5 Ways to Sabotage Your Success

It was a delight to talk to the business community at ConnectED in Edinburgh about the 5 ways to sabotage your success. It seems a crazy notion that any of us would want to sabotage our success, but as I explained in the talk, sabotage is a result of the programming that is our unconscious mind.
Self-sabotage is any behavior, thought, emotion or action that holds you back from getting what you want consciously. It is the conflict that exists between your conscious desires and unconscious mind.

Self sabotage not only prevents you from reaching your goal, but also becomes a safety mechanism that protects you against disappointment. In other words, your mind is protecting you from getting hurt by doing what it thinks is best, which is keeping you within your comfort zone.#

5 Ways to Sabotage Your Success 

1.  Staying in Your Comfort Zone
Are you choosing OK instead of great? Are you choosing the familiar instead of risk?
When we push ourselves out of our comfort zone it doesn’t feel comfortable, hence the term comfort zone!. We start to listen to the voice in our head saying it won’t work out, what if it goes wrong, we aren’t good enough, people will judge us and so on. More often than not we will then end up retreating back to where it feels comfortable.
Your comfort zone has only got comfortable because you have been sat in it for a while. Think back to a time when you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone, perhaps when you set up your own business or started a new job? It may have felt scary for a while, but how does it feel now? My guess is more comfortable!
More often than not, those who take more risks have less regrets than those who play it safe and can’t handle uncertainty.

2.  Mis-use of your mind
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal – Thomas Jefferson
The mind is made up of the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious mind makes up around 95% of your thoughts, emotions, behaviours, beliefs and values. In other words, it runs the show!. In an average day you will have approximately 70,000 thoughts a day of which science tells us, 70% are negative.
Start to become more aware of the thoughts you are having. Where there is a negative thought there are a hundred more lined up behind to join it. Stop the snowball of negative self talk by being more conscious of where you place your focus of attention. Use your mind instead to create positive expectations around your success.

Start to become aware of your thoughts because your thoughts are powerful.
Your mind is a powerful vehicle for success. Used in the right way it can be the difference between average and excellence, between success and failure.

3. Not valuing yourself and what you have to offer.
Richard Branson, a man who values what he has to offer!
Maybe you think you are where you are by chance, that it’s a fluke?. You may find yourself working all hours as you strive and struggle to prove yourself because under the surface you don’t believe in yourself. If you don’t truly value yourself, people will pick up on your fear and insecurity and think your not up for the job, or lack credibility. This will start to feed your worst fears back to you – that inner dialogue telling you that your not up to the job.
Start believing in yourself and what you have to offer – if you don’t value yourself, no-one else will.

4. Limited Beliefs
We are have limited core beliefs. These beliefs are ‘programmed’ into us at before the age of 6 and can be tricky to spot ourselves. They are one of the key ways we sabotage our success because on an unconscious level we will do what we can to keep the programme of our beliefs running.
Our beliefs are often not our own, but those ‘handed’ down by our parents and care givers. What were your parents beliefs about success and money? Who wrote on your walls growing up? Did you get told money doesn’t grow on trees, or not to get too big for your boots? What beliefs are you harbouring which may be directly impacting your own success?

5. Procrastination
One of the major ways people sabotage their success is through that old friend procrastination.
You might be procrastinating because you are too busy listening to other people trying to seek validation for an idea or a decision instead of listening to yourself and your intuition.
Fear of failure is heavily linked to procrastination. You may have projects unfinished, ideas that have never been allowed to seed and pieces of work that you never finish. Why? All because you have a fear of failure so you don’t finish something in order to avoid the pain of finding out. Or you may be thinking that certain conditions need to be in place first for you to take action, or that something has to be done perfectly.
Look at what you are procrastinating over. What are your patterns of behaviour when it comes to making decisions? Look at the signs you may be trying to self sabotage your success.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

Mark Twain

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Sara Maude

Sara Maude is an Edinburgh Hypnotherapist, Solution-Focused Psychotherapist, EFT Practitioner, Transformational Coach and International Wellbeing Trainer providing in-person and online sessions. Sara provides problem-free therapy which goes deep into the heart of the unconscious mind to create powerful lasting change.