Alignment With Jenn - (#16) Self-Sabotage Seduction: The Sneaky Patterns Keeping You From Your Next Level

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

In this juicy episode of RECEIVE, Jenn pulls back the curtain on one of the most seductive yet destructive forces blocking your desires: self-sabotage. Forget the cliché image of blowing millions overnight—self-sabotage is often far more subtle, wrapped up in innocent excuses like “I don’t have time,” “I’ll start when I’m ready,” or “This is good enough.” 💋 What you’ll hear inside this episode: The hidden tug-of-war between what you consciously say you want and what your subconscious believes is safe. The 8 most seductive disguises of self-sabotage (including “The Later List,” “The Shrinking Act,” and “The Chill Phase”). Why “I don’t have time” or “I can’t afford it right now” is rarely the truth—and how those phrases are secretly stealing your dreams. The deeper fears that keep powerful women stuck in loops of waiting, preparing, or settling. Jenn’s 3-step process to identify, neutralize, and rewire the subconscious patterns keeping you from your next-level timeline. ✨ This episode is an activation: once you see your patterns, you can’t unsee them. And once you learn how to dismantle them… you become unstoppable. 🔮 If you’re ready to break free from the cage of self-sabotage and expand into the life you know you’re meant for, DM Jenn on Instagram with the word PODCAST to get an exclusive 5-minute video on how her program can help you rewire your subconscious and claim everything you desire.

Hello, hello, welcome to this episode of Receive. I am your host, Jen Ditsasey, and I am so excited to talk to you today about one of these sneakiest, trickiest topics that is wildly, wildly transformational to understand more about. And that is self-sabotage. So we oftentimes think that self-sabotage is going to be something that is very obvious, right? The first thing that comes to mind is the person who achieves wild wealth in a short period of time, and then they sabotage it, right? They spend all of their money on hookers and cocaine and drugs and things like that and they waste all their money or they overspend and overspend and they blow all their money. Yes, that is self-sabotage. But that's a much more dramatic version of self-sabotage. Most people are not doing that kind of self-sabotage. Most people are sabotaging themselves in very,

subtle ways. And for a long time, I hated the term self-sabotage because I'm like, I would never sabotage myself, right? I love myself. I care about myself. Why would I sabotage myself? Why would I sabotage myself? Well, the reason that people self-sabotage is because there's a conflict between what you consciously say you want, for example, a relationship, and what you unconsciously or subconsciously believe is safe, possible, and good to experience. So you can consciously want a relationship, but you can subconsciously believe that relationships aren't safe, men are bad, I'll never be loved the way that I want to be loved, it's a waste of time, it'll take away my freedom, whatever it might be, right? And if on some level your subconscious believes that what

you want is unsafe in some way, then it will create self-sabotage in very subtle ways to prevent you from having that thing that you want. And that's what I want to talk about today. I want to give you a lot of examples of how self-sabotage shows up so that way you can see it for yourself. Because any behavior that we have that is a limiting behavior, well, honestly, any behavior, but specifically our limiting behaviors, any behavior that you have is showing a limiting belief under the surface. Okay. So always dating the same toxic men is showing that underneath the surface, there's something

that is out of alignment with your highest good. There's some belief in there that we need to neutralize. We need to clear out in order for you to experience your highest timeline. And truthfully, that's the journey that we are going on in this lifetime, is to clear out and neutralize all of that gunk that we have collected so we can receive everything that we're destined to receive. And so I want to give an example of this. I've had this same conversation twice over the last week with two women came on.

I had calls with them about them joining my program. And they were both highly, highly successful women in their careers, like wildly successful women. And what they wanted is they wanted to manifest relationships, right? Super common pattern in our reality and our lives. And I would ask them, you know, why do you think you haven't had a relationship? Yada, yada, yada, right? We'd get into it. And what it would always come out as is they're like, well, you know, I just work a lot.

