How To Prevent Self-Sabotage from Destroying Your Potential

Happy Thursday!

This week at a glance:

I’ve spent years struggling with self-sabotaging my own progress.

I’m fascinated by why humans do this, and I’ve reflected on my own behavior a lot.

I've found two main journaling prompts extremely useful for overcoming my self-sabotaging behavior.

Understanding the root cause of my self-sabotage has been incredibly helpful.

I hope that it can help you and be of service!

My self-improvement journey began with a short story.

It’s from a collection of short stories called “Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives” by David Eagleman.

Each short story presents a different version of the afterlife that offers profound insight into how you can live better.

The entire collection is brilliant — but one story stands out to me.

It’s called Subjunctive.

The afterlife in Subjunctive is filled with other theoretical versions of you:

From an excerpt:

In Subjunctive, whether the afterlife is Heaven or Hell depends on how short you came from reaching your potential.

I read “Sum” shortly after making an existential career change, and I had just started dabbling with self-development.

Subjunctive floored me — it rocked me to my core.

It was the first time I’d consciously thought about what it meant to achieve my potential, or more strikingly, the terrifying thought of failing to achieve it.

“Reaching your potential” is a vague concept to pin down. There are infinite ways you could “reach your potential.”

Subjunctive provides a coherent definition:

If you can confidently step into an afterlife where you would be judged against your potential — assured that you won’t be stepping into a hell of regret — you’ve lived well.

If you accept this premise, we can define living well as :

As with any definition, its inversion is automatically defined as well.

Therefore, not living well is knowingly falling short of your potential — living in a way you know isn’t up to your standards.

This is self-sabotage.

Self-sabotage is tricky because if you’re not careful, you can fall for defining your potential in an overly robotic sense.

You define meeting your potential by what you would become if you put every spare minute of your existence into bettering yourself in some regard.

But the problem with this is that you’re a human, not a robot.

Your purpose is not to be an efficient execution machine.

If you focus myopically on achievement to the detriment of any enjoyment, fun, relaxation, and pleasure, this could also be seen as sabotaging your potential — the potential you had to enjoy the bizarre ride of living, loving, and laughing as a member of a species that is aware of its existence.

You also have the potential to be happy, and that is no small detail.

We need to be careful in defining “reaching our potential” by the robotic sense of endless hustle.

There is more to living as a human than acquiring skills, making money, and checking tasks off todo-lists.

Everyone will have a unique idea of what it means to reach their potential.

Life is a single-player game, and in your game, you are the game master.

Because of this, self-sabotage doesn’t look the same for everyone.

It shares similar characteristics but is unique to a person because its definition depends on the victory condition that person has for their game of life.

The same activities that would be called self-sabotage for someone playing a game to build a strong and healthy family can’t be classified as such for someone playing a game to maximize their hedonistic pleasure with their time on Earth.

You self-sabotage when you engage in behaviors that don’t support your victory condition to the point of becoming a problem.

Overcoming self-sabotage isn’t an easy task that can be solved with an article.

But like many of life’s problems, the first step is self-awareness.

You can only stop sabotaging your progress toward your victory condition when you understand why you’re doing it.

Over the past few years, I’ve unfortunately been no stranger to self-sabotage.

Through reading, reflecting, and growing, I’ve become aware of the root cause of my self-sabotaging behavior.

Understanding this has helped tremendously.

This isn’t one of those “defeat self-sabotage in x number of easy steps” types of articles.

I wish it were that simple.

The best I can provide is a perspective for self-reflection, and some journaling prompts to help you realize where you might be getting in your way.

What’s In It For You?

The insanely frustrating part of self-sabotage is that it seems utterly useless.

Why do people behave in ways that go against the vision of the life they want for themselves?

But it’s crucial to recognize the why behind your self-sabotage. 

Because there always is a why.

You are getting something from sabotaging your potential. And that something is usually the comfort of the familiar.

Even if a habit, environment, or sense of identity is toxic and destructive, its familiarity makes it preferable to the unknown.

A woman who has known nothing but toxic relationships with abusive men may bounce from jerk to jerk because being a victim is all she’s known — she wouldn’t be anchored to anything if she removed herself from an abusive relationship.

The familiar can be an identity — a role you’ve grown accustomed to playing that doesn’t serve you. But It can also be a path.

Predictable paths with clear outcomes, even if worse options, are preferable to the unknown chaos of unpredictability.

You will sabotage your growth to stay in the lane of “predictable with clear goals and outcomes.”

Think of this as the “staying in school” technique.

Many people who pursue higher education do so because they’re obsessed and passionate — a good reason to pursue a Master’s or Ph.D.

Some see it as the best way to achieve higher earning potential.

But some people stay in school because they don’t want to enter the real world.

