Why you are self-sabotaging your launches

In my last blog, we looked at some of the behaviours that you're doing that might be self-sabotaging your launches. Things like procrastination, perfectionism, all of the things that we often are dealing with as business owners, but then we don't realize are actually sabotaging our chances of success when we're launching.

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Are you self-sabotaging your launches?

Today, I'm looking a little bit deeper. I'm looking at why we actually do these things. Because once you understand why you're doing it, it makes it a whole lot easier to start to correct that and to start to shift towards more positive behaviours that will support your launch rather than hurt it.

So, the first reason why we tend to self-sabotage, and this applies to anything good in our lives, anything that even though we think it's something we want, it might feel a little bit uncomfortable. Now, we self-sabotage because when something feels scary and uncomfortable, we will then try to stay in our comfort zone. And the easiest way to stay in our comfort zone is to sabotage the thing that is moving us away from our comfort zone. So, launching feels uncomfortable. Right? Growing your business feels uncomfortable. Anything that feels uncomfortable we're then going to maybe procrastinate it.

We're going to hold back from taking action. We're going to not show up as our best selves, and we're going to do everything we can subconsciously or unconsciously, I never know the difference between the two. I think, unconsciously, is the right one to use here. We're going to do everything in our power to stay in that comfort zone. Comfort means survival to your brain. Right? This isn't your prefrontal cortex running the show. This is your reptilian brain, the old part of your brain that has not adapted to modern life. For it, it believes that what you're doing now, what you've always done, what feels comfortable is good. Because that means you're going to survive.

And yeah, it would have in the past, that would have meant survival. But now when you're trying to grow and trying to do something that's a little bit challenging, we want to push past that need to survive. Another reason why we tend to self-sabotage is because we're afraid. We're afraid of failure, obviously. But a lot of the time we're afraid of success. And it was a big aha moment for me when I realized that, “Oh, wow, okay. I'm actually self-sabotaging because I'm afraid of succeeding. Not just because I'm afraid of failing, but I'm also afraid of what success looks like.” So, for me, that was a deeper fear of being responsible and being a leader to a bigger audience. That felt terrifying.

Growing my audience and having more students to teach, and opening myself up to potential judgment, rejection, all of that felt really scary. And in my mind, that is what I had equated success with. In my mind, I thought, “Well, if I become successful, I'm going to grow my audience. And that means I'm a leader, which means I'm then responsible, and people are going to judge me and people are going to not like me.” So I was self-sabotaging to stay in the zone that I'd built that felt really comfortable in my business. Because our brain is wired to resist change. Change is not comfortable to us even when it's something that we want.

And it's going to do everything in its power to avoid that change, to resist that change. Even if the change is a positive change, even if it's what we think we want. Because ultimately, even familiar discomfort is still comforting to us. And it's only when it gets to that point where we're like, “I am so fed up with myself. I am so sick of myself. I'm so sick of this discomfort.” It's only when that discomfort becomes more painful than making a change that we end up making that change. It's like the straw that broke the camel's back or like hitting rock bottom. Right?

It's only when we hit rock bottom and we get so uncomfortable with where we are that changing becomes the less painful option and that's when we end up making that change. This applies to bigger things in life. It applies to, if you were to quit smoking or quit drinking or go on a weight loss journey or anything like that, you're still going to encounter the same self-sabotage that you would in a launch. It's really quite fascinating, because a lot of the same patterns that show up in your launch will be the same patterns that show up elsewhere in your life.

And for me that's been one of the biggest benefits of working with a coach over the last year, has been identifying where these things are playing out in my life. Now, another reason that we might also be self-sabotaging is to make life harder for ourselves. That sounds really weird. Right? Why would we want to make life harder for ourselves? But a lot of us, myself included, have this belief that things have to be challenging, they have to be difficult for it to be worthwhile. And that we have to suffer for us to be worthy of it. Now, because we're believing that suffering makes us worthy on some unconscious level, and it might've been something that you picked up as a kid, maybe your parents said, “Well, you've got to work hard to make money. Or you've got to work hard and get the best grades.”

And maybe it might've been instilled on that kind of level. But however you got that belief, it's now showing up in that you're making things harder than they need to be because subconsciously you believe that they need to be difficult to be worthy of it. So there are a few reasons why you might self-sabotage. I know it's quite a lot to digest. So come back and listen to this episode again. If you want to go and journal on it, if that feels good, it can be a little bit confronting. A really awesome book that I loved on this topic is called, The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest. It's fantastic. Every time I read it, I've read it about three times now, every time I read it, I feel like I'm personally being attacked in an amazing way.

So I highly recommend downloading or buying that book.

 

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