How to Stop Self Sabotaging Yourself

Have you ever wondered why you hold yourself back, even when you know exactly what you want and how to get it? It might feel confusing or even frustrating, but there’s a deeper reason behind it.

What we often call self-sabotage is actually a hidden way we try to protect ourselves emotionally. After years of coaching midlife women, I’ve seen how patterns like procrastination, perfectionism, and self-doubt aren’t signs of weakness; they’re signals.

And when you start to understand them, you can begin to shift them into something much more empowering.

Self-Sabotage is a misguided form of self-love.

When we self-sabotage it is our own way of keeping ourselves safe. It may feel very frustrating when you know you are capable of doing better but you just can’t seem to do that.

For five plus years as a life coach, I’ve worked with midlife women who are often successful and living good lives. Yet, in one or more areas they are often sabotaging themselves and can’t figure out why.

My job is to help them figure out why they are literally holding themselves back from what they want and to teach them how to change those behaviors into behaviors that help them feel better about themselves and make the changes they deeply desire.

Let’s start with talking about what self-sabotage is not.

It is not happening because you are lazy, unmotivated, or a bad person, though those might be the things you are saying to yourself at times.

Self-sabotage is a way you hold yourself back in certain areas because of mostly unconscious beliefs that override your intellectual thoughts.

How many times do you know what you should be doing but just can’t seem to do it.

There is nothing bad about you as a person if you are holding yourself back in some ways. It can feel frustrating, but it’s not because you are a bad person.

However, after a long time of sabotaging your own efforts, you may feel low self-esteem and a lack of confidence in certain areas.

I want to reframe this who subject in a way that can help you take better care of yourself and reduce self-sabotaging behaviors and self-defeating behaviors.

To do this, I’m going to identify some negative thought patterns that are common in many women.

Awareness of these patterns is the first step. Here’s what I know. We never ever just do things to hurt ourselves for the sake of hurting ourselves.

Our behaviors, no matter how counter-intuitive it seems are done for the purpose of helping ourselves somehow and it’s usually a misguided purpose of keep you safe.

When I say safe, I mean emotionally. The thing about our emotions is that while we might be absolutely physically safe, our feelings may be screaming that we aren’t.

How Our Self-Sabotage Keeps Us Safe

I would say that we tend to self-sabotage in ways that keep us from being too visible, too successful, and to keep ourselves from disappointment or future hurt.

Yes, it’s mostly versions of being afraid of success or afraid of failure.

Why would you be afraid of success? It usually comes down to what others will think of us or the fear that we’ll become someone we don’t want to be.

The fear of failure is we don’t want to try something and not do it right, or it will feel too horrible to try and fail.

The 7 Ways We Self-Sabotage Ourselves

To help this make sense to you, I’ve drilled down into the specific ways women self-sabotage. If you see yourself in one or more of these ways, this is really common.

So common, I’d say most of us have some of these issues at least some of the time. So here we go.

1. Procrastination
2. Perfectionism
3. Fear of failure
4. Fear of rejection 
5. ​Self-doubt
6. Negative self-talk
7. Self-criticism

Let’s dig in!

Procrastination

I used to consider myself a procrastinator. It was a part of my identity. Through writing this blog, I had my big AHA that I really wasn’t.

It turned out, there were just a few areas where I procrastinated. Once I realized that, I noticed that in all the women I worked with who thought they were procrastinating.

It becomes much easier to work with your procrastination when you identify exactly the areas where you do procrastinate.

There is no advantage to telling yourself over and over that you are a procrastinator and creating that identity for yourself and treating it as if you have a defect.

You are a great person who has an area or so where you put off doing things. That is so much easier than working with a personality defect!

Perfectionism

Most of the women I work with identify with perfectionism. Many women want to do everything perfect!

That is a lot of pressure to put on yourself all the time.

The cost though is that you end up only doing the things you know you can do perfectly and not doing things you are sure about.

Perfectionism kills dreams

Perfectionism is the killer of dreams. I see so many women not willing to go through the beginner stage to get to proficiency, especially when it comes to their heart’s desires.

Maybe it’s okay to learn and practice something new for work but to do it for a hobby or a creative career, it is not okay.

Instead of putting that imperfect time in, they avoid doing the thing they think they will love because they can’t do it perfect right from the get-go.

Perfectionism is boring

Trying to be perfect leads to a constricted and possibly a boring life! I believe that leading a boring life is bad for your health, your mood, and your overall sense of well-being.

Now to be clear, I’m not talking about creating the facade of an exciting life on social media or doing things that other’s think is exciting. I’m talking about doing things that light you up.

If you don’t do things because you are afraid you won’t do them right or do them perfectly, you may get stuck in a life of doing the predictable and unchanging motions of life.

Perfectionism is fear of failure

You can’t fail if you don’t try. So the best way to not fail is to not start. When you don’t do things because you don’t think you can do them good enough, you are avoiding any chance of failure in that area.

Not failing doesn’t help you at all. Failing over and over is what actually gets you closer to perfection. And that perfection is in the doing and experience.

Fear of Failure

Following on the heels of perfectionism is fear of failure. This fear seems so baked into us that it almost feels dangerous to fail.

When I think about failing, especially publicly, I can feel the fear in my body. It does not feel good.

However, it really is just an emotion. It’s not actually dangerous—it just feels dangerous.

And to avoid that feeling, we will avoid putting ourselves in situations where we might fail.

When we avoid all things where we might fail, we miss out on so many experiences and opportunities to succeed big time.

Yes, you read that right. When you avoid things where you believe you might fail; you also avoid opportunities for huge successes.

