Avoiding Self Sabotage – 7 steps to Permanent Positive Change

Self Sabotage is something we are all guilty of at times, however those who engage in constant negative self talk find this cycle of initial motivation to complete failure is a regular occurrence in one or more areas of their life. People can and do change! Do not, under any circumstances assume you are “just like that” and cannot legitimately transform your actions, behavior or circumstances. I’ve done it and seen plenty of other people do it too. If you have taken the time to come here and read this, you are already on the way to achieving it! I believe self sabotage stems from people not believing that deep down they deserve what they want. Life doesn’t have to be depressing, hard, sad and pointless.
Life should be abundant, happy, exciting, educational and emotional, don’t settle for anything less.

My personal experience

I’ve noticed the people most affected by this tend to be very selfless and generous. Always doing things to please other people. They get immense pleasure from helping and supporting everyone around them, to the extend that they are uncomfortable if the favour is returned and feel awkward asking for help when they need it.

If there is one point I want you to take away from this article, it would be:

If you notice you are in a cycle of self sabotage, become more selfish.

Learn to become comfortable with doing things for your own benefit. Take time to consider how your intended behavior or action might affect YOU in the near or distant future. Will it be a good day at work tomorrow if you yell at a colleague because they are late on a task? Will you be fitter next week if you skip today’s training session? I believe just as we can have physical imbalances in our bloodstream/body, our emotional levels can be out of balance. If you self sabotage in any area of your life, it might just be that you need to be more selfish and realise that if YOU are happier and healthier, it will resonate with everyone and everything you deal with on a daily basis. If you enjoy making other people happy, you should know by now how to do it, so give a little of that medicine to yourself.

What do I mean when I say for your own benefit?

• Being comfortable handling highly stressful situations
• Being assertive at work without being aggressive
• Eating wholesome food to support your body (your life’s vehicle!)
• Avoiding conflict by calming down before responding to accusations/arguments
• Using spare time to educate yourself on something you need to be better at
• Telling people you love, that you love them!
• Celebrating achievements no matter how small

Do any of these things “benefit” you?

• Flying off the handle during arguments
• Admitting defeat before you begin
• Unwillingness to increase demands during training
• Make excuses for not eating nutritionally dense, healthy food
• Blame someone, something for anything that you perceive as going “wrong”
• Procrastinating instead of taking immediate action
• Taking on too much at once
• Being disorganised

Everyone has the resources and ability to initiate a true change in their behavior to stop the cycle of self sabotage. The positiveness can and will snowball to the point where you have no choice but to accept it! You need to get momentum with that initial drive and goal, and then change into a comfortable gear to get through the journey in a reasonable time frame.

Are you lazy by nature? If so, it will strongly affect any long term change. Be prepared for this and do whatever it takes to remind yourself daily that this really matters to you. I’ve said before – a bad day shouldn’t create a bad week. Accept you didn’t get it right this time and pick up where you left off, immediately. Celebrate improvements and ignore failures. Focus the energy on what you want, not what you are doing wrong.

Be realistic with goals, expectations, time frames when planning anything in your life. Keep in mind that other people will do their best to bring you down, not even consciously a lot of the time. Jealousy can cause people to say and do things they wouldn’t do if they were conscious of it. Don’t rely on other peoples compliments or comments to uplift you. Beating self sabotage is a deeply personal, internal experience that must be driven by you, for you.

