Jay Papasan:
So, what if I told you that the biggest obstacle between you and the success that you seek isn’t the economy, it’s not the competition, it’s not even your circumstances, it’s you.
Self-sabotage, we all do it to ourselves in our own unique ways, and it shows up all of the time. Let me tell you why we’re gonna focus on the Six Ways That People Self-Sabotage this week. We teach a group coaching class called the First Domino. It happens over about seven weeks. We teach people how to claw back their time about four hours a week, identify the one thing they need to do in order to be hitting their goals this year–that first domino, that daily activity or weekly activity that if they can just do it, they are making meaningful progress, small bites that add up to a lot over time. That’s the first domino.
So, this is taught to hundreds of people over a webinar, and I’m just sitting there trying to get some engagement. Let’s get warmed up, right? So, I just randomly asked the question, what’s the number one way you self-sabotage? And I thought I would get four or five answers and we’d get a nice little learning moment to kick off the class. And what happened is the comment section exploded. Everybody, when you ask that question, “What’s the number one way you self-sabotage?”, they tend to know the answer. They know that thing that they habitually do that gets in their way, gets between them and their daily success.
Well, here’s the thing. In this episode, we took all of those answers, we grouped them into six categories, and we’ll tackle each of those six ways that people generally self-sabotage and try to give you some examples of how people have conquered it and some strategies to do it. So, that’s our promise, that you will hopefully find one of those six ways that you go, “That sounds like me,” and we’ll give you something to meaningfully do to make progress and change that habit.
‘Cause here’s the thing, it’s not like you are broken. Everybody deals with this. The ways we self sabotage because everybody knows it and can articulate it so quickly. It’s an habitual thing. And you know this from studying The ONE Thing and listening to this podcast. Habits can be built and habits can be broken. In this case, we’re gonna break a self-sabotage habit and hopefully replace it with one that leads to success. And that’s the goal of this episode.
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
So, the first way that we identified that people self-sabotage out of the hundreds and hundreds of responses, we kind of grouped them together. Number one was procrastination and avoidance, right? We all have habits where we’re kind of putting off what we need to do or we’re avoiding it consciously or unconsciously. So, this is just the kind of thing a lot of us who have ADHD, we struggle to get started, we keep putting it off, it keeps moving farther into the future, despite our knowledge that we know we need to do this thing. We know we need to do it, but why can’t we just start?
We make excuses sometimes. A lot of times, we get into that kind of Monday syndrome where we’re kind of overwhelmed by everything and we don’t actually figure it out. But for me, I look up and I see this a lot. A lot of times, people use learning, “I need to know more about this,” preparing as a form of procrastination.
So, how does this manifest? So, I think a lot of times people will delay action because it isn’t perfect yet, right? I need to know more. They’ll keep coming up with excuses that sound very reasonable, but the fact is there’s a lot of stuff that we’re not going to know what we need to know until we kind of get into it. So, we might as well start. What’s the minimum we need to know in order to take action and move forward?
So, how do we move forward? I’m going to go ahead and just give a nod to Mel Robbins. If you’ve read her work and you’ve listened to her podcast, she kind of talks about the two-minute rule. You can goof off for two minutes, but then you have to start. And basically, you’re just starting a countdown clock. You know, “3, 2, 1, Go. 3, 2, 1, Go.” Whatever that looks like, count down and just set yourself a little mini deadline. But it’s not next week, it’s in minutes. Can you set a mini deadline for you to just take the first step?
The other one is just to break it down. A lot of times, the reason we’re procrastinating and avoiding things is because it feels too big. We’re afraid of it. Can you break it down into the very first step, and then ask the question, what do I need to do to do that? What’s the first thing I need to do and realize that some of the work we’re doing is actually progress instead of avoidance. Now, we’ve redefined it, we’re breaking it down into that first step and we’re doing something that actually contributes towards our final goal.
Obviously, I can’t have this section without just time blocking. Put it on your calendar, right? You’re thinking you need to do it, you’re thinking you need to do it, put it on your calendar. And our research and in actual research in the field, it makes you about three times more likely to show up and actually do the thing that you know you need to do that you’re putting off just by having it on your calendar, an appointment with yourself to do that work.
