Are You Sabotaging Yourself? Watch Out for These 5 Habits

You dream of starting your own company, BUT you haven’t perfected your business plan yet.

You got offered a promotion, BUT it comes with more responsibility.

You wanted to start a health and weight loss journey this year, BUT your past attempts failed. Why should you expect success this time around?

You want your boss to consider you for a management role, BUT you don’t fit the mold at your company. If you got the job, you’d feel like an imposter.

You have to deliver a big speech tomorrow, BUT you don’t want to dwell on it tonight. Instead, you’ll drink your worries away.

When trying to reach goals and enjoy success and fulfillment, your worst enemy might be the person staring back at you in the mirror. You could be standing in your own way and blocking blessings and satisfaction.

Self-sabotage is a common problem for many people. You can overcome it, though.

​Learn how to stop sabotaging your success and start living the life you want. Here are five success-destroying obstacles and how to overcome them, taken from some of the best resources on mindset and personal development.

Success carries with it a certain amount of responsibility. Too often, people are frightened by the additional expectations. What are some of the duties many people shy away from?

What scares you about success?

Overcome a fear of success by envisioning what your life would look like without it. How satisfied would you be in the same role at your current job, making your same salary or hourly wage, doing the same thing on repeat over decades?

Take a lesson directly from nature. Look at plants and animals. They grow, change, and flourish, or they die. One thing they don’t do is stay stuck in place or time.

​Embrace opportunities. Take bolder actions. Big risks typically earn big rewards.

Don’t fall victim to an “all or nothing” way of thinking. You aren’t doomed to failure if your first attempt at something didn’t turn out how you hoped.

The heavyweight champion of the world doesn’t become a boxing great overnight. No, they have done a lifetime of behind-the-scenes work. They’ve competed over and over again, learning more and getting better each time. And sometimes, they lost their matches.

Like hockey great Wayne Gretzky and basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan have said, “You miss 100% of shots you never take.” Don’t be so afraid to miss the shot that you never try.

​Avoid calling a missed shot a failure. You won’t immediately succeed at everything you attempt. Call it a learning experience, recalibrate, and try again. Time, dedication, and practice are the main things setting a world champion apart from an amateur.

Procrastination is often a symptom of perfectionistic thinking. In Napoleon Hill’s wildly popular book “Think and Grow Rich,” he writes, “PROCRASTINATION, the opposite of DECISION, is a common enemy which practically every man must conquer.”

Too often, you’re afraid to take the first step toward reaching your goals because your plan isn’t flawless. Before you know it, you’ve stalled without even starting.

Overcome analyzing something to death. Just start. An imperfect action is better than no action at all.

​Making decisions is downright impossible and extremely slow when you overthink and over-plan, hoping to avoid less-than-stellar results. Every action has a consequence. Act anyway.

You may subconsciously participate in feeding yourself false ideas about yourself or the world. Your unhelpful (and probably untruthful) thoughts can limit your outcomes.

Try to catch yourself in unhelpful thoughts. Expand your mindfulness through reading. It will help you identify and challenge the beliefs that lock you into self-sabotage.

​Read personal growth books that build your self-confidence. Work to replace ingrained thought patterns with empowering beliefs that propel you toward success instead of keeping you in a self-sabotage loop.

Turn outwards to a supportive community or mentors to prevent the pattern of self-sabotage that may stifle your progress. Learn what you need and find the proper support to boost you where you need it most.

You don’t have to journey a pathway of success alone. Successful people get that way because they find the help they need in the places they need it most.

​Find a group of like-minded people—a small business, mastermind, or fitness group. And why pick just one? You can belong to many groups who support you in various ways and areas.

For some, self-sabotage can be a repeating pattern of similar beliefs or actions that prevent you from achieving your true potential and highest calling. For others, you may reach a point where your progress stalls.

You wonder what you’re doing wrong. You feel like a permanent failure or unworthy of success.
You don’t have to accept self-sabotage as a way of life. Use this guide to help get yourself unstuck.

If this guide inspired you, read more self-development resources and connect with our like-minded community through a Secrets of Success Mastermind membership. Your membership gives you access to the greatest self-improvement minds in history, information you can’t always find in your bookstore or library. The collective wisdom of our community, tools, and strategies will help you rise above mediocrity.

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