The Garden: Self-sabotage

Often times we hear people talk of self- love; self- respect, self- discipline et al. Not very often do we get to hear of self loathe; self- destruction; self- abuse and the likes.

Today I want us to have a look at self- sabotage, as it has come to my attention that most of us at some stage of our lives go through this phase. I therefore want to help those who identify with the phrase to overcome it.

Behaviour is said to be self- sabotaging when it creates problems and interferes with long-standing goals. The most common self-sabotaging behaviours are procrastination, self-medication with drugs or alcohol, comfort eating and forms of self- injury such as cutting etc.

Self-sabotaging can occur in your career; your love life and just life in general. From my observation it appears that the reasons why most of us end up being victims of self-sabotage is because to start with, we question our worth. This question stems from our insecurities which are sometimes deeply rooted and not always necessarily obvious. The idea that “I don’t deserve this” is what usually fuels our sabotage in that once we believe we do not deserve it we ruin it or we do things that will ruin our chances of getting it. Sometimes even upon getting it, we don’t live to enjoy it either because we drove it away intentionally or unintentionally. For instance, you do not believe you deserve love or a good partner; you meet one and then you mess up your chances of a happy ever after with them. You get into your dream job and you just find yourself messing up every chance you have to prove that you indeed deserve to be there simply because there is an underlying believe that you are actually not worthy of your position. This translates to other areas of our life even with our relationship with money.

What we need to be conscious of is our subconscious state of mind because so very often it is the energy of those thoughts that attract the energy we put out on a day to day basis. Most times we sleep to our subconscious simply because we have become so automotive when it comes to the manner in which we do life. We are so programmed and superficial that almost every action is repetitive and processed. When we start digging deeper and really pay attention to our insecurities they will certainly inform us of the areas we have issues with. Once we are aware of our insecurities, the next step would be to accept them. After the step of acceptance then ideally we would have to address the issues and find ways of overcoming them which then means ultimately overcoming self-sabotage.

Until we have gotten to the bottom of our insecurities and have believed that we are worthy of good things. That we are worthy of happiness, peace of mind and every other joyful experience life has to offer, we cannot successfully beat self-sabotage. When we start believing right we find that we do not need to convince anything or anyone and we certainly do not need to manipulate events to work in our favour rather the attraction responds to our energy which is from our sub consciousness.

Bottom line: sincerity and being aware of yourself goes a long way. Moreover, acceptance and dealing with issues is very critical. What we avoid or fail to deal with will eventually deal with us.

Here are some examples that you might be in self- sabotage mode:

• You have fear of success
• You dwell on too many options
• You quit easily when the going gets tough
• You don’t take your money situation seriously
• You let others monopolise your time
• You avoid the hard work in favour of the trivial
• You don’t take radical responsibility
• You tell yourself a negative story
• You spend all your time planning
• You sabotage your sleep
• You don’t cut yourself any slack

Once you have identified majority of these, you need to pay attention. What this means is that part of your personality acts in conflict with another part of your personality. Therefore, you need to practice new behavior until habit is formed.