And like, I really value my work. And it's hard for me to find time for dating. It's hard for me to, you know, really like find time for it. it, you know, because I'm traveling all the time, yada, yada, yada. The truth is, though, you will make time for anything that is valuable and important for you. Time is never an excuse. I should actually say time is always an excuse, but it's never a real reason why you're not doing something. These women had deep fears around relationship. That's actually what was stopping them. It was not the fact that they couldn't make time to go on one to two dates a week or a month, right? Anyone can make that time.

You can't make that time and there's something horribly wrong in your life. So it's recognizing that our minds are going to spin and spin and spin a whole bunch of BS to protect us in air quotes. I'm doing the like little finger air quotes to protect us from what it believes is not safe. So if we've had unhealthy relationships in the past or relationships, maybe they were even healthy, but they just made us feel limited or stuck or hurt. or we heard, I've had numerous clients tell me that their father cheated on their mother, and that really has caused them to not want relationships on a very subconscious level. And so what we need to do is, and I'm using relationship as an example, but there's all sorts of ways that this shows up, right?

It shows up a lot for business owners. When business owners are like, God, I want to reach that next level of, you know, clients and everything like that. But, man, that means more visibility. That means more responsibility. that means I might fail bigger, that's bigger risk. We will sabotage that. So what we need to do is we need to show the mind that these things are safe, that they

are okay, that they are not to be avoided. Because whatever we avoid, the mind considers less and less and less safe. So before I get into my method for clearing self-sabotage, I want to share with you eight of the top ways that I see self-sabotage showing up for the wonderful, amazing women that I work with in hopes that you will be able to see these in your own life, start making some changes as well. So the first one that I see is really subtle and it's really tricky, and I call it the later list. It's saying, okay, you know what? Once I have the money. Once I have the time. Once I have the energy. Once I have the relationship, then I will X, Y, and Z. It's putting off what you want for some

mystical time in the future. The reason that this is great, it's great in multiple ways because it gives you the pleasure of being like, ooh, I'm going to do it, right? It's a little bit satisfying, like, oh, that's going to be so awesome. And you get to kind of enjoy the dopamine hit of it. But what it's also doing is it's pacifying your subconscious mind who's a little scaredy cat and doesn't want you to experience this because it's unsafe in some way. So it's putting off our desires for the future because of X, Y, and Z. A big one I see is saying, you know what? I like, I really don't have the money for this. I don't have the money to invest in myself right now. But when I do have the money, I will, which is like the biggest little loop I've ever heard for BS. I was on a call with a, she was a potential client that's now a new client. She just joined my program. And she was telling me about how she wants to grow her business. But what happens is that by the end of the day, she's always way too tired. And she always will put off working on her business. self-sabotage, right? Very subtle. And then we get to the end of the call and she's like, you know, I don't know if I have the money for this. And I was like, do you see that this is the

same pattern that you're playing out? You are putting off what you want for something in the future, for when you have the time, for when you have the money. You're literally delaying away your life. And she said, yeah, she's like, that's exactly right. And so that's what she ended up signing up for the program because she saw that that's a pattern that she's playing out, putting things off for later saying, I'll do this when I have this. In reality, most of the time, we need to do it when we don't feel like we have the money, when we don't feel like we have the time, when we don't feel like we have the energy, when we don't feel like we're good enough. Because that's how we get to where we want to be. If everybody waited until they got there to do all the things, nobody would be there.

So notice in your life, what are you saying? I'll do it later. I'll do it when. The next one is never ready. Somebody that is always unready. Right. They are always like, oh, you know what, I just need to like fix this a little bit more or I need to take another course or I need to like spend a little bit more time working on this and then I'll send it out. I need to ask a few more people for advice and then I'll do it. They are, this is that same little sneaky habit of being like, you get that dopamine hit of like, I'm working on it, right? I'm making progress.

