The 9 Ways We Self-Sabotage & How to Overcome It

Victoria, where are you?

What? Hmm?

Are you in the blanket?

No. Mm-mm.

Are you under the blanket? What the heck?

I'm nervous. They don't want to be on camera. Hey guys, Victoria S. Dorsano here, and I'm a certified health and life coach with an evidence-based approach so you don't have to wonder what's real and what's not on the internet. Have you ever had to give a presentation on stage, but then moments before you become just fraught with self-judgment and worry and anxiety, so much so that you feel like you just keep imagining all the things that could go wrong on stage? Ladies and gentlemen. Or maybe you've gotten tasked with a large team project and you start to judge your team's competency with the task, so you actually just start to take control and do most of the work on your own. Look at me. Sure. Look at me.

Sure.

I'm the captain now.

Or perhaps you just really want to start taking better care of yourself this year, but every day somebody seems to need something from you and you oblige because you want to be a good friend. But then you find yourself putting yourself last in your list yet again. These are just a few examples of the ways that we as humans can self-sabotage our own success. Crazy, right? We want something so bad, yet we just create this vicious cycle of self-sabotage without even knowing we're doing it. And today I'm going to share with you guys exactly why we self-sabotage our own success, what are some common ways that this plays out, and how you can actually break this nasty cycle to get even closer to your goals than you ever have before. But first, if you haven't given this video a thumbs up, go ahead and do that down below before I get started. This helps YouTube start to promote the video so that other people that might really need to hear this information might get to see that as well. So think of this as your act of kindness for today. Cool? Thanks, guys. Let's get started in learning how to break the cycle of self-sabotage. Sabotage is a hard word to say over and over again. Self-sabotage. Self-sabotage. Self-sabotage. Self-sabotage. Self-sabotage.

Self-sabotage.

Welcome to this ASMR course in self-sabotage. Sorry. So I recently completed a training where for 6 weeks I did daily exercises where I noticed all of my sabotaging ways and I was able to replace them with wisdom and truth. And wow, like just wow, I learned a ton. This course was based on Shirzad Chamine's book Positive Intelligence, and if you haven't read it yet, I highly suggest it as it's been a phenomenal resource in my growth as a coach and also just as a person in general. But today I wanted to talk to you about some of the tricky ways that we all self-sabotage and what you can do about it. So imagine your mind as a scene from Star Wars. [NOISE] In your mind, there's both the light and the dark, and basically like the Jedi and Luke Skywalker representing the light, and the stormtroopers and let's say Darth Vader representing the dark. For as long as the light exists, the dark exists as well. Which side prevails in your mind? Well, it's just a matter of which side you decide to give more power to. We all have this inner sage, which is our wisest, purest, and most genuine self, and we all have a really strong judge, which is our master saboteur. The Judge compels you to constantly find faults within yourself and within others and just your conditions and circumstances that you live in. It generates a lot of your anxiety, your stress, your anger, disappointment, shame, and guilt, and all those kind of uglier, darker emotions. And the Sage is just the source of love and light and compassion and action and happiness and just untapped potential and true fulfillment.

But how am I to know the good side from the bad? You will know when you are calm, at peace, passive. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

When we were born, we were just purely born with sage energy. But as we grow up, our judge saboteur actually develops to initially protect us from the world, and it assumes the worst as its method of protection. Sherzad gives the example in the book of if you're in the jungle, let's say, and you see the leaves starting to move and, you know, a tree next to you is starting to shake nearby and the leaves are rustling, you would be better off assuming that you were in grave danger, even though that this assumption would be based on very little information of just the tree moving and the leaves shaking. So the judge makes an assumption about the perceived danger in the environment, then triggers a hypervigilant response, And this brings me to the actual discussion around accomplice saboteurs. Just as Darth Vader uses stormtroopers to act out a response, the Judge uses at least one accomplice saboteur to elicit a self-sabotaging response to a situation.

"Always two there are. No more, no less.

