How Do You Sabotage Your Success?

It is not the circumstances, the economic situation, your profession, your age, etc., that hold you back from being a successful solopreneur, growing your business and living the life you desire for yourself but you. You sabotage your success due to some internal factors that influence your behaviours and actions, your responses to the circumstances and challenges of the environment. The good news is that, if you sabotage yourself due to your internal blocks and other limiting factors, you can change the situation by looking at and changing the internal factors determining how you respond to your environment. When you change your responses, your results will also change.

There are many ways you can stop yourself from achieving your business goals and being successful or even from setting higher-level goals. It might sound strange, and you might argue that you want to achieve your goal. Of course, you do not stop yourself consciously from being successful. Success eludes you because you sabotage yourself with subconscious programs resulting in procrastination, making wrong decisions, not making a decision at all, playing small, staying in your comfort zone, not taking consistent action, not offering your services or products to potential clients, etc. Due to these internal factors, you operate on autopilot, repeating well-known habits, decisions, behaviours and actions.

The main factors that sabotage your success and keep you stuck are within you, and you can change them:

1. Your limiting beliefs are deeply engraved in your subconscious mind, and you often are not even aware of them. Your willpower, based on your conscious mind, is usually not powerful enough to counterbalance your limiting beliefs for a long period. Your subconscious mind is the under-water 90% of the iceberg and controls and influences your life through your decisions, behaviour, actions and habits. To achieve long-term changes, you must clear your limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering ones. Of course, strong willpower can help you achieve some success, but it will require a lot of energy. For example, you use your willpower to be visible consistently on social media and get clients, but your results are not consistent, and you are stuck at a certain level of business income. Even if you achieve your goal, you won't experience genuine satisfaction and joy because the journey has been a continuous struggle; it was painful and exhausting. Why not choose the easier and more joyful way towards your goal by working on your limiting beliefs?
2. Your self-talk or inner chatter is a powerful way of forming your belief system and determining your mood and attitude. If your self-talk is negative, it will affect your mood and attitude, action-taking ability, consistency, relationship building, self-confidence and many other essential aspects of business success. Negative self-talk plants new limiting beliefs into your subconscious mind and reinforces existing ones.
3. Your habits are formed by repeating the same actions until they become automatic, and your subconscious mind takes over the reins. For example, you perform the same activities in the same order each morning. You don't even think about them. If your repeating actions are productive, they save you time in the morning. Habits can have positive effects and increase your productivity. Habits often decrease productivity and hinder your success in achieving goals. For example, if your habit is to stop the alarm in the morning and sleep 10-15 minutes more, you might often be late for work or a meeting. Even if you are on time, you will arrive stressed because of the morning rush. This stress will affect your mood, behaviour, creativity and decision-making during the day. You might spend the first hour of your working time checking emails and social media instead of performing priority tasks. Later, unforeseen situations might appear, and you won't be able to finish your most important tasks.
4. Your fears stop you from stepping out of your comfort zone and taking action in certain situations or embracing something new, such as attending networking events, offering your services or products in new ways, creating new services or products, etc. The most common fears are fear of being judged or not being loved by others, fear of the unknown, fear of failure or even fear of success. If you do not handle these fears, life will pass along, and you will remain in your familiar but unsatisfactory comfort zone, not being able to grow your business.
5. Your expectations can affect your achievements by putting blinders on your eyes. If you expect something to unfold in a certain way, you will be so focused on this way of doing things or a result showing up in a certain way that you will not see the opportunities life puts into your way to achieve your goals. This problem may appear regarding your plan. You expect that you will do every step as it is in your plan. You do not pay attention to the changes of the environment and review your plan accordingly. In our complex and continuously changing world, it is futile to expect that reality unfolds exactly as planned or as we think it should happen. When you are free of expectations, your mind is open and receptive to the opportunities that show up, and you will be able to notice these opportunities and act accordingly (if you are ready to step out of your comfort zone). And it might be very different from what you thought, prefigured, planned or expected. This doesn't mean you should not make plans to achieve your goals, especially when it comes to your business. Planning is necessary and helps you look at the resources you will need in the future and take the necessary steps to acquire them. It also helps to know the next step or action you should take. But you should not be attached to your plan. Review it regularly and, if necessary, make adjustments. Be open to new opportunities and respond to challenges.

These five internal factors or blocks are often connected, and the common point is usually your beliefs that influence your inner talk and expectations and fuel your fears. Sometimes, they can also be the root cause of your habits.

You can start getting unstuck by working on your limiting beliefs and the habits that stop you from taking consistent and effective action. Analysing your self-talk and changing it is also a good start because self-talk reflects your limiting beliefs and fears. When you change negative self-talk into positive, you reprogram your mind to positive beliefs and disempower your fears.