How to Prevent Self-Sabotage

Nobody is immune to self-sabotage. It shows up in the office, in friendships, in the quiet choices we make about what we think we deserve, and at some point it catches almost everyone. Picture a job posting that excites you and scares you in equal measure. The voice in your head decides you'll never get it, so you close the tab and never send the application. The position goes to someone else, and you've talked yourself out of something you actually wanted. Learning to spot that pattern, and interrupt it, keeps you from losing out on the things that matter.

A positive outlook helps, but pretending your negative feelings don't exist is a mistake. Pushed down, they don't disappear. They wait. So give them a hearing. Talk to yourself candidly about what you're feeling and let the feeling be real. Once you face it directly, you can ask where it came from and start to settle it, instead of letting it fester into another round of self-sabotage.

Then there's the problem of repeating yourself. Making the same mistake again and again is strangely easy, and every repeat keeps you stuck in place. The way out is to treat your past as material to learn from rather than evidence against yourself. Casting yourself as the perpetual victim of your own errors just feeds the cycle. When you catch yourself drifting back toward an old blunder, pause for a couple of minutes and actually look at what's happening. That gap is where you can change course.

Pay attention, too, to the tone you use with yourself. Are the thoughts running through your head supportive, or are they sharpening a knife? Most people are brutal critics of themselves, especially around relationships, grades, and how they're doing at work. Harsh self-talk is a trap. Catching the criticism as it starts, and deliberately answering it with something kinder and more honest, retrains the voice over time until it starts to say you can do the thing you've set out to do.

Consider how you unwind at night. A lot of us replay the day and tally up everything we got wrong, imagining how it might have gone if we'd handled it differently. Rather than sitting in that courtroom, convert the verdict into an aim. Say a conversation ended with you leaving out something important. Make better communication the thing you work on for the next one. The judgment becomes a target instead of a wound.

A large share of life sits entirely outside your hands, and naming what you can't control frees up energy for what you can. When you let go of the things you were never going to change, you stop pouring effort into dead ends and self-sabotage loses a foothold. Acceptance is what lets you move on.

Perfectionism deserves its own warning. Demanding flawlessness from yourself is a fast route to sabotage, because the standard can't be met and the failure stings every time. Ease up when things go sideways. Loosening that grip opens room for new experiences, and it makes you more willing to learn from your own mistakes, which is how you build resilience and the ability to recover from a rough stretch.

If self-sabotage is a habit for you, undoing it won't happen overnight. Pick one of these ideas and stay with it before adding the next. Small, steady changes feel less jarring than trying to overhaul everything at once, and over time your life genuinely improves. The reward is more success and more happiness, and relationships that aren't quietly strained by the things you never let yourself try.

- Rosemary Kitchen

Reference: Cain, M. (2012). How to Defeat Self-Sabotage so You can Get What You Want. Retrieved on February 18, 2015.