This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 106: Why Do We Self-Sabotage?

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today’s episode is really hard for me to talk about, but I need to talk about it. Self-sabotage, that thing where we consciously or unconsciously stop ourselves from reaching our true success, our true potential, or even simply doing what it is we actually want to be doing.

We’ve talked a little bit about self-sabotage on the show before, notably back in the episode about fear of success, which was episode number 83, if you want to go back and listen to it. That was also a really difficult topic to talk about because I worry that it’s not universal. I want to keep this show accessible to everyone and for everyone, but even right now, as those words are coming out of my mouth, I remember the advice that I give to people, and that is, the things you create are not for everyone, and that is okay.

And I created the episode about a fear of success to help people process a fear of success, if that is something that they were struggling with. And similarly, today’s episode about why it is we self-sabotage might not apply to everyone. If you’ve never gotten in your own way, if you’ve never found yourself thinking, “Why am I not doing A, B, or C,” then this might not be the episode for you, and that’s okay. But if you have ever found yourself thinking, “What am I doing? Why did I keep myself from being happy? Why did I not write tonight? How did I let my time get away from me? Why did I not ask for that promotion? Why did I not submit my manuscript when it was done two years ago?”

If you’ve ever gotten in your own way, that’s what we’re talking about today, when we do things consciously or, often, unconsciously that hurt us or that keep us back or that keep us down. Again, I do this all the time, and it’s very frustrating. And most of the time, I find myself asking, “Why am I like this?” Well, there’s an answer. It’s maybe not an easy answer or a pleasant one, but there is an answer for why we don’t live out our full potential, why we don’t allow ourselves to shine.

And I talked about this topic a little bit in episode 83, about the fear of success, because there is an element of fear wrapped up in it, but I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. Here’s an example. This is the final episode that I’m recording in the year 2020. And so, looking back over the year, this was going to be the year that I wrote, produced, all of that stuff for season two of my fictional podcast, Girl in Space.

I had a plan. I was going to write up until June and then July, August, September was going to be for recording and then beginning dialogue editing. And then it was going to release in November. Notice I say “was,” because on the day I’m recording this, December 30th of 2020, I am currently on episode four of season two. Not recording, not dialogue editing, I’m still writing it. “But Sarah,” you might say, “you have had 12 months to write 12 episodes. 12 episodes that, after all is said and done, comes out to 30 minutes apiece. How hard can it be?”

This is why we are talking about self-sabotage today because I got in my own way in so many ways, but mostly, I am the queen of putting things off. I am the emperor of procrastination. I will let my emails build up and build up and build up until there are hundreds of them and it is a Herculean task to get through and respond to all of them. Similarly, if something is daunting or scary, I put it off and I say, “Well, I’ll get to writing Girl in Space season two after I tackle all these emails,” or, “after I do my finances for the month,” or, “after I wash this mountain of dishes,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s always something that we can be doing instead of writing. And I guarantee, I am always leaning toward that other thing.

Sometimes it even gets tricky, and my procrastination shows up as something else. It disguises itself. Sometimes I’ll say, “Okay, I set aside this time to write. It is now time to write, but I’m feeling a little tired, and maybe I should lay down and take a nap,” or, “maybe I should rest,” or, “maybe I should do something else, because that’s self-care and self-care is good, and who am I to deny myself self-care? I probably need it.” Sometimes I do need it, but sometimes I don’t. And part of my own particular brand of self-sabotage is not knowing when that is. And especially if I know that I could and should be writing, putting it off anyway.

I recently ran across another way in which I self-sabotage. I was invited to write a story for an anthology type of thing. I know. I’m being very, very vague on purpose, and I was very honored and very flattered to receive this invitation. And I said, “Oh my gosh. I would love to do this. When are stories due?” And they gave me the date when the story would be due. And every day up until that due date, I put it off. “Oh, I’ll work on this tomorrow. Oh, I don’t have the creative energy to work on this right now. Oh, I should be writing season two of Girl in Space,” or, “Oh, I should be answering my mountain of emails.” And the really, really sad thing is, is that the night before the due date, I emailed these wonderful, amazing people and I said, “I’m so sorry. I’ve let you down. I’m not going to be able to submit a story.”

Missing a deadline is classic self-sabotage. It’s interesting. I recently heard Neil Gaiman speak about a very similar thing. He was invited to write a story for something, probably something very important and prestigious, and he hemmed and hawed over it until, I think, 24 hours before the story was due. And he emailed his editor, or whoever was putting the project together and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m not going to be able to submit this story.” And in this case, the editor for this project said, “Neil, I bet you can still do it. I’m really sorry to hear that you can’t, but another writer did their story in 12 hours.” So, and of course, Neil Gaiman took that as a challenge and very triumphantly wrote and submitted an award-winning short story within 12 hours.

