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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 is that you do not check out. Push through. On the other side of that state is a life you’ve always wanted to get to but somehow never could. Really.
I’m drawing a line in the sand with you right here.
You might discover that the effort you put into these pages is commensurate with the effort you have put into your life. That statement alone could change a life. Or not.
Get your head out of the sand (or your navel or wherever you currently have it buried) and make whatever you are reading here make a difference for you. You can do that at least.
“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Okay, champ, let’s get rolling.
03
The Question
That’s what we call a life. Wanting new; addicted to the familiar.
The idea for this book began with my asking myself a simple question.
Why?
Why is my life the way it is?
When I looked at my life I could see it was, in certain areas, headed in a direction that I wasn’t particularly happy with. It seemed that regardless of the approach, there was always an inevitability about some areas of my life. My pillowy stomach. My finances. Certain relationships. I mean, damn, I’ve done TONS of growth work over the years and STILL my bank account gets overdrawn? Where’s my Tony Robbins private helicopter/jet/submarine, for the love of God?
How come I’ve never really made a difference with these areas of my life? It’s not as if I can’t earn money, but how the hell have I seemingly always struggled so much to build it? It’s not as if I don’t know how to get my body in shape, but why is it always so temporary? No matter how much I tried, I would continually go in these cycles of winning, losing, winning, losing, and at the end of it all, wind up right back where I started. There have even been times when I was actually further behind after that real-life yo-yo!
It made no difference that I knew I kept getting into the same cycle and making the same mistakes. Like you, I’m not a freaking idiot! I can see what’s wrong! However, no matter how hard I tried, it was as if I would eventually be compelled to keep doing the same stuff I had always done, and I was apparently powerless to stop it! What the . . . ? I knew what I wanted to do, but I kept getting snagged by the hook of doing things the same way, going back to old and bankrupt and destructive behaviors.
You might want to take a breath here and ponder a couple of questions for yourself. Why do you do what you do? Again, go beyond the usual answer you give yourself. Think. If you keep living this way, where is it all headed? I mean really headed? Not some wispy concept of your future but rather a down-in-the-dirt look at where your current actions are leading you. Well? You might find those questions tough to answer, but this is the kind of digging that will release you from your trap of sabotage.
Earlier, I pointed out that self-sabotage isn’t always the big, extreme things we do to screw up our lives. It’s important to understand that there are millions of tiny ways we are sabotaging our lives every day. You have to see there’s a problem before you can do anything about it. But it’s important to understand that self-sabotage can also lead to very destructive behaviors. It shatters marriages, fractures families, turns people to hard drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex addictions, infidelity, and all kinds of toxic behaviors that trash an otherwise decent life.
When it comes down to it, no one can seriously fuck up your life quite as magnificently as you can. And you do.
In my career as a personal development guy, it’s my job to help people have insights that empower them to make significant change in their lives. I’ve seen how very common it is for people to get stuck in cycles of behavior that, in the cold light of day, seem to be in complete opposition to what they say they want. Men and women the world over are trapped in a myopic stream of self-talk and patterns of behavior that keep them spinning in an all-too-predictable life.
Regardless of the number of times it seems life is on track, it always eventually seems to go off.
We are all building things only to burn them right back down. And we’re tired of it.
YOU’RE NOT A CATEGORY
In looking for a way to get our lives back on track, I read somewhere that what we need is “willpower” or “discipline” or some other generic term (don’t even get me started on “mental strength” . . . ugh) that serves only to help us explain to ourselves the lack of real change in our lives.
These terms are absolutely useless. They make zero difference!
What is “willpower,” anyway? A feeling? An emotion? A mood?
What about “discipline”? Is it thoughts or actions, or is that a feeling too? Don’t give me your bumper sticker answer either, the one that immediately comes to mind. Give it some thinking. Define it. We all use these kinds of words without really questioning them.
Here’s what I’ve found. When it comes time to make real change in your life, explaining yourself with that kind of shallow thinking makes not one blind bit of difference. I hear it trundled out by new clients all the time—“I just need a bit of self-discipline” or “I don’t have any willpower.” It’s all voodoo! You wouldn’t know willpower if it ran over you with a moped! If you are focusing on that kind of answer, you are doing the equivalent of implying that your car runs on stinky bathwater that costs you about four bucks a gallon and that you get your money from the kind lady at the bank, who sits in the back room making twenty-dollar bills out of recycled Target receipts and unicorn snot. Nonsense.
For example, if you’re one of life’s great procrastinators (and you might be still pondering whether you are or not), it’s not as if somebody says, “Yep, you’re a procrastinator, take two doses of willpower a day,” and BAM! The whole world opens up to you and off you go, motivated as hell and sucking up life goals like sugar-free bonbons on a Sunday afternoon sofa-fest, is it? The fact that you now understand you will need some sort of self-discipline to overcome your procrastinating tendencies doesn’t actually solve anything. In fact, it leaves you just as stuck as you’ve always been!
