Are You Self-Sabotaging Your Success

As a bestselling author, the creator of spiritual growth programs, and a radio podcast host, I have had some significant success in life. Even more importantly I have had reason to be grateful for enabling positive changes in numerous other lives – helping guide those lives to the kind of success they deserved. However, the road hasn’t always been straight or smooth for me. Along the way, I made several discoveries about myself that helped me craft my own success. Today I want to share one of the secrets of my success with you – and I think you’ll find it a bit bizarre!

My experiments with self-sabotage.

One of the most influential thinkers of the 20^th century, Mahatma Gandhi wrote about My Experiments with Truth. I think we all have our own experiments with truth at some point in our lives. Mine was when I made a rather unwelcome discovery about myself. Having been a classical singer of significant ability for so many years, there have been literally hundreds of auditions that I’ve been a part of. I noticed a pattern in those auditions – when the stakes were high, I was just not able to perform! Or if I did perform, my performance would be below par. It would disappoint me as well, not just those judging the auditions. I would get sidetracked or would find some other excuse not to do my best or not do it at all.

So, can you tell me why I was doing this? I realized that I was doing this consciously – bizarre, don’t you think? Why on earth would I take a series of steps, or rather missteps, that would prevent me from achieving what I dearly wanted to? It just didn’t seem to make any sense! Why was I sabotaging my achievements and my success? Why do you think I was doing this? The answer is both simple and complex, you will find.

How we self-sabotage our success.

I saw another instance of self-sabotage in a client: this is an ambitious client looking to get ahead in her profession. However, she goes ahead and takes what can only be described as a dead-end job – a dead-end job that wasn’t even a job in a few months. Why did she take the job knowing that there was no scope of advancement, and well knowing how precarious that job was? Why not wait until something really worthwhile came along? In other words, why self-sabotage? At some subconscious level, we self-sabotage our success because we believe we are unworthy of success. We are scared of our own success. And that is why we self-sabotage: because something inside us tells us to act contrary to our own interests. Is it possible to reverse that instinct to self-sabotage? How did I manage to teach myself to prevent this self-sabotage?  I invite you to join me, to know more about self-sabotage. I invite you to find out if you’re doing this to yourself right now and to learn how not to do this to your future success.