Copyright

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First published in the US by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

This UK edition published by Thorsons 2019

FIRST EDITION

© Gary John Bishop 2019

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Source ISBN: 9780008344412

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008344429

Version 2019-04-17

Dedication

I dedicate this book to the helpless and hopeless, the frustrated and defeated: today is a day when it can all begin anew. I don’t care about your past, and you shouldn’t either.

Thanks to my beautiful wife and inspiring sons, without whom I could never be the man I have become. Through your generosity and love, we are a family committed to making a difference in this world.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

01 Here’s the Rub

02 A Life of Sabotage

03 The Question

04 The Magic Little Sponge

05 A Throne of Throwns

06 Establishing the Truth

07 The Three Saboteurs

08 You

09 Them

10 Life

11 The Point of the Spear

12 Redirecting Your Way Outta This

13 You Can Finally Stop Doing That Shit—No, Really!

Endnotes

About the Author

Other Books by Gary John Bishop

About the Publisher

01
Here’s the Rub

In your day-to-day life you are, for the most part, on autopilot.

Someone once asked me, “What’s at the core of every human being?”

“Bullshit,” I replied.

There were a few nervy moments of shoe-gazing silence followed by a gust of swirly, disjointed questions to cover the unease.

Apparently, they were expecting some new-age, metaphysical answer about untethered spirit or essence of ancient forests or particles of distant stardust sprinkled with fairy juice. But my response was (and is) unequivocal. In my experience of people (yes, I’m people too, as are you), if you set aside all of the positivity and hope, there is quite clearly a whole other animal lurking below the surface, a conversational bullshit if you like, something not quite as empowering or comforting as we’d all like to believe. Not evil or nefarious but rather something more akin to cynical, constraining, repetitive, and ultimately unfulfilling.

The kind of stuff that undermines a life. Sabotages it, to be precise.

This wee book is my take on finally uncovering and transforming your bullshit. The kind that constantly sabotages your life.

So, if you’re tired, overwhelmed, overworked, underloved, stopped, paused, bored, broke, too anxious, too analytical, lacking confidence, uninspired, disconnected, on the wrong path, headed in the wrong direction, bottomed out, mired in the past, worried about the future, disappointed, afraid, untrusting, unforgiving, suspicious, angry, frustrated, or just plain stuck in a cycle, I’m your guy and these are your pages.

No, really, they’re yours. Don’t just read them, use them.

Let’s get to the blackened heart of that bullshit, then root it out.

In my last book, Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life, I wrote about the constant internal chatter that we all deal with. The noise of opinion, judgment, reasons, fears, and excuses that rattle around in our heads every moment of every day. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s quiet, but nonetheless, it’s always there. Your self-talk is the locker room of your life. Where everything is strategized and worked out. Where your plans for yourself live and die.

Most of these plans never see the light of day. Especially the good stuff, the dreams. You kill them where they rise. In your head.

People are little more than a living conversation, both internal and spoken. A dialogue in a body. A skin-and-bone bag that talks, and it talks about everything, and the limit of that talk is the limit of that life. Period.

In short, you are what you talk about, or rather you are the nature of what you talk about. If, for you, life is too much, it really is too much! The confusion is that you think life is a certain way and you are just reporting on what you are seeing. But that’s actually backward. The reality is, you create your experience of life in your self-talk and then act accordingly. And you’re doing it all the time. You’re never (like never, ever) acting upon life itself. What you are acting on is your opinion of life. That’s why it’s such a different experience for each of us.

Life just is. What you call it is up to you. Bear in mind you’ll have to live with your call. And you do.

This isn’t something new either.

Philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger explored the importance of language and how it molds our as-lived experience of absolutely everything. Those feelings you have (or lack thereof) are constituted in your language. Your talk is your life, and we see it most glaringly in your regular little sashays into the world of self-sabotage.

This may require a bit of radical thinking on your part, but in a very real sense, your emotions and your conversations are in a constant tango with each other, swaying and swooping through life. As a society we have become increasingly addicted to changing our emotions—to feel happier, more confident, more whatever—and all without addressing what is enlivening those states. It’s not the sucky life you seemingly have but your dialogue about your life that has you by the throat, and the vast majority of that dialogue is blissfully unnoticed and therefore unexplored by you. It’s running in the background.

