There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself.
If there's an ongoing gap between where you are and where
you want to be, and your efforts to close it are consistently met
with your own resistance, pain and discomfort, S sabotage is
almost always at work. On the surface it appears to be
a product of self hatred, low confidence or a lack of
willpower. In reality, S sabotage is simply
the presence of an unconscious need that is being fulfilled by
the South sabotaging behaviour. To overcome this, we must go
through a process of deep psychological excavation.
We must pinpoint the traumatic event, released unprocessed
emotions, find healthier ways to meet our needs, reinvent our
self-image, and develop principles such as emotional
intelligence and resilience. It's no small task, and yet it
is the work that all of us must do at one point or another.
When Carl John was a child, he fell on the ground in school and
hit his head. When he got hurt, he thought to
himself, yes, maybe I won't have to go back to school now.
Though he is known today for his insightful body of work, he
actually didn't like school or fit in well with his peers.
Shortly after his accident, John began experiencing sporadic and
uncontrollable fainting spells. He unconsciously developed what
he would call a neurosis and ultimately came to realise that
all neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering.
In John's case, he made an unconscious association between
fainting and getting out of school.
He came to believe that the fainting spells were a
manifestation of his unconscious desire to get out of class,
where he felt uncomfortable and unhappy.
Likewise, for many people, their fears and attachments are often
just symptoms of deeper issues for which they do not have any
better way to cope. That is an introduction from
chapter one from the book by Brianna Wiest, The Mountain is
You. And today I want to talk about
looking after yourself and getting rid of self sabotage.
And I'm going to start by sharing one of my coaching
clients journey where they truly felt as if they were self
sabotaging. And this showed up particularly
in their practice when they were thinking of ways to impress
people and people please. And we started to unpick.
One of my favorite questions in coaching is what do you receive
when you do X? And often the answer to that
question is nothing. Then we end up laughing because
they figured that there's something.
The question is always what? Why is that something that makes
it so familiar, so secure, so comfortable to go back to
something, repeat a pattern that consciously you know is
unhelpful for you now, Brianna Wiest in this book, The Mountain
is You, has put it beautifully that it's looking at a better
way to cope. You don't know any other way to
cope, you don't know any other way to process the emotions, and
on the other end of the scale, you have no idea that you've got
ongoing subconscious patterns that are driving the self
sabotage, driving patterns that are unwanted.
So what makes you so comfortable in repeating a pattern of which
you know is unhelpful for you? What do you receive when you
repeat these patterns? Now you may be thinking, well,
what patterns? Well, let's use the example of
being on a diet. At one point or another, all of
us have decided we want to be healthier, we want to be fitter,
we want to be slimmer. To do that, you have to make
sacrifices, and those sacrifices are by way of what you eat or
perhaps financial because you get yourself a personal trainer.
Whichever it is, you're trying to break a pattern.
You're trying to create a new habit.
To do that, you have to let go of what you used to do.
You have to say goodbye to the way you used to think.
And ultimately you are saying goodbye to the pattern that
served you, Not served you. Served you.
As in, it didn't really serve you, but at the time, as the
book says, you didn't know any other way or a better way to
cope. Now, what happens between you
deciding you want to be on a diet and implementing that plan
is a mindset shift. It's simply not a decision to do
so. There has to be something else,
another driver, another motivator that is steering you
towards the new story you want to create for yourself, the new
lifestyle that you want to live. And that shift is 99% of the
reason why my coaching clients find me.
If you don't know, a coach's job is to facilitate the process,
asking you strategic questions to help you get to your own
solution. So that question I mentioned
earlier, what do you receive when you do X?
That's helping you gain a deeper insight into who you are and why
you do what you do. And by the end of a coaching
session, you would have had some revelations, some new
discoveries, come up with a new plan.
But if you're looking to, we'll use the example of going on a
diet, but you keep returning to the same pattern and keep going
back to the chip shop or McDonald's or wherever it may
be. We would then be working on what
are you getting out of this? And it's in the gap between
where you are and where you want to be.
That's where my work comes in, that's where I facilitate your
thinking process and support you through understanding yourself
on a deeper level. Why is it important that I'm
talking to you about this now? Well, we are.
You haven't noticed six months into 2024?
We've got six months left to complete the goals that we set
in January 2024. How far have you come?
What goals have you achieved from your vision board?
What would you like to do next? Now if you are listening to this
and you're at a place where you may not have achieved any of
your goals and you suspect there is self sabotage at play, this
certainly is the episode for you to be listening to.
