Alignment With Jenn - 3 STEPS TO STOP SELF-SABOTAGE FOR GOOD✨Goodbye Fear of Failure

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to this episode of the Alignment with Jen podcast. I am your host, Jen Ditsasey. And today we are talking all about self-sabotage. I have done like, I don't know, hundreds of client calls and I took them all and I had AI analyze the data to tell me like, what is the most common things that people ask about? Guess what it was? It is self-sabotage. It is so extremely common. And it is something that so many success, successful women like you in my audience are struggling with. And so I want to do an episode where I want to help you identify where you might be struggling with self-sabotage. And then I want to give you a three-step framework to help you start overcoming it today. So that way you can really start going after your

Starting point is 00:00:48 visions and your goals without taking two steps forward or one step back. I had a client who said, she's like self-sabotage feels like I have a rubber band around my waist. And it's like I'll walk forward and then I'll get pulled back. Walk forward and then I'll get pulled back. And I'm like, goodness, yeah, I totally get that. And I look at my clients, my friends, myself, like, this is such a massive pattern for people. And so how do we get ourselves to actually really show up for the life that we want to create? Right. How do we go full force towards that life without sabotaging it unconsciously? So let's talk about that today. And I wanted to share this quote from Alice Cornyn and Shelby. and it's that self-sabotage is when we want something and then go about making sure it doesn't happen.

Starting point is 00:01:35 It's so true, right? It's so, so, so, so, so, so true. So I think of self-sabotage as this idea that part of you wants it and then part of you fears it. And so it creates this dance, right? And it creates this like that two steps forward, one steps back. And oftentimes it can happen in our career. It can happen in our love life. It can happen in our health, in our fitness goals. And there's a variety of different reasons why we self-sabotage. So I'm going to kind of start with the deepest level of programming of why we self-sabotage. So as you, if you've listened to my podcast before, you know I'm super big on our subconscious beliefs. Right. We have this whole operating system that's happening below the surface of what we're aware of. Right. If you think of an iceberg, 80 to 90% of that iceberg is

Starting point is 00:02:24 underwater, we don't see it. That's the same that's true for our programming. 80 to 90% really, I think it's like 99% of our programming is below the surface. It's things that we are not aware of that we are just acting on. And we are just so automatically ingrained to do those things. It's our triggers. It's our automatic responses, our judgments, our fears, our doubts, the limitations we unknowingly place on ourselves. And self-sabotage has. happens because for multiple levels of this programming that exists, but one of the deepest levels of our programming is something called our values. So our values are the things that what we value, right? The things that we unconsciously deem important. And these are very deep within our programming

Starting point is 00:03:12 because they're typically programmed at an extremely young age. They can even be programmed before we have words to express what we're actually thinking and feeling. So they can be very, very deep programming and most people are completely unaware of their values. So I'll give you an example of how values might cause self-sabotage. So let's say that Anna Maria, I don't know, just somebody I made up. I don't think I know anybody named Anna Maria. Anna Maria has a top value for freedom, right? That's her top value. Remember, these are unconscious, so she may not know that. But then beneath that, she has a value for fun. And then beneath that, she has a value for love, right? And our values are unconsciously ranked. So if her top value is freedom, but then a couple values down is love, there's probably

Starting point is 00:03:59 going to be a conflict, right? So Anna Maria might really struggle to commit. She might really struggle to actually pursue a relationship. She probably is great at traveling. She's probably great at probably even running a business because it gives her more freedom. But she might struggle to create that love and connection. And I'll tell you, Anna Maria is actually me. That was, this was three or four years ago when I first did my own values on relationship. That was my values. My top value was freedom. And a couple values down was like a love and a relationship.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Pretty interesting. I've since changed that and my life has changed, right? I've been able to be in a successful relationship. So think about some of these areas in your life where you might have conflicts. And it's a pretty easy. You can do kind of like a bootleg values assessment of yourself where you just, look at a certain area of your life. Let's say you pick career. If you're struggling in career and you can just ask yourself, okay, what's important to me in career? What's important to me in

Starting point is 00:04:59 career? And then you can go back through the list and you will get probably 10 to 15 of these. You can go back through and you can rank them. So you'll say, okay, is this more important or is this more important? And you'll rank them all from one to 10 and look at them and see, are there conflicts in there? Is something more important to me than something else? Another one that's kind of interesting that I saw with one of my clients is that this client in particular really, really wanted to be healthy and eat healthy. His mom had just passed away and he really wanted to start taking care of his health after seeing what happened with his mom. So anyway, we look at his values. What we see is that he has a very, very high value for fun and enjoyment. And that is part of his health values. But later down