So, break it down, have a small bite, give yourself a very short deadline. And I promise you, the avoidance and procrastination–we’ll go into some of the emotional elements of that–just getting started makes a lot of those things fall away. A lot of the things we thought we needed to be prepared, we don’t actually need. We were over-preparing, over-planning, whatever you want to call it, but basically it’s all about procrastination and avoidance. Start.
Now, there’s tricks for this. If you remember my episode with Tyler, if you’re in that category of folks that are really gonna have a mental struggle there, I’ll add one more technique. He talked about body doubling in our episode together. And that’s the idea of like, because maybe my ADHD is really getting in my way today, can I change my environment? Or in this case, body doubling is you’re just asking someone to do it with you. “Hey, I know I really need to do this. Can you just come hang out with me while I do it?” For whatever reason, a lot of times, getting someone to be there with you, maybe creating a safe environment, maybe a distraction, that person is doing it with you, allows people that have a block to get started.
And the other one is to maybe, instead of a deadline, give yourself a reward. If I can just do this thing today, I get to do that. So, hopefully, one of those is, you said, “That’s for me. That’s the one. I need to invite someone to help me. I need to break it down more. I need to set a deadline. I just need to get it on my calendar, so I’ll do it.” Whatever the case, procrastination and avoidance tends to be the number one. People don’t get the things done because they never get started. Take the first step and you’re on your way. Let’s go to number two.
Number two, self-doubt and negative self-talk. So, this can contribute to procrastination and over-planning and some of the other ones, but the core root here is that we’re not doing the thing we need to do. We’re self-sabotaging because of the voice in our head that’s our very own. We’re saying that we’re not good enough. We’re not good enough yet. I don’t know everything I need to know, that we were afraid, right? Maybe if I do it, what will people think of me? Will I fail publicly? We get all of these ideas in our heads about outcomes that might happen, and we end up preparing for all of these what ifs instead of doing the kind of just-in-time planning that we need to do.
So, it can get us caught in all kinds of trouble because of our self-doubt, our imposter syndrome, I’ve talked about that in length here, everybody suffers from it. Whatever the cause, the fear, the self-doubt, doubt, the negative self-thought can absolutely stop us in our tracks. We’re ready to go, but then that voice kicks on. A lot of times, our perfectionism, this, “I’m not good enough,” we wanna call it high standards, but it’s really more about the perfectionistic disease that we suffer from.
You know, perfect is the great way, right? I want it to be perfect. “I want it to be perfect,” is a great way to never get anything done. Very, very few things are perfect. I would argue that almost none are. Maybe we found the perfect love in our lives, so I’m not gonna say never, but in the real world, perfect doesn’t show up very often. And most people couldn’t recognize it if it showed up right in front of them, but that’s what they’re seeking. And so, they do all of these activities, they have all of this talk, but it’s perfectionism that’s masquerading as high standards, which becomes this whole kind of mental lute that they get caught up in.
So, again, you know what? You need to start thinking about failure as feedback. That’s another thing that Pat taught us in that previous episode. If you can start looking at any kind of failure as feedback, and that is how we get better, think of all the things that you have been able to do in your life that you weren’t good enough when you started, right? You weren’t very good. We’re all bad in the beginning, except for a handful of things that we might’ve been gifted with something in our genes or in our environment, so we started off maybe a little better than others. But for the most part, any new endeavor, we all start at the same place. Not very good, don’t know what to do, and we’re all there. And so while we’re so focused on how we might fail, everybody else is in the same boat and nobody’s paying attention.
I’ve talked about the spotlight effect before. Everybody walks around and thinks and imagine that everybody’s watching everything that we do. That’s the spotlight effect. This idea that we’re like literally on a stage with this giant halogen light just focused on us. Everybody’s in their own spotlight. They’re not paying attention to us. When someone sees you’re real, they’re thinking about they’re real, right? So, we have to kind of move past that and realize that this is an emotion, acknowledge it. “Hey, I’m afraid, right? I have self doubts,” that is usually some form of protection. That’s us trying to protect ourselves from something. We can acknowledge it. We can say thank you for it. And then, we have to move on because that is how all learning happens by getting in a little outside of our comfort zone and starting to grow. And what surprises people is how fast they can get good once they get going.
