No matter how far you go in life the problem of self-sabotage will never be too far away. What is this mysterious and powerful force that can cause so much havoc and destruction in our lives? In today’s episode we explore the fundamental mechanisms of self-sabotage and how they can hold us back. No matter who you or where you are in life you need to be aware of this powerful internal process and what you can do to recognise and overcome it.
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Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.
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Speaker:Grab yourself, some free stuff and find out more yesterday we talked
Speaker:about setting internal standards.
Speaker:It was a really good episode.
Speaker:I hope you had a chance to listen to it.
Speaker:If you didn't make sure you check out yesterday's episode
Speaker:on setting internal standards.
Speaker:Today, my friend, we are talking about something that comes up so often.
Speaker:It's the issue of self sabotage.
Speaker:It's the issue of.
Speaker:Why do we sometimes do things that de-rail.
Speaker:Uh, progress.
Speaker:That derail our process.
Speaker:Recently I was coaching a lady who.
Speaker:Is the head of a peak body that looks after something like it was, it was maybe
Speaker:a, I don't know, was it 120 billion in revenue across the whole market sector?
Speaker:This lady was looking after the peak body that oversees the sector and a.
Speaker:It was amazing because she reached out to me saying that
Speaker:she struggled with self sabotage.
Speaker:Now I've been coaching people a long time.
Speaker:I've been speaking at events a very long time, and I am aware of self-sabotage or
Speaker:hear about it on standard, I think, but I.
Speaker:Still get amazed when you realize just how many high
Speaker:profile, highly competent people.
Speaker:Deeply believe they don't deserve to be there and that
Speaker:somehow they're going to ruin it.
Speaker:So we want to talk about that today because whether you're
Speaker:running a multi-billion dollar sector, Management organization or
Speaker:whether you're running a family.
Speaker:Or whether they're living on your own and, uh, you're just not running
Speaker:much other than your own life.
Speaker:We're all very capable of doing this very human thing.
Speaker:So, what is it basically?
Speaker:Self-sabotage is.
Speaker:Undertaking actions driven by in deep internal beliefs that ensure that we do
Speaker:not progress beyond our current level of.
Speaker:Experience and performance.
Speaker:Did you like that?
Speaker:I just made that up on the spot free flow.
Speaker:It's basically things that we do.
Speaker:That have to be biased based on internal beliefs, often barely articulated to
Speaker:ourselves things that we semi consciously believe sometimes subconsciously believe.
Speaker:And that manifests as actions and activities in the real
Speaker:world that retard our progress.
Speaker:So why would we do it?
Speaker:What would we do it?
Speaker:If you, if anybody asks us, if somebody comes up to you and says, Hey,
Speaker:would you look more success in life?
Speaker:Would you like more money, more health, better relationships,
Speaker:more love romance, intimacy.
Speaker:How many of us are going to go?
Speaker:Hell no, I don't want any of that.
Speaker:That's going to ruin everything I want misery.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:I want relationship breakdown.
Speaker:I want to lose money.
Speaker:I want to go into more debt.
Speaker:None of us are saying that, right?
Speaker:Of course we can all agree that we want to grow and prosper and succeed.
Speaker:So what stops us doing it?
Speaker:So.
Speaker:The best example that I could probably give you shut off the bat
Speaker:is that so sabotage is nothing more complicated than homeostasis at work.
Speaker:So homeostasis.
Speaker:Some of you would understand is it's sort of a broad medical
Speaker:concept is that our bodies stay constantly at a regulated point.
Speaker:So most of the time as you go throughout our day, our heart rate, our hormonal
Speaker:levels, I'm in a hormonal level shift at different times in the day.
Speaker:Based on our circadian rhythms, but at the, you know, things like
Speaker:our blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rates, oxygen saturation
Speaker:levels tend to stay roughly around the same point throughout the day.
Speaker:Why.
Speaker:Because our body is always trying to do one of a couple of things.
Speaker:It's trying to keep us alive and it's trying to conserve energy.
Speaker:So our body has learned over millions of years of adaption and evolution.
Speaker:To do the least possible to keep us.
Speaker:Just functioning.
Speaker:In the most efficient way now, imagine.
Speaker:You're walking along a snake, jumps out in front of you and
Speaker:of course, instantly your body.
Speaker:He goes into a sympathetic nervous system response.
Speaker:Your heart rate goes up your hormone levels.
Speaker:Uh, Uh, pin a friend adrenaline, go through the roof.
Speaker:Uh, respiration rates change as you go into fight or flight.
Speaker:But then after that, you'll notice that even if it's, you know, scary,
Speaker:That eventually your heart rate, your blood pressure, all that
Speaker:stuff, returns to the baseline.
Speaker:So that's the example.
Speaker:Another way to think about it is here at the moment in Australia, it's winter.
Speaker:And it's a really cold winter for us.
Speaker:It started really early and it's really cold.
Speaker:So where I live in our home, we have, you know, really great hating
Speaker:you just set this little dial.
Speaker:It's a magical button.
Speaker:And of course the thermostat just operates that way.
Speaker:It just holds the house at that temperature.
Speaker:It senses.
