Do you always seem to fall short of success? You might be unconsciously keeping yourself from reaching your goals, even when you think you really want to achieve them!
Learning about self-sabotage – and your reasons for it – can help you to stop this unconscious cycle so you can go on to create a life you desire.
Reflect on these reasons to determine if they might be keeping you from success:
1. Fear of failure. One of the reasons you may not reach for success is because you’re afraid to fail. Failure is hard to manage, ignore, or handle. It can eat away at your self-esteem and make you doubt your abilities, so it’s not surprising you’ll do anything to avoid it.
2. Low self-esteem. If you lack confidence and suffer from low self-esteem, self-sabotage may feel natural for you.
* You might think you don’t deserve success, so you unconsciously destroy any chance you have of getting it.
3. Fear of change. Success is often tied to change, such as a new job, better home, or other things. You may be sabotaging your efforts because you don’t want anything to change.
* You’re used to your current lifestyle and don’t want to modify it.
* For example, you may claim that you want a mansion or a private jet, but you don’t actually want to pay for these things or be responsible for them. So, you ensure you never have them in the first place.
4. Control issues. You might self-sabotage in order to remain in control. Are you allowing your control issues to prevent you from reaching success?
* Control and perfectionism are often tied together. If you want everything to be perfect all the time, then you may be losing out on big and important opportunities.
5. Habits. Sometimes your habits can sabotage you without you even realizing it.
* For example, if you have a habit of always being late to meetings, then you may miss your chance to impress a client and get a raise. You self-sabotage your own success because of an old habit.
* Habits such as drinking and doing drugs are also extremely sabotaging.
6. Negativity and criticism. The criticism may come from your own internal negative voice, or it may be coming from outside sources such as your family members or friends. Negativity and criticism can be internalized and cause you to sabotage success.
* If you constantly hear that you’re not good enough, smart enough, or talented enough, then you begin to believe this. You feel that you don’t deserve to be successful.
* You may not want to try things that could help you because you don’t think you’re worthy of them. Family, friends, coworkers, bosses, and others may have you believing that you’re useless, dumb, or worthless.
* In addition, research shows that your parents can affect you as an adult. If your parents exhibited self-sabotaging behavior, then you may copy it throughout your life. You grew up seeing this pattern and have a hard time breaking out of it. Their insecurities can carry over to your life.
If you’re sabotaging your own life and future, you can change. It will require effort and time, but it’s possible to reshape your thoughts.
Whenever a thought appears that doesn’t support your efforts to achieve your goals, immediately replace it with a positive thought, instead. You’ll get better and better at both recognizing unsupportive thoughts and changing them the more you practice it.
Soon, you’ll be on your way to success!
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