“Aha, Mr. Scottish man, but I bought that self-discipline book, and I’m going to read it . . . next week.”
*Sigh.*
That’s right, you’ve now got something else to procrastinate with. And the cycle continues. As I’ve said, knowing a descriptive term for how you live your life just isn’t enough. And if what you know isn’t making the difference for you, perhaps what you think you know isn’t what’s really going on after all!
Self-discipline is nothing more than doing what you say you will do, when you least feel like doing it.
In other words, acting in a positive way when you most likely feel negative. When I say “acting” I don’t mean “pretending”; I mean TAKE THE FREAKING ACTIONS! So, if you’re waiting for the energy or positivity or enthusiasm or for your chakra to glow a bold yellow, enjoy the wait. It’ll be a long one.
What if you are, in fact, not a procrastinator anyway? What if it’s something else entirely? (No, I’m not referring to some medical condition either.)
I’ll give you a clue. No, I take that back, fuck clues, this isn’t Scooby-Doo. Here’s the deal. There’s no such thing as a procrastinator; it doesn’t exist. It’s a descriptive term. A category. There is only someone who procrastinates from time to time and with certain things. We all poop from time to time too, but you don’t refer to yourself as a pooper, do you?
“Hello, everyone, my name’s Sharon, and I’m a pooper.”
Therefore, it’s not a case of “I am a procrastinator,” something you are, but rather “I procrastinate,” which is something you do. And if it’s just something you do, then you should do another thing instead. This isn’t some personal condition or affliction or something that you “have.” It’s not a fucking disease.
Sometimes it’s a case of just answering the email instead of watching TV. That’s hardly a great mystery of life, is it? There may be “experts” out there who offer sympathy and approval to make you feel better, but I want to give you the option of an actual better life. And sometimes that fucking hurts. Most of the great things you have done with your life included some level of discomfort, pain, or pressure. That’s just how it is. Whatever you are out to accomplish in this life, you’ll have to get more than a little okay with the experience of struggle or, hell, even overwhelm. In many ways, your all-out insistence that real-life change should be comfortable is what’s holding you down. Growth—real, seismic growth—hurts. Sometimes a lot.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
—Viktor Frankl
WRESTLING WITH EELS
When it comes down to it, it’s as if you are struggling to make your life go in a certain way while at times it seems magnetically drawn in another direction entirely. But you’re trying (or at least you’ve tried), right? It feels like you’re constantly wrestling with the things you want and feeling them slither and wriggle out of your grasp. Every now and again you come back to the fight, whether it’s with your body or your credit cards or your love life or your career, you see a glimmer of light, and then the whole thing falls apart. Again. In many ways it’s like being trapped in the cycle of being yourself. Not the great, awesome, idealistic, free-as-a-bird-with-Instagram-pictures-to-die-for self but rather the familiar, cyclical, WTF, own-worst-enemy, here-we-go-again version. That self.
You know exactly what I’m talking about here. Those times when it seems like everything is going relatively well and then . . . BOOM, you throw a hand grenade in the whole fucking thing. And you can’t stop yourself.
Y’know, those times when it seemed like you were “getting along” with your significant other and then, six, seven, or eighty-eight words later, all hell breaks loose and you’re suddenly scrambling to find someone with a pickup truck to help you move your shit outta there! Then you calm down. And they calm down. And you mumble some BS apology at each other and then you order a pizza and it fixes things, and then you both kinda forget, but you don’t, so you wait for the next incident. And then that one happens. Then the next one. And so on.
So now you’re spending $120 a month on make-up pizza while your ass is ballooning faster than a ten-dollar blow-up bed from Walmart. And you argue about that too.
All just because you couldn’t stop yourself from saying THAT THING, the one thing you always say. The thing that fucks everything up even though you KNOW you shouldn’t say it. And you say it anyway.
So, you take yourself on, bring back those twin devils of “willpower” and “self-discipline,” try a bit harder, eat a bit better, and knock out two fields’ worth of kale in a week. Then you pull the shit-pin again, and before you know it that slice of pizza that you PROMISED you wouldn’t eat somehow magically intertwines itself in your fingers and slithers unnoticed into your mouth like the sneaky little pepperoni bastard cheese-snake that it is, right? Now the problem is pizza and the battle moves to a new front. Damn, maybe the enemy really is gluten, huh?
Maybe for you it’s that dream job that you worked so hard to get. Six months in and your feet are already getting itchy. Again. Or that time you were so proud of yourself for paying down your credit cards only to blow them wide open with a mini you’re-only-young-once-I-work-so-hard-I-deserve-it spending spree . . . again! Apparently the “only young once” mantra extends well into your forties these days. And beyond.
If you’re in your teens, twenties, or thirties, yep, you have a lifetime of this madness ahead of you too. Stick that in your LOL for a minute or so.