Ready to stop self sabotage? Get a pen and paper and continue on:

• Allow yourself to accept praise. You need to be comfortable feeling proud of any change and achievements. Give yourself permission to shine! What has happened in your life to make you think you do not deserve long term success? Write it down.
• IDENTIFY Take the time to write down what it is you are “failing” at. What areas of your life do you continually self sabotage? Next to each one, write how you can combat it. You might plan to count to 10 before responding to an email, or packing your training gear into the car so you can get changed at work and go right to the gym. Plan simple strategies to combat the individual circumstances so you have a failsafe in place to keep you on track.
• What is the PATTERN? Get detailed here and really express on paper what goes through your mind before, during and after a cycle of self sabotage.
• How long does it take from motivation to failure? (hours, days, weeks, months?)
• Barriers to success – List anything or anyone who presents a challenge to your success? (e.g. work hours, family member, lack of information) Present solutions to each of your barriers.
• What should the priorities in your life be? (For me they are fitness, health, education, happy relationships, time for rest/play, helping others.) Can you combine priorities to ensure success?
• Seal the deal. If you train yourself to have immediate awareness when initiating your pattern of behavior that results in self sabotage you can stop it before it gets any momentum, and redirect your energy.

Thankyou again for reading, I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to check out my articles. I love writing and hope I have helped someone today!

How to see the glass as half full – Tools for becoming more positive

I personally battled a 2 year long bout of depression that did more than just drain me mentally. It affected my relationships, lost me many a job and even had physical ramifications that are only now finally clearing up (some 8 years later). My confidence was non existent and I had no friends. I had dug myself into a hole. I could find a negative to any positive people wanted to throw at me. I could find something wrong with everything. I actually started finding a wicked sense of pride and achievement in being negative. I don’t know if my depression was a chemical imbalance, or whether my circumstances at the time became too much for me and I just let go and let the darkness take me over. If you have never experienced true depression, the best way I can describe it is that you wake up in the morning and start crying right away because you are literally unable to face the day. Every task, conversation, meal, shopping trip, shower is too much effort and you simply can’t get out of bed. A total sense of helplessness and an overwhelming negative feeling about every single aspect of your life.

I’m in a different space all together now, it is blissful, sometimes still emotional and I do have bouts of rage that I am gradually whittling down. I feel so alive though and I have an overwhelming desire to help others now instead of wallowing in self pity. I hope what I share here may help you if you are feeling down, struggling financially, having relationship problems, or indeed suffering depression or anxiety. I’ve built up a series of steps and cues for myself which I feel I should share, in case they can even help just one of my readers.

I can’t go on any further without referring to some of the amazing people who I’ve learnt from in my journey so far. I went from living in a caravan park, and living off food vouchers in a destructive relationship, to being happily married, with a son, living in paradise, financially stable and living in a energetic, motivated space. My first wake up call came from one of Tony Robbins’ CD sets. I remember buying them out of desperation. I figured my next stop was a shrink and seeing as I couldn’t afford one, I went to the local book shop and ordered a 6 CD pack of his motivational talks.

Constant and Never Ending Improvement

The main thing I took away from what he teaches is that you must always ask yourself an empowering question to find some direction. For me, it is always “What can I do right now, this INSTANT to improve my situation? “ I used this in a very literal sense. Sometimes it meant logging on and looking for a job. Other times it might be to swallow my pride, and apologise to someone, or even go through and sell some items on ebay so I could pay a bill. Creating a habit of stopping myself in the peak moment of rage or anxiety and asking that question was one of the most powerful tools I used to change my state from helplessness to productive. Tony also talks a lot about the C.A.N.I principle – Constant And Never Ending Improvement. I’ve successfully applied this to all areas of my life and I feel just reminding myself of it keeps me very motivated. I try to think of it as 1% a day = 100% in 100 days! You can apply it to everything – for me it is very important with my training and developing my nutritional habits as I want to attain as much information as possible and use what I know to help others. I am much more relaxed about both areas now because I don’t see a particular “end point”. I’m ok with never being perfect. I still have goals but there is always an open end them. I enjoy every day seeking out a way to improve my fitness, strength, endurance, cooking skills and relationships. I don’t set out to improve on every aspect of my life every day, but I do make a mental note of something I want to achieve, no matter how small. I love the driving force thinking like this provides me, it is really empowering and gives me so much energy. Disappointment has been banished from my life, I just keep looking forward to what I can work on next. It isn’t tiring at all, you live in a sense of achievement and motivation all the time!