School has clear goals and a path for you to follow.

There’s comfort in the familiar structure. Compare that comfort to the big, wide world: an open game with infinite paths.

I am not saying that everyone who pursues higher education is afraid of the “real world.” But some are — and “staying in school” is a good analogy for this effect.

Consider an alcoholic whose comfortable familiar has become entering rehab and trying to get better.

Even though it’s painful and worse than a new life free from addiction, the path to recovery is clear.

The path in the world when you’ve recovered is not — it’s the unknown.

The unknown will always be more uncomfortable than the familiar, even if the familiar is toxic and destructive.

I’ve struggled with staying in school:

When I began working out seriously and becoming passionate about health and fitness, I got the idea that it could become more than just a hobby.

I imagined creating fitness content and coaching people to be healthier.

I then set an entirely self-imposed limitation on myself: before I could do this, I had to get to a specific body fat percentage and be “shredded.”

For the next [embarrassingly long time, too long to admit in public], I would sabotage my progress by having cheat days (that would turn into cheat weeks).

This way, I was always on the safe and comfortable path of: “just lose a few more pounds to take that photo shoot.”

Losing 10 pounds is a comfortable path with clear outcomes.

Building a content and coaching business centered on health and fitness is not.

That’s the unknown. That’s the path with risk and uncertainty.

Journaling Prompt:

What is your comfortable familiar?

What does “playing it safe” mean for you?

Investigate why you can’t pursue a more exciting path — are your reasons legitimate, arbitrary, and self-imposed (like thinking you have to be “shredded” to talk about fitness.)

How are you potentially holding yourself back by staying in the comfort of a familiar path with more predictable outcomes?

What are you getting from self-sabotage — how is it providing comfort?

What’s Your Adventure?

Consider every adventure film you’ve ever seen.

Or more like every film you’ve ever seen. If the film prevented you from falling asleep in the theatre, it contained two elements:

• The protagonist (hero) faces a situation with risk and uncertainty.

• The hero accepts the risk, steps into the unknown, and returns victorious (except for the occasional dark movie where the hero dies).

For a story to be an adventure, it needs risk and the unknown.

If it doesn’t have these elements, it’s not an adventure.

If you want to live and have an adventure instead of merely existing, you must embrace risk and the unknown.

To grow, you must embrace the human journey of becoming.

The hero’s journey.

The hero enters the unknown, faces the dragon who lurks there, and brings back the knowledge to their community, thus expanding the known territory.

And a healthy human existence is one where you do this, even on a relatively small scale.

Your dragon doesn’t have to be able to kill you, but you need a dragon.

You’ll manufacture reasons to stay within your realm of the safe and known to avoid facing your dragon.

Self-sabotage stems from a fear of adventure. You either neglect to pursue what you feel called to do in favor of the safe alternative, or you manufacture roadblocks so that you can’t follow your adventure.

The first journaling prompt was to dig into what your comfortable familiar is — the identity you know that is holding you back from what you could become.

The second part is to reflect on your adventure: What path of risk and unknown scares you?

When you investigate your adventure, don’t shy away from thinking about what failure would look like. Too much self-help content suggests never considering failing an option, and I think that’s a load of baloney.

Failure is the scariest when left ambiguous — in many cases, when you honestly investigate your fear of failure, you may learn that it’s as minor as a bruised ego.

Journaling Prompt:

You won’t earn the company of your theoretical best selves if you choose to play it safe.

You’re Going To Die

Memento Mori.

The stoics reminded themselves of their death frequently.

It may seem like a gloomy habit, but it’s crucial for defeating self-sabotage.

Your self-sabotaging behavior is masked by the idea that you can do it later. That you have more time.

You push back deadlines and delay starting your meaningful project because you’ll have time later.

But you don’t know that.

When I spent years sabotaging my fitness progress from the fear of the unknown, I wasn’t consciously quitting. I was pushing deadlines back into the future. I’d tell myself:

 “Okay, I’ll get my fitness photos in 8 weeks from today. Then I can start.”

The future isn’t going anywhere. As long as you’re alive, you’ll have the option to outsource your potential to your future self, who will, for unknown reasons, be much more motivated than the present you.

You need to be aware of death to appreciate the harsh reality of self-sabotage. Your time is limited.

When you sabotage your potential by continuously manufacturing excuses not to pursue your adventure, you’re inching closer to death without having earned the company of your theoretical best selves.

Recognize the comfortable familiar that holds you back.

Recognize the adventure you feel called to pursue and why it’s scary.

What will happen if the dragon beats you?

And always remember — your life is slipping away from you in each moment.

Stop banking on future moments that are not guaranteed to take action.

Stop self-sabotaging.

How to Work With Me

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