So, we can reframe failure in our heads. We can thank our instincts that are trying to protect us and then move past them. Sometimes, just acknowledging them and naming them is a great thing. And then, I’ll fall back on my friend, Jen Davis. I’ve quoted her before, but she always says, “In anxious times, productive activity lowers anxiety.”
So, here’s the thing, we can focus on how bad it might be. We can focus about how bad we might fail. But the moment we move into action, different parts of our brain engage. Now we’re thinking about, “Well, how am I going to do that? How am I going to say that?” And we get out of that kind of mental loop where we’re projecting what might happen and, now, we’re experiencing what is happening.
So, taking action is a great anecdote, reframing what failure might look for you. And then, I’ll call all the way back to Meg and say sometimes, a little public accountability, inviting people to support you and hold you accountable to doing what you need to do is exactly the recipe we need to move past self-doubt and negative talk. I just will tell you that this is one, the more successful you become, that you’ll be battling all along the way. I’ve talked to people who’ve sold millions of copies of books that have achieved amazing things in business, in life, Olympic athletes, you name it, billionaires, people in every field, they all suffer from this from time to time. And it just becomes that friend, that friend who’s trying to protect us that we have to learn to have a little conversation with and move on to the next thing. So, let’s move to the way that we self-sabotage number three, planning pitfalls.
So, when we look at planning pitfalls, and we kind of analyze everybody’s answers, it went on one of two extremes. The vast majority of people overplan. And over-planting is a form of procrastination. On the other end, some people are just flying by the seat of their pants, and they realize because they didn’t plan it all, they hit stumbling blocks that they could have anticipated that stop them in their tracks.
So, there are two extremes, like instead of this being a bell curve, this is a U-shaped graph, people who struggle with planning, planning pitfalls as a self-sabotage are either going to one extreme or the other. They’re not planning at all. They don’t think through what they’re going to do. And so, they just stumble into it and they spend a lot of time planning in the moment instead of doing anything, or they’re spending weeks, months, sometimes even years trying to have the perfect plan when the reality is that plan is gonna meet reality very quickly and they’ll have to make adjustments.
So, we have to kind of fall into this middle. Instead of saying, “Just one more thing, I just need to do one more thing and then I’ll be ready,” we have to kind of flip that. “What do I need to know to go back to the first step?” You hear that again? It’s gonna show up a lot because planning and learning go hand in hand. Like I need to know more, I need to have it better laid out, whatever that case is, we can always keep adding to that pile without doing anything.
So, we wanna step past that and get into a minimum viable action. We call it the First Domino. What’s that small step that I can get started? What’s the plan I need to make that happen? I’ll tell you, 90% of the time, you need to spend about 10 minutes thinking about it and put it on your calendar. So, I need to do… let’s just say I need to make 20 contacts to my database. I can go buy a database, and tag it, and do all the things, or I can say, “You know what, I will do that over time, but right now I just need to pick the first 10 people I’m going to call. I need to have something to say to them. Great. Let’s do that right now. Here’s what I’m going to say. Here are the people that I’m going to reach out to first.” And then, you can pick up your phone in a TCPA-friendly way and go do it.
So, boom, minimum planning to take that first action. And then, after that, you’ll go and go like, “Wow, it would have been really helpful if I had prepared maybe a PDF because I’m talking to them about this event. They said they want more information. And then if I had that, I could have sent them.” So, the next day, you take one extra step based on what you learned the first day, you’re out of this over planning, but you’re actually planning for success. You know the three or four things that you need to know that you need to do in the right order to be successful, and then you execute on it. And as you execute, you will learn even more nuance, but you’re gradually getting better as you go, instead of going for this kind of perfection on the front end.
So, again, this is fundamentally kind of like using extreme Pareto. It’s taking the 80-20 rule. What is the 20% of this that actually matters? And what’s the first step? You’re just going to a success list. What is absolutely the first step of this process? And what do I need to plan for to make that successful? A lot of times, when we chunk it down, man, it gets so much more visible.
Now, one of the other ones might show up, that’s okay, but we’re getting past this planning pitfall. For those handful of you, it was enough for me to actually comment, if you just wanna dive in, you know what? I would rather you err on that side than the other. You will go in and take action and realize you should have planned and have to do it on the spot. But a lot of times, at least, then, you know exactly what you needed to think through, so you can take the next action.