“Chunking it down” was a great way to cope with anxiety attacks. I’d often have an overwhelming sense of urgency about me when trying to get through normal daily tasks at home or work. I would often stress myself out so much over it, I’d throw my hands up in the air, claim “it can’t be done, there is no way I can finish this in time” then promptly burst into tears or tear shreds off the nearest person who dared to try and calm me down. If you take a moment to truly prioritise what is in front of you, you can often get a little list going and break things down into smaller tasks and then be strong and push yourself to only focus on one at a time. Looking back I’m actually embarrassed about my behavior, but to me at the time, in the moment, it felt so rational!

Perspective and Gratitude

A strong influence for me over the last decade has been someone I have never had the chance to thank in person, her name is Belita, the child I sponsor in Africa. Receiving her letters would give me a huge reality check. To hear her describe how excited she was to sit in her new classroom at school now, (because my money had helped them build one) was sobering. She told me it was much better than being under the tree because at least when it rained now they would be able to keep on with the class. After reading her letter, not being able to afford to go the movies, or having to get up and work at 4:30am, or my boyfriend leaving his clothes on the floor seemed so very trivial. No matter how poor my financial situation became, I prioritised my monthly payment to her over everything else. Someone so far away has affected my life so much and one day I hope I can meet her to tell her that in person. Writing back to her, telling her about what is going on my life made me realise I was somewhat materialistic and had no reason to be so negative. She has always been so happy about everything in her life, and so thankful for what she does have, it made me sick to the stomach as I became more aware of my attitude and general outlook. I needed to find ways to appreciate all the greatness in my life. To have a sense of gratitude for all the wonderful people and experiences that came my way.

The Law of Attraction

A good friend of mine who I met through my husbands design work, is Helen Hall. She is an amazing Health Coach who taught me a lot about real health and real nutrition, which was a far cry from what they taught me in my Personal Training course! Having meals with her and her partner at the time, Stephanie Burns, led to many enlightening conversations about how we could eat and live better. They introduced us to Udo’s oil and eating LSA (a ground up meal of linseeds, sunflower seeds and almonds), got us drinking more water and snapped us out of our slack habit of eating whatever we could get on the way to training. We learnt to respect our bodies with better fuel.

I’ve learnt that the right people tend to come into your life at the right time. Helen taught me a lot about health, however the main reason I wanted to mention her is because she introduced me to a movie called “The Secret”. If you haven’t seen it, it is about the Law of Attraction. Steve Pavlina has a good article on this and there is a lot of writing about it out there so I won’t rehash what has been done before. A brief explanation is:

Your can attract into your life what you think about. If you think about negative things, that is what the universe delivers. If you think about money, or a job, it delivers that too. For example, if you are struggling financially, and you tend to think about bills and debts, that is what you will get more of. If you constantly think about how fat you are, you are ordering more fat from the universe! If you change your tune and think about money and higher income, or a healthy body, you will have opportunities come your way, and even cheques in the mail that you didn’t expect.

1. Know exactly what you want.
2. Ask the universe for it.
3. Feel, behave and know as if the object of your desire is already yours (visualise)
4. Be open to receive it and let go of (the attachment to) the outcome.

For all of the above to work, it is imperative that you think about what you are grateful for all the time. I have started a gratitude journal and try to write 5 things in it every night. I’d recommend everyone to start one whether you believe in the law of attraction or not. I write things like:

Thankyou for my health
Thankyou for my wonderful relationships with my family,
I’m grateful for the money that is helping us pay our home off
I’m grateful for how much sleep I have been getting

Doing this every day helps you to appreciate everything good in your life and makes it easier to disregard the negatives. The more thought you give to all the great things, the more you start to pay attention to opportunities and coincidences that can lead you to what you want. You know when you want to buy a certain model of car, then for a few weeks, you start seeing that model everywhere you go? Same principle – it sets you up to notice and pay attention to ways to bring the things you want into your life.