Starting point is 00:05:45 the list, we look and look, do we see a value for nutrition? No. He was eating really horribly, but it was because there was no value for nutrition. So oftentimes, the things that we find easy are things that we value unconsciously and things that we find hard are things that we don't value unconsciously. So that's what I want to share. So one of the things that causes us to self-sabotage is if those values are out of alignment and they're not directed at what we want. Let me share a little bit about what happens and kind of the symptoms of self-sabotage. So some of the symptoms of self-sabotage could be things like, procrastination. Perfectionism is even a symptom of self-sabotage. I've heard this from a lot of clients.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Like one client had a software product and she was like, yeah, I just like can't release it until it's perfect. That was literally what she always said because perfection doesn't exist. And so it's a form of self-sabotage when we set a standard that we can never reach. Losing motivation and gaining motivation, losing motivation, gaining motivation, really struggling to say consistent on what it is that you want. That's a form of self-sabotage. In relation, It might look like picking fights out of nowhere. Or I had this roommate years ago who had kept a notebook, a notebook of a list of all the things that she didn't like about her significant other. And I was like, why are you with him if you don't like all these things?

Starting point is 00:07:03 And she's like, oh, no, I just keep the list so that way like I'm never surprised. That way I can like, you know, really be aware of it. I was like, that's interesting. I don't fully understand it. But, you know, if it works for you and I think they're still together. And that was like a long time ago. that was sort of a tangent, but self-sabotage can look like picking fights. It can look like always seeing the negative in your partner, those sorts of things. We very unconsciously sabotage ourselves. And you might

Starting point is 00:07:28 see it in yourself, right? Think of the areas in your life where you really struggle to be consistent, or you really struggle to actually go after what you want. I was talking to a client yesterday, and she left her job and she's going full time to pursue her career in the arts. And she's like, okay, I want to, you know, spend this much time every day creating content. I want to spend this much time every day building my personal brand. And she's like, but I'm not doing it. And she's like, I have all day and I'm not doing it. And that is a form of self-sabotage, right? One of the ways, I was going to get into this later, but I'll share it now, to really help yourself not self-sabotage is to shrink your goal. So oftentimes if our mind can't really conceptualize something, like a very big goal,

Starting point is 00:08:12 right, going from, you know, zero followers to a million followers, that's really hard to conceptualize, right? But you can break it down to a very micro, micro, micro step. So what I told her is I was like, okay, rather than saying you're going to spend two hours a day on this and two hours a day on this, why don't you just spend 15 minutes a day? Because what happens, 15 minutes is a magic number. What happens is we get dopamine after about 15 minutes of doing something. So if we can get past that, we're going to start to get more momentum. Motivation's going to be easier. So that's a pretty cool thing to know. So rather than telling yourself you're going to spend, you know, two hours a day on something, maybe you say, okay, if it's something that's really

Starting point is 00:08:54 challenging for you, I'll start with 15 minutes and I'll kind of ride that dopamine roller coaster, but the only goal is the 15 minutes, right? And just staying consistent with the 15 minutes. You can be consistent with anything for 15 minutes, three days a week or five days a week. that's literally how I started my supplement business. I didn't know how to do that. So 15 minutes a day was my goal. You make the goal so tangible, so accessible, so realistic that you begin to build this snowball that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Right. So how can you break it down? Maybe in dating, instead of being like, okay, I'm going to go on two dates a week until I meet my husband. That's kind of a lot. You say, okay, I'm going to spend, you know, five minutes a day on the dating apps, engaging with people, connecting with people authentically.

Starting point is 00:09:45 That's a much more manageable first step if you're having a lot of resistance starting to date. So what are some more examples of self-sabotage? So one is pulling back when things start to work. So if you find that you are pursuing something like a relationship or a business or something, and then you find that when it starts to go well, you pull back, you hide, you shrink. That's a form of self-sabotage because we're trying to protect ourselves from something. So self-sabotage is a protective behavior. It's really designed to just keep us safe, to keep us protected. And I heard recently on the Mel Robbins podcast about she was interviewing a Harvard researcher, and I don't know the name of this woman, but she was saying how the reason that

Starting point is 00:10:33 we don't change is for two reasons. One of them is energy and one of them is ego. right we want to preserve energy and we want to protect our ego and i thought that was such a brilliant like distillation of that information and that's very very true and those are prime directives of the unconscious mind is to preserve energy to protect the self to make sure that the self is safe and so we will do those things so asking yourself if you're struggling with self-sabotage right first how is it showing up right what's the pattern for you and really like analyzing yourself like a scientist, but then second, what are you afraid of? Ask yourself this question, what bad thing happens if I succeed?

