Ep. 23: How to Overcome the Habit of Self-Sabotage

Coming close to achieving a goal or accomplishing a dream and then having it suddenly slip away can feel like the most helpless, powerless experience, and is the root of so much unhelpful thinking (“See, it’s just never going to work out for me….”). But what if the problem was all based in your mindset? If so, that would mean the solution is there too. Whether you know it or not, self-sabotaging thoughts, feelings and actions are likely at the core of your “so close but so far” experiences. In this episode Coach Stephanie walks you through her own experience of self-sabotage, where it came from, and how she ultimately defeated the mindset that held her back from success for so long. She also outlines a 7 step process that you can follow to defeat your own self-sabotaging behaviors so that you can move forward to accomplish anything - and everything - you really want. 

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast. My name is Stephanie Finigan, I'm your coach and host, and on today's episode, we're talking about one of the most common topics that comes up when I'm coaching clients, and that is the topic of self-sabotage.

Self-sabotage is sneaky because it's one of those things that, it can come up anywhere. It can come up when you're talking about your career, your relationship or relationships, your finances, your health and fitness. Any area of your life is an opportunity for self-sabotage to enter the scene and really screw things up for you, right? If you've ever been a victim of your own self-sabotage, then you know what this looks like. You know you're going along and things are pretty good. The relationship's going pretty well with the new partner or, hey, you're paying off that debt pretty quickly or, well, you're moving up the career ladder at this new company pretty quickly or your business is starting to explode or the weight's coming off. Everything's happening and it's going really well. And then suddenly there's a moment where it's not anymore.

And you hit a bump and it might seem small at first, but it gets quickly bigger and bigger and the backside starts and suddenly you are not where you were. You're not where you want to be. And if you do any self-reflection at all, you can come to realize it's largely because you have taken yourself out of the game. You have taken certain actions that led to the result of you sliding backwards and being further away from your goal than where you want to be. That's self-sabotage. It's likely we've all experienced this in some level, but for some of us, it's a much more prevalent issue, and that's why I wanted to talk about it today.

Okay, so we can't talk about self-sabotage without talking about a few key concepts in coaching, particularly the concept of creating new neural pathways or thought highways, as I like to call them. That's how I was trained on talking about them. And it's, I think, a very useful way to think about neural pathways.

So what's a neural pathway? It's literally a connection that's made in your brain when you think a new thought. So anytime you think a new thought, you can think about it like you're creating a new neural pathway in your brain, or as we like to call it in coaching, a new thought highway. So just imagine all these millions and millions of little roads in your brain every time you have a thought. The reason we call it a thought highway is because much like a regular highway, the more you drive on it, the easier it is. So what I mean by that is this, imagine a road that is brand new, it's being built. There's woods everywhere and suddenly there is a new road that's being carved out through the middle of the woods. That road at first is a dirt path. It is dirty, it is bumpy, there's rocks, there's weird swerves. If you drive down that dirt road, it is gonna be difficult, right? You're going to have to like hold on to the wheel pretty tight and stay focused and you're going to have to swerve a lot. It's going to take you a lot of effort and energy to get down the road.

That's similar to what happens when you think a new thought. Your brain creates that new neural pathway but at first that pathway is like a bumpy dirt road that you're driving down. The more that you drive down a dirt road, the smoother the road gets. The more often you drive back and forth on it, the pebbles smooth out and the dirt pats down, and that road gets easier and easier to move up and down, to the point where at some point, that road eventually becomes a highway, it gets paved, and now you can drive up and down it very, very fast, and you can do so without a lot of effort. We've all done this, right? You get on the highway and then you relax a little bit because you just kind of get in your lane and you go and you're just cruising.

So what this has to do with self-sabotage is this. When you think a new thought that is exactly like driving down a bumpy dirt highway. It's uncomfortable, it's awkward, you're creating a new neural pathway in your brain but it's not one that your brain is familiar with yet. So that new neural pathway is like a bumpy dirt road. And until you think that thought over and over and over again, it's going to remain that way. The more you think that thought, the more you pave that dirt road into a highway, the more that neural pathway becomes smooth and easy and effortless for your brain to reach for, the more frequently you will think that thought.

