A short motivational talk by John Assaraf defining "self-handicapping"—the habit of using stories, beliefs, or circumstances as excuses for not achieving goals—and giving a practical, four-step approach (awareness → question → choice/decision → action) to stop self-sabotage across life domains (health, wealth, relationships, career).
Chapters
Hey, I hope you're having a great day. I just decided to come in here into my studio and talk about something that I've seen a lot lately. I don't know why, but maybe it's for the purpose of doing this video and it's called self handicapping. What does self handicapping mean? Well, everybody knows what a handicap is and many of you probably know my wife Maria has got a physical challenge. She was born with congenital scoliosis and she had to learn how to go from walking to crawling back to walking again when she was a little girl. And she's basically lived her life with this physical challenge and focused with her family and herself on how she can lead a normal life regardless of the physical challenge. Let me divert just for just a moment, for what is self handicapping? Self handicapping is when you say to yourself, because of my lack of knowledge or lack of skills or lack of motivation or lack of purpose or lack of money, or where I was born or how old I am, or how young I am or how inexperienced I am, or from this part of the world that I come in. When you use those reasons as to why you aren't or haven't yet achieved the level of success that you want to achieve, you're self handicapping yourself. You're using your story, your circumstance, a belief, an idea, a thought, a paradigm to handicap yourself. And that is going to limit your, your ability to succeed. Now, what do you do when you recognize what I've just said may be you? The first thing is to recognize that we all have these ideas, thoughts, beliefs about ourselves and the world that either move us towards what we want to achieve or keep us stuck or even move backwards towards lesser than what we're capable of achieving. So what I want you to do is I want you to ask yourself a question. Where are you self handicapping yourself? What story, what excuse, what belief are you telling yourself that's manifesting in you not taking the action that you need to take? And when you recognize what it is, make a commitment to yourself that you are going to stop self handicapping yourself. The first part of it is to just be aware that you're doing it. The second part of it is to take action and figure out, how can I achieve the level success that I want to achieve in any area of your life, whether it's health, wealth, relationships, career, business, doesn't make a difference. How can I with my lack of knowledge, how can I anyway with my limiting belief, how can I anyway with this fear, how can I anyway soon as you ask your brain to figure out how you can, you stop handicapping yourself as to why you're not. Does that make sense? As soon as you commit to how you can, regardless of the circumstance or the belief or the emotion, then you're giving your brain the permission to move forward anyway. And that is the way to get rid of self handicapping awareness, question, choice, decision and action and behavior. So use your brain to help you move forward versus keeping you stuck. All right. I just had to do that today. Enjoy your day.