Starting point is 00:11:18 What bad thing happens? And that's going to be extremely illuminating for you. So I want to share kind of this other framework about self-sabotage. And it's this idea that avoiding something is helping you to regulate an emotion that you don't want to feel. So for example, let's say posting online makes you feel. makes you feel anxious. You don't do it to avoid that anxiety, right? It's this idea that there's like a trigger, which is posting online. And so you do something to escape it. So maybe, and this all

Starting point is 00:11:49 happens unconsciously, maybe you think about posting online and you start to feel the anxiety of posting it. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no. I want to avoid that uncomfortable emotion. So I'm going to find temporary relief by going over here and doing my laundry, right? Researching. And, content. That's a sneaky one. Researching other creators. Maybe I'll do a little scrolling and call it research, right? What you're doing is you are finding something else that feels productive in order to avoid that uncomfortable feeling that you're associating with that bigger goal that you have. So you want to identify what's that uncomfortable feeling that I'm trying to avoid and find a way to get yourself to feel comfortable with it. This kind of goes into that process of how you

Starting point is 00:12:34 overcome this because part of the way, and I'll get into this more later, part of the way you overcome it is by getting yourself to be comfortable and okay with uncomfortable emotions. The more that you can get yourself to just exist in an uncomfortable emotion, the more rapidly your entire life is going to change. Something that I have noticed with myself is when I started my first business, I quit my job, I joined a very expensive mask. mastermind and I just felt like I was bleeding money. And that period was super stressful for me because I wasn't making very much money and that I was spending a ton. So I just saw my money like do took, took, took, took, took, too, going down every month. And I had to do so much nervous system

Starting point is 00:13:18 regulation. I did literally everything. I did energy healing, nervous system regulation. I did all of my subconscious tools in order to help myself get through that period and be okay with that dynamic at the time. Now, fast forward multiple years later, I'm really comfortable when things don't look how I want them to look, right? If my business has a lower month or like I have a week where I'm like, oh, like, you know, I didn't make that much money this week or whatever it is. I'm really uncomfortable with the volatility now, not really volatility, but the ebbs and flows that naturally happen in a business. And I'm so grateful for that time period because I taught myself how to be comfortable with those uncomfortable emotions. So it's actually a gift.

Starting point is 00:14:02 that you have those uncomfortable emotions because I see it as they're preparing you for a bigger level. They're preparing you for that next level when you might have more discomfort come up, but you're going to have the tools. You're going to have the resources to be able to handle it. You're going to know, have the confidence to know you can handle it. But you also resolve those beliefs that were causing that in the first place, right? Because for me in that example, there were beliefs that were causing me to feel that way. Beliefs of about money, beliefs about the universe, beliefs about what was possible for me. And I did so much to change that that now I feel really calm about money. I know money is always showing up for me.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Money loves me. Money is just everywhere. But I didn't know that at the time. And I needed that experience to get there. Right. So these areas of self-sabotage, they're actually, they're like a little, if you turn them around, they look really good on the other side. Because there's something so good in there that you need to learn so you can hold a bigger level so you can play a bigger game. That's what I'm saying. Another thing that creates self-sabotage is what I called old identity gravity. Think about like the gravity of a planet, right? It's pulling stuff into its orbit. It's keeping us, the planet Earth's keeping us all on Earth because of that pull and keeps us from floating away. The same thing happens with your old identity. The old version of you, the old

Starting point is 00:15:27 person that you were has this gravity to it, right? And people will come into my program and they'll be like, I've been in the program one week and like nothing's changed. And I'm like, okay, like, you expect 45 years to be undone in one week? Like, sign me up for whatever that is because I've never seen that in my life. That's called the pharmaceutical industry. That's like a pill. That's not realistic. There's that old gravity that has to reverse. You've got to get out of that old momentum of your old identity. And so there's a variety of different ways that you can do this. If you're finding that you keep reverting back to your old self, right? Maybe you are consistent with working out for a week and then you stop or you're consistent with, you know, writing your