So here's an example. Let's say you've got $50,000 worth of debt. If your thought is, oh my god that's so much debt I'm never gonna get out of it, I'm never gonna pay this off. If that's your thought, if that's one of your first thoughts when you think about $50,000 worth of debt, then it's very likely you've had other past experiences that have shown you, hey, debt is hard to get out of, debt is bad, I don't like being in debt. Very similar thoughts to that. The thought highway that is created when you think those thoughts is very smooth. So that thought that, oh my God, I'll never get out of this, that thought is very easy for your brain to reach for, because you've had similar thoughts like that in the past.

Now, if you think it's $50,000, but it's not that big of a deal, I bet I could pay it off pretty quickly. If that's a new thought for you, if you've never really had a thought like that before, that's gonna be a dirt road. That's a new neural pathway, that is a new thought. It's a little bit bumpy and a little bit uncomfortable and your brain probably doesn't believe it yet. So it's harder for you to reach for it. It's harder for that to be the automatic thought that you have when you think about $50,000 in debt. However, the more often you think the thought, you know what, I could pay that off. I bet I can handle this. I bet I could pay it off quickly. The more that you think those thoughts, the more paved that highway's gonna be, the faster your brain's gonna be able to reach for those thoughts when the idea of $50,000 in debt comes up. And now suddenly, that's gonna become the new paved highway for you. That's gonna become the thought you reach for. That's going to become much easier for you to get to.

And then of course, once you have that thought that you believe, that creates your feelings. Your feelings create your actions and your actions create your results. So if you want to pay off $50,000 worth of debt, it's much easier to do it from a head space and a thought of, ooh, I bet I could do this. It's not that bad. Versus the thought of, oh, my God, I'm never going to pay this off. Right? Which one of those thoughts gives you a better feeling, which will then drive a more productive action, which will then get you to the goal you want to go to? You know the answer.

So this is what I love about this concept is it really kind of drives home this idea of you can think anything you want and you can have all sorts of thoughts like, oh my God, I'll never get out of debt, I'll never lose weight, I'll never find a good relationship, I'll never meet this goal. You can have those thoughts. Just be aware that those thoughts are coming to you easily not because they're facts, not because it's just meant for you to have sort of a crappy experience in that area of your life, it's just because you've thought those thoughts a lot in the past. You've thought them a lot, and therefore they are now cement highways and they're easy to get to for your brain.

Okay, so that's the concept of the neural pathways or the thought highways. The reason this is so important, you could probably suss this out for yourself, but the reason this is so important when we talk about self-sabotage is because in order to get somewhere new, in order to achieve a new goal, in order to do something you've never done before, or to do something you have done before but to repeat it, you need to be able to think new thoughts. That's the foundation to overcoming self-sabotage.

When you have a goal, no matter what the goal is, you're trying to get to a new place in your life. You're trying to be a new person in an area of your life. In order to do that, you're going to have a lot of new thoughts along the way, and you need to build those thoughts into highways. I can do this. This is possible for me. I'm the type of person who does this stuff. Those need to become your highways. So let's tie this now into the concept of self-sabotage. Self-sabotage is this idea that you are moving your life in a certain direction and something happens and you stop doing that.

The thing about self-sabotage is it's always about you and your mindset. And this is not a license to beat yourself up for that, but it's a license to notice that where you're sabotaging yourself, that is your opportunity to do things differently and actually correct that behavior. You have total control over this. You just need to become aware of what you're doing, when you're doing it, and then change your behavior. You need to be changing your thinking.

So for me, I have an example of self-sabotage. I know I've done it many, many times in my life. There was a point where I wanted to change careers and I pivoted away from a career I had in the corporate world into a career in the field of international development. This was something I'd wanted to do for a very long time, and it took me a long time for a whole lot of reasons to get there, but when I finally made the pivot, what it looked like was leaving a corporate job, leaving New York City, which I loved and still love and still feel sad that I left because it's my favorite place in the world, leaving a relationship, which at the time the relationship was still intact, but like physically leaving and living elsewhere to go to graduate school to get a degree and move forward with this new career path.