This book takes the work we started in Unfu*k Yourself to the next level. We’re out to finally uncover your personal brand of self-talk and discover why it remains the source of all that’s currently shitty in your life. In the day-to-day living of our lives, we mostly just experience the moods and emotions of our internal chatter without doing the work to determine what it’s really saying. So, if you’ve ever wanted to know why you talk to yourself in the way you do and, more specifically, what it is that drives that talk . . . read on.

Before you start to think I’m slipping into another “positive thoughts” cliché, let’s get something clear. There’s a reason simply changing your self-talk to “I’m good enough” or “I’m smart enough” or “I am loved” or “I can do it” to overcome the negative BS doesn’t quite work for everyone.

The problem with that approach is that it doesn’t address the muck. You just can’t be one way to overcome another way that you don’t like. You can’t short-circuit the process. It’s the emotional equivalent of sweeping the dead cockroaches under the rug before your friends arrive. Sure, it all looks good, but in your heart of hearts you know the dead cockroaches are still there. It’s like that in our minds—when we sweep the negative emotion under our mental rug, deep down we still know something else. Something more akin to the truth. It’s like lying to yourself but you just don’t believe the lie. A con game.

We’re using these pages to get under that rug. To reveal those hidden emotional cockroaches and free you up, to let you authentically be rather than pretend to be. You can, of course, shift your emotional state by doing, a process I covered in my first book, but the common denominator in all of this is language.

The way we work is that we can only ever be one way at a time. You can’t be angry and loving simultaneously in a single moment. It’s one or the other. You can’t be forgiving and resentful or indifferent and sad. At any moment in time, you’re always being one way and ONLY one way.

Before we dive in, a few people commented that my last book didn’t say much about me, so I’m rectifying that right here and now.

I’m Scottish. Full-on accent, with a penchant for kilts and crappy weather.

I love empowering people. My life’s work is to give people something that might allow them to change their lives for the better. I don’t do that by telling you you’re awesome or that one day your ship will come in or that everything happens for a reason or any other kind of modern, new-agey schtick that some people have come to adopt.

I give it to you straight. Right between the eyeballs. You are the problem, and you are the solution!

(As a related aside, someone once told me I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. “Tea isn’t everyone’s cup of tea either” was my response.)

I’m also not arrogant enough to think I could solve a conundrum that has perplexed philosophers, scholars, scientists, and great minds as far back as we (or at least I) can trace. My single intention is to make a difference with one person. You. That’s it. If you’re reading this and focusing on how it applies to your spouse, your dad, your boss, your cousin, or your ex, you’re completely missing the point.

This book is for you and about you.

That’s it.

So, what is this book?

For starters, this book is a short, intense jolt to your way of thinking. I’m not out to give you all the answers here. Your answers will come from you. They always do. This is more like a catalyst, providing questions and ways of looking at things that will spark something in you and cause you to take on your life in a new way.

Inspiration, motivation, passion, and whatever else you are looking for in your life is on you. That has been the case in the past, it is the case in the present, and it will be the case in the future.

A big part of living the life you want is taking ownership of your choices, now and in the future. This book is more like a voyage of self-discovery, of thinking about and uncovering and ultimately revealing your true nature. When you finally understand where you are coming from, you are giving yourself a greater shot at changing how your life will go.

I approach this book from my own little brand of “urban philosophy.” I say “philosophy” because that’s just what this is, a view, an angle on what it is to be alive, to be a human being and attempt to make our way through the complexity, fear, and struggle to some sort of consistent happiness and success. I use the word “urban” because the greatest lessons of my life were learned in the black-and-white streets of my Glaswegian childhood, where the rules were simple and the consequences clinical.

This is a model that I created. I looked at many different disciplines and approaches, studied a number of philosophers, took what made sense to me, and started to dig. I’ve used this model with my clients and found that when they put in the work, when they get down to that true, driving nature of theirs, monumental change really is possible. What I’ve come up with is a way for you to look at your own wiring, to understand your self-sabotage so that you have real pathways to spring free from the morass of what you have become and experience the freedom to take yourself on once and for all. To do that, you might have to push through some initial confusion and disagreement. That’s okay. Be aware that much of what I say here might be counterintuitive to the way you currently see yourself. Eh . . . that’s kinda the point.