Hearing that story about Neil Gaiman in such a similar situation makes me feel really ashamed, and it fills me with regret. I could have been part of something really cool, and I could have proven to myself that I could meet a deadline, and I could have done… Fill in the blank. All of the good things that would have come from not missing the deadline, from not self-sabotaging, but I self-sabotaged. I got in my own way. I kept myself down. I dimmed my light.

How do you sabotage yourself as a writer or even a human being? Do you not ask for raises and promotions at work? Do you stay in bad or toxic relationships? Do you binge-eat unhealthy things and break your streak at the gym? Do you binge Netflix instead of working on your homework, or your presentation, or your report? I am not saying that good things are bad. I am not saying that comfort food is bad. I am not saying that watching Netflix is bad. I’m not saying that going for a walk when you need a break or taking a nap when you need a break is bad. I’m talking about that spasm, that twinge of guilt that you feel when you choose to do one thing, but you know that you really should be working on something else, when you dismiss your own best interest, when you understand perfectly well what success means for you and what your goals are, and then you screw it all up.

Again, sometimes this is fear-based. I talked in episode 83 about fear of success being very similar to, if not often mistaken for, a fear of change, a fear of growth, a fear of becoming something different, a fear of having to meet expectations that seem really challenging.

Years ago, I read a book that completely changed my life, and it’s one of those books that every time I reread it, it changes my life all over again. It’s called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, and at its core, it is all about self-sabotage.

And I didn’t realize this the first time I read it. The first time I read the book, it was with a mastermind group and I was going through this thing, this phase, this time in my life where I thought I knew everything, and I thought I knew best, and so anytime someone put a self-help book in front of me, I would roll my eyes and say, “Okay. Yeah, I’ll read it, but I won’t absorb it,” or, “I won’t believe it,” or, “I won’t take it to heart.” Maybe we’ve all been through a phase like that, but I read it, and surprisingly, I had some takeaways, and I was like, “Oh, okay. This book wasn’t a complete waste of my time.”

Years later, there was something just pinging me in my brain, and I returned to the book, and I re-read the whole thing. And the book asks a lot of questions, and it asks you to write down this and this and think about why you do this. And I actually took it seriously, and I journaled along with the entire book. I got a copy on audiobook and I just sort of journaled along, and I paused it whenever a question was asked, and I would actually put time and thought into my responses.

And I think this is why the book was so meaningful to me. This is when the book changed my life. And then I read it again recently, and it did the same thing all over again, because I’m in a different phase of my life now, and I get in my way in different ways.

But what really struck me the very first time that I read it, that takeaway I had, was about this concept of an internal thermostat. Gay Hendricks proposes in the book that we all have a certain level of comfort, and that’s our internal thermostat, and if we ever start to go above that comfort into true joy and happiness and fulfillment, we sabotage ourselves to bring ourselves consciously or unconsciously back down into our comfort zone, back to wherever it is our thermostat has been set. Gay Hendricks calls this our upper limit problem, our ULP, and it’s a barrier that is based in four beliefs.

And I’m not going to recite the entire book to you, because it’s completely worth reading. I suggest that you do get a copy of The Big Leap if you don’t have one already, or if you haven’t read it already. There are these four barriers, four ways, four reasons that we sabotage ourselves and deny ourselves the highest level of joy, comfort, success, all of the good things. And you may experience one, two, three, or all four of these barriers. For me personally, it was two of them that stuck out to me. But for you, it may be one or two or three or all of them, or maybe none of them. Again, like I said in the beginning of this episode, maybe you don’t sabotage yourself, in which case I want to hear how and why, because I want to learn from you. So, go over to the comments for today’s episode, episode number 106, out at sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com, and tell me about how you stopped sabotaging yourself, because I want to know. I also want to hear from those of you who do sabotage yourselves, and we’ll talk about that in just a little bit.

Those four barriers. Number one, feeling fundamentally flawed or bad. This is essentially low self-esteem and a negative perception of yourself. This is maybe when you have a lot of self-talk that says, “Oh, I’m such a loser. Oh, I’m a rotten person. Oh, I’m no one. I don’t deserve success. Who am I to call myself a writer? I’m no good and I never will be. No one will ever like what you create.” So, essentially, you believe that you are worthless, and either consciously or unconsciously, you will behave in ways that affirm your negative beliefs about yourself. You give your inner critic a chance to say, “I told you so. You should have played it safe and stayed small.”

This is often accompanied by the fear of failure and the fear of success, both of them at the same time. You’re consciously afraid of failure, and so you keep yourself small. You keep yourself playing small so that when you fail, you fail small. Simultaneously, you have a fear of success. You have a fear of reaching over that internal thermostat. You have a fear that if you try and reach, you simply are not good enough. And you think, “There’s something wrong with me. I’m not really that good.”