Our greatest contributions and successes do not happen when we hide from failing. Our greatest contributions and successes come when we are willing and even welcome the chance to fail.

The more you fail; the more you experience life. And something can seem like a failure until it doesn’t.

Fear of Rejection

No one loves the feeling of rejection. This fear of rejection can also keep us from living up to our potential.

On some level we may crave greater success or more experiences but we are also wired to stay safe within our tribe.

Our tribes are our families, our faith communities, our friends, and our career/work associates.

Anything we do that might make us feel different or that we think might bring the disapproval of one of our tribes, will create some fear in our bodies.

Here’s a real basic example.

Let’s say everyone in your family is a teacher and your family is so proud of its identity as a teaching family. You, however, want to be a race car driver.

No one in your family has ever been a race car driver and you know you will be facing disapproval.

Instead of pursuing your crazy dream, you decide to go to college and get a teaching degree.

As a college advisor I saw this hundreds of times. I now see it in women later in their lives.

We will literally sacrifice our hopes and dreams for ourselves just so we won’t upset other people.

Self-Doubt

So many dreams die on the hill of self-doubt. Of all the self-defeating behaviors on this list, I would say self-doubt is the most toxic and debilitating.

To combat my own self-doubt, I’ve developed my own solution. If I want to do something, I start doing it and commit to keeping at it until I get what I want.

I love being a writer and life coach. Over the years, I worked on believing in myself more than I doubt myself.

This has led to creating a career for myself that I really enjoy and also grow from. By achieving this impossible dream, I’ve become a woman that I am really proud of.

The overcoming of my self-doubt in myself has been the most powerful thing I’ve ever done in my life.

It’s not being a writer and life coach; it is the conquering of my self-doubt.

The next two self-sabotaging behaviors are similar but they have significant differences. Both are ways we hold ourselves back.

Negative Self Talk

Negative self-talk is something most of us practice until someone like me comes along and says stop it.

Negative self-talk includes talking in a negative way about others, yourself, the world, things you don’t like, and any other thing that you view as negative.

Here’s the problem with this. When we use all the negative things around us to blame for why we can’t succeed in some way, we limit our own power.

Now I get that as a woman, taking even more responsibility seems outrageous. We already feel like we’re taking on the responsibility for how everyone around us feels.

But you simply must take responsibility for your negative self-talk and blame of others. It’s so easy to blame others, situations around us, or even our past for how our life is right now.

Your power to change lies 100% in your ability to reduce and limit your negative thoughts.

What do you do instead? You look at how your thoughts and beliefs are either helping you or holding you back.

For example, recently I was talking to a person who blamed their husband for the weight gain. The problem was that the husband wanted to eat late in the evening and this person wanted to eat dinner much earlier.

The negative self-talk was blaming the husband and also other parts of her life for her weight gain.

So, to be clear, yes, the timing and type of meals might very well be contributing to the weight gain.

However, ultimately it is this person’s choice to eat when and what she wants rather than letting it be her husband’s choice. When we look clearly at our negative self-talk, we can see where we have an opportunity to change if we want.

I promise you, behind all your negative self-talk, is all your power to decide and act for your own best interests.

Self-Criticism

Self-criticism is when your negative self-talk is aimed squarely at yourself. You are the victim of your own hate and disdain.

If you find yourself doing this, you are not alone!

Every single woman I know or have worked with does this at times.

You’re never going to completely eliminate self-criticism but you absolutely can quit believing it. Most of it isn’t true anyway.

We criticize ourselves, in an attempt to make ourselves do better. I suppose at times this has been helpful. However, overall it is self-defeating.

You deserve to be treated with kindness, compassion, and love. And this starts with giving that to yourself.

I promise, you won’t become lazy or selfish, (though I hope that you become more of that, minus the negative connotations), but instead take better care of yourself.

All good change comes from compassion, kindness, and love of yourself.

When I begin working with women, they usually want me to help them feel better about things without having to change those things.

By that I mean, they want a solution that requires them to take better care of themselves, without them actually having to take better care of themselves.

A common example is someone that is busy all day every day, and who correctly says they need more time to exercise.

So the self-critical part will tell them that they are lazy and they need to push harder, give up sleep or rest to get that exercise in.

That’s the part most of us listen to most of the time.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work well. When we’re exhausted mentally and physically, it’s difficult to add even healthy habits to our day.

So the compassionate, kind, and loving self can look at your current schedule and find that time by cutting back on work hours (most of you give way too much time to work, thoughtlessly), cutting back on time with people you don’t enjoy, and cutting back on chores you hate.

Seriously, don’t listen to that critical part of you that says you have to give more, do more, and be more. She’s just a scared little kid.

When you practice talking to yourself with love, your whole life can change. You and how you feel are just as important as how anyone else feels!

What to Do Instead of Self-Sabotage

In a nutshell, you begin treating yourself as well as you would treat anyone else.

I know, this can bring up some anxiety.

Listen, most women will endure years of self-sacrifice to avoid a few thoughts and emotions. You don’t want to feel like you let someone down or disappoint them in any way.

Here’s the thing. Your very own well-being depends upon you being able to let people down and disappoint them.

You are not responsible for how anyone else feels.

When you know this, that is when your self-sabotage can finally end.

And this is the really cool part. When you love and take care of yourself, it is better for everyone in your life. Your well-being allows you to be your best self in all of your life including partnerships, family, friends, and work.

You’ll get more done in less time. You’ll feel better more of the time. And best of all, you’ll enjoy your relationships even more.

Plus you finally will understand that your self-sabotage isn’t a terminal problem. It’s just something that needs a little course correction.

If you see yourself in any of these situations and want to get help in changing your patterns, click here for a consult to see if working with me could help.