I do personally believe in the law of attraction (LOA). It has helped me with finding a career path I am passionate about, and being able to work from home. It’s helped my husband get remote work through his employer too. It has helped us start up our own businesses. We’ve gone from broke to a much better financial situation. We aren’t renting anymore. There were sums of money I asked the universe for and we got them within 12 months. I believe the way I think because I put the LOA into action helped me with getting pregnant and having a healthy baby. I believe it helped me get out of my depression and find plenty of motivation every day, with enough left over to help other people. If nothing else, it is a great tool for your emotional management as it can assist you to stay positive and maintain a sense of direction in your life.

Above all, respect and nourish your body. It is the vehicle for experiencing life and you can live on an amazing permanent high by fuelling yourself with good nutrition! Feeling physically well through exercise and food will go a long way to improving your mental experience.

I hope you can apply these tools for motivation, success and a positivity to your life. Be happy with constant and never ending improvement, celebrate all your achievements and keep looking for new ways to improve your life, 1% at a time.

If there are any areas of my posts that you would like me to expand upon, please let me know, I’m happy to oblige!

How To “Snap Out Of It” & Get Motivated Again

There have been plenty of moments in my life where making some drastic changes was necessary for me to move forward in my life and improve my somewhat stagnant situation.  I aim to share some of what I learnt here.  I’m thankful for everything I have experienced as I know now, that it has shaped my behavior, motivation and direction. I’m well aware there are much worse things one can go through than my rough patches, that is the case for everyone, there will always be someone who can top your story. I will use this weeks article to educate you on how you can apply some basic skills and methods to any situation to cause a change in direction and get you out of that rut you are in.

Being “stuck  in a rut” might mean you:

• Are tired when you wake up in the morning
• Don’t get excited about going to training
• Can’t be bothered preparing meals in advance to take to work
• Snap at people because you are just “stressed”
• Don’t have good nutrition
• Cry at the drop of a hat
• Are frustrated with your slow progress
• Can’t prioritise your tasks/work/home organisation/jobs
• Find a negative in just about every situation and can easily ignore or disregard the positives
• You are lacking in motivation

It isn’t always related to health and fitness, even work or your sex life can suffer. It becomes easier to accept things as they are and just shuffle along and go with the flow. It seems like a good option for a little while, then the self doubt starts to set in. You start wondering why you bother at all, then you start making excuses to slacken a little further. Before you know it, you don’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning at all. You stop making the effort and just go through the motions. I will take you through some steps as a self improvement exercise you can do to snap out of it and get that fire back.

AWARENESS

What you dislike in others, is usually present within YOU.

While this is clearly not a 100% scientific fact in 100% of people, it is often a great way to get you in a space to determine what it is about your way of thinking, your habits, the way you treat others that needs some fine tuning. Your ego will tell you otherwise, often very cunningly! Don’t make excuses or beat around the bush.

• Do you hate laziness?
• Can’t stand it when people don’t give you a wave when you let them into your lane in traffic?
• Think that customer service staff ought to at least smile sometimes?
• Analyse your friends home/office/car and immediately consider the level of order and cleanliness relates to their personality?
• Think the fattie at Maccas in the food court shouldn’t be ordering the chips and should have a water instead?
• Hate being interrupted in a conversation?
• Feel like people aren’t really listening to you when you are talking?
• Want to yell out the window and tell the people walking that they better go faster if they want to lose some weight?

Observe when you form judgements of people in your life through your self talk, or perhaps quiet words to a colleague or friend. Even jot down a point form list. Have an honest look at yourself and see if you can correlate what it is you don’t like about what you are seeing or hearing to something YOU do. You may find more connections than you would like. It is important to do this as a regular little exercise for a few weeks because you will then catch yourself in the act so to speak. Once you are regularly observing it happening you can move on to being aware of how YOU are going about your daily life and start correcting some of your behaviors.