And so I remember it was one of my very first days of grad school and I remember sitting in a classroom and I'm surrounded in this classroom by students who are from all over the world. I was one of the few Americans in the class, and it was amazing. I loved that. That's exactly what I wanted. I was studying international development, and I did not want to sit in a classroom with a whole bunch of other white Americans like myself with the same background. I wanted to be there with a completely diverse group of other students who had completely different experiences than I did. And that's where I was. I was very happy to be at exactly the program I wanted to be at, surrounded by the people I wanted to be surrounded by, studying the topic that I wanted to study. I had left this corporate job and made this big leap without any roadmap on how to do it and I was really proud of myself that I took the risk and that I did that. At that time, I had no debt at all. Prior to that, I had wrestled with debt before. I had no debt. I had just finished my 10th marathon or something. I was in great running shape. I had this wonderful relationship. I was as healthy as I've ever been. Shit was good. Shit was really good. And I remember sitting in that classroom, looking around, thinking, oh my God, I'm exactly where I wanna be right now and everything in my life is exactly like I want it to be.

And I remember having that thought and then I distinctly remember having an immediate wave of panic hit me at that moment. When I look back now, I have like a visceral reaction to that moment because I can see now, I can see exactly what was happening, which is I was absolutely on the verge of self-sabotage and I started to do just that. I started to sabotage everything, all of it. I stopped running. I started smoking. It was like a very rapid downward spiral from that moment forward for a while. And it took me a while to regroup after I went through that experience because I couldn't believe what had happened and how quickly I had sort of let so many important aspects of my life unravel because I had some sort of strange panicky feeling the moment that I realized I had everything that I wanted and everything I'd been working for. I'm not the person who gets everything that she wants, I'm not the person that shit works out for… I didn't know it at the time, but upon a lot of reflection and work, I realized those were the thoughts that I was thinking .

What happened in that moment was any thoughts like oh my god, I have everything I want - those thoughts were brand new for me. I had not had those thoughts maybe ever in my life and they were full-blown dirt roads. They were brand new neural pathways that were just not at all developed. They were very uncomfortable for my brain and I immediately dismissed them. I immediately said no no, that's not that's not me, that's not true…

And I immediately reverted back to some very old thought highways that I've had for a very long time that were much easier for my brain to get to. So those were thoughts like some of the ones I just mentioned, like, this isn't going to work out for me. I'm not the person that things work out for. Those thoughts were much more comfortable for me, even if I didn't realize I was thinking them. And so because I was thinking those thoughts, I started having feelings like, ooh, I'm uncomfortable with things being good. So I need to start kind of getting back to what's much more familiar to me, which is things being in a bit of chaos, which is always having something to worry about. There was always a problem. There was always some sort of chaos. That was the mindset I was used to. And that's the mindset that my brain wanted to get back to because those were my thought highways.

That eventually ended up resulting in me losing a lot of the things that I had worked so hard to gain and going back to old ways of being that I had previously closed the door on. Since then and since working on my own habit of self-sabotaging, I have been able to stop myself from repeating that pattern.

So that's my example of self-sabotage and where that came from. So the key here is to be onto your brain. Anytime you're trying to accomplish something new, you are at risk of potentially self-sabotaging, particularly if you're somebody who has done so in the past, like I am. And so you need to be onto your brain.

And the key here is just to expect that this is coming, expect that the self-doubt's coming, expect that the self-sabotage is winding up and trying to get ready to knock you off course. If you know that it's coming, it's not so shocking when those thoughts start to creep in and say, oh, you can't do it, this is too hard, I told you this was gonna be too hard, there's no way you're gonna be able to achieve this. All that chatter in your brain, if you expect it, then it's not as surprising and it's easier for you to say, okay, that's actually not true. That's just my brain trying to keep me safe. It's just my brain trying to conserve energy.