Still, come on, take 15 minutes before you sit down, like if you’re gonna record a reel on social media for your business, if you’re gonna have that important conversation with an attorney or with a client, think through what that conversation needs to do. What will winning look like? 15 minutes of quiet time and preparation can set you up for success. You don’t need 50 hours. 15 minutes will do, and it’s better than zero, all right?
So, planning pitfalls is number three. Before I dive into the second half of this episode, let’s take a quick break, and then we’ll see you on the other side.
Welcome back, folks. Let’s dive into the fourth way that people self-sabotage, and that’s people-pleasing and poor boundaries. This is all about us interacting with folks. So, how does this manifest? A lot of people that show up in our ONE Thing training will raise their hand and say, “This is me, right? I’m a yes person. I’m the parent at PTO that says yes to every single opportunity. And I say yes, before thinking about what’s already on my plate.” A manager that feels like in order to win at work and win with their people, they become kind of a yes person. They support everything instead of doing a big part of their job, which is actually saying no, so that you can focus on the handful of things that actually matter.
If you’re a freelancer or you’re self-employed, a lot of times, this will manifest, the poor boundaries, you actually end up because you’re really trying to make people happy and you’re like really trying to overdeliver, you undervalue you were your work and you over deliver. So, you end up with a client that doesn’t pay you a lot of money that takes up a whole month of your time. So, these boundaries show up in ways that we could have said no or we could have set firmer boundaries, and it shows up all the time.
So, what are some strategies if you suffer from this people-pleasing disease? And we often call it that, it’s not literally one, but people who suffer from it realize that their people-pleasing habits, their poor boundaries are setting them back. And there’s great research that I’ve mentioned from Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take. People who are always giving without boundaries do not end up being the most successful. They might be winning the karma battle, and they’re that person that everybody loves working with, but a lot of times, their career isn’t moving forward because they aren’t, as Jenny Wood would say, being a little bit selfish, right? They’re just kind of guarding some of their own resources, so they can make sure that they’re still moving forward while supporting the people around them.
So, one of the strategies that we use in our coaching is we’ll invite entrepreneurs and leaders to create their not-to-do list. This isn’t just about delegating activities, but what are the things that I might be willing to say yes to in the moment that I know I should not? And then, we create a list because, a lot of times, we know what these things are, right? I know that if I go to the PTA board, I’m so wanting to be seen as a good parent, I’m gonna say, yes, yes, yes, when I really should just maybe only raise my hand once a quarter, right?
So, what are the areas where we tend to say yes, where we know we shouldn’t? A lot of times we can just create a list and that awareness of the things that we need to be saying no to absolutely shows up. And a lot of times we can just tell people, “Hey, I realize I’ve done this in the past. Right now, I’m stretched thin. Can you circle back another time because I really can’t commit to this now?” We have to give ourselves language for saying no. Often, that doesn’t include the word no. It’s not like you’re just saying “No” to your teammates, to your family, to the other people on the boards that you serve on, right? But you’re saying not now or I can’t right now. You’re giving a different kind of explanation.
Here’s a phrase that you can kind of think about. “Hey, I love that idea. I would love to help you. Right now, I have too much on my plate. I’m afraid that if I said yes to this, I would only let you down. So, I’m sorry, I can’t right now.” That’s just a simple explanation for why not now. Did you hear that? It might be that you can do it later. They can say, “Well, great. Can I circle back at the end of the year?” and say, “Great. And if I have free time then, maybe we can do it.” You don’t even have to make the commitment then. You can just say, “Let’s talk about it later.”
And that’s the other one, delay the decision. A lot of times, people will ask us to do something, do something extra that wasn’t in our scope of work for our services. They’ll ask us to do something for them on a personal basis or a professional basis. Buying yourself time is huge. I kind of give my staff this script and I have over the years, “Can I get back to you on Tuesday? Can I just circle back?”
If you have DM’d me on social media, sent me something on LinkedIn, a lot of times, you will get a standard answer if you’re asking me to be on a podcast or do a speech. I’ll be like, “Hey, I’m trying not to make commitments on social media or in my text threads. Can you please drop me an email,” and I’ll share my email, “And I’ll sit down with my calendar and see if I can say yes to this.” I’ve already pre-written it. I just type in a few letters. I literally type in with a capital N and a capital S, no social, and that whole line will show up in my text thread or it’ll show up in my DMs. And that is how I protected myself from having an exciting opportunity in a text thread that I’m afraid that I’ll forget about. So, I need to say yes or no right now. I’m just moving it into the future.