A master and an apprentice." So think of the accomplice saboteurs as the ones actually acting out the self-sabotaging behavior. The Judge is just kind of the trigger to that. It's kind of like poking them along, be like, hey, you know you want to do it, right? There are 9 different types of accomplice saboteurs, and each of us has a favorite one or two that our personal judge likes to activate a little bit more than the others. And each of these accomplices has their own unique lie that they tell you to keep them around. And that's why self-sabotaging behaviors can be so cyclical, because these accomplice saboteurs convince us that they're actually our friends and that they're helping us. So let's break these 9 saboteurs down, and as I do, make sure to try to listen to see if any of these sounds like your particular accomplice saboteurs that get activated in you. And just as a note, to make myself clear, these are all adaptations out of Shirzad Chamine's book, Positive Intelligence. So definitely, like I said again, pick that book up, take a read. These are all just kind of summary points of his book. So I'm going to go ahead and describe these accomplice saboteurs much in the way that he would in the book, with a few tweaks as to my own personal experience of them. Number 1: The avoider. The avoider focuses on the positive and the pleasant, but in an extreme way. And it avoids these kind of unpleasant and difficult tasks and conflicts that we naturally have in life. It leads you to basically having habits of procrastination and conflict avoidance. And it results in damaging eruptions of festering conflicts that have been sidestepped because it causes delays in getting things done throughout the day. Its lie to you is that you're being positive. Not avoiding your problems. Number 2: The Controller. And my personal accomplice of choice, the Controller runs on an anxiety-based need to take charge and control of situations and kind of bend people's actions to one's own will. It generates high anxiety and impatience when that's not possible. In the Controller's worldview, you're either in control or out of control. And while the Controller allows you to get short-term results, in the long run, it generates a lot of resentment in others and prevents them from exercising and developing their own capabilities to the fullest. Its lie to you is that you need the controller to generate the best results from the people around you, when that's simply not true. Number 3, the hyperachiever. The hyperachiever makes you dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation. It keeps you focused mainly on external success rather than internal criteria for happiness. And it often leads to an unsustainable workaholic tendency that causes you to fall out of touch with your deeper emotions and your relationship needs. Its lie to you is that your self-acceptance should be completely conditional on performance and external validation. Number 4: The hyper-rational. The hyper-rational involves an intense and exclusive focus on rational processing of everything, including relationships. It causes you to be impatient with people's emotions and regard emotions as unworthy or, you know, not needed for consideration whatsoever. When under the influence of a hyper-rational, you can be perceived as kind of cold or distant or intellectually arrogant even, and it limits your depth and flexibility in relationships at work or in your personal life, and it intimidates less analytically minded people. Its lie is that the rational mind is the most important and helpful form of intelligence that you can possess. Number 5: Hypervigilant. The hypervigilant makes you feel intense and continuous anxiety about all the dangers surrounding you and what could go wrong with those dangers. It is constantly vigilant and it can never rest. And it just results in a great deal of ongoing stress that just wears you and the others around you down. Its lie is that the dangers around you are bigger than they actually are and that nonstop vigilance is the best way to tackle them. Number 6: The Pleaser. The Pleaser compels you to try to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others constantly. It causes you to lose sight of your own needs and become resentful of others as a result. It also encourages others to become overly dependent on you And its lie is that you are pleasing others because it's a good thing to do, denying that you are really trying to win affection and acceptance indirectly. Number 7, Restless, my second most favorite go-to accomplice saboteur. The Restless is constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or through perpetual busyness, and it doesn't allow you to feel much peace or contentment with your current activity. It gives you a never-ending stream of distractions that makes you lose your focus on the things and relationships that truly really matter. Other people have a difficult time keeping up with the person that's ruled by the Restless, and they often feel distracted from him or her. It's lies that by being so busy you are living life fully, and it ignores the fact that in pursuit of a full life you miss out on your life as it's happening. Number 8: The Stickler. The Stickler is the need for perfection, order, and organization taken too far. It makes you and others around you anxious and kind of uptight, and it zaps your own energy and the energy of others in the attempt for perfection all the time. It also causes you to live in constant frustration with yourself and others over things not being perfect enough. Its lie is that perfectionism is always good and that you don't have to pay a huge price for getting there.

