#18: There is no such thing as self-sabotage
Do you have a battle going on inside every time you try to achieve something important - a battle between the part of you that's trying to do well and your inner saboteur, who is determined to mess things up for you? Have you ever wondered why you work against yourself in this way? I mean, it's exhausting, right?
The answer, my imperfect friends, is that your inner saboteur isn't a saboteur at all - at least, not intentionally. She wants you to do well. It's just that she's afraid of what might happen if you do. If you want to go places, doing battle with her isn't the answer. You need to tune in to your inner saboteur, work out what makes her tick, and then get her on side. I'm going to show you how.
Download your Self-Sabotage Worksheet here.
Episode transcript:
Do you feel like you're constantly fighting an inner battle between the part of yourself that wants to do well and the part that's determined to mess things up for yourself? That's actually not what's happening at all.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Something of a clickbaity episode title this week - sorry about that. I mean it, though: there really is no such thing as self-sabotage - though like a good marketer, I’ll add: conditions apply. I want to share with you a realisation that revolutionised the way I deal with my own writing anxiety, and which has shaped the way that I’ve approached helping my coaching clients.
The way we often think about ourselves, and how we work towards (or don’t work towards) our goals is all wrong. We view inner lives as a battle ground: between the part of us that’s trying to realise our goals and the part that’s sabotaging our progress, between the part of us that’s trying to believe in ourselves and our inner critic, between the part that just wants to be happy and have a nice life and the part that keeps throwing one grenade after another in front of us, destroying the things we care about. As if getting what we want in life isn’t difficult enough without having to fight an enemy within.
I remember thinking this way in the past, and being puzzled by it. I really, really, really wanted to finish the book that I was writing (and, which, ahem, I’m still writing), but every time I sat down to work on it, I found that I’d do anything to avoid it. It was like there was some force inside me that was pushing me away from it, which would immediately start urgently looking around for a distraction whenever I opened the document. I couldn’t understand it. Why was I - the very same person who really wanted to get this thing finished, and who was constantly stressed out by the fact that it wasn’t finished - stopping myself from making progress? Why was I standing in my own way? Why was I sabotaging myself? What was in it for me?
The answer, I realised eventually, was that I wasn’t sabotaging myself. Or, at least, I wasn’t intending to. Strange as it may sound, the part of me that wanted to finish the book and my inner saboteur - the part of me that was stopping myself from working on the book - ultimately wanted the same thing: they both wanted me to be happy. They just disagreed about how to get there. The part of me that wanted to finish my book knew that finishing my book is important to me: I’ll be happy when it’s done, and so will my publishers, my agent, my employer, and anyone else who’s listened to me banging on about it over the last few years. It will be a huge weight off my mind, and a relief not to have to think about it any more. Finishing my book is an important goal for me. However. My inner saboteur is worried. Making progress on my book is dangerous. It involves writing things down, things that might be wrong. It involves writing on a topic about which I can always read a bit more. It involves discussing the views of other people whose ideas I might inadvertently misrepresent. It involves not discussing the ideas of other people who I really should be discussing, but don’t realise. It involves producing something that might ultimately disappoint people. My inner saboteur is not trying to sabotage me for fun. She’s not really trying to sabotage me at all. She’s just trying to protect me.
When I think about my own experiences with self-sabotage, problems with writing are the main things that come to mind. But you might experience it differently. Perhaps there’s some change in your life that you really want to make, but you keep finding excuses not to make it. Perhaps you don’t get important things done because you’re constantly glued to your phone. Perhaps your personal relationships suffer because you don’t make the effort needed to nurture them, or because you behave in a way that you know is unreasonable. The same applies. None of this is really self-sabotage. You’re not intentionally working against yourself. You really do want the best for yourself. You’re just clumsy in the way you go about it - you keep tripping yourself up.
Now, why is this realisation important? Well, it changes the way that we can address the problem, move out of our own way, and get to where we want to be. When we take the ‘battle ground’ view of our own inner lives - you know, the one where there’s a part of us that’s trying to achieve our goals and another part that’s doing everything she can to stop us - achieving what we want to achieve becomes a battle of wills, where making progress towards our goals is a matter of locking horns with our inner saboteur, trying to outwit her, hoping that we’re stronger than her. It’s exhausting. It’s like swimming against a tide. And while we’re battling that part of ourselves, of course, we’re still having to contend with all the external obstacles that stand in our way - obstacles like finding enough time to work on what’s important to us, fending off demands from other people, and picking ourselves up and trying something new when we don’t meet with immediate success. Wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have an enemy on the inside?
The good news is that you don’t. And because you don’t - because you’re not intentionally working against your own progress - getting what you want doesn’t have to be a matter of doing battle with yourself. In fact, doing battle with yourself really isn’t the most effective and efficient way to overcome the obstacles you’re creating for yourself. Instead, you need to give your inner saboteur what she wants. That can be tricky. It’s not always easy to work out what she wants, especially if you’ve spent a long time assuming that all she wants is to see you fail. You’re going to have to tune in to that part of yourself and listen to it in a way that you might not have done before. Make friends with her. Give her a name, if you like. Take, as your starting point, the insight that she’s really not trying to sabotage you, and ask yourself the following question: Why is this part of me standing in my way, given that she wants the best for me?