Starting point is 00:16:08 substack for a week and then you stop. There's a variety of different ways to overcome that. One of the fastest ways to change your identity is to change your environment. And I mean your physical environment. So you can move to a new place. You can go right in a new place. Maybe you normally go right at your desk. Maybe you go right at a cafe and you get yourself a cute latte. Because our environment, they say with addicts, it's so valuable for addicts to overcome addiction by getting out of their environment. Because our unconscious mind creates so many triggers based off of our environment that we are very unconsciously aware of. Right. This is why if you want to lose weight, they say like get rid of all of the food that you don't want to be eating and don't have it in

Starting point is 00:16:49 your environment. Our environment is extremely powerful. That's one really. really big way to get out of this old identity gravity, but also just recognizing like, because that gravity exists, it's going to take some time to reverse it. And so there might be hiccups along the way, but you keep going, right? I saw this graph online and it was like that growth we think is this linear line upward. And it's not. It's actually like this wiggly line. It's still going upward, but it's got peaks and valleys. And that's the truth. And so you don't have to be perfect, right? And you don't want to get into this pattern of saying, okay, well, I didn't, I did it for two weeks and then I messed up. So now I'm just never going to do it again. What you want to

Starting point is 00:17:32 do is, okay, you know, I messed up. I'm going to restart today. I'm going to restart right away so that way I can keep moving toward my goals. And what you'll find is that self-sabotage shrinks. So let's talk about the three-step method for getting rid of this. I've already kind of given you some tools to use for this, but let's talk about how you can really get over this. So the first one is just identify, right? How is this actually showing up for you? What happens when you start to pursue that goal, right? What do you, what do you find? Where are you procrastinating? Where are you perfecting? Where are you avoiding? Avoidance is a really big one. The second then is to create safety around that new level. So you can normalize it. That can be an environmental change, but

Starting point is 00:18:19 it is also neutralizing those past beliefs and fears. So I mentioned in the beginning of the episode, there's those core values, right? So in some cases, if self-sabotage is really strong for you, you're going to want to rewire those values. That is something that takes some support, that takes some help to do,

Starting point is 00:18:40 because those are very deeply programmed. If that's something that you want to look at, you can send me the message podcast on Instagram. My Instagram's at alignment with Jen, and I can give you some information. about my program where we work on those values and those beliefs alignment, helping you overcome those beliefs that cause that self-sabotage. It's also getting yourself to feel safe in that new expanded level.

Starting point is 00:19:03 So let's say that your goal is right now you're at $10,000 months and your goal is to reach $50,000 months in your business. And you find that every time you go toward that, you get super anxious or nervous or you stop showing up, there's these patterns of self-sabotage. You want to identify those patterns, but then you want to create safety at that next level. So part of that is through the subconscious rewiring work, which I talk about already. That's what I do in my communities. And then part of that is also just allowing yourself to sit in that discomfort, right?

Starting point is 00:19:35 And use tools and strategies to allow that discomfort to exist and allow yourself to move through it without making it bad. Right. and it's allowing yourself to not be perfect in that process. Something that I really like to do is if I'm starting to feel unsafe about something, right, anxiety or fear comes up, I place my hands on my heart and I just tell myself I'm safe, right? I close my eyes and do some breathing to kind of calm my system. That's a really simple way. But I will say self-sabotage is a really interesting one because it shows up differently for each person.

Starting point is 00:20:12 And I really do believe the best way to improve it is rewiring those subconscious. beliefs. So again, you can message me if you want to learn about that because those beliefs, so much of self-sabotage is unconscious. We're not even aware that we're doing it. And we're most of the time not aware why we're doing it. Right. And so when we want to stop doing it, that can be difficult because it's like this hidden thing, right? The mind that's creating the self-sabotage doesn't see the self-sabotage as a problem. Your subconscious does everything because it thinks that it's helping you. That's important to recognize. So some of the things you can do again are creating that safety around that. And then the last thing that you want to do

Starting point is 00:20:52 is imprint that new vision for yourself. So this could be through visualization. That's a really powerful way. It can be through hypnosis as well. But it's allowing your unconscious to basically accept that new vision. Because right now you have your current reality and the new reality that you want. And the self-sabotage is the game that gets played in the middle. And so if we can get your unconscious to accept that newer vision, it can help to close that gap. I'm going to be releasing actually a new program in the coming months about this specific part of it. I'm really excited about it. So stay tuned for that. And yes, I hope that you enjoyed this episode and I will see you in the next episode. Bye.

Alignment With Jenn - 3 STEPS TO STOP SELF-SABOTAGE FOR GOOD✨Goodbye Fear of Failure

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