Speaker:The environment and it just keeps everything on the same level.
Speaker:So you're not getting these huge fluctuations in temperature.
Speaker:Self sabotage.
Speaker:My friend operates very similar to a thermostat.
Speaker:It's basically, we get conditioned to a certain level of joy experience, romance,
Speaker:intimacy, success, finance in our lives.
Speaker:And something deep within our psyche likes to keep us just about where
Speaker:they're just about where we're used to.
Speaker:Which is, you could see the evolutionary advantage of that, right?
Speaker:Like when we were living in caves, it was kind of like we wanted every day to
Speaker:look pretty much like the one before.
Speaker:For most of our evolution as a species, surprise change was not a good thing.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:If the weather changed dramatically, if the tribes around you changed
Speaker:dramatically, if there was a sudden change in disease or pestilence,
Speaker:that was a really bad thing.
Speaker:So we, what we wanted as a species was predictability.
Speaker:We wanted huge amounts of predictability.
Speaker:So it's almost as if.
Speaker:Evolutionary journey has taken us along this path of predictability and stability.
Speaker:But we're not faced with those challenges anymore.
Speaker:We live in a world now.
Speaker:Where we can create extraordinary change in our lives because there's all sorts of
Speaker:optionality that never used to be there.
Speaker:Uh, my, you know, We, uh, we, my daughter's homeschooled.
Speaker:I run her home education and, um, she's amazing.
Speaker:You.
Speaker:She's just grown so much through this process and we're
Speaker:doing a lot of world history.
Speaker:And you see that for most of world history, you go from the pre-modern
Speaker:times through three modernity.
Speaker:It was really about survival.
Speaker:Like the vast majority of people didn't read, they didn't have optionality.
Speaker:They, you know, you're either a surf working for the local Baron or you were.
Speaker:You know, working for subsistence, accurate agriculture, just to
Speaker:get enough food for the day.
Speaker:It's only very, very recently in the human journey, historical
Speaker:journey that we've had optionality.
Speaker:You know, you go back to somebody like the Magna Carta.
Speaker:You see this first time where things like, you know, there was this vague idea that
Speaker:the king and the barons couldn't just steal all your stuff because they felt
Speaker:like it, there was this, you know, and then we come through the Renaissance and
Speaker:we start to see this flowering of kind of new ideas of governance and art and
Speaker:music and literature, and all of a sudden.
Speaker:You know, yesterday in history with Olivia, we were doing
Speaker:the Gutenberg printing press.
Speaker:And I said to her, I said, it's the arrival of the Gutenberg printing press.
Speaker:That suddenly allowed vast numbers of people to first learn, to read and then
Speaker:have access to texts that previously had only been available to the elite, to the
Speaker:super rich, to Kings and Queens and to, and they were kept usually in monasteries.
Speaker:So all of this is my way of saying that the evolutionary protectionism that we've
Speaker:lived under for so long has become less important in these last few hundred years.
Speaker:So, what are we got?
Speaker:We've got a system where we can cognitively say to
Speaker:ourselves, you know what?
Speaker:I would love my life to be different.
Speaker:I want to lose weight.
Speaker:I want to make more money.
Speaker:I want to get out of debt.
Speaker:I want to do this, that and the other.
Speaker:But we've still got this kind of evolutionary system inside us that
Speaker:wants to hold us exactly where we are.
Speaker:What drives it?
Speaker:The other mechanism that might be useful to you to think about is it's driven also.
Speaker:By the fact that we equate change as being more painful than
Speaker:staying exactly where we are.
Speaker:So to lose that weight.
Speaker:Might require changing diet require more exercise.
Speaker:Basically our brain equates that with pain.
Speaker:It requires you to equate that with effort and difficulty.
Speaker:And if at the moment we like.
Speaker:Uh, what's the point, right?
Speaker:You get that point where you're just like, oh, I'm tired.
Speaker:I just don't feel so self-sabotage happens because we have this differential
Speaker:operating and it's like, basically,
Speaker:We make a bargain with ourselves.
Speaker:We say, you know what?
Speaker:I it's less painful to stay where I am.
Speaker:At least it's predictable.
Speaker:At least, you know, even if my friends are no good for me, even if I drink
Speaker:too much, even if I'm hate my job.
Speaker:At least it's familiar.
Speaker:Whereas doing something radically different, you know, blowing up your
Speaker:life and pursuing something totally new.
Speaker:Is not easy.
Speaker:It's just not, it's like we kind of, we know that's pain.
Speaker:So, again, it comes back to a little bit of what we said
Speaker:yesterday about internal standards.
Speaker:Nobody can make this decision for you.
Speaker:Nobody can make this decision for you.
Speaker:You know, what are some practical examples?
Speaker:It's like, you know, you'll.
Speaker:You'll get a promotion and then start having huge, you know, getting stressed
Speaker:out and then fighting with people.
Speaker:And then you just give it up and walk away or you get in a relationship,
Speaker:but then you have control issues.
Speaker:And after a certain amount of time, and you get really
Speaker:suspicious of the other person.
Speaker:It's almost as if deep inside we w we, whether we feel we don't deserve something
Speaker:or that we're going to be exposed.
