Self sabotage doesn't exist - here's why

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Vishad Doshi, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Self sabotage may not actually exist.

Yeah, you read that right. And I’ll explain why…

Let’s take a change in life that you want to implement like wanting to get into physical shape. The advice you receive from someone like a trainer is that you need to go running every day, and to do that, they give you life hacks like organize your running kit by the side of the bed, get up at 5am each day and go running, and you do all that consciously – for a day, week, month, year, until you stop, and when you stop and end up not getting into shape, you put it down to self-sabotage.

The term implies that we intentionally did something (or stopped doing it) which prevented us from attaining our goal.

And while it’s true that we stopped doing something, it goes beyond it being intentional.

It’s our conscious and subconscious at odds with each other.

When you consciously said “I want to get into shape”, your subconscious, which has been running things for you all these years keeping you alive in the process, in response goes “…why?” It asks why because (without you even consciously knowing or being aware of it), the current situation of not being in shape meets your 4 humans needs:

· It meets your need for certainty and control because you know what to expect when you’re not exercising: it means you can do the things you enjoy like sitting on the couch watching TV

· It meets your need for uncertainty and variety because there’s a range of things you can do to stay out of shape e.g. exercise less, eat less healthily

· It meets our need for significance and ego because ourselves and others may say to us things like ‘nah, you don’t need to get into shape, you look fine as you are’

· It meets our need for love and connection because you see others around you who aren’t in shape either so you can resonate with them and continue to do things you enjoy instead like eating junk and watching TV together

Using romantic relationships as another example, if we know someone who always get into dysfunctional relationships, we could say “He/she will never get what they need from relationships like that”.

In our heads, we think that what they think they need is the Hollywood/Bollywood-style, fairy tale love story. However, in these dysfunctional relationships, if you take a look at each human need:

· Certainty/control – they’re certain that they’re always miserable in these relationships and that these relationships are always shit. The use of a universal quantifier in always here is also telling – by saying something always happens gives certainty because if we say something always happens, then we’re being certain in what’s going to happen

· Uncertainty/variety – now and again, the other person in the relationship will do something unexpected, which is still shit – so you have the certainty of the relationship being shit mixed with the uncertainty of when the shitness happens

· Significance/ego/feeling special and love/connection– when it is shit, they’ll phone everyone they knows to gossip about it and get told “but you’re nice and you should get a different partner”

So to say they don’t get what they need in a relationship like that is not right – all of their needs are met.

Your natural reaction here might be “Yeah but no-one goes into relationships that are dysfunctional on purpose.”

That’s true, and remember that our subconscious couldn’t give a monkey’s about our happiness – it wants to keep us alive and meet our needs, it’s not interested in whether that situation makes us happy. So, unless we work with our subconscious to meet our needs in healthier ways, we’ll continue experiencing these less than ideal situations, an if we wonder why we keep experiencing these, it’s because our needs are being met without us really knowing.

It has perceived this new idea from the conscious as a threat to how it run things, so naturally enquires about it. If you were to say “I want to be more happy”, the subconscious doesn’t compute that, because our subconscious only cares about survival and meeting your needs, not about you being happy.

In fact, for the subconscious to consider your happiness, it’d have to deconstruct the system it has in place already that’s keeping you alive.

What we’re getting at is that when our subconscious objects like this, it’s not an act of self-sabotage, it’s an act of self-protection – our subconscious wants to go back where we were previously because it was meeting all of our needs and hence saw no need for things to change. Furthermore, it sees that if we do look to make changes, who knows whether our needs will continue to be met, hence the element of protection from the unknown.

These are 2 of the primary directives of the subconscious from the world of NLP in play:

The subconscious follows the path of least resistance and the subconscious keeps negative memories and experiences repressed to protect you.

This is where communicating with your subconscious is key here if you want to do the work and make changes for yourself. The more your subconscious believes and buys into your idea, the more it’ll work for and with you

Having that communication actually tests us to see how much we actually want the thing we say we want it. Remember, we said our subconscious wants to believe and support us, but needs clarity. If we find we can’t give it that clarity for whatever reason, then it could well be a sign that we’re bullshitting ourselves – that we don’t really want the thing we say we really want, and we only say we want it because it might sound like the “right” thing to be wanting/doing, or that ‘everyone else is doing/wanting it, so I might as well too.’

How much you want it may even come down to what have you got to lose by not doing anything right now. If your life isn’t great at the moment to the extent where staying in your own Land of Problems means that further problems or prolonging the existing ones could be nearer than you think, then that want for something else, which could either be further/prolong problems (in which case, you’d not be worse off than what you are already facing) or paradise (whatever you define that to be), is strong enough to convince your subconscious and hence you work towards that want with a subconscious that’s bought in.

This gives an indication as to why most people don’t change or undertake this work on themselves or keep themselves in situations that aren’t working out for them, like their current job that’s burning them out or the relationship with their partner that they’re unhappy in: the tradeoff between the certainty of the current situation and the uncertainty of the death-or-paradise jeopardy that comes with making the change is too great, so they choose to stay in the Land of Problems because they meet their need for certainty by staying where they are. So, when it comes to them saying they reaaaaally want something, and get questioned on how much they want it, they might follow that up with an excuse which actually suggests they may not want it as they initially suggested.

The difficulty we all have is being honest with ourselves. We might think it would be a good idea to lose a few pounds in weight and in a dream world we might love to have a six pack, but do we really, really want one? Usually when people aren’t doing something they say they want to do is it’s because they don’t really want to do it.

They want to lose weight because their wife says they should, or they want to change jobs because their husband thinks it would be a good idea. But they don’t really want to. They’re just okay with their podgy midriff and wanting to work in the local shop for an easy life.

If you find you’re not making changes even though you’re telling yourself consciously you want to, the first thing to do is sit down and ask yourself honestly whether you do really want to change. Our unconscious mind is great at telling us to take the easy option or make excuses, so you find yourself not having the motivation or momentum to do the things you say you want to do. Taking that time to sit down will allow you to reassess things and find out where you want to go. If you don’t, that’s okay. You don’t need to carry on with the bullshit to yourself and others. Just be kind to yourself and accept the life you have is the life you’ve chosen and that if you want to revisit that decision, you can take your own responsibility and do so. Taking this approach will, in itself, make you considerably more content and peaceful on a day-to-day basis.

So next time you want to change something in your space, as this lyric from the song Self Saboteur by Kid Kapichi (check the track out, by the way: it’s a proper tune) suggests: “if you mean it, then make me believe it.”

Enjoy the record.

Feel supersonic