Saying all of those negative things, reciting all of that negative self-talk, really felt heavy for me there. And actually, if you find yourself doing a lot of negative self-talk, I actually have an episode of the Write Now podcast for you. It’s episode 61, and it’s called Self-Writing and Self-Talk. I encourage you to give that a listen if you really identify with this type of self-sabotage.

Barrier number two. Again, these come from Gay Hendricks. I don’t want to take credit for his work. But barrier number two is disloyalty and abandonment. And wow, this one really punched me in the face. Basically, the thought here is that you can’t fully expand into joy and success and greatness because I will leave people behind, important people who mean a lot to me. I will be disloyal to my roots, and ultimately, I will end up alone. This comes with a certain degree of guilt as you begin to gain success, as you begin to live more fully into your creative life, and with this, perhaps, comes the sense that your life is not fully your own, and that you need other people’s approval and validation to go down the path that you were meant to go on.

And wow, this one really spoke to me, and here’s a direct quote from the book that I wrote down in my journal and I still reference. Regarding barrier number two, the book says, “Guilt makes you put on the brakes, holding yourself back from finding more success and keeping you from enjoying the success you have. You follow breakthroughs of success with bouts of self-punishment,” or, as I call it, self-sabotage. You’ve maybe heard someone say that it’s lonely at the top. You may have equated self-sabotage with self-preservation. You might be terrified that it’s not you abandoning them, it’s them abandoning you.

I remember when I first landed my TV deal, I told a small handful of friends about it just because I was so excited, and I remember many friends were overjoyed and they were like, “Oh my gosh. Congratulations. This is huge.” But I remember one friend looked at me and said, “Oh, does this mean you’re too good for me now? Are you going to go to Hollywood and change?” And that hurt. Oh my gosh. I had no idea how to respond to it, so I just kind of laughed and said, “No, I’ll still be me. I won’t change.”

But I want you to ask yourself, is that the sort of reaction that you would get from your friends and family? Is that the sort of reaction you think you would get from your friends and family? Are you keeping yourself small for them? Are you sabotaging yourself for them?

Barrier number three is the false equation of thinking that more success equals more burden. And what he means by this in the book is that you think of yourself as a burden, and Gay Hendricks puts it like this. He says, “When you think this, your mantra is, ‘I can’t expand to my highest potential because I’d be an even bigger burden than I am now.'” I feel like this one is very personal for the author because he talks about a very personal story where his mother made it very clear to him as a child that he was a huge burden on her life, and he talks about convicting himself of that crime. And he says, “By my thirties, I began to wake up and realize that most of the guilt I felt was for crimes I had not committed.”

This one resonated with me a little bit less personally, but I’ve talked to a lot of writers who have read The Big Leap and that’s the one that sticks out for them. And so, again, some of these may resonate with you, all of them, none of them, whatever it is for you. But that third barrier is thinking that success will make you an even bigger burden on the ones that you love, and that can lead to very self-destructive and self-sabotaging behavior.

Finally, barrier number four, the crime of outshining. Essentially, this is where you are told, either verbatim or a little bit more subtly, not to outshine someone else because you’ll make them feel bad, or in other words, you’re told to tone down your genius so that others don’t feel threatened by you. Have you ever been told that, especially as a child? “Don’t go showing your art project to everyone. Keep it to yourself. They’ll feel bad. Don’t show anyone else your report card. That’s gloating, that’s boasting, and it makes other people feel bad. Don’t show off. Don’t sing so loudly and so wonderfully. Tone it down a little bit. Don’t show up the other ballet dancers. Keep yourself humble.”

The ballet dancer thing aside, I heard all of this so much growing up that I really learned to keep my work to myself. I would write a poem or a novel, and I would file it away in a drawer or write it in a notebook, put the book on my shelf, never show it to anybody, because I was told that when you make great things, it makes other people feel bad, and that you shouldn’t talk about all the A’s on your report card because it makes other people feel bad. Even right now, as I’m telling you this, even though I know that it might resonate with you, I’m like, “Oh, I shouldn’t tell people this because they’re going to think I’m a snob and that I’m trying to outshine them.” What, because I got A’s on my report card when I was in second grade? Big deal. And maybe even that’s downplaying it. I have no idea. I am so deep into this one, I can’t even see it or rationalize it.

Now, barrier number four has an alternate sort of manifestation, and I’ll quote again from the book here. “Alternately, people with this barrier find success but turn down their enjoyment of it. If they appear to be suffering, they can get empathy and sympathy from others instead of jealousy and resentment.” So, there are two types of self-sabotage going on here. The first one is hiding your work or not doing the work at all, hiding your artistic talent, not singing, not dancing, not painting, but then there’s also sabotaging your enjoyment of it, brushing off compliments, subconsciously making your work and your life harder so that you don’t feel superior to anyone so that you’re not tempted to gloat so that you’re not tempted to experience a life full of joy.

