3 Ways We Self Sabotage Ourselves

Hey, everyone. I am coming on for another video for a topic that is incredibly timely, 

I know for myself and where I'm at both getting ready for a program weekend and also getting ready to speak in Prague. But I would assert it's probably a timely topic for anyone who has ever led anything in their lives ever. 

Today I’m going to talk about three ways that you self-sabotage with being great. The way this is going to work is I'm just going to run through the three ways that I notice I do this and that I would assert a lot of other people do as well. 

So if you're curious to learn a little bit more about me, but also curious to maybe see if I've nailed you to a tee in ways you self-sabotage yourself as well, then keep on option.

Before I get started,. I wanted to mention when I say being great, that could mean anything. It could mean knowing you're a badass. It could be knowing your brilliant, knowing you're capable, seeing that you're a leader, seeing that you're the one, seeing that your contribution counts. 

Those are just some of the examples of what I mean, but if you relate too great as something else, like being creative, or being a good mom, or being a great coworker, consider that counts for this conversation too.

The first way that I notice I self-sabotage myself from being great is owning my responsibility with blame. 

When you're responsible for something, what it means is that you're willing to take full ownership for it, so if you're the leader of a project, even if you have a team of people, you're willing to be responsible for and own that the goal of that project is yours all the way through. 

However, what tends to happen is we confuse responsibility with fault. Fault is always about blame. It's about shame. It's about what's wrong. It's about catastrophizing yourself or shrinking yourself down.

One thing that I know for myself is when I notice a project isn't going the way that I think that it should, I tend to take full responsibility for it.  I get curious about what I'm doing that has the project going this way. 

Then sometimes as an act of self-sabotage, I also blame myself for it. I think of how it's my fault that it's not doing good enough, and from fault, I tend to just beat myself up and try to over-perform to compensate for that feeling of shame, rather than just simply get clear on what it is I need or what conversation I need to be having with my teams so things will go differently.

The second way that I noticed people self-sabotage themselves from just owning it is they love, to only look at the gaps, what's missing, what's wrong or what's not there yet. 

A perfect example of this is let's say I'm trying to fill a workshop full of people. If I said that there should be 10 of them in that workshop and a week out, there's only three, all I see are the seven seats that are empty, and all I focus my attention on are the seven seats that aren't filled yet. I beat myself up for that. 

I treat myself like a turd for that.

I start to think about what other actions I need to be to get those seven seats filled. I don't ever take the time to acknowledge what makes filling those first three seats extraordinary.

It’s also important to note that  I think sometimes people also self-sabotage in the other direction. 

They settle for "Eh, three's good enough." I'm not talking about having three be good enough. What I'm talking about is having yourself acknowledge what it took and what was special about having those three people in. 

Did you have more conversations than you've ever had before? 

Were you willing to call the person you've been avoiding for six months because it's scary to have enrollment or a sales conversation with them? 

Taking a moment to own and celebrate what's working, even when there are gaps because there's always going to be gaps in everything you work on.

Then the last way, that I want to speak about is the way that we sabotage ourselves and refuse to own that we're great is when we don't go and get our own needs met. 

We ignore them. Even sometimes it's literally the physical needs that we have for our health and wellbeing. We eat like crap, we won't go to bed on time, we'll stay up way too late, we'll check emails at three o'clock in the morning. That's a form of self-sabotage in itself.

The thing that I really want to hone in on that I think not enough people talk about because there's a stigma around this making you weak is sometimes our needs are deeper than just what we can go handle on our own. Sometimes our needs are around hearing what's working from our teammates, knowing that we're fully supported by our partners, understanding that even if a decision matters, it's not going to be the end of the world if it fails or frankly just fails based on your terms or high expectations of yourself.

I want to own I've made this statement today as a way to break up my pattern of getting to the edge of creating something great and looking for all the reasons why I won't be great at it. I hope that this was valuable to you as well, and maybe it illuminated some patterns that you had that you haven't addressed or noticed as patterns before.

Whatever the case, if you found value int this, I'd love to hear about it. Please go ahead and share your favorite takeaway or if you notice that you have self-sabotaging behaviors that I didn't talk about.