But you're not really. You're not really in the arena. You're not really taking action. You're preparing to take action versus actually. taking action. And so when you recognize that, you're never really going to feel ready to take action on things that are big for you. That's the truth. That's what I've seen in my experience, starting multiple businesses, is that I've never really felt ready for my next level. And if I did feel ready for it, I was ready for the next level after that. Because when you feel ready for something,

that's because you've had experience with it. It's become familiar. And so then, of course, you're going to feel ready for it. Right. You've done it. It's only once you're, you've done it, that you'll feel fully, fully ready for something. And so one of the things I learned very early on in my business journey was like the lean startup model. It's, and one of my business mentors said that by the time you take a product to market, if the product is like perfect and ready to go, you've waited too long, you've missed the mark. Because you want to put things out there and do things before you're ready because that's how you really build the strong muscle. That's how you find out, is this the right fit, right? Versus people that wait and wait and wait and wait,

They wait. They spend their entire lives waiting. Then another one that I notice a lot is the shrinking act. Oh, God, this one's so insidious. It's downplaying what you really want. It's saying like, oh, you know, like this relationship is good enough or this job is good enough or this business is good enough. They lower their standards because they fear that they can't have what they really want. They fear that they won't be good enough, that they won't experience what they really want. So they shrink and they say, this is fine. They accept less than they know that they're meant for because of fear. It's a form of self-sabotage. These are so sneaky, aren't they? They're little sneaky bugs. Another one is, this one's tricky to talk about because there's truth in the need for rest, but I call it the chill phase. It's people that are constantly,

like, in this chill phase of life, or they're always leaning back into resting. And they're like, you know what, I just need a break. I just need to take some time off. I just need to think. I just need to relax, right? And what happens is these people never end up creating any momentum. They never actually take any real actions. And they're using rest as an excuse for to procrastinate, to not seek out what they want. And something that I want you to recognize is the mind is very, very clever. And it will cloak all of these with a lot of reasons why they're all okay. Right. You'll be able to rationalize them all. But the thing is, if you really want an extraordinary life, life, you've got to stop rationalizing away your time, your money, your life and what you want. You've got to

stop rationalizing away your dreams. So I am a big proponent of rest. I'm a projector who I don't have any active energy centers or energy centers that produce energy if you're familiar with human design. So I require a lot of rest. With that, I also recognize that I can use rest as an excuse for not doing the things that make me uncomfortable. And so a huge part of this journey of creating and manifesting a life you want is getting okay with being uncomfortable, with allowing yourself to be uncomfortable, with acting before you're ready. Another one that I always see is like the busy bee trap, which kind of goes into the one I talked about earlier, but it's filling your time with safe tasks, like emails or cleaning or organizing or taking your dog for a walk. These all feel

super productive, but you're not doing the things that are actually going to move the needle toward your bigger vision, right? Maybe you're spending time emailing, cleaning, working when you really should be going on dates with guys or you really should be working on that dream business of yours. A massive form of self-love is going after what you truly want versus settling for mediocrity. Think about it. The biggest form of self-love you can give yourself is just giving yourself the life that you want. There's no bigger form of love than that. So something I recommend doing is for this busy B one is auditing your time and really looking at how am I spending my time, right? What am I doing with my time to see if you're

spending it well? I see this one a lot with entrepreneurs who are like, I need to do everything, right? I need to do it all in my business because they fear that next level. So they use it as an excuse of like, I just have too much to do, but in reality, they could outsource it. They could get support with it. But what they're really doing is they are delaying and they're self-sabotaging. And so something I really want to get across here is that self-sabotage is not going to be like a red flag that you see. It is going to be something typically that you will not notice until it's been happening for a while or is something that you will notice after the fact. You can notice it as it's happening if you are very self-aware. And if you keep really clear on what your goals are and what your visions are for your

life and you look at your time and you say, how am I spending my time in accordance with this? That's a really big indicator of self-sabotage. But one example, another example I want to give is of this busy bee trap is back in September, I might have shared this story on the podcast before. My business was kind of at a plateau, which was interesting because it hadn't been before. And I was really looking and I was really trying to think and understand why I was experiencing this pattoe. And what I did is I did my subconscious rewiring method, which I'm going to share with you in a moment. And I cleared out some of the fears and some of the doubts that I had had. I had had a fear of too much responsibility of if my business gets too big, it'll be too much responsibility and it'll exhaust me.

