Summary
Are you struggling with self-sabotage and want to learn how to stop self-sabotaging behavior? I have seen many people start to see success and they get right to the edge and end up failing. Why? They get in their own way. The conscious mind may want success, but unconsciously you could be doomed to fail. Everything you are and everything you have done up until this point is a result of the choices you have made and continuing to make the same choices will continue to bring the same results. By running towards what you are afraid of you can stop self-sabotaging yourself and set “fear goals” that keep you headed in the right direction, and often the right direction is the direction you are most afraid of.
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Transcript
Why Are We Self-Sabotaging?
Self-sabotage it’s like sitting on the branch of a tree and cutting the branch out from under us so that we fall. It is literally going after what we want in life. And then as soon as we’re about to get it, we sabotage everything. It shows up over and over again in humans, in relationships, in work in health, it is a major problem. And as soon as you learn to get past this obstacle, your life’s going to get a lot better. So today we’re gonna talk about what to do when you’re scared and self sabotaging. Let’s go.
I know it’s been a while. If you’re on YouTube, I see out there and today I want to talk about self sabotage because I have a student in the WFA group where we teach people how to start a work from anywhere ad agency and get the first paying client. And he said, he’s gone out there and he’s gotten a couple of clients and he’s making progress. And he’s starting to feel himself, self sabotage. He’s starting to feel himself, talk himself out of it. So he’s starting to have success. And in his mind, he’s just rationalizing why he shouldn’t continue. It’s starting to not feel safe. And this idea of feeling safe is really huge. When it comes to self sabotage, generally, we’re going to sabotage what we’re doing because our conscious mind is saying, this is what I want. I want to make more money.
I want to get paying clients. I want to quit my job. I want to do all this. And the subconscious mind is saying like, what are you crazy? This is horrible. And working to end up dead basically. And that is because the subconscious mind exists to keep us safe, not to self actualize. It is the conscious mind and self actualizes and the unconscious mind that will sabotage us every step of the way.
There’s a great book by Gay Hendricks out there called the big leap, which is about when we level up, we cut ourselves back down because we’re not comfortable at that next step. So we need to figure out how to unravel that. Self-sabotage how to get out of our own way and stop stomping on the gas with our other foot on the brake at the same time. Now, one thing that you have to understand is that humans are basically computers that are preprogrammed to act and behave a certain way.
Like 90 something percent of our thoughts and behaviors are habitual and they’re repetitive. And they’re the same every single day. So we’re basically operating on autopilot, some of us more than others, but even the most woke of us is largely on autopilot. We don’t understand ourselves, even if we think that we do, you would be surprised at how much is hidden from yourself. So the number one thing here to do is acknowledge that we don’t understand all of our behavior.
How to Avoid Self-Sabotaging Behavior
Be open to the idea that we’re going to have to ask questions about why we’re behaving the way that we are. And so this guy in the group, number one, he’s doing awesome. He’s going out there, he’s getting results. And two, he’s bringing it to the surface when he’s starting to feel scared and self sabotage.
So that means you have to get around people who think and behave differently than you do. Because something I had to learn the hard way was all of my beliefs have led me to exactly where I am today. If I’m not getting what I want in relationships or in health or in business. It’s because I have beliefs that are false, that have led me to where I am. Everything is just cause and effect. So I have to reprogram my beliefs and I have to behave as a successful person would behave. So I basically have to step out of myself and do what is, does not come naturally to me. So a lot of people think, you know, you should trust yourself. You should feel it in your gut. And they’re talking about the subconscious. And again, this, you should trust your gut. If it’s a matter of personal safety, if you’re a physically in harm’s way, you should trust your gut.
And you’re going to have to watch the episode to understand how doing the opposite of what you normally do can get you the result that you’re after. If you haven’t been able to get it. Now, this is something that stops people from getting to that point is that let’s say that you start a new business.
You start feeling unsafe, you start feeling more exposed because having a business does make you more exposed. You, you are more at risk. There are more people, depending on you, you do have more responsibilities. So let’s say you start feeling unsafe. You might rationalize why you should go back to your nine to five. You might come with all sorts of great reasons why you should get out of there. And again, it’s not just business. Let’s say you’re avoidant and relationships. And you’ve been seeing someone for too long.
It’s possible. You’re going to start to rationalize why you should leave that person. You’re going to start to find flaws in them. You’re going to search to find all sorts of good reasons why you should be single again when subconsciously it’s, because you’re afraid of being in mesh with somebody. I know that’s getting into relationship theory, but the point is we do this in all areas of our lives.
