The Hidden Hurdles of Success: Understanding Self-Sabotage

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Sabotage might blow up your entire business, or it can be a slow and steady decline or, more so, a slow and steady stagnation.

Speaker 2: 0:16

You’re tuning into the Confident, Connected Leader podcast, your premier destination for breaking through your current professional barriers. Your coach and host, Lisa Jeffs, will help you transcend limitations and achieve new levels of professional success beyond self-doubt, sabotage and burnout. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: 0:42

Welcome to the Confident Connected Leader podcast. I’m your host, lisa Jeffs, and today we are talking about one of my favorite subjects, one of my favorite subjects to teach about, to help eliminate from people’s lives sabotage. And really interesting fact and please don’t fact-check me on this, because I quickly googled it before this, so it may not be completely accurate, but what I googled was that sabotage comes from the French word sabote I hope I pronounced that right and apparently it was derived from industrial workers throwing wooden shoes in machinery to sabotage the work environment. And I forgive me because I can’t remember exactly why, but I’m sure it was working conditions that weren’t great.

But this goes into, you know, sabotage is really about you know, kind of blowing up and not in a good way our own progress, and I’m going to talk specifically about sabotaging. You know, leadership, whether you are, you know, leading a team, leading a project, leading a mission, or it’s your own vision that you’re simply sabotaging. I want to talk a little bit about why that happens, because you really got to see sabotage in a new light, without the self-blame and the shame and guilt and all those really lower vibrational emotions that can go with sabotage. I’m happy that sabotage is talked about more often now and it’s not such a hush-hush thing that people are so filled with so much shame about During the pandemic, I believe, or slightly before then. I have a blog on my site and it just blew up with hits. It was the most visited blog on my entire site and I knew that there was a need for support because, for me, one of my reasons why I love talking about and love supporting people and supporting clients with sabotage is because I’ve been through my own. In fact, it’s one of the what I use in my practice.

When we look at the shadow archetypes and we can get deeper into that in another episode but shadow archetypes such as the saboteur, such as the victim, the martyr, these are all aspects, shadow aspects that can reside within us, and for myself, the saboteur was always the one that was very prominent. Those of you who aren’t familiar with my story my saboteur came in guns blazing at the height of an expansion in my business. It was I had had my best year financially and just in general, and my next year was set to be about five times as expansive. And I remember a moment in my bathtub where I literally felt like I was contracting. I just felt like I was going inward. My energy was completely contracted and it felt like I had bricks on my legs and I knew that I was going to have challenges moving forward, that my saboteur was coming out to play. So let’s talk about why the saboteur comes out, why you may be sabotaging your growth forward, and this can come at any point in your journey. Often it comes at a point where you wouldn’t expect it to. It doesn’t always come at the beginning. A lot of times at the beginning we feel safer because we really haven’t stretched out of our safety zone. So the safety zone or the safety line is a reference that I refer to as anything within the safety zone or anything within below the safety line.

At or below the safety line is where we feel safe, it’s where we feel comfortable and it’s where we will typically remain, unless we are actively stretching beyond our comfort zone. This is why you see a lot of people or groups of people and they just kind of at the same place. They’re just kind of at the same place If you think about some of your family or your friends, maybe in the past, that they’re all kind of hovering in the same financial bracket the same. They may have the same kind of size, house, the same driving, the same cars, whatever that is. There’s no limit to what that looks like, but it’s all kind of the same because they’re all in that safety zone, they’re all comfortable and what we typically do is when we are in our journey, when we’re in our leadership journey, when we’re growing our work in whatever fashion that is for you, we’re going to hit a point that is beyond what our internal thermostat says is safe. Now, I’m not going to say that everyone sabotages, because we all have our different challenges that we go through. But if you are sabotaging and it doesn’t have to be when I say sabotage, it doesn’t have to be some just epic you’re burning everything down and just like hot mess sabotage, which it can be at times and I have definitely been there.

So there’s absolutely no judgment on my end. But often it’s a very subtle and you’re going to know that you’re sabotaging because you’re going to have no growth. You’re going to be at the same place. Basically, you’re going to be at the same financial place. You’re going to be at the same projects you’re doing. It’s just going to be the same. And if you’ve had bigger goals or bigger vision for a while right, I say three months, six months a year, two years, three years, five years, 10 years. There’s a good chance that there’s part of you that is stopping your progress. It’s sabotaging the progress. So why do we sabotage? We sabotage as self-protection. That’s it, without sabotage. Your inner saboteur is not coming into drive you crazy or to make your life hell.