This book has curse words in it, just like the last one, and most likely the next one too. I like curse words. They sprinkle much-needed life into the otherwise jaded landscape of our everyday talk. If you can’t handle a few choice expletives in life, well, I was going to say “Put this book down,” but to hell with it, you need what I’m about to say more than most. Buckle in and read on.

Let my intention be clear: I’m out to give you knowledge—real, juicy, life-changing knowledge—that you can use to think and think and think your way out of this cluster of confusion and self-defeating behavior you’ve gotten yourself into.

When I say “think,” I’m not talking about the kind of gummy pondering/wondering/thought-ing you do in the drift of your daily life while pumping gas or making your favorite banana-bacon sandwich (really?), but rather a deliberate and intentional engagement with an idea. Real thinking is what can happen when your existing paradigm (all the stuff you know) gets challenged and interrupted.

This thinking thing is not easy. It’s the kind of mental stretching required when you are quite literally forced to consider something else, something you hadn’t considered or at best partially considered, and then do the work to connect it to your life. Thinking is an interruption. Real breakthroughs become available in your life when you interrupt yourself and your automatic responses to whatever life presents you with.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote: “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”

You don’t think. There. I said it.

I’m not attempting to make you choke on the next hearty quaff of that iced venti half-caff sugar-free skinny cinnamon dolce soy latte that you’re currently sucking down like a freshly emptied Dyson on full throttle. We spend very little time doing the actual thinking that will inspire new lives for ourselves, and no, scrolling through quotes on Instagram doesn’t count as thinking.

The thinking you do throughout this book will help you to make sense of yourself.

What you do with that? That’s up to you, but I wouldn’t advise just sitting there with it. You could, oh, I don’t know, change your freaking life or something.

But it’s not a given. This is your life, and it needs work. You could spend your time challenging what I am proposing, or you could spend your time challenging yourself with what I am proposing. Each will produce a different outcome. It’s pretty damn obvious which one could lead you to change your life and which one will leave you spinning your wheels.

It starts by waking up.

In your day-to-day life you are, for the most part, on autopilot. It’s why you miss the exit on your way to or from work, why you put on your pants, shoes, or jacket the same way every time, brush your teeth the way you do, and generally just get life done. Automatically.

You’re not up on your toes, awake to your potential. You’re not alive to what it is that truly lights you up or engaged with the kind of life-changing stuff that will make this all worthwhile.

What you think is “awake” is actually asleep. You might wake up near the end of this existence, but that will probably be far too late for you. Wake up to that, at least.

While you read this, there might be some occasions when you’ll need to take a chain-breaking leap from the anchor of what you currently believe. It’s fine, you won’t die. Dare yourself to jump.

Here’s a little pointer. From time to time you might want to wake up to how you are engaging with this book. Check in with how you’re doing. I recommend breaking this process up into sections to give yourself time to percolate with what I’m proposing, take notes, highlight what you need, and come up for the occasional gulp of air. We are dealing with your propensity for self-sabotage, after all. We won’t be frolicking through the abundant, joyous fields of your heart’s desire in these pages. More like wading our way through decades of your unwanted strife, lack of fulfillment, and constant sabotaging of all that is good in your life!

This might not be comfortable for you.

Some of you might find what seems like a lot of bad news in these pages.

Oh well.

There are no unicorns or states of euphoria or, hell, not even a particularly sympathetic ear. There’s a time and a place for all that stuff. This is not the time or the place, that’s all. However, I do have a promise for you. If you hang in there until the end, do the thinking, uncover your subconscious motivations, and apply the ideas and principles, you’ll make more sense to yourself than you ever have, and you’ll have what you need to finally demand your life back.

It’s possible to interrupt the cycle of self-sabotage. Let’s get to it, shall we?

02
A Life of Sabotage

There’s nothing quite so damaging as the human desire to be right.

When I talk about self-sabotage, what do I mean specifically? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines “sabotage” as

“destructive or obstructive action carried on by a civilian or enemy agent to hinder a nation’s war effort” or

“a: an act or process tending to hamper or hurt

b: deliberate subversion.”

But in this case, sabotage isn’t apparently committed by an “enemy agent”—or is it? Maybe the enemy agent is you yourself.

This is sabotage committed by us, against ourselves, and it can subvert just about everything good in our lives.

It is a deliberate subversion, though. Completely deliberate.