These four barriers, these four limiting beliefs that are in our way, these are some potential root causes for why we sabotage ourselves. I’m curious to know, did any of these resonate with you? I would love to hear your thoughts over in the show notes for today’s episode at sarahwerner.com. If you scroll down to the bottom of the post, there’s a place for comments, and I would love to have a conversation there with you about what we’re talking about.

What does it mean for us if we don’t put our tendencies to self-sabotage in check? I think honestly, to put it bluntly, it leads to diminished potential. It leads to a less satisfied creative existence. It leads to regret and maybe even some resentment.

These are some really, really big things that we’ve been talking about. These are huge underlying themes of our lives that have maybe been implanted into us even as we were children, and it’s not going to be something that, “Oh, I’ll drink a soda and have a good cry, and then I’ll be over it, and I can move on and be happy forever.” I don’t know where I got that weird example of drinking a soda and crying, but that’s just the first thing that came to mind. But what I’m saying is, once you realize why it is you’re sabotaging yourself, once you acknowledge it, then you can begin to move forward.

For me, I started by acknowledging. I did a little bit of journaling. I did not have a soda and cry about it, but I did some extensive journaling about unearthing the history behind each of the barriers that spoke to me. I wrote about the memories that surfaced. I wrote about the ways that I was trying to protect myself, because, like I’ve said before, change, even good, positive change, can be scary and uncomfortable.

The first step is acknowledging. The second step, I think, is being aware of how you sabotage yourself. I had to call myself out the other day. I was sitting at my desk in my office, and I was nervous about writing that morning, because I was going to be tackling a scene that I didn’t quite feel prepared to tackle, and I still had a lot of uncertainty about it. And it felt like that E.L. Doctorow quote where he talks about working on this part of the story is like driving through a thick fog with only one headlight. Every foot that you move, every inch forward, is so hard, and I really didn’t want to face that. And so I was like, “Well, I’ll just put this off for now. And, oh, I’ll do something useful and check my email.”

And I opened up my email, and immediately, when I hit the little Gmail button in my favorites bar, I immediately closed out of my internet browser, and I said, “Wait a minute. This is self-sabotage, and I don’t actually want to be checking my email. I am simply avoiding a difficult challenge.”

Be aware of your methods. Understand what triggers you. Understand what sends you into self-sabotaging mode. You can also have a friend who calls you out on it. This is one of my favorite things about being friends with other creators. They will text me and say, “Hey, Sarah, what are you doing today?” And I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m just taking care of some emails before I start writing.” And they’re like, “Is there a reason you’re doing emails before writing? Are you avoiding your writing? Are you sabotaging yourself?” And I’ll be like, “Ah, I’m under attack, but thank you. Thank you for calling me out on my crap.”

Finally, make small changes. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the habit-building technique of getting 1% better every day, but as far as I know, it goes back to James Clear, and he talks about how transformation doesn’t come in a giant explosion. You’re transformed every day in those tiny steps, inch by inch, a cumulative, and as always, give yourself a lot of patience and grace along the way. These are huge things that we’re dealing with. Like in the Pixar movie Inside Out, a lot of these are core memories for us. A lot of the negative self-talk, a lot of the fear of outshining, a lot of the fear of abandoning your tribe or being abandoned, the fear of being a burden, a lot of that is so deep within our personality, it’s like a fundamental building block of who we are.

And like I said earlier, you’re not going to just whisk that away in an afternoon, but you can change your behavior. You can recognize when you start to self-sabotage, and you can stop. You can realize halfway to checking your email, “This isn’t what I want to be doing.” You can turn around. You can pull that novel out of the drawer and dust it off and submit it. You can do all of these things.

Like I said at the very beginning of this episode, talking about self-sabotage is so difficult because I feel like it manifests differently for everyone, and it also… It comes from a very deeply personal place for each and every one of us. But I hope that this was helpful. I also hope that you pick up a copy of The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks and that you give it a read.

I don’t know. Maybe it just hit me at the right time. Maybe it really is a magical piece of work that will help transform your life. Either way, I would love to know your thoughts about this episode, about The Big Leap. Once again, you can do that out at sarahwerner.com. I invite you to scroll down to the bottom of the show notes and let me know your thoughts. I respond to each and every comment I receive on my website. So, please do engage with me there.

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Special thanks this week go out to Amanda Dickson, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, TJ Bricke, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Ricardo Lugo, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you all, as always, so much for your thoughtful and generous patronage. I truly appreciate it.

And with that, this has been episode 106 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I am trying to get over my tendency to self-sabotage.