And we have to admit to ourselves that maybe our rationalizations are bullshit. Maybe they’re made up. And again, they might feel like the most real thing to you in your body. But just question it, just say, what if, what if this reason for quitting this business, isn’t real. What if I’m doing it to stay safe and then say, okay, well then how would I act instead? And this is where the concept of believability comes in.
How to Get Proper Mentorship and the Concept of Believability (Credibility)
So this is a great book by Ray Dalio called Principles and Ray Dalio runs one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. He’s a multi multibillionaire and he’s made a study, his law, his entire life of studying people and how they behave and how they act, how a bill organizations and why people the public and within his organization act the way they do.
And he talks about believability and believability is basically the idea that if you want to get rich, you can’t take advice from people who are not rich. You can’t take advice from people who haven’t done, what you want to do. If you want to get six pack, abs you cannot take advice from somebody who’s 50 pounds overweight, even if it sounds great. And so, you know, you know this, you’ve heard this people are going to give you advice about how to make money.
People that have no idea how to make money. And you have to understand that they’re weighted believability. The chance that they’re correct about this is very low. Now there’s one exception to this. If people are trending in the right direction, you might want to listen to them. But if they’ve never gotten the results in their life, you basically should do the opposite of what they say. So if your family tells you, you shouldn’t start a business because you’re not going to make any money and they’ve never started a successful business and you want to get rich and they’ve never been rich.
You should basically do the opposite of what they say, because they have no way to believability. Now, if you go out there and you talk to somebody who’s built, you know, 10 different multimillion dollar businesses, they have a very high believability. If you’re trying to get six pack, abs you go out there and you talk to somebody who has got six pack abs, then they lost them.
Then they got them back again. They have believability because they have repeatedly gotten the result that you are after. So we’re going to want to use the power of an alter ego here, and we’re going to want to do what that person would do in the situation. So there is the, the phrase, what would Jesus do now? This is not a religious talk. I’m not religious, but this caught on it was so popular because it allowed people to easily model the behavior of someone they admired.
We can use the same thing in ’em what’s called the alter ego effect. So I once had an executive coach and he said, pick out somebody that you admire and write down their principles. So I picked Bruce Lee at the time and I wrote down the things that I really admired about Bruce Lee, his discipline, um, his ability to master things, repetition, all these characteristics that I really admire that had gotten him the results that he got.
And then we will go into a situation that I was unsure about or not getting the results that I was after. And I would say, you know, what would Bruce Lee do in this situation? And then I would try to act and behave in that way. And so that’s going to be unnatural to me. It’s going to feel unsafe. It’s going to feel unnatural, but I’m doing it because I’m modeling the behavior of somebody with high believability.
So one we’re getting scared and we want to act the way that our mind is telling us. We have to realize we have very low believability in the situation. If we’re rationalizing our behavior and business and not getting the results that we want, we have to admit to ourselves that we’re probably not only wrong, but completely wrong. And we should do the opposite of what we should think we should do.
So we asked to do something called act as if act how your most successful self would be if you’re in business. Um, and you’re having a hard time taking action because you’re self sabotaging. You’re stopping yourself from taking action. See, what would the version of me that’s already making $10,000 a month do in this situation? What would the version of me who’s already making a million dollars a year doing the situation?
You know? So I, I was stuck a couple of years ago at a plateau in my business, making about six figures in revenue. And I couldn’t get past that. And I thought, what would the version of me who’s already running a million dollar business to, they would hire somebody for support. I didn’t feel like I was ready to hire somebody. It felt scary and like too much exposure, like I was taking on greater risk, but that I knew if I was already making a million dollars, that I would definitely hire someone to do support so that I could focus on revenue generating activities.
Now, sometimes we put the cart before the horse, we confuse cause and effect. So by doing that, by hiring someone to do support, and then I could focus on revenue, generating activities, even though I didn’t want to do it until I made the million dollars by doing it ahead of time, I ended up making the million dollars. So we often have to do the thing we don’t want to do that we know we would do at a later stage.
And we always say, I’ll do it when all do it. When we have to do it. Now, if we want to get that result. So if you’re experiencing self sabotage, you have to first bring it out into the open, make it conscious, tell it to somebody else. Sometimes that’s enough. Next. You have to admit that your rationalizations around how you want to behave could be completely wrong.