You can probably think of some examples of self-sabotage by taking a look at the people who have come and gone through the musty hallways of your life.

It’s always much easier to measure the decline of others than your own.

It could be an uncle who struggled with drug or alcohol addiction, stuck in a cycle of self-destruction he couldn’t seem to break free from. Or maybe it’s an old friend who lost their savings, their house, and even their family to compulsive gambling and the burden of debt.

Then there’s the sibling who binges on crappy food until their weight is hopelessly out of control and even their life is now in very real danger. Or the nephew who still lives with Mom and Dad in his twenties, thirties, or forties, shunning real-world independence, accomplishment, and growth and choosing a digital escape of video game conquests and internet porn. Hell, some of this might be what you’re dealing with yourself. These are all obvious examples of self-sabotage.

But what about the less obvious examples? Maybe you’re reading this and thinking you’re not that badly affected. Sure, you have your hang-ups and your vices. You’d like to achieve more at work or find a good partner or shave a smidgen of excess living off that tiny corner of your left ankle (okay, it’s a spongy layer of fat clinging onto your gut like a panicky squid, but I’m being nice here). You have goals of reading more, watching less TV, or getting in better shape. But your behavior isn’t nearly as self-destructive as in these examples . . . right?

But here’s the thing. The sabotage I’m talking about isn’t limited to those blatantly obvious examples. It’s also something that happens in lots of little ways throughout the day. It’s something we all do, and we’re doing it pretty much all the time.

It can be something as simple as constantly hitting that snooze button in the morning, or the tendency to show up a little late to places you’re scheduled to be. Not so late that it becomes a major problem, but you still find yourself rushing out the door as you shove your feet into your untied shoes and arriving five or ten minutes later than you’d like. Sometimes it looks like skipping breakfast and settling instead for a candy bar. Or maybe you’re one of those people who chronically procrastinate but always manage to get things done at the last moment, so you don’t think too much of it. Living on the edge, huh?

How’s that working out for you?

There are probably examples in your relationships too. Think about the times when you argue over nothing, hold onto grudges too long, hide or lie about your emotions, judge yourself or others too harshly, or just don’t call your mom or dad or friends as much as you should. Surely that’s not self-sabotage?

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 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.

That’s what we call a life. Wanting new; addicted to the familiar. Even when the familiar is as dull as dishwater. When it comes down to it, you’ll willingly trade in what you want for what you know. You’re doing it right now in your life!

Often when people are stuck in unhappy relationships or unwanted careers, this is what they are really dealing with. It’s the trade-off. Underneath it all, it’s not about the kids or the family or the money or the risk or the judgment of others. It’s all survival. Safety over aliveness. Predictability over joy or love or freedom or the life of your dreams.

What makes it so hard to see is that you never fully witness the trap you are stuck in. You only get to live with the consequences of that trap. Your entire life to this point has been a series of actions subconsciously driven to trap you in the same bubble of life.

Take a minute to allow yourself to take stock here. What has been the underlying experience of this life of yours? When it’s all said and done, when you look at the struggle and determination, the victories, the defeats, the sorrow, the drive to be happy and content, the seemingly never-ending hunger for something better—better job, better body, better partner, better family, better house, better society, better clothes, better social life, more passion, more purpose, more followers, more whatever, on and on and on—what are you left with?

Pause here for a moment and honestly answer that question for yourself.

Well?

When I ask my clients this question, they mostly have the same answer. “I’m exhausted.” Sometimes it’s worse.

Sometimes they say, “It’s okay.”

Fuck!!

Reminder—this works only if you pause and populate this conversation with your own circumstances, your real-life situations and cycles of self-sabotage, to start to draw some sense from what I am saying and how it applies to your life. Do the work here. Start to see the issues of your life through the lens of what I’m saying—your repetitive and destructive behaviors are supposed to be that way! Your life was set up to repeat them. They’re also what keeps you being that familiar you, living with the same constraints, weighed down by the past, always in the same, tired struggle for a better day but occasionally sedated by a glimmer of hope or optimism.

Keep in mind, if you really are after some kind of new life, some new and unprecedented result, that will require risk on your part. That will require you to push through your predictable self-talk, your all-too-familiar emotional freeze-frame, and reach for the unknown.

You can’t do new without risk. Period.

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