Because we are not talking about your conscious behaviour, we are
talking about your unconscious behaviour.
Our unconscious mind is over 80% of what we think and over 80% of
how we behave. So that means we've got 20%,
just an incipancy, 20% that is conscious.
Think about that ratio for a moment, relate that to yourself,
and then think about it for the parents that you're working with
and consider the patterns that you see them showing in their
behaviour. Now if we have over 80% that's
driving the unconscious and we've just got 20% as conscious,
imagine the work that it's going to take to make a shift from
unconscious to conscious, making changes of eating whatever you
want to being more restricted. It's difficult to go cold
Turkey, as we call it here in the UK, meaning you're going to
cut it off altogether. Usually there has to be a
gradual process for you to get to the place where you want to
be. And it's exactly the same thing
we need to consider when we're looking at unconscious needs,
unconscious behaviour that's been fulfilled by self
sabotaging behaviour. One of the things I do in my
coaching sessions is introduce emotional literacy.
And I used to coach a gentleman who had dyslexia and he was one
of the main reasons why I introduced it in this way.
But I gave him a tool that had a list of various emotions, and
these emotions were what he used to describe how he was feeling.
And he kept this on his phone and he kept it on his desk at
work and would refer to it, which would help him increase
his emotional literacy. And he felt relieved that he had
words to truly describe how he's feeling because often people
want to make shifts in their life without truly having an
understanding of the emotions that are either driving the
unconscious behaviour, the unconscious need, and unable to
describe the impact that it was having on them.
Using emotion words, emotional literacy is one of the key
factors to making shifts in your life.
And if you think about it in practice, if you look at some of
the successes you've had with your children and families, most
of them are going to be born from a revelation, a new
understanding of the challenges that they were faced with and
why you're involved, what the risks truly are.
If you think about that for a moment, most families gain an
understanding through literacy, specifically emotional literacy,
specifically if they are engaging with you, gaining a
fuller understanding of the impact of what's happening in
the home on their child. Think about when they are
enrolled on domestic violence programmes, parenting
programmes. They all introduce new words,
new vocabulary, new emotional literacy to help aid
understanding. Because when we understand how
we feel, we have a better understanding of the impact it's
having and a deeper understanding of our behaviour
that links to the emotion. Only then are you in the most
ripe place to begin to decide the shift that you want to make
for your life. The shift you want to make away
from self sabotage. It's no small task.
You would have heard from my podcast a week ago that my
client that has been with me for a year now, Letitia her journey.
You would have heard her say that there were moments where
she just did not want to continue because there were
things happening around her. But she was clear that and
recognised that that was a pattern that she was returning
to. But because she had the
knowledge of the pattern and she was in the process of the
coaching and the art therapy, she had the right tools to
recognise the pattern and make a decision that she felt was right
for her, which was to continue with the coaching sessions.
There's a lot of things that happen to us when we're younger
and as adults where we make these unconscious associations
between a trauma or between an event, an incident, and the
impact of that. Often what's missing is what is
the association that we're making that is creating the
space for self sabotage to exist.
Understanding what that association is and how it
relates to your life now is going to be your kryptonite
moving forward. We must understand that our
minds and our bodies, sometimes they don't know how to cope.
They don't. And that's OK.
You've done the best you can with what you have and what you
know, and we know through the theory about the cycle of change
that you will attempt to make changes and return back to the
pattern, attempt to make changes and return back to the pattern
on average six to seven times. We know this and we know this in
our practice, right? So this is not about you being
hard on yourself. This is about you recognising
where you are and where you'd like to be.
And ultimately this space here about self sabotage.
What is it going to take to get you there?
What do you need? What do you need?
When was the last time someone asked you that?
What do you need from me? What a beautiful question.
I see that on TikTok with gentle parenting.
I like watching some of those posts and it reminds me of
Montessori teaching where they ask the child in the midst of
them crying or not being very happy.
Saying that politely, of course, because we know they can cry the
house down all the way down. But let's think about this for a
moment. In the midst of feeling that
upset, I've seen some of these in quotes, gentle parents
asking, what do you need? It's such a disarming question
because in some ways it gives rise to the thought that there
is permission for you to receive what you need.
Did you hear what I said? For those in the back, it gives
rise. It gives rise for the potential
of what you need being received. Wow, imagine that.
So I want you all to have some reflection time after this
podcast episode and I want you to share this podcast episode.
I want you to be thinking about if yourself Sabotage could speak
to you, what would it say? What advice would it give to
you? On that note, have a blessed
week.