After that find somebody with high believability, somebody who’s gotten the result that you’re after over and over again, and then ask yourself, what would this person do in this situation? Write it down on a piece of paper. It’s not enough to think about it.
Pick somebody that you admire that has gotten great results in this area of life and say, what would this person do in this situation? And if you know them personally, you can call them up. You can ask them if you don’t know them, that’s okay. You can imagine you can have an imaginary council in your head, write down exactly what you think they would do. Then go out there and make yourself do it.
Proper Goal Setting for Entrepreneurs (Fear Goals)
Now, at this point, you’re gonna hit a physical block. You might physically not be able to do it. This is like, let’s say I’m a guy who wants to go talk to a beautiful woman and he wants so badly to go talk to her.
He knows that his friend who’s really good with women would just go right up and talk to her and he can’t get himself to do it. Why? Because his body is going to stop him. He’s going to freeze. That is a nervous system response to help us survive in the face of danger. Okay. We have fight flight or freeze. So if you’re going to freeze in this situation, it’s because you’re trying to avoid the negative outcome.
Now, if this man reframes it and he says, it is my goal to be rejected by that woman rather than gain her approval. Right? Cause that’s what he’s afraid of us. I won’t go talk to her. He’s afraid he’ll be rejected and humiliated if he switches it. And he goes, is my goal to be rejected and humiliated by that woman. Guess what? That takes away all the power.
And he goes out there and makes it his goal. And what do you think happens? He walks up and he’s confident because he’s going after what he was scared for and he’s going to get a good outcome. So years ago I’ll be super scared to spend tons of money on ads. I would be so terrified if I scaled to a thousand dollars a day in ad spend that I would lose all my money and go broke forever.
And I wouldn’t make any sense nails. So guess what I did. I made it my goal to go out there and lose a thousand dollars a day. And again, the thing that I most don’t want, I make it my goal. And I go after it, I call it fear goals, fear goals. And I do this constantly. I have an a morning review. I have all my fear goals, all the things that I’m afraid of, I write it down and then I make that my actual goal.
And again, don’t do this with anything that puts you in physical harm, but if it’s psychological, there’s a very good chance that when you go off your fear goal, you’re going to get the thing that you wanted in the first place. So, you know, maybe I lost a little bit of money on ads, but by sticking with it, I uncovered the key to growing profitably.
Okay. It’s that breakthrough where we have to go after the thing that we scare, we are scared of most in order to ascend to a new level. So for this person, who’s, who’s, you know, he’s feeling unsafe and is business. He’s feeling scared, um, that it’s not as secure as a job. I hate to say it, but psychologically, what you have to do is you have to go after that fear, that it’s unsafe, that it’s not as secure.
Your goal is to not have as much security. That’s what you got to make it because in the beginning of business, you are going to have less security than a job. And if you resist that, you’re just going to self sabotage. You’re going to rationalize it to yourself who can wake up and find beers. You’re exactly where you started.
And then you remember, okay, wait, I wanted a different life than this, but if you go off of that insecurity, I want to be less secure than it was before. Cause that’s what I’m most afraid of. Guess what? You’ll probably find on the other side, that security. Okay? Because you’ll take the risk to actually increase your earning potential, make way more money and have way more security. There’s a Buddhist saying what we resist. Persists, stop resisting, Gloucester it, head on, make it your fear goal.
Write it down. Model somebody you like, and that’s going to help you break past your self sabotage. Again. If you don’t know where to start, go tell someone where you think you might be. Self-sabotaging write it down on a piece of paper. If you have no one to talk to model somebody, make a fear goal, go out there, get it. The thing you’re most afraid of you’ll get the opposite of it. Okay.
I don’t know if you notice this, we create the circumstances that we resist the hardest. If we’re so scared of losing money, that we will never start a business or invest in ourselves, where do we end up completely broke. That’s what we’re afraid of in the first place. Okay. If we’re so scared of being alone, that we have anxiety around every single person we date or that we have a friendship with.
Cause they’re scared to leave us. Guess what happens? People don’t tend to bond with people who are that insecure and we end up alone. So again, it’s like a cruel joke that we get the thing that we resist the most in life. If you just switch your mindset to go head on for the thing that you’re resisting, instead of resisting it, you’ll get the opposite. You’ll get what you want.
It’s great to be back on the work from anywhere podcasts and back in the YouTube channel. Throw in the comments was this helpful? Was this hard to follow? Are you going to put this in practice in your own life? Maybe go out there and try it and throw in the comments, how it worked out. I would love to hear it.
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