Let’s pretend you’re at the beach.

You’ve painstakingly built up a beautiful sand castle with multiple levels, intricate details, gorgeous design touches, and you’re super proud of what you’ve worked so hard to build.

Let’s say someone comes up and stomps all over your sand castle, destroying all your hard work.

What would this person be?

An a**hole.

But we do this to ourselves all the time.

We both build the castle and destroy it.

When we look to others and see their success, we wonder…

What do they have that I don’t?

What are they doing that I’m not?

Sometimes it’s not a matter of skill or luck.

The difference between your outcomes and someone else’s can be as simple as your patterns of behavior.

You may be doing the right things, while unconsciously simultaneously undoing them. 

Why?

There could be many reasons….

• you don’t truly feel worthy of success
• you’re not ready to handle or maintain success
• you fear what’s on the other side of success
• you fear how success will change your comfort zone, your relationships, how people will respond to you

We move by default in the direction of what is most comfortable, not what is most beneficial.

So when we force ourselves out of our comfort zones and start to move towards what is most beneficial, that’s where self sabotage can come into play.

In examining my own behavior closely, I’ve noted seven ways that I self-sabotage.

Perhaps you’ll recognize some of these in yourself too.

And if you do, in recognizing them, hopefully with your newfound awareness, you can stop them altogether.

Or at least long enough for you to make some progress.

Get close to the end and stop

So often, I start a new task or project, and everything is going just fine, until all of a sudden, what was once going smoothly now feels like swimming through wet cement, or trying to stay afloat in quicksand.

It just feels impossible.

There’s a mental and physical block that abruptly kicks in, and I feel like I have to take a break, I can’t possibly finish.

So I abandon the task for days, weeks, or even sometimes, months.

And when I come back to resume and see what I had left, I’m always like “oh, that’s it??!”

I’ll start working on an article, abandon it after a fit of overwhelm accompanied by a mental breakdown, think I have sooooo much left, then come back and see all I had to do was write two closing sentences.

When I look at that behavior pattern closely and see where I unconsciously start to put the brakes on myself, it’s always right before the finish line.

That last little bit is suddenly where I most painfully feel the difficulty or impossibility of the task.

In life, you don’t always get partial credit.

Sometimes, that first 99% of effort doesn’t count unless you finish the last 1%.

If I were to write 99% of a book, I still don’t have a book written and still can’t say I’ve written one.

If I were to get 99% of the way through the publishing process, I still don’t have a published product.

If I were to finish 99% of the credits needed to graduate, I still don’t have a degree.

Don’t stop right before the finish line.

Coast too soon after success

Years ago, when I first started building my online Amazon book publishing business, it was a grind, but I saw success relatively quickly.

Within the first 6 months or so, I was able to match the income I was earning from my previous full time job I had just gotten laid off from.

When it comes to online business, things change so quickly…algorithms, competition, complexity, barrier to entry, etc…so when something is working, it’s safe to assume that that is the easiest time there will be for that thing to work, so you should strike while the iron is hot.

And keep striking.

What I should have done was take advantage of the momentum I had and keep pushing just as hard, or even harder.

But I coasted too soon.

In a youtube video by Sam Ovens, a multiple 8-figure business owner, he mentions the idea of a wealth thermostat.

No matter what, when all is said and done, no matter how big our ups, or how big our downs, we always find a way to make our way back to our baseline level of income we are most accustomed to and comfortable with.

The good news is that when things are bad and we suffer a setback, we always find a way to get back to our baseline, no matter how bleak things look.

But the other side of this is when we start to show signs of pushing past our baseline, we pull back.

Don’t settle for your baseline–push past it.

Don’t rest at your equilibrium–raise it.

If something is working, don’t stop–keep going.

And do more.

Double down.

Triple down.

Don’t allow the first sign of success to be permission to rest on your laurels.

Overcomplicate

When things are easier or faster than I expect, I make it harder by adding complexity, and finding a way to throw in a wrench, so I can make myself get hung up on erroneous details.

Recently, I was sending messages to people in a facebook group to promote my newest book, Challenge Accepted, and it was going much faster than I thought.

Great, right?

So what did I do?

I caught myself going back to my script (that was already working fine) and changing little things like line spacing, emojis, comma placement, and turning lowercase letters into capital letters and vice versa.

*slow blink*

It’s as if I said to myself…

‘Oh this is going easy? Can’t have that–let’s make it tedious and time consuming!’

Parkinson’s Law was in full effect.

In my mind, I had a set amount of time that it would take to finish the task, but when I was on pace to finish sooner than that, I noticed myself unconsciously finding ways to slow my pace, rather than maintaining that same faster pace and thinking I can either move on to another task sooner or have time to do an additional task.

Accept simplicity.

Accept ease.

Accept speed.

Don’t make things harder by adding complexity where simplicity will suffice, difficulty where ease will suffice, or time where efficiency will suffice.

Aim for “perfect”

I talk about overcoming perfectionism so much because it has been one of my hardest (and most recurring) lessons to learn, but when I do grasp it, it is one of the most positively impactful shifts on all areas of my life.

There is no such thing as perfect, nor is there a need to execute things perfectly in order for them to be successful.

Holding yourself to an impossible standard is just a way of holding yourself back. 

Invent tangential busy work

After wrestling with procrastination for far longer than I care to admit, I sometimes finally get myself to sit down and get on task.

And what happens?

Every mini task I encounter along the way to doing the main task I’m supposed to be doing, I find a way to make a side project distraction out of.

I set out to publish a new blog post.

Then notice I should change the font on my website.

While I’m changing that font, I get the itch to change the color scheme.

But to what exactly?

I don’t know.

Now I have to research color schemes on Pinterest.

I’ll think better if I have a different color scheme.

Now that my website has gotten a much needed, highly urgent makeover, I finally get back on task and head to Google drive to open the Google doc where I wrote the piece I want to publish as a post on my blog.

But gosh, it was a bit cumbersome for me to find that file.

I need to make some new folders and reorganize my Google drive.

Right now.

How have I been working with these folders organized like this??

It goes on and on….

Invented busy work is how you get in your own way of completing what is most important.

Say no before someone else can

Have you ever refrained from trying something because you were afraid you’d fail?

Have you ever refrained from asking for something because you were afraid the answer would be no?

We don’t want to put ourselves in a position of vulnerability to failure, judgment, or rejection, so rather than taking the risk of subjecting ourselves to this, we eliminate the risk by simply shutting down prematurely.

We prefer to reject ourselves than be rejected by others.

We prefer to wonder if the answer would have been “no” instead of know for sure.

In doing this, we succeed in shielding our egos from humiliation, but also succeed in shielding ourselves from elevation.

Self sabotage is the behavior that you unconsciously participate in to ensure that there is always a wall in between you and success.

These behaviors are usually so subtle that you won’t even recognize them.

But despite being seemingly small behaviors, they have big consequences.

When we don’t get the results we want, the first tendency is usually to look outside of ourselves for answers.

But really, we are the ones in the way.

Even the most ideal of circumstances are still not a guarantee of success, because we always have to contend with ourselves.

And when we do, we don’t always win.

But when we are aware of our behaviors, we are in a position to change them.

Hopefully, this has illuminated some of your patterns, so you can end the cycle of self destruction.