And I’m giving them a task. If it’s really important to them for me to help them out and do this thing, they can go to the trouble of dropping me an email. The vast majority of the time that always happens, I cannot think of a single time I’ve missed an opportunity because I’ve introduced that tiny extra step. So, buy yourself time. Those are clear hacks for kind of saying no in the moment but you’re really saying, “It’s not now. I can’t decide now,” or “I can’t do it now.” Those are the key frames that you can put around saying no and kind of escaping the people pleasing.
Here’s the last little thing that maybe you need to hear is that when you do end up saying no to people, it’s not like they’re gonna stop hanging out with you, it’s not like they’ll never invite you to a party again. Get past the whole FOMO thing, right? There is the joy of missing out too. When you realize that by saying no, you get to have more time with your family, you got to finally unwind and actually relax that weekend, there is real joy on the other side, but it’s not like you’re gonna become a pariah in the office or among your friends because you occasionally say “Not now” or “I can’t right now.”
When you set boundaries, when you say no or not now, you’re not letting people down. It’s actually just the opposite. If you say yes to everybody, you’re going to let everybody down because there’s no way you’re going to give them your full attention and your full abilities if you’re saying yes to every single person. Okay, that’s number four, people pleasing and core boundaries. Let’s talk about number five, distractions.
So, when we think about number five, distractions, the number one way that people distract themselves is their actual phone. You know, we are absolutely tethered to it for most of the day. It’s how a lot of us do our jobs. It’s also how a lot of us manage our personal life. It has become the digital hub for us, the smartphone, for doing so much. And with AI, it’s just getting to be even more.
So, how do we get out of this cycle where interruptions and distractions are constantly derailing our focus time? So, here’s like a few handful of strategies for you. First and foremost, you can’t do it all the time, but when you’re doing that core most important work, maybe you’re lead generating for your business, maybe you’re writing that really special proposal, maybe in your personal life, like you’re reading to your kids, like at bedtime, I need to be fully present right now. When you’re in those moments, and they’re not 24 hours a day, folks, this is just a few hours every day, if you really looked at your calendar, “That is my money time in that area, That’s when I need to be wholly focused,” maybe consider setting your phone aside. Maybe consider setting it on do not disturb.
When I go to the movies, right? If you go to a Broadway play, if your phone starts ringing in the middle of it, they’re going to ask you to leave, or you’re going to be that guy, right? You don’t want to be that guy. So, a lot of us naturally will put our phone on do not disturb when we’re in those areas. Can we learn to do that when we’re doing our most important work? How do we keep that phone from being our number one source of distraction?
I have literally gone to some of the apps that I know I can use as a form of procrastination because I just feel the pull. “Oh, I need to go manage my Instagram DMs.” And it’s not that I’m networking. I’m just not working. Right? That is a key phrase, right? my networking are not working if you use social media for business. Because a lot of times, we go there under the guise of networking, but we’re just not working. We’re scrolling, we’re doom scrolling, whatever. So, put the phone away in those key moments.
And also kind of… you know, like Gary does the three-foot rule, there’s only so many people that can access them all the time. I do some of this by managing who can text me and what shows up in a notification on the Apple phone. The people that are in your favorites can actually break through your Do Not Disturb. And for me, that’s very few people. It’s my direct reports in my family. It’s not everybody. So, I use Do Not Disturb all the time, and there’s very few people that can break through that barrier.
So, distractions, honestly, there’s so many strategies for this. One of the other ones that I’ve heard and I’ve actually practiced and I’ve preached is if you work on a browser, most of us do, I use Chrome, whatever that is, consider having different browsers for different activities. So, if you are doing your work, maybe use Chrome for doing work. And if you’re going to do social media or go check on the news, have that in a separate browser that you can actually shut down or shut down that window with all the tabs.
Having to take those extra steps a lot of times when we’re going to open up for me, it was always all of the fun stuff was on Firefox, right? Or maybe it was on the Microsoft browser, Explorer, whatever that was at that time. My work was over here. Having to do the extra steps to start that up, sometimes I would catch myself. And that prevented me from distracting myself.
