, it’s because you don’t love yourself enough. Do you imagine telling someone else all the bad things that you tell yourself?
Picture yourself telling someone else, you are good for nothing, you never do anything right.
See? It looks bad. It feels bad. Now, why do you say such things to yourself?
This book; Love yourself like your life depends on it may be just what you need. Loving yourself will help you be kinder to yourself.
You will love yourself, unconditionally, whether you feel like a million-dollar or a bag of garbage that you. You will give yourself unconditional positive regard.
You will love yourself with your flaws, interests, shortcomings, successes, and through the good and the bad days. This way, the value you place on yourself and self-worth will improve, and you will find yourself doing more things that are good for you because well, you deserve it!
Reparent yourself
Your upbringing highly influences how you think of yourself today. If your parents were highly critical, nothing that you do will be good enough. You will always use their criticism as a measuring yard to see how good you are and if you don’t match up, you feel like crap.
By reparenting yourself, you address all the way that your childhood hurt you and shaped you. You start correcting the errors of your upbringing and making parenting yourself afresh.
If your parents neglected you, chances are you believe that you don’t deserve that much attention or good things, and you sabotage yourself every time good things happen to you. I wrote about how you can reparent yourself and correct the mistakes of your upbringing to live a fuller life.
Get rid negative influence
Some people just want to complain about life. They see all the things that are wrong with the universe and cannot point at a single positive thing. Such people engage in self-destructive behavior since they believe that there is no point in trying anyway, everything is screwed up. If these people are your friends, get rid of them.
Get rid of people that fill your mind with negativity. If they keep telling you that you are a loser, ugly, don’t deserve good things, get rid of them. Once you listen to this kind of talk often you start believing it. It becomes your narrative.
Shedding off such influence and toxic friends will help you construct your own reality. A reality in which you are a good person, you deserve good things, and you are going to work hard to get all the good things that you deserve.
The right kind of relationship can be the support network that you need. Have a friend that you can talk to about your feelings and unmask things you are ashamed about. Tell them how you feel. Good friends can help you transform your life.
See a therapist
If you can afford it, see a therapist. A good professional will help you understand why you self-sabotage. She will also help you come up with strategies to help you deal with self-sabotage.
Sometimes we use self-sabotage as unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with disappointments and fear. We use sabotage when we don’t want to get out of our comfort zone and do the things that come naturally to us.
When you choose to sit all day and watch Netflix eating junk food rather than finishing up a project, you are choosing to be comfortable and avoiding discomfort.
A good therapist will help you expose some of the lies you tell yourself. She will help you explore the reasons behind your behaviors and help us confront your destructive behavior and adopt good ones that will help you move forward.
Learn mindfulness
Learn to catch yourself once you are about to get into some destructive behavior and self-sabotage. Mindfulness will help you be present and understand what you are about to do and stop yourself from doing it.
Self-sabotage is common if, for example, you don’t think that you deserve love. Every time your relationship is going great, you start looking for ways to screw it up. In such situations, learn to catch yourself before you do or say something stupid.
Remember if you hurt your partner you can’t take it back. When you get hold of yourself before you screw up, you will save your relationship and maintain your happiness. This is easier said than done but it is possible.
Exercise
Sometimes we underestimate the power of exercise. A little movement, not necessarily gym intensive kind of exercise can make you feel good about yourself. You improve your self-image and body image the more you exercise.
Feeling good about yourself makes you want to do more things that make you feel good about yourself. You are less likely to engage in destructive behavior if you exercise regularly.
See a self-awareness course to help you improve yourself and stop self-sabotaging.
Related posts:
