Ask Jack #7: Stop Self Sabotaging! | Jack Canfield

Hi, everybody. I'm Jack Canfield and I'm here with my colleague Patty Aubrey, the president of the Canfield training group. In addition to being a business genius who has been with me growing our personal development business for the past 30 years, Patty is also a New York Times bestselling author and a great coach who coaches many of our top students. And she's helped me lead all of our online and in person mastermind groups. Hi, Patty. Welcome.

Thank you. Jack. Good, good to see you.

Good to have you here.

Well, I'm excited about today because today we're going to talk about one of the biggest issues that we have that we see a lot of people have, including us at some level called self sabotage. And so we're going to be talking about that and why it's so important and how to look at that differently.

Cool. Yeah, yeah. And this is part of a new thing we're doing for everybody now. We're doing Ask Jack again. We're having people send in questions and we're answering them because we want to know what it is that's stopping you specifically and how we can directly address that so that you get the information you need, the tools, the skills, the awarenesses to help you break through.

All right, so I have the first question.

Okay.

Are you ready?

I am.

Okay, so first question is how to deal with self sabotage. This person wants to lose weight, get healthy, and grow a successful business selling her artwork. But she can't stop procrastinating and making excuses for herself even though she's holding herself back from her dreams. So she asked, how do I stop the procrastination, self sabotage and making excuses? I know logically that I have to stop it, but I don't know how. I keep hearing my parents voices in my head telling me that art is just a hobby, not a full time job, and that I'll never be able to support myself as an artist. So how do you get these old tapes out of your head for good? Well, I would like to say, for starters, my dad said to me, are you crazy? You're gonna go work at that guy? Jack Canfield, he's not a businessman, he's a hippie. And now he worships the ground that you walk on. So how do you deal with it?

Well, how did you do it? I'm really curious, why did you go against your father's advice?

I had a couple different opportunities. One was a really good job. It was gonna make a lot of money in the beginning, but I didn't think it was a Healthy environment. And I didn't know anything about you. I didn't know anything about self help, but something I went inside to ask myself, what is really right for me? And I only followed my intuition and thank God, because I think I made $2 an hour for five years learning to live my purpose. But it paid off in the end, which is part of what we need to talk about today and how not to let those little stories that get in the way stop us.

Now, let me just clarify. I wasn't paying her $2 an hour. But you worked. I was working many more hours than you should have.

And you did say, give yourself a raise. I said, I can't. We can't aff. So when we can, you better.

Yeah, no, that was great.

Those are fun times.

Here's the main thing to realize everybody that has these voices in their head, they're just voices in your head. You know, so many musicians and artists that I've worked with, they've been told you can't make a living doing that. You need a backup job. What's your backup plan? Maybe you should go to university, get a real job when you come out. And the reality is that I think that everyone needs to follow their inner guidance, you know, and really do the thing that makes you happy. And if art is what does that. You need to do that and to realize that voices in your head are just voices in your head and they're not. They're not real out there. Now, obviously, you know, she's got parents who are telling her that that's real. But the point being that our job in life is not to make our parents happy. You know, we need to honor them, as they say in the Bible. We need to respect them. We need all of that. But our job is to make ourselves happy. That is our first fundamental principle. And that's why Joy is your guidance system. If you're working on your own, Joy, you're going to be fine. And I love the. I saw a quote recently. It was from Byron. Katie. I'm probably paraphrasing it, but she said, lord, please. It was a prayer she said every day. Spare me from the desire of wanting or needing approval, appreciation or love. And the idea being, as soon as I need someone else's approval, I'm screwed. You wrote a book called Permission Granted. You know, you just give yourself your own permission to do what you want to do. It's not our job to be pleasing other people. We become a people pleaser, which is kind of a term in psychology that says you're codependent. You're making other people's needs more important than your own. And I have counseled and coached lots of people who. One woman I remember, she wanted to go be in the Foreign Service and work at a international school, like in Dubai or someplace. And her parents didn't want her to go, and she decided, I have to do what I want to do. And she went. She's very successful. She's happy now. Her parents are fine because she survived. She's doing well. But you have to be willing to step out there. Most parents, and I think the thing to remember is your parents want you to succeed. They want you to be happy. They don't tell you things like that because they want you to be miserable. They think they're telling you the best thing. I had another client who everyone in the family was a doctor. And the mother, the father, the aunts, the uncles, the brothers, everyone was a doctor. Like three generations. He did not want to be a doctor. He showed up in one of our Breakthrough to Success seminars, and he talked about having migraine headaches all the time. And when I asked him to give his headache a voice and speak to him, it said, I don't want to be doing this doctor thing. And what was fascinating is he became an anesthesiologist. So what does an anesthesiologist do? Numbs you out. So he was numbing himself out to his own desires. What he wanted to do was have a garage and work on exotic cars. So when he quit being a doctor and started working on the cars, the headaches went away and never came back. He made a very good living. It wasn't what his parents were wanting. And you probably heard we work with a lot of clients from India, especially now that we're doing online. And someone said to me recently in a workshop from India, said, the parents only want you to be. You can only grow up and be one of three things. In India, you're either going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a disappointment to your parents. Obviously, they want you to do well, but we have to be willing to look inside ourselves. And then the question becomes, how do you deal with that voice? Something I learned from Tony Robbins with nlp, which was really interesting. Take the voice in your head and speed it up so it sounds like a Mickey Mouse voice. You can't make my nerves. You got to go to school. You can't do that. Artists don't make any money. You'll die, you know, and it gets really silly. Or you can even do like, and drown out the voice and the work we do. I think that's important to say. Replace the voice, replace it with what are the words you wish your parents would say to you and say them to yourself. And then turn that into an affirmation and say that, you know, write it on a card, put it on your mirror, put it on your computer, put it in the dashboard of your car and repeat that affirmation to yourself every day until it becomes like your address, your phone number, your name. You know it so well that it becomes the thing that you let guide your life.

