The straight of it is, these are all actions that diminish relationships over time. They eat away at and destabilize healthy connections with the people we care most about. Sometimes to the point where we no longer care about them.
We become disconnected from the people we care about. And we feel justified. Oh boy, are we justified. There’s nothing quite so damaging as the human desire to be right.
How can that NOT be an act of self-sabotage?
On the other end of the spectrum are the people who will cheat on or break up with their partner on a whim as a convoluted way of protecting themselves from being hurt in the future. Other people will become obsessively jealous over imagined affairs, creating discontent and disconnect so that there’s no relatedness left. You might be someone who has done this. How did that turn out for you? There is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy, even if it’s not as mysterious or glamorous as we sometimes read about. Sometimes it just looks like imploding our relationships.
With regard to our health, self-sabotage can manifest itself in the ways we eat all the wrong stuff at all the wrong times, how we put off our exercise plans or use the excuse of getting caught up in the mundane details of our daily lives to explain our lack of action. We might give ourselves excuses to have “just one” cigarette or glass of wine or slice of cheesecake (which, of course, turns into more), skip doctor’s visits and checkups, or just not pay enough attention to our body and what it’s telling us.
Again, these aren’t extreme examples. They’re often subtle, so we don’t even realize what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. Even if we do realize these actions are a problem, we don’t understand that they’re part of a larger pattern, a pattern that’s carrying us in a predictable direction. The kind of pattern that keeps you perpetually weaving the life you currently have.
Skipping one little dentist’s appointment or having one extra piece of chocolate cake isn’t a big deal, right? Eh . . . wrong. What if that’s part of a bigger plan? One that you’re not keyed into, at least consciously.
You see, this self-sabotage thing is a product of something larger, and it’s affecting every part of your life.
There’s a reason why so few make it out of the trap of their own mind. The trap all too often seems to be just fine from day to day.
Step back a step or twenty and, eh, not so much.
It’s little wonder that those big dreams of yours seem nigh impossible, given how challenging you’ve made it just to get out of bed in the morning. I mean, really? On one hand you talk about wanting to be an author or a business owner or going back to school, while at the same time you’ve reduced your life’s potential to the lofty aim of getting up at the first alarm buzz or fighting the meaningless battle of prizing yourself away from your cell phone a little more often.
But ask yourself, if you really wanted to advance in your career, why would you be giving all of your attention to crappy little problems like not being able to get up in the morning? Why are you getting wrapped up in petty no-difference crap rather than the kinds of issues and actions that are going to move mountains, that are going to authentically engage you with real progress, real accomplishment, and real purpose?
If you really wanted to have a great love in your life, why in hell would you keep nitpicking your relationship to death until that connection decays right in front of your eyes? If you really wanted to get healthier or lose weight, why would you keep screwing around in such ordinary and uninspiring ways when it comes to making the changes you say you want to make?
You just can’t keep responding in ordinary ways if you are truly out to live an extraordinary life.
There has to be a potent demand on yourself to rise, to reach for greatness when compelled to take your typical low-road route, and there’s no magic potion for that demand.
It’s not a feeling or an attitude. It’s more like a sick-of-your-own-nonsense approach to certain areas of life. If that deflates you, look again. It needs to enliven and inspire you.
Telling yourself the truth is rarely easy, but it’s a surefire way to free yourself from your own subconscious self-sabotage trap. What makes self-reflection challenging is that you’re both the con artist and the one being conned.
You see, we chalk the problems of our lives up to one of two things: either we believe there’s a failure in our character or we blame our problems on external factors. We think it’s just a matter of trying harder or getting lucky or knowing more. We think we just didn’t start the right business, meet the right person, or find the right diet.
In reality, what we consciously think we want isn’t lined up with what we are actually driven to do in the depths of our subconscious.
In Marcus Aurelius’s personal writings to himself, which later became the famous philosophical work Meditations, he noted that
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
In our modern age, our soul is a tie-dyed fabric of all the thoughts and impressions and dreams we’ve had or have been given since we were babies. In the same way the dye seeps into the fabric, these thoughts are deeply embedded in our mind, in our subconscious.
And it’s all too often not the color we want it to be.
That color you’ve dyed your soul, that set of invisible rules that have been embedded in the back of your mind, in your subconscious, is what determines your path through this life. It’s not your determination, not your circumstances, and most definitely not your luck.
Luck is for those who cannot define their success, and if you cannot clearly define it, you will most likely never be able to repeat it.
THE THREE SABOTEURS—AN INTRODUCTION
If you want to start doing something about your not-so-private little head game of self-sabotage, you’ll need to first systematically uncover and then go about interrupting the conversations you have with yourself. Not the surface thoughts, but rather the repetitive, profoundly deep and dark internal dialogues that rattle around in your mental cage and guide your every thought and emotion. The stuff under the rug.
This will allow you to finally see your “three saboteurs,” three simple internal statements that do real and lasting damage to you and your life. The three saboteurs are the fundamental conclusions you have come to about yourself, the other people in your life, and life itself. I know you might find it hard to believe that your entire existence is unraveling because of three simple internal statements, but it is, and in these pages I’ll help you uncover not only why this is happening but also what your unique statements are.
How did you end up with your three saboteurs? We’ll get to that. How do they impact your life (beyond the obvious)? We’ll get to that too. How do you get yourself out of this crap? Oh, we’ll get to that one, trust me.
For those of you who “Why? Why? Why?” the hell out of life, I have some answers for you too, although that incessant search for the answer is in many ways why the question is never satisfied.
Why? Oh, puhleeeeease!
I am out to unveil the inner workings of what makes you sabotage. We’ll start at the beginning of your life and work our way to the very point of the spear. Today. In the first few chapters, we set the stage for why human beings would even have a propensity for sabotage in the first place, but it’s safe to say your penchant for messing with your life didn’t happen in a vacuum. Certain things had to happen in your life, in a particular sequence, some of which are common to all human beings, some that are unique to you. We’ll uncover what these are for you.
This will take some work, and as you move through the chapters you might find yourself wiped out or in a state of confusion or fear. That’s fine. The important thing