And it'll affect my health negatively. And because that has happened to me in the past. And so I did some rewiring around that. And it was wild because within a couple of days, I saw my business completely differently. I saw that what I had been doing is hiring different coaches, trying different methods to solve a problem that didn't exist. I was trying to find another system and strategy for my business when I already had a strategy that was working exceptionally well. But in my mind, the problem was the strategy when in reality it was that I had these fears and these doubts. So my mind was creating basically busy work to keep me safe from that experience, from having that larger business. Once I cleared those out, I have had numerous of my highest revenue months,

like over and over again, where it's like just keeps getting higher. So recognizing and understanding how this might be playing out for you. It is likely in the areas where you feel frustrated, where you might feel stuck. But it could also be in the areas where you actually feel content, because sometimes contentment can be keeping us away from the bigger visions that were meant for. So there's a couple of pieces to really rewiring and shifting self-sabotage as it's showing up. So the first thing you want to do is really pinpoint and identify what is the deeper fear underneath the surface. What is the deeper belief, the doubt underneath the surface? And usually this is in the form of if X happens, then no, why will happen.

If I get into a relationship, then, oh, no, I will have my freedom taken away. then I will be treated poorly, whatever it might be. And then what you want to do is you want to understand more about that for yourself. And this is really what I guide people through in my program. I have a four-month program and I take you through clearing out these deeper held subconscious beliefs and subconscious fears and doubts. One of my clients described it as like removing the cage. And it's like your whole life you live in this cage of your fears and your doubts and experiences. And when you start to do this work, you remove that cage and you see your entire life differently, completely differently, like the story I shared about me and my business. I already had the solutions in front of me.

I didn't have to change anything. And so we want to understand really what is driving that behavior. And I do this through very specific questions and a specific method of identification to really find out why are you, why are you fearing that outcome? right? What's really coming up for you. Then what we want to do is we want to use specific tools that work at a subconscious level to neutralize the emotional charge on that fear, that doubt, that limiting belief, that limiting belief, that fear, that doubt has any life to it is because there's emotion attached. If there was no motion, emotion, it would be meaningless to you. It wouldn't matter, right? A white piece of paper. Most people have no emotion attached to a white piece of paper.

it's pretty meaningless. They could give it or they could take it. But these fears and these doubts, we have emotion attached to them and that's why they matter. So we want to neutralize that emotion. And we do that in the subconscious mind and we also do that through nervous system work. So I like to use both tools and work on both levels because it creates Chef's Kiss amazing results. Then what we want to do is we want to imprint our new vision, the new belief that we want to have. So instead of relationships take away my freedom, we want to believe relationships allow me to expand into my infinite potential or whatever you want. I'm cool with whatever you want. So typically, when people want to manifest a new reality, they do not do steps one or two. They start with the

imprint phase, which is things like affirmations, visualization, gripping, those kinds of things. And those are helpful. But if you have all of this gunk in your subconscious mind that has not been neutralized, your affirmations are going to be fighting a losing battle. So we really want to do steps one and two of identify and neutralize before we imprint. You're going to get way faster, way better results. So I hope that this has been tremendously helpful for you. I hope that you kind of got to see this from a new perspective and really got to understand a bit more about how this might be showing up for you in your life. I will say that self-sabotage is probably the sneakiest thing that we experience. But the way to start identifying it is really looking at your behaviors.

And notice what behaviors are you doing that do not serve the timeline that you wish to create? And when you start to identify those patterns and those behaviors, you can start to unravel your experience. So if you would like help with this process, that's my favorite thing to do. I love helping people through this. Send me a message on Instagram with the word podcast. And I will send you a three, not three, a five-minute video on my program where I guide you through this entire process. So we can clear out this old gunk and you can start running toward your goals. So I hope you have enjoyed this and I look forward to seeing you in next episode. Bye-bye.