Well, hold on, your hair wasn't fixed there.

That's my husband's primary saboteur, by the way. But I can say having a stickler husband is actually pretty nice sometimes because he's like really good with cleaning, like to an extreme extent, and I am not. So that's a kind of benefit of having a stickler saboteur husband. All jokes aside though, guys, he's great. He's— that's the saboteur, that's not actually who he is. But when it comes out, I don't mind too much because like cleaning does need to get done though. Number 9: Victim. The victim wants you to feel emotional and temperamental as a way of gaining attention and affection, and it results from an extreme focus on internal feelings, particularly painful ones. And it can often result in this martyr streak. The consequences are that you waste your mental and emotional energy, and others feel frustrated and helpless or guilty that they can never make you happy for long. The victim's lie is that assuming the victim or martyr persona is the best way to attract caring and attention for yourself. Now hopefully you were able to pick out which of those 9 are your top 1 or 2 accomplice saboteurs. It's important to have an idea of which 1 or 2 are your top ones because you want to be able to pay attention every time you're feeling those saboteurs taking control of a situation. Which leads me into talking talking about how to actually stop yourself from self-sabotaging. According to Shirzad, there are 3 main steps to stopping this vicious cycle of letting your saboteurs run the show. Number 1 is to weaken your saboteurs. Weakening your saboteurs involves identifying which thought and emotion patterns come from your saboteurs and seeing clearly that they're not serving you in that situation. Typically, these saboteurs actually justify themselves and pretend they're your friends. Like, "Hey buddy, you know you want to control that situation, right?" That's the controller, right? That's kind of like them kind of approaching me thinking like, "Oh yeah, you need me. You need me to get things done." So that's what happens personally for me. Another one is, for example, Chris, right? So the stickler, the stickler saboteur will convince Chris and be like, "Hey, I'm your friend. I get things done. I keep things clean. Perfection is good. Remember, if we do things perfectly, no one's mad at us. We're fine if we do it perfectly. If we don't, the world explodes. So they kind of convince you that they're doing you a favor. To weaken these saboteurs, all you need to really do is to observe and to label the saboteur thoughts or feelings when they show up. Going back to that example that I gave at the beginning of the video of giving a presentation on stage, you might say to yourself, "Oh, the Judge is back again, and he's telling me that I'm gonna fail, and there's the Controller trying to make me feel anxious about it and take control of the situation." So that's how you go and kind of label and observe. Number 2: strengthening your sage. This means shifting to the perspective of the sage and seeing every problem as a gift or opportunity to grow. And number 3 is boosting your self-command. Basically, this just means practicing bringing your focus and attention back to some sort of sense in your body, whether that's noticing your toes wiggling in your shoes or bringing awareness to your breath. Think of it as sort of a mindfulness practice that only takes about 10 seconds at a time, instead of doing 30 minutes of meditating. So guys, these are just some of the basics of what I experienced in my 6-week course, and I can concretely tell you from my own experience that I have been able to get to the point where I can actually detect my saboteur within less than 10 seconds and shift to my sage. I felt more calm, peaceful, and present in these past few weeks since completing the course than I have in a long time, and it's only taken about 15 minutes a day to complete it. I've loved this practice so much that I've actually decided to enroll in further coach training with Shirzad. And as a part of my enrollment, I'm actually now able to offer the same 6-week course that I took to you guys. If you're interested in learning more information about how you can defeat these sabotaging behaviors and activate your Sage, click the link below in the description to request more information. And if you haven't already done so, please take a moment to hit that like button down below and subscribe to my channel to get more awesome video content like this directly onto your feed. Bye! It's a wrap!