Self sabotage often follows predictable patterns. Recognising these patterns is crucial to breaking the cycle. In this blog, we will start the journey to identifying and understanding your sabotaging behaviours, and understanding the significant impact this awareness can have on your mindset, actions, and business success.
Self sabotaging behaviours are more common than you might think and come in various forms. There is no shame, blame or judgement in recognising these behaviours and learning to understand why they occur for you. Sometimes the reasons may be simple and sometimes they may be complex; rest assured through mindset work, there are ways to reduce the incidents and their impact while processing the thoughts and feelings effectively and efficiently.
You may well have experienced one or more of the following:
- Procrastination
- Overwhelm
- Negative self talk
- Imposter syndrome
- Shiny Object Syndrome
- Perfectionism
You may have other names for your form of self sabotage and that’s ok. Our self sabotage and the reasons behind it are as unique as we are with one fundamental part that is exactly the same for each of us: we are human.
The first step to taking your power back and breaking free from your self sabotaging behaviour is to identify your patterns.
To help you with this identification you could do one or more of the following:
- Keep a journal of your behaviours, thoughts and feelings. Notice triggers and look for recurring themes.
- Take time to reflect when things haven’t gone to plan and ask yourself “Why?” with curiosity and compassion.
- Work with a mindset coach who will be able to fast track the process of identification through questions and reflection.
Once you have identified your patterns, you can start the process of changing them. This may be include:
- Reframing thoughts and feelings behind the reason why you sabotage yourself.
- Putting in place new behaviours that stop or reduce the incidents of the triggers that lead to your sabotaging behaviours.
- Working with a mindset coach to truly understand why the sabotaging behaviour pattern started and when so you can work from the very starting point rather than somewhere too far forward.
- Creating new beliefs with solid foundations.
This process of change may not result in the total eradication of your self sabotaging behaviour. For some, it’s about reducing the depth of impact and the duration of these behaviours. It is important to set yourself up for success at this point by leading with anticipation rather than expectation.
Taking time to recognise your self sabotaging patterns and working on changing the behaviour is vital for business success. Many business owners try to keep their head down and battle on through or simply resign themselves to the fact that they can’t change and risk burning out or running out of money or both. If one knows where and when we are more likely to sabotage our success we can change things for the better.
Imagine running your business with less procrastination…how much more productive would you be? How much time would you save which could then be doing fun stuff?
Imagine running your business with less negative self talk…how much easier would it be to show up? What actions would you take if you never doubted yourself?
Imagine realising your sabotaging yourself but knowing what to do about it…how empowering would that feel? How resilient would that make you?
In conclusion…
Recognising and understanding your self-sabotaging behaviour patterns is vital to overcoming them. With awareness and actionable strategies, you can break free from these destructive cycles either by removing them completely or reducing the incidents of them. As a business owner, working on your self sabotaging behaviour patterns has a positive impact on your business; improving productivity, saving time, speeding up decision making, improving how you show up and ultimately improving business success. I invite you to take a moment to notice how you are getting in your way and the pattern it follows and, if you need help, reach out.
Until next time,
Best wishes
Philippa x