Speaker:That's another part of self-sabotage.
Speaker:We think everybody's going to find out that we're not adequate.
Speaker:We're not up to it.
Speaker:Well, if this helps, here's the tip.
Speaker:We're not, we're not up to it.
Speaker:We're not adequate.
Speaker:None of us offer just about, you know, We're just not, no, one's perfect.
Speaker:None of us are going to be utterly brilliant all the time.
Speaker:And one of the fastest ways to stress yourself out.
Speaker:Is to have the expectation that you're always going to be, you know, just
Speaker:perfect and have everything sorted out and be the best leader manager, parent
Speaker:spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend athlete.
Speaker:We're not going to do it.
Speaker:You know, what we're going to do is approximate a potential we're going to,
Speaker:we're going to keep pushing towards the best that we can do with what we've got.
Speaker:By setting high internal standards.
Speaker:But you look at someone like Brenae brown, who's made an absolute Korea out
Speaker:of basically the concept of vulnerability.
Speaker:I was going tell the truth, be honest.
Speaker:This guy tell people the truth.
Speaker:I often say that to leaders, like just for crying out loud, stop
Speaker:trying to be impervious and perfect.
Speaker:And just tell the truth.
Speaker:My greatest moments as a speaker.
Speaker:You know, in front of audiences of over 10,000 people at a time.
Speaker:I've just come from relaxing and being really authentic and honest and caring
Speaker:about people and not trying to be perfect.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:What are we going to do?
Speaker:Let's wrap this up.
Speaker:How did this self-sabotage manifesting for you?
Speaker:It could be.
Speaker:Uh, health and wellbeing, diet and exercise relationships, finances, debt.
Speaker:Korea promotion work relationships.
Speaker:I think.
Speaker:It's a little bit like breaking the sound barrier.
Speaker:I don't think you can just calmly wander along the path of incremental change.
Speaker:I think what we need to do.
Speaker:Is signup.
Speaker:For a radically different self perception.
Speaker:We need to sign up for a radically different sense of self.
Speaker:We need to sign up.
Speaker:For I'm sick of where I am.
Speaker:It's not working for me.
Speaker:It's not okay anymore.
Speaker:I'm going somewhere else.
Speaker:And then just making that firm decision.
Speaker:To just go for it and get on with our lives.
Speaker:I honestly, don't see another way to tinker around the edges of this.
Speaker:I think it really is something that we need to.
Speaker:Radically just step into.
Speaker:Until you get a different vision of yourself and refuse to back off it.
Speaker:You're going to be stuck in various forms of self retarding behavior.
Speaker:So my friends, there's a lot in that practically.
Speaker:I'm always trying to bring this back practically.
Speaker:What do you do?
Speaker:I think really what is necessary is a firm practical decision to
Speaker:perceive yourself differently, to get really good at monitoring self talk.
Speaker:I talk about that.
Speaker:So often listening to that internal dialogue yesterday
Speaker:afternoon, I found myself.
Speaker:You know, just, just really a bit weary, uh, doing a lot of stuff.
Speaker:Training kids, homeschooling business, travel.
Speaker:And I could just caught myself.
Speaker:I'm like Jonathan, you're doing it.
Speaker:And you can hear it.
Speaker:And it took me years to get good at recognizing that internal
Speaker:dialogue often just driven friends by fatigue, and you're just tired.
Speaker:So capture yourself in the act of negative self-talk.
Speaker:Decide to develop a different vision of yourself, decide to develop a different
Speaker:vision of who you are and what's possible.
Speaker:And what you want in life.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:Go supersonic break the sound barrier.
Speaker:Just go.
Speaker:I'm going big.
Speaker:Or I'm going home.
Speaker:I really mean it.
Speaker:I hope this isn't just a platitude.
Speaker:I'm serious.
Speaker:It's like you literally have to go.
Speaker:I don't care.
Speaker:It just.
Speaker:You have to say to yourself, it is better.
Speaker:That I attempt this and file.
Speaker:Then I stay stuck exactly where I am in miserable.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:That's that's kind of what it comes down to that you've got to decide to leave.
Speaker:Leave the land of Egypt.
Speaker:In a sense, if you go for that old Testament, biblical prince of Egypt
Speaker:narrative, you've got to leave.
Speaker:You've got to go.
Speaker:I got to get out of where I am.
Speaker:I can't stay here.
Speaker:These outcomes, the quality of my relationships, my finances, my health.
Speaker:They're not okay anymore.
Speaker:I'm not staying here.
Speaker:It's time to go.
Speaker:Okay, that is it.
Speaker:That's all I wanted to say.
Speaker:I hope that's a blessing to you.
Speaker:Please make sure you've subscribed.
Speaker:Go and check out the show notes to grab a bunch of free stuff.
Speaker:You want me to come and speak at your business, your school, your
Speaker:organization, your conference.
Speaker:Reach out to me.
Speaker:There'll be a link there in the show notes to contact me.
Speaker:And we can build something very specific to whatever your event or purpose is.
Speaker:All right, everybody.
Speaker:God bless my name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:This has been.
Speaker:The daily podcast, my friend, you and I are going to talk again tomorrow.
