How To Eliminate Self Sabotage

How to stop self sabotaging

Did you wake up today planning to take on the world and win? Did you accomplish that or did you slowly sink into the morasses of life?

You woke up a bit late so you had to skip the gym, traffic was a bit worse than you thought so you arrived a bit late, now you’re late for a meeting and rushing to the conference room with no preparation. On your way out the door you forget to grab your lunch from the fridge and now you’re going to have to eat out, get something fast and not as healthy as you wanted.

The slow spiral we put ourselves in just because of one misstep so early in the day causes us to self sabotage all day long, sometimes even for the rest of the week because it fouls our mood and throws us off track.

Did you get off track today? What will the consequences be for the rest of your day and week?
What Rules Of The Game Are You Playing By?

Defining how you sabotage yourself is all about the rules of the game you’re playing. If you’re a hard core scheduler, will one missed hour totally ruin your day? If you’re accustomed to a more fluid day (ie. fire fighting) will the sudden introduction of more structure in your life will slow you down ending up with you not accomplishing as much as you intended today.

We all have rules of how our life is supposed to operate, when we get off track we start spiraling down into a routine of self sabotage. We give ourselves permission that it’s okay to slack off, not push forward and just give up the fight because the whole day is shot.

Are you having these types of conversations in your life regularly? If you are like most of us out there we constantly beat ourselves up with just the most minor missteps in our lives and feel like the weight of the world is going to come crashing down.
How To Stop Self Sabotage

It’s the human condition to want everything in our lives to go smoothly and then feel the doom and gloom of failure when it doesn’t. The most important thing you can do for yourself is recognize that life is imperfect and you can alter how you feel about what’s happening.

Once you realize the ways you’re sabotaging yourself and when it most likely will occur you can put a system in place to prevent it.

The easiest way is to understand what you expect your day to run like and what it actually runs like and the gap in between is where you’ll sabotage yourself.

Rewrite the rules your day runs by and you’ll stop self sabotaging yourself. You may be a bit sceptical at first, but stick with me here, it really is that easy.

Sabotage comes from disappointment, if you master not getting disappointed you’ll rarely sabotage yourself.

Let’s take this for a test drive…
Three Steps To Stop Self Sabotage

Get clear on your expectations, what absolutely must happen and what would be nice to happen.

For example, if you want to exercise you must go to the gym, it would be nice to do all the exercises on your list, but if you get ½ of them done then you’ve accomplished more than not doing anything at all.

Are you aiming for 100% completion every time or are you allowing yourself room to revise later as you grow and learn (which will naturally occur,) but only if you get the first version out.

What about that project, many times we leave it open ended on time, so it continues to grow and our expectations of what it will be grow. Instead put a hard limit on how much time you’ll spend then publish it. You can always go back and review it later if you so choose, nothing is final.

Do you consciously put a time limit on how long you’ll work on a project or do you leave it open ended and never finishing it?

Don’t believe you’ll produce something above your current skill-set, we all see that really fancy presentation and project and want ours to be like that. We all start somewhere and grow with each time we do it. If you think you’re going to go out there and create the next Apple on your first attempt. You’ll get so overwhelmed with trying to emulate their level that you’ll sabotage and never produce your project.

What standards do you try to achieve that are beyond your reach right now and how are they holding you back?
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Follow These 3 steps to stop your self sabotage

If you’ve just scanned to the end of the article to get the meat, here’s my wrap up for today.

Self sabotage is because you’re expecting perfection and allowing yourself to not complete anything on your plate, it’s better to have a plate you gorge yourself on than a plate full of diet food. That way you always have something to pick at. Today is the day you stop overloading your plate and only putting on there what you can reasonably do.

Step One: Identify the actions that must be done and those that would be nice to have. If you only have time to get to the musts make sure you do them first.

Step Two: Put a time limit on your work, never leave something open ended or time will creep on you and you’ll never accomplish anything.

Step Three: Own your skill-set, we all begin somewhere. Once you realize you are giving 110% to each action you take you’ll grow. If you always sit back and fine tune you’ll always be waiting and training yourself that it’s okay to just wait, you’ve been waiting too long.

Focus on mastering these three steps and you’ll soon find yourself a machine that doesn’t sabotage your own success.

Josh is The Chief Performance Coach at www.igniteyourawakening.com