Ponder this: What if the point of your life (not anyone else’s, remember? YOURS) is to continually and subconsciously set up “the game” of your life, a relentless cycle of sabotage and recovery?
What if very little of how this life of yours has turned out is actually because you haven’t met the right person, haven’t found the right career/passion, haven’t had the courage/confidence/smarts/breaks, or any other reason to which you have turned to explain yourself? What if your life really is a quite intentional and eerily familiar setup for the same results over and over? A conversational trap that you get yourself into but are unable to see, so you spend your life looking in all the wrong places, seeking some kind of answers, but it’s all subconscious and you invariably stay stuck?
“When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.”
—Émile Coué
When Coué, a nineteenth-century psychologist, spoke of the imagination, he was referring to our subconscious. By “willpower,” he meant our conscious, cognitive thoughts. Where these two conflict, the subconscious wins. Always.
So, if the subconscious always wins, and we are wired to constantly play the same game of sabotage and recovery over and over again, are we just terminally fucked? I know this initially sounds pretty grim, but you need to understand what makes human beings so successful. Survival.
SURVIVAL OF THE OBVIOUS
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not the strongest nor the fittest nor the smartest who survive.
Dinosaurs alone showed us how wrong that theory is. Some of them were strong, some were smart, but none of them saw extinction coming!
Who, then, is it that survives?
The predictors. Those who can most accurately predict change can adapt to change and therefore survive. The good news is, you are a prediction and survival machine. It’s the single reason why we as a species have stayed around as long as we have. Our ability to see things before they happen allows us to adjust and stay safe. We do that by remembering, by keeping score of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s right, what’s wrong, what works, what doesn’t work, and all via a massive trench of memories stored in the banks of our subconscious for reference and guidance. You have spent your entire life keeping track, looking for familiar keys to where things are headed, and following a life of the familiar.
Every Monday morning looks the same because you are already predicting how it will go before it even starts. This prediction-ism is absolutely everywhere.
That first date who showed up late and didn’t dress well enough?
Prediction? “Ugh, clearly they don’t care. Imagine a life with THAT! Nope . . . bye-bye.”
That’s it? They walked in fifteen minutes late wearing sneakers and you’re done? Yep!
Your ability to predict gives you a greater shot at survival. In this case, you’re out to quickly weed out the ones who are a complete waste of your time or sanity before marriage or a long-term relationship. And your tip-top record in pairing yourself with the perfect mate is testimony to your rapier-like accuracy in this field.
Suuuuuuure it is . . .
You predict your relationships, your finances, the weather, politics, your health, your career, you name it. You have an opinion about how all of that (and more) is going to go.
It’s all automatic, spun out by your subconscious in an instant. Hell, there are even things in life you won’t take on because you’ve already determined they’re a waste of time for you. Predictably.
By your using that same drive to predict and therefore survive, there goes that book you’ve always wanted to write (prediction: don’t know what I’m doing, therefore sure to fail), that new business you wanted to start (prediction: too risky and I’ll lose everything I have), the dream to move to Bali (prediction: now isn’t the right time, it won’t work unless I get more money), the new career (prediction: one day I might be ready for the responsibility, but it would be too hard right now for someone like me), that perfect relationship (prediction: I won’t make the same mistakes again, so not until I meet “the one”). There’s no end to the possibilities you’ve written off with nothing more than a series of auto-response triggers in the confines of your head.
“It’s too hard.”
“It won’t work.”
“I can’t do it.”
“I don’t know enough.”
“There’s no point. It won’t make any difference.”
In terms of survival, what better way to live a long and relatively safe life than to continually barf up the same kinds of issues and problems and then apply the same tired and useless solutions? Your own personal Matrix of old emotions, old complaints, old experiences. Your “no reality” reality.
Every day is a new day, right? No, every day is the freaking same day.
I mean, at least you always know what’s coming. You also know that you’ll survive it too, even if it sucks! No unknowns, no uncertainty, nothing out of left field, no threat to you, just a single, predictable line of engagement. You apply the same eyes and ears to every situation life throws at you and spin in your own mini tempest of the same old dramas and upsets. Circumstances may change, but what stays the same is you and how you see them, as well as how you deal with them and ultimately how you participate in life. The problem here is that it’s often hard to see those automatic predictions we’re making every day in an effort to survive. It’s hard to uncover the themes and story lines that underlie our life events.
But humans are funny creatures, and we’re often not content to live a safe, predictable life. We want excitement! Adventure! Passion! And that’s the crossroads where human beings exist. Pulled to predict life and stay safe, yet at the same time thirsty for the new and its tempting allure of a better existence. Wanting and lusting after change while gripped by the anxiety of keeping life safe, certain, and survivable. Minimize the judgment, minimize the failure, crush the pain and the uncertainty and the chaos of real change. Safety eventually wins. Survival is the victor.