How do you recognize and overcome self-sabotage?

# How do you recognize and overcome self-sabotage?

Self-sabotage is rarely a part of you working against you. More often it's a part that protects you, with a strategy that has never been updated.

What is self-sabotage, really?

You've decided. This time you're doing it: the phone call, the project, the conversation you've been putting off for weeks. Then the moment comes, and you find yourself doing something else.

Most people call it self-sabotage, as if someone inside were rowing against you.

Not me.

When a behavior is repeated over time, it stops being a choice and becomes a strategy. At first you do it, then it happens without you noticing, until it seems like the only possible way to react.

Why do you keep doing it, even when you know it isn't useful to you and to your goals?

In the Premium I describe a precise structure. A behavior that reduces discomfort gets repeated, the brain registers it as a solution and, over time, automates it. You avoid the situation, the tension drops, relief arrives.

The brain doesn't look for what is better, it looks for what is already known. The known is reassuring, even when it destroys.

Then a subtler shift happens: from “I do it” to “I'm just like that.” Reality hasn't changed. What has changed is the meaning you give to your behaviors, and that's where a strategy starts to look like character.

What is it trying to protect?

Think of the last time you stopped one step away from something you wanted. What did you avoid, in that moment?

Maybe that delay gave you something. Relief, for example. Or the certainty of not finding out how it would have gone.

In the book I write that the voice that holds us back often has a good origin. It was born at a moment in the past, with a useful function, and it tries to spare you pain, judgment or failure. The point isn't the intention. It's the strategy it uses to try to do it.

That's why the useful question isn't “Why do I sabotage myself?” It's “What am I trying to protect, and in what other way can I do it?”

How do you recognize it while it's happening?

It almost always starts with a sentence. “You already know how this ends.” “Who do you think you are?” “Forget it, you'll just embarrass yourself.” If we think we aren't able to do something, and we tell ourselves so, we probably won't even try.

Then the mind looks for evidence. It's confirmation bias: someone who believes they aren't liked interprets every no as confirmation. The results seem to prove you right, and a spiral starts that leads to giving up before even beginning.

I started to hear that voice by creating silence. I turned off the car radio, took away the music while I worked, and wrote down in a notebook the sentences that kept repeating. Some weren't even in my voice.

And you, which sentence do you hear a moment before you stop?

Which questions break the automatic pattern?

The real turning point isn't fighting it: it's making it visible. An effective question interrupts the automatic pattern, because it takes the mind out of the habitual answer. Once the question is asked, the brain can't not answer.

When you hear “I can't do it,” ask yourself these questions, in this order:

• What makes me say I can't do it?
• What would I need in order to succeed?
• What would happen if I managed to do it?

And when the urge to put things off arrives: “Is this feeling improving my action or slowing it down?” Then the last one: “Is this a choice or a reaction?”

Between stimulus and response there is a space. If you don't step into it, you don't choose. You react.

Is understanding it enough to stop?

Understanding it opens the space. It's not always enough: a response repeated for years tends to start again on its own, even when you know the situation is different.

The questions already do a lot. In the Premium, though, there is a faster kind of work, one that doesn't go through convincing yourself: it acts on the voice itself. The same sentence, said from a different position, produces different effects. If it arrives “from inside” it feels like truth; if you hear it in front of you it becomes something you can evaluate.

Try imagining “You can't do it anyway” said in the voice of a cartoon character who has always made you laugh. Is it still the same sentence? When you change the tone or the distance of that voice, you're not convincing yourself of something: you're changing the experience.

And then there's direction. In the Away From / Toward metaprogram many people start from pain, but keep moving thanks to a desired direction. Knowing what you're moving away from gets you started. Knowing what you're heading toward makes you stay.

If the behavior that blocks you is persistent, intense or limits daily life, this work doesn't replace the support of a mental health professional.

A small exercise

1. For the next few days, every time you notice yourself putting off something you wanted to do, pause for a moment.

1. Listen to the sentence you're telling yourself and write it in a small notebook, just as it is.

1. Ask yourself: “Is this behavior useful to me and to my goals? What is it trying to protect?”

1. Bring the sentence back to a real fact: “I can't do it” becomes “Today I'm struggling.” Then ask yourself: “What other way do I have to protect what matters, without giving up what I want? What is the next useful step?”

1. When you recognize it, you can even smile at it and say: “Oh no you don't, I've recognized you, you can't fool me anymore!” Then notice what changes in you, even before taking the step.

First the question changes. Then the state changes.

To go deeper

If you've started to notice the sentences that arrive a moment before you stop, in the the Premium Edition of Strategic NLP – The Invisible Blade you'll find the table of cognitive biases with the defusing questions for each one, the exercise for reprogramming internal dialogue and the techniques dedicated to disempowering the blocking voice, also through dissociation. You can start right from what you've learned to notice today.

• How to manage internal dialogue
• How to make change last
• Impostor syndrome
• Changing beliefs and habits