So, distractions is the big one. Number one strategy here is to put some boundaries on your phone. You can put time limits on apps. You can even make apps inaccessible at different times of the day. In both the Android phone and the Apple phone, if you go into parental controls, they put these in here for us to manage our teenagers. But guess what? We can also apply those rules to ourselves. Number six and the final one is your environment and triggers. Let’s dive into that now.
Number six, environment and triggers. This is very, very, very much about how we set up our environment. Well, we can design our bunker. You have an office, maybe you have a cubicle. If you’re in a cubicle, you can put on noise-canceling headphones. You can put a sign, I’ve seen people do this on the back of their chair. “Hey, do not disturb, I’m in the middle of an important project.” You can actually, then, also find a space that you can go to where those distractions aren’t. A lot of times, there’s a common space that people aren’t using. If your desk is just too distracting right now, go there. Now, other people might be in an office environment, and they just need to close the door sometimes. So, design your bunker.
I’ll tell you the story of Sarah, who was my EA back in the day. We were working on a book with some fellow co-authors called Hold, and we were near the finish line. And Sarah had agreed to be my EA because she wanted to learn about writing and become a better writer. And she did go on to become a professional writer, by the way. But her job as an EA, she sat outside of my office in a cube and every single person that reported to me, part of her job was to be my gatekeeper, right? To keep people away from me so that I could be focused. So, she tended to be distracted all day long, right? Other departments would swing by, “Hey, I need to invite Jay to this meeting.” Different employees like, “Hey, I need to get this from Jay,” whatever that is. And it was really tough.
What she wanted to do, and we had about four months to do it, was be the person who put all the finishing touches on the book Hold, right? She wanted to be the editor. She wanted to run point on all the final edits, but she needed quiet time to do that. And she wasn’t at a place in her life where she could just work nights and weekends. She needed to do it during the day.
So, the strategy we came up with is we found a space in the office that was underused. At that time, it was literally in the basement, but it was a space that not many people went to. And even though part of her core job was to be at her desk and be responsive, we both agreed that between the hours, I think between 8.30 and 10:30, I knew that she would be in that basement working on the manuscript. And all we did was communicate it to the team. “Hey, I’m in another meeting. I will be away from my desk until 10″30. If it can wait, please come back then or call me if it’s truly an emergency.”
Guess what? 90% of the time, nobody needed to call her because it was actually an emergency. They read the sign, and because she wasn’t there, she couldn’t just, “Hey, it’ll just take a minute,” right? She wasn’t there for that line. They would have to go find her, and she didn’t say where she was. They just waited, and they came back. And when she got back, she got to do her most important work, and she did. She did a great job. That book became a national bestseller. Thank you very much, Sarah. And she was able to do her core job. She just had this one time block where she wasn’t present or as accessible, and she designed it and communicated it, so that nobody ever complained.
So, that’s one extreme. Someone in a job, in a role, in a space that is full of distractions, we were able to engineer a window where she could go to a bunker that did not impact her core job, it did not impact the team, mostly because we communicated it.
Now, do you remember in college when you had to go meet with your professors? What did they do? They had office hours. They had designated times when they would be in their office and also be available. What would happen if you designated two, maybe three times a day, where people knew that you were accessible and you would open the door and invite them in? Now, they would have to think about it. They would have planned for it and they would show up. Maybe they had to wait a couple of hours, but they don’t have to wait days. So, there’s not a long delay, but they still get access to you. But in between those times, you get access to your own focus time to do your work.
And so rolling that out, we’ve done it hundreds of times with different clients. A lot of times that works. Again, if like Sarah, you don’t self-sabotage and keep opening the door because you see someone. So, figure out that balance between accessibility and focus time, and then go for a trial run. And you often have to communicate this. The people who have the power to knock on your door, you have to tell them why it’s really not gonna work.