Well, I think too. So let's just take art, for example. I think one of the biggest questions would be, so if art were to become my business and my life, what would it really look like?

Yes.

And get really, really clear on what that looks like and write it down and tell everybody you know and start with the people around you and go further and further and further. I think a lot of people try to think it through in their head and where you've always been great is like, all right, what does the strategy look like? Show it to me. What's the outline? Here's the holes. Why is this here? Why do you think we should do that? You know, it used to kind of make me mad to a fault, but the reality is to have somebody kind of help you get through it and clearly think it through is helpful because sometimes we're too close to our dreams that we just can't see how to monetize them as well.

Well, find someone who's already done what you want to do. We talk about that. Find a mentor who's already done what you want to do. Take my son Kyle, who is a hip hop artist and he's also a dj, and he has a music studio in his condo where he literally has recorded albums that have won Grammy awards. And the reality is his mom wanted him to do something different. You know, and I have to say, at first I was kind of like, well, maybe you should go to Full Sail Audio. That's an audio engineering school, so you can learn the audio side of it in case you don't make it as an artist. I was guilty of it, you know, fortunately, he did go to Full Sail and he got to all that. That's why he has a studio. But he pursued his dream. He's. He's not a famous person like some of these people that have million dollar homes and all that, but he's happy. He's doing what he loves. He's well respected in The Bay Area. He's got a group, he's got his own single act. He does. And the thing is, he's surviving. More than surviving. He's really happy and makes good money. The pandemic kind of slowed it down a little bit for the DJ work because a lot of the bars and weddings and things stop happening. But this is a kid who followed his dream and he's happy. So the thing is like you're saying, what's the vision look like? Ask someone who's already done. He talked to a lot of people who were successful in that business and got a lot of advice and did what they told him to do and as a result became very successful. I think one of the other things to realize for not everybody has such a clear awareness that their parents told them not to do so. Something, you know, some people, they don't know why they're not pursuing it. And it's a belief that they picked up between the age usually of 3 and 8 years old. You know, the money doesn't grow on trees. It's not okay to ask people for things, et cetera. And that can stop you and make you self sabotage as well. You get really close to what you want if you have competing motivations, like when I win, it makes other people lose, or if I'm wealthy, it'll make me corrupt. I won't be able to get into heaven. You know, we hear that, you know, easier for a camel to crawl through the eye of a needle than it is to. For a rich man to get into heaven. If you believe that and you hear it as a kid, then all of a sudden you're getting close to being successful. You don't know why, but some part of you pulls back.

So I want to talk about that more because I think that's a big thing for a lot of people that go through this kind of work. They are solo entrepreneurs or they have a day job and they're switching into something new. And so they have this competing agenda, which is I have a boss on one side, but I have me on the other. And I think that shows up in that area as well, the self sabotaging. Because there are those two competitive stories. Well, I can't have both. And so how would you have someone sort of reframe that? I mean it.

Well, I think most people live in what we call either or thinking I can either be this or that, I can have a full time job and be that well, or I can have my own entrepreneurial thing. I can be a great Parent, but I can't be the CEO of a company or I can be the CEO but I don't have time to be a great parent. And what we teach is and or I mean we teach both and you know, and, or is the problem both and is what you want. And so the reality is you can and so you want to have a belief, an affirmation. I can be both a great parent and I can be a great CEO. I can have a full time job and I can develop this side gig until it becomes, I always say to people, don't quit your full time job until your, your dream job over here you're creating is providing at least enough income to survive on. And I usually say at least half of what you were getting over there. And then when you stop that job, you can put full time energy on it. But evenings, weekends, holidays, getting up early in the morning, staying up a little late at night, you know, that's how I did Chicken super du Sol. I was a full time trainer and I wrote that book from 10 till midnight over the course of a year. And then when it took off, you know, we were writing books almost full time for 15 years.

I typed from midnight to 3. So I remember.

Yes you did. I want to say one thing, one more thing about this for the person who wrote this question in and that is the importance of community. See your parents are there telling you one thing out of their love for you. But they don't know everything that's in your heart. They don't know what you were born to do, what's in your DNA, all that. Find a community of people, whether it's a mastermind group, a club, a church group, whatever that supports your dream. You know, that's why we do our coaching clubs and our mastermind groups because these are all like minded people who are going for their dream. And when you've got 8 to 10 people or 100 people in a coaching club like we have that are supporting your dream, then what happens is you that overwhelms the lack of support or the other voice. And so you're getting that constant reinforcement from your accountability partner, your team coach, your mentor, whatever it is. So community is really, really important to help you get where you want to go.

Yeah, I agree with that and I think a lot of people think that they have to do it alone and so nobody goes it alone basically. So if you're not in a group, get in a group would be my final word on that one.

Yeah, well, let's let that be our final word for this, and I want to thank all of you out there today for watching. And if you have a question you'd like us to answer in a future episode, please post it in the comments below. We want to hear from you and make sure we're helping you overcome your specific challenges so you can get better results in everything you do. And if you found this video helpful, please take a moment to like it to share it with a friend who also may need to see it, and subscribe to this channel. For more videos like this one, and for some additional tools and videos on how to overcome your obstacles and thrive in life, make sure to check out the resources page on jackcampfield.com there's a ton of great resources there, many of which are free, and thanks again for watching and have a great day.