It’s coming in to protect you. And when we can know and really embody that and understand that we’re able to work with the saboteur, understand what is the reason I’m keeping myself safe? Is it that I’m terrified of rejection? Is it that I’ve built myself or built my work up to a certain place and now I’m scared of ruining my reputation or something not going right? And again it basically ruins the reputation that I’ve built so far. A huge one that I see over and over and over again is fear of success, and this is especially prevalent when I work with purpose-driven leaders, highly sensitive leaders who really have a desire to keep everyone feeling good. They don’t want to their success, to intimidate others or have others feel bad that they haven’t achieved the same things, or they don’t want to lose that love from others. It’s a core.

When we really break sabotage down to its core, it’s a fear of being abandoned, it’s a fear of being rejected. It’s those core wounds that get triggered and it’s often connected to not feeling worthy enough. So we’re not going to get into all the bits and pieces of how to move through it in this episode, but know that if you are sabotaging, you’re aware of that. Release the judgment, because the judgment of I’m doing something bad, I’m wrong, I’m somehow dysfunctional, because I’m sabotaging, that’s going to keep you in a loop with it. That’s going to keep you in this sabotage loop because you’re judging it. And part of the healing that we do is integrating the saboteur and that means releasing judgment and just seeing it for what it is, just being curious about it of. Oh, I’m in the same place that I have been for two years, interesting what is going on. Why am I keeping myself in the same place? What is it giving me? What is a positive payoff and what is the truth to this situation For me? One of my biggest reasons for keeping myself that the sabotage came on was fear of judgment and fear of success, which often go hand in hand, and it had me in a hold for a while. I really had to release that judgment, especially when you’ve gotten to a certain place in your work or whatever.

You’re doing your projects, your business and then it suddenly hits you. It can bring on a whole new sense of what is wrong with me. I was fine and now suddenly I’m backtracking. This is really important that you release a judgment and, if you need to hire someone, hire someone to work with you a professional, a coach, a therapist who can bring in new light, because you don’t want to go down the spiral of self-critical talk when you’re dealing with sabotage. You really want to just see it for what it is. Oh, this is interesting. Why am I doing this? What do I need? What is a part of me whether that’s your inner child or it’s your saboteur what are those parts of me? Need to feel safe so I can move forward confidently. I don’t care if you’ve been sabotaging your entire life. Often these are patterns that have been present for a while. You may not have noticed them, you may not have been aware of them for a long time, but they’re usually not something that just comes out of the blue. I don’t care how much. I don’t care if you’ve been doing it for decades.

You can move through the sabotage and get to the other side, and a big part of it is the awareness around it. It’s taking full ownership, it’s not blaming anyone else and it’s seeing it for what it is a protective pattern. We’ll get more into it in other episodes, because I love talking about this. There’s nothing more satisfying for me as a coach, as a healer, than to see someone break free past their sabotage. It’s incredibly fulfilling and it’s incredibly fulfilling for the person, because it really is something to celebrate when we can walk hand in hand with our saboteur and it’s no longer controlling our actions and the actions that we take. And we are finally. We finally break free past the safety zone, past the safety zone and we start making progress. It’s wonderful. So you’re gonna wanna stay. You’re gonna wanna tune into our next episode, where we’re gonna go into the same foundations around burnout.

We’re gonna be talking more about. Burnout is becoming more and more prevalent than ever with the women and the men that I talked to, especially in the leadership fields. So we’re gonna be talking more about that, because it may or may not be what you think, and I wanna thank you for being here and still if you’re still watching, still listening. Thank you, I’m honored to have you on this journey with me. I will put in the show notes a link to a free meditation. This is a free meditation that is gonna take you on a guided journey to visit your saboteur. If you want to understand more about why you are sabotaging, this is a perfect meditation to do to have a conversation with your saboteur and to get some valuable information. You may need to do it a few times to really connect with it, but I have done it. I have clients who have done it and it has been groundbreaking in their journey to move beyond the sabotage. Thank you again for joining me and let’s stay connected.

Speaker 2: 15:29

Thank you for tuning into the Confident, Connected Leader podcast. Lisa Jeffs is committed to helping you break through barriers and climb to new professional heights. If today’s episode inspired you, we’d be honored if you could subscribe, rate and leave a review To stay updated with practical tips and insights, follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. You’ll find all relevant links, including those for our complimentary gifts and trainings, in the show notes. Until our next episode, embrace your confidence and stay connected.