Where are you sabotaging yourself?

Early this week I read an article from Jakob Greenfeld and it has been a game-changer for me.

In it Jakob talks about how he has a friend who blatantly sabotages themselves by not doing simple things that would have a huge impact on their success.

He then turns his attention to himself, "where am I sabotaging myself?".

This turned into a 3 step process for identifying and eliminating self-sabotage.

1. Write down your answers to the question "where am I sabotaging myself?"

It's likely there'll be multiple painful examples, I know there was for me.

2. Separate problems from symptoms

When you skim your list most of these items will be symptoms of something deeper.

As Jakob says "when you’re struggling with headaches and low energy, you can of course fight the symptoms by taking ibuprofen and drinking lots of caffeine. But eventually these temporary fixes will stop working and all kinds of unwanted secondary consequences (e.g. stomach cramps) start popping up."

Try find a common theme between your list, what's the root cause of these issues?

If there's no theme amongst them, you need to dig a little deeper.

Jakob did some digging to find the most common root causes of self sabotage and came across some common themes:

• fear of success
• fear of failure
• fear of rejection
• fear of loneliness

Which all seem valid but likely come from something a little deeper "The most likely root cause seems to be a lack of self-esteem/self-love".

Once you identify what that root cause is, it's time to tackle it.

3. Tackle the root cause

Identifying the issue will go a long way to helping solve the problem.

The act of writing about the issue will crystallize your ideas and let you objectively view the situation.

From here Jakob explores some potential solutions to his problem that will likely be useful to you:

Journaling - Consistently asking the question "how am I sabotaging myself" will allow you to actively identify situations where you might be holding yourself back.

Meditation - Will keep you in-tune with your mind and let you objectively review your actions.

Therapy - Might be useful to work through deeper rooted things that are holding you back.

Affirmations - May help build self-confidence and at worst will mean you've wasted a little bit of time.

Following this exercise myself has helped me step out of my own way and better understand where I'm holding myself back.

If you're feeling a little stuck I recommend reading the full post and working through this exercise yourself.

So what are you doing to stand in your own way of success?