I like to think of it like this: whenever I have those thoughts, those self-doubt thoughts, which then lead to my self-sabotage, that's just a sign that I'm doing something right. Because it's a sign that I'm moving in a new direction. Notice how you don't have those thoughts, you don't have those sabotaging thoughts, those doubtful thoughts, when you're lying on the couch watching Netflix. I'm lying down on the couch watching Bravo, I'm never thinking, there's no way I can do this, right? Because I've done that a thousand times. I only have those thoughts when I'm doing something I've never done before or when I'm doing something I'm not fully confident in or fully versed in. When I'm doing something that's challenging, that's when I have those thoughts. So just know when you start to have those thoughts, it doesn't mean anything's gone wrong. In fact, it's a sign to you that you're doing something right. You're moving in a new direction you've never been in before. That's why you're having those thoughts. That's all they mean. And just knowing that is very empowering because then suddenly it takes any of the scary out of those thoughts. If your brain starts saying, oh my God, we can't do this. I can't run an extra two miles. I've never run that far in my life. Instead of thinking, that's true, I better stop and walk and call an Uber. What you can think is all this means is I'm doing something new, which I am.

So if you wanna overcome your self-sabotaging behaviors, here are the seven steps:

First, whenever you're doing something new or whenever you're doing something challenging, expect self-doubt to show up. Expect that you're going to start to have thoughts that then lead you to sabotage. Just know that that's coming.

Secondly, know the signs that it's here, right? Know the signs that your self-sabotage has shown up and it's thoughts in your brain like, I can't do this, it's too hard, I don't know how, what's the point? Just be aware whenever you start thinking those thoughts, okay, it's here, right? The self-sabotage has shown up at my front door and now is my chance to do something about it.

So the third step here is to call it out. Say like, okay, that's just my brain trying to protect me because I'm doing something new. These are just thoughts I'm having. These are not facts. I don't have to believe these thoughts. These are just old thought highways that are very well paved in my brain, but I could think something different. Just call it out so that you're aware of what's happening.

Step four, remind yourself that self-doubt only shows up. Self-sabotage only occurs when you're doing something new. So it's a sign that you're doing something right. And again, notice how self-doubt never shows up when you're lying on the couch watching Bravo. Just doesn't, it's not there. You've done it before, you're familiar with it, right?

Step five, since all thoughts are choices, decide what you do want to think instead. So you might choose to think something like, I know this is hard, but I can do hard things, right? We all love that saying, I can do hard things. I don't know how to do this, but I know I can figure it out. My why for why I wanna do this is bigger than this moment of self-doubt. You could think of any thoughts like that, any of those thoughts that you think that are just a little better feeling, those are gonna help you. Start to practice those thoughts. Start to practice them so that those bumpy dirt highways become paved highways. They become much faster and easier for you to reach. The more you practice those thoughts, the more normalized they become in your brain, the faster it is for your brain to get to them. I don't know how to do this, but I know I can figure it out, is a great one. I love that one, I lean on it all the time.

Step six is just take one action towards your goal that's new and challenging. It doesn't matter what it is, but just take one. Momentum is a real thing. So if you are in the midst of a self-doubt moment, if you're feeling that panic that I felt that day, if you're feeling something where you're thinking, oh my God, I don't know if this is gonna work out for me, or if you're thinking something like, I just don't know if I can do this, I just don't know if it's gonna work out for me. After you go through steps one through five, just take one action and build on that. Whatever you can do, the next best step you can think of towards your goal, just take it, take it that day to help move yourself forward.

And then seven, let the feeling pass. Whatever remnants of self-doubt are still there for you. Whatever remnants of, you know, fear of self-sabotage are still there for you. Let those feelings pass. Whatever remnants of anxiety are still there. Let those feelings pass. All emotions are just vibrations in your body and they will pass. So if you do steps one through six and you're still feeling it, just know the emotion will pass. It's okay, this is not here forever. It's just for a moment. And then you keep going.

Repeat this cycle as much as you need to, but this is gonna help you work through any sort of feelings that could then create that any sort of emotions that may create that self-sabotage in your situation.

Okay, that's what I have for you guys today. I hope that this was helpful. I love coaching on this as I do all the topics I talk about on the show. If you have any questions, comments, just reach out to me. I'm on Instagram all the time, pivot underscore coaching, or you can find me over at makeyourpivot.co. Lots of information over there about how we can work together, and if you want to get coaching specifically on self-sabotage and how you experience it, go over to makeyourpivot.co and you can you can sign up for a 60 minute free consult and we can chat and get you on the way to stop sabotaging and start meeting your goals with much more ease. You deserve it. It's possible. I want to help you get there.

Alright, I will talk to you guys next week. next week.