The details of the answer to that question are going to depend on your individual circumstances. Here are two further questions you can ask to help you home in on the answer. One is: What is my inner saboteur trying to hold on to? And the other is: What is she afraid will happen if I succeed? In my own case, with my writing anxiety, I realised that a big part of what was holding me back was a fear that completing my book and encountering criticism of it would undermine my hard-earned confidence in my own abilities. What if sending out my completed and very imperfect book into the world destroys me? So, my main reason for holding myself back from making progress on my book is linked to a fear that something bad will happen when I do. By contrast, one of my clients who is also struggling to complete a book has a holding-on reason for not progressing. She thinks that, when she finishes her book, she’ll no longer be an early-career researcher, and for various reasons she’s afraid of that. So, she’s lingering over her book because she wants to hold on to certain aspects of her life that she sees as linked to not having finished it.
Have a think about your own reasons for not making progress towards something that’s important to you. Is there something you’re trying to hold on to? Or is there something you’re afraid will happen? Perhaps it’s a combination of both. I’ve created a self-sabotage worksheet to help you process all these questions - there’s a download link in the episode notes, and also on the ‘Resources’ page of my website. Bear in mind that this sort of probing into your motivations for holding yourself back is an ongoing process. If you spend 10 minutes after listening to this episode working through my self-sabotage worksheet, you’ll be able to come up with some important insights about why you’re having trouble making progress, but you’ll probably find that more thoughts will spring to mind over the next few weeks and months. Beginning to think seriously about your real motivations for self-sabotage might, for you, involve switching to thinking in a new way about yourself, and your understanding of yourself will increase with time. For that reason, you might want to revisit the self-sabotage worksheet every month or so at first, just to check in with yourself and reflect on what’s going on inside.
After you’ve identified what’s motivating your inner saboteur - what it is that she’s afraid of, or what she’s trying to hold on to, your next question is: What would I need to believe in order for this not to be a problem? And this question, really, is all about how you can work with, rather than against, that part of yourself that is holding you back. Let’s say that, like me, you’re progressing more slowly than you’d like because you’re afraid that finishing what you set out to achieve is going to leave you open to criticism and disapproval. What would you need to believe in order for that not to be a problem - in order for it not to hold you back? For me, one possible answer is: I’d need to be confident that I wouldn’t attract any criticism or disapproval when I publish my book, and perhaps that the reception will be overwhelmingly positive. Another possible answer - perhaps a more realistic one - is: I’d need to believe that, although some people might criticise my book, many others will appreciate it, and the satisfaction of being appreciated by those people is going to mean that the occasional criticism is not a problem. Or: I’d need to believe that being criticised or disapproved of doesn’t matter - I’ve faced that in the past, and yet here I am, still standing, and still believing in myself. If you have trouble with this question, try approaching it in a different way. If it was your best friend who was afraid of the thing that you’re afraid of, what would you say to her about it? What advice would you give her? It can be useful to think of it like this because, often (and depressingly), we find it easier to be compassionate and supportive to other people than to ourselves.
When you address this question - What would I need to believe in order for this, my inner saboteur’s worry, not to be a problem? - you might find that something interesting happens. You might find that, having articulated what it is that your inner saboteur is worried about, you’re immediately able to recognise it as not a problem. In other words, just the exercise of articulating the worry might cause it to dissolve, just as turning on a light in a dark room causes those ominous-looking shadows to dissolve. Our anxieties thrive in the shadows; they grow when we hide from them, when we fail to look them in the face and articulate them precisely. So, for example, perhaps, after having a think about what it is that your inner saboteur is worried about, you realise that you’re afraid that being successful will make you unlovable. Your immediate response might be: That’s ridiculous, of course being successful doesn’t make anyone unlovable. That sort of quick-fix dissolution of the problem does sometimes happen, although it often doesn’t, so be patient. Another thing that might happen is that you might realise that your inner saboteur’s worry is linked to some specific past experience that upset you, but which has led you to make inappropriate generalisations. So, perhaps, having realised that you’re worried that being successful will make you unlovable, you’re able to trace this back to a time when your success resulted in you being rejected. You might have had friends or romantic partners who were insecure and jealous of your success, and who turned their back on you when you did well. Or maybe someone once told you to beware of shining too brightly, and that advice left an impression on you. Don’t be surprised if you’re able to recognise, rationally, that the problem was not your success but other people’s inability to deal with it - but emotionally, you find it hard to shake the feeling of anxiety that arises from it. This is normal. Our emotions take time to adjust.
Instead of locking horns and doing battle with your inner saboteur, you need to reason with her. She’s a worrier. She can be a bit neurotic. Be patient with her - she’ll come round eventually. What can you tell her that will help her worry less? Perhaps you can point to some of the successful-yet-lovable people you know. Perhaps you can recall times when your success was met with joy and celebration. Perhaps you can reinterpret some of your past experiences with success - times when your anxiety led you to read disappointment and disapproval in the reactions of people who really weren’t reacting that way at all. Every time you do things like this, you help reassure your inner saboteur. And the more you reassure her, the less she’ll stand in your way.
Whatever it is that you decide you need to believe in order for your inner saboteur’s anxiety not to cause problems for you, try to capture it in a single sentence, or a picture, or an object, or a memory. Something succinct that you can look at or bring to mind when you feel that resistance that comes with trying to hold yourself back. This works like handing your inner saboteur a comfort blanket - or a shot of whiskey, whatever it is that’s going to calm her down. Importantly, when you do feel that resistance, don’t think of it as an obstacle that you need to tire yourself out by pushing against. Think of it, instead, as a sign that you need to take a second to check in with yourself, acknowledge any anxiety that you’re feeling, give yourself a hug (perhaps just figuratively), and then carry on. There is no part of you that doesn’t want the best for you.
Now before I go, do you have an idea for an episode of The Academic Imperfectionist? What challenges are you facing that you could do with some help with? Please drop me a line and let me know. You can use the contact form on my website, or tweet your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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