Why Do We Sabotage Ourselves?

The Daily Grind #15

I’m going to be honest with you guys. Not that haven’t been, but I have certainly been holding back. Whether it’s nervousness or sheer laziness, there are times in our lives where we get really excited about something.

We take on some more projects and really find our groove.

But suddenly, before we even launch something, we get some knots in our stomach.

We hesitate to press the big red “LAUNCH” button.

We fail before we even get it all started.

I have been in that sort of loop for a little bit revolving around a few projects of mine. I’ve justified it with finding another client (in which I’m grateful for), but there is still that hesitation lingering around.

It’s a rather new experience for me since I haven’t really been in this situation before.

With writing, I jumped in with no hesitation and stayed committed to it.

Youtube videos is a whole other thing though.

But it still begs the question why exactly do we do something like this?

Furthermore what is the best way for us to deal with it?

Why Do We Self-Sabotage?

Why do we stop ourselves short before the starting line?

From looking at myself, I believe it can be boiled down to a few things. Fears, excuses, doubts, asking too many what if’s, and possibly having way higher expectations.

Fears of course feed into our excuses and doubts that we have and it’s up to us to overcome that fear. I’ve also talked about doubts and excuses in the past before so I’m hesitant to explain it more here.

Especially since I think what’s more concerning is asking what if’s and having high expectations.

In both of these cases — and the other cases as well — a lot of this is going on in our own head.

With what if’s we’re creating these scenarios that may be true or might not be true. This is important to keep in mind because whatever is going on in our head doesn’t really matter.

Sure what we think and say attracts to us on some level, but the advice I want to give in dealing with these mental games is simply this.

Launch The Damn Thing

Placing high expectations on yourself can be challenging and it can overwhelm you, but the one thing I’ve learned recently and should be employing more is this:

Focus on launching. Don’t worry so much about the results.

When we start caring about the numbers or our hopes and dreams of doing certain things it creates a bias. It clouds our judgement.

Of course we do something for our own selfish reasons. Whether it’s to prove a point, expand our brand, or bring us closer to whatever goal we have set for ourselves.

But we can’t get that in the way of the work itself.

It’s through that where we sabotage ourselves because we care so much to be right or place an expectation of how things should proceed.

As soon as we start pushing our dreams into a reality or an expectation, we will fail and have to learn.

My brother knows that all too well as he’s working with a group who has stars in their eyes and is expecting to launch a game soon that’ll generate thousands of sales in the first month. This is from a group who started campaigning the game a few weeks before their launch. Furthermore they are a new group so no one has heard of them until now.

It’s not realistic, but they set that expectation because they looked at other games similar to theirs. Games that took a highly trained group years to develop and have been in the market for years now.

My points are simple:

• Focus on launching and creating.
• Give updates and hype it up along the way.
• And most importantly, have expectations, but don’t let them control your actions or influence your emotions.

Self-Sabotage Happens When…

Self-sabotage comes when our expectations aren’t met. Even in that light, we need to learn to forge forward.

For example, my writing challenge didn’t meet my expectations. But I’m still pushing to write every day for this series. Furthermore I want to be stepping up my game.

That is my focus for this week: launch.

Launch stuff as much as you can and stop holding back.

Focus on the launch and don’t look back or ask “what if”, it’s not worth it.

To your growth!

Eric S Burdon

On that note, I’d like to take some time today to announce something. Yes, I have actually launched something as well and that is…

A brand new website!

Yes. I am serious. I have another website as of yesterday and I have already started to work on it.

That being said, it’s not open to the public just yet. However I’ll give you a teaser as to what the site is.

Well, it’s not much of a teaser since the website says exactly what it’s for. Either way, it’s a site that helps in boosting low self esteem as well as confidence. It’s been an idea for a few months now and I’ve been waiting until after the writing challenge I did to launch the site.

I’ve been dragging my feet a little with it, however I’m excited to be doing this and putting in more work onto this site.

Yesterday I spent time putting together plugins and doing more behind the scenes work for this. With most of it all done, I want to be promoting it now as there is an opt-in at the bottom of the page. I also plan to use that list to promote posts once it’s live as well.

As for how many posts you can expect per month it’ll generally be around 5 per month so you won’t be getting emails from me on a daily basis or anything.

So if you want some tips and guidance on boosting self esteem in certain areas you can sign up to the list by visiting the site here and input your email at the bottom.

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