You know, we do this with our kids. We basically negotiate and bribe, but at work, it’d be like, “Hey, I’ve got to do my core job or all of us are at risk, right? I’m the boss. And if I’m failing, we’re all failing. So, I need your support. I’m going to have these periods of time where I’m not going to be as accessible.” Obviously, if it’s bleeding or as my mom would say, “If it’s bleeding or on fire, if there’s smoke or blood, call me. Otherwise, deal with it.” So, whatever your language would be around that, find a rule where it has to hit a certain threshold for them to break through your bunker. I promise you, it won’t all fall apart without you.
Just like with Sarah, a lot of managers, one of the things they love best is kind of riding in on their white horse to help people. And that is a form of self-sabotage. Because, one, we’re doing their job for them. And in some ways, we’re also communicating to them that they can’t do it because we’re always doing it for them, right? So, instead of empowering them and enabling them to grow, think through their own problems, we’re actually sabotaging that learning process. By giving them space to think about it before they come to you, guess what?
This individual I’m talking about discovered a lot of them when they sat down to define the problem that they were gonna bring to him instead of just walking into his office and talking about it, they realized they knew the answer. But they hadn’t even thought long enough. They just wanted to bring it to him because he had trained them into this weird codependent state.
So, both extremes, you have a door that you can close, but you’ve made yourself overly accessible or maybe you’re in an environment and you need to go to a place that’s protected. Either way is a solid strategy for dealing with your environment. It’s all about your bunker. How can you design a space where at a minimum, a couple of hours a day, you can do that focused work that you know is going to propel you closer to your goals?
So, that is the six areas that we identified as the ways that people self-sabotage. I realize because they tie back to environment and inability to say no and the different things that there is some overlap. You look up and number one, we know what we need to do, but we’re just avoiding it, right? And we’re doing all kinds of things to justify high standards and overlearning to justify why we’re putting it into the future.
Number two, we have self-doubt. We have all this negative self-talk that gets in the way. And we have to kind of move past that by tricking ourselves into reminding ourselves that failure is just feedback and that we can actually just take a smaller step and we don’t have to shut down or we can do some of those great ADHD strategies that Tyler Elstrom shared with us in his episode. Bring someone else in, right? Give ourselves a reward. What are the different things that we can do?
We also have the planning pitfalls. Overplanning or completely not planning can both shut us down. Then, we have the people pleasing, right? We have poor boundaries. Are we able to actually say no, or at least not now when we need to, so that we can protect the time that we need to protect to get the activities done we need to get done so we can do the things we need to do in order to reach our goals, right? They’re all tied together.
Five, we talked about distractions. This is almost always people distracting us or us distracting ourselves. And we nailed that one really hard. Phone is number one. Can we keep that distraction out of the way? And the last one is about the place, right? Our environment and the triggers in it are constantly distracting us, gave you a few strategies there. Hopefully, one of those is one that you can lock into and you can absolutely implement. And speaking of which, I think it’s time for us to talk about our challenge.
So, to wrap this up and give you your challenge, remember, self-sabotage is not a character flaw. Nothing’s broken with you. The sheer fact that so many people, when you ask them, what’s the number one you self-sabotage, they know the answer, just like that. We all suffer from this. We all get in our own way, and we do it in our own unique ways. So, there’s nothing wrong with you, but these are habits of self-distraction and self-sabotage, and habits can be adjusted over time. It won’t change overnight, but we can make small adjustments that can make a big difference over time, which brings us to our challenge.
Remember, environment is kind of the twofer of the thieves, right? If we design our environment correctly, it can say no to people, right? Because people can’t find us, we’re not in a place where there’s a high traffic area, and we can also design our environment so that we’re not distracting ourselves, right? It is set up for productivity. So, the challenge this week, pick one area of your environment, your workspace, your phone settings, maybe your daily routine, and make one adjustment. You’re picking one area of your environment, you’re gonna make one change that will help you be more successful and prevent self-sabotage.
That is your assignment for the week. It’s as small as I can make it. One change in one area, and guess what? After you do that for a while, you can go back and do another change. And you can build it a little bit at a time until you’ve found the bunker that protects you from so many of these self-sabotages.
Now, next week, I’m gonna do another solo episode and I’m gonna revisit one of our most popular topics, busyness, right? It shows up all the time when we’re meeting with people and talking about how they are in some ways getting in their own way because of their approach to things, their belief that busyness is the answer, is actually getting in their way. So, busyness is the topic again next week. Lots of new facts and new research to bring to bear. I will see you next week.
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