If you can create a sense of constant awareness around how you behave, think and act it will let you see how you got into your rut, and how to modify yourself to take things up a level and achieve some momentum in your life.

CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

If you are in a negative environment at home, work, the gym, your relationship, your fridge, your computer – you can bet your bottom dollar you have been coaching yourself into being an expert on being negative and it is probably rubbing off on the people you live with. Time for you to jot down what you need to change in your environment. This step is crucial – you MUST make a conscious effort to be physically in a supportive, motivating, positive, excited environment for your mental space to be able to change.

A new colour on the bedroom walls or doona might freshen that space up a little. Moving house (biggie but can be life changing!) to a nice neighborhood, city or town. Buying some new training gear for the gym. Go through your computer files and clean them up! Wash the car. Stop procrastinating and get around to doing those little odd jobs you have been putting off. Some other more detailed suggestions you could consider:

Stop watching or listening to the news. If you don’t believe me that bad news is in the majority, do a little tally over a week. Does hearing about another murder, suicide, plane crash, bombing, drug bust, politician bickering, child left locked up in a daycare centre do anything whatsoever to improve the quality of your life? Will you be any worse off if you didn’t know? It is so very refreshing to take this step, you will feel a lot lighter not carrying around those thoughts in your head every day. If anything “that” bad was going on in the world and it is crucial to your survival to know, I guarantee someone will make it their business to tell you personally.

Purge! If you can’t see your desk for all the paper, or the car doesn’t fit in the garage, it is time. Your stuff is not you, it isn’t even a representation of you, it is just stuff. It is easy to do one room per day over a week or two and completely purge your home. Stop holding on to things you haven’t used for years, haven’t worn for years. If something has sentimental value, give it the respect it deserves and display or use it. Find a way to integrate it into your life. Everything should have it’s place and the more things you can put away in a box in a cupboard the better. Be methodical and organised about it. Keep like with like. Label all boxes. If you can look around objectively you will probably find plenty of things that don’t need to be out, or even in the house at all. Have an ebay day or a garage sale, or donate some things. If worst comes to worse and you really did need that 9th screwdriver or the extra car mats, or the spare computer screen – just go out and get it when you need it secondhand or new. I personally got rid of a LOT of items when I moved last time. Haven’t missed a single one yet. Don’t hold on to things just in case you need it, we have internet shopping and express postage these days, you will get by!

Ditch friends who drag you down! If you are serious about changing your situation, you simply cannot allow yourself to be surrounded with people who are detrimental to your goals. If you have friends who smoke, and you want to quit – tell them, request they don’t smoke when you are around. If you have friends who tell you often they don’t get why you bother dragging yourself to the gym at 6am, or why you go to the effort or preparing your meals ahead for work – tell them outright that these things that seem a waste of time to them, are important to you, that you find it offensive when they make fun of your efforts purely because they are embarrassed that they can’t be bothered. If your mates are constant whingers or attention seekers, point it out to them, sometimes people really don’t realise they are doing it! It takes guts to do this but if you are serious about making a change in your life, you will find a tactful way to do it. Seek out people who are already doing what you want to do, working in a field you’d like to get into, exercising regularly.  Motivated, excited passionate people infect everyone around them. Use the internet to connect with people who are a few steps ahead of you in the chain and learn from them. The more positive people  you can have in your life or online networks, the more ideas and motivation you will get for free. You shouldn’t have to expend energy trying to bring other people up to your level, to understand what you are trying to do.

Be the instigator. If you are stuck in a relationship rut with your partner, friend, colleague, child or relative – suck it up and make an effort to improve it. Do something tangible. If you make a conscious, genuine effort to be encouraging, compassionate, a good listener, loyal, motivating and perhaps exciting with the people in your life, they WILL return the favour. You don’t have to do anything big – simply giving your partner a longer than 2 second kiss before you scoot out the door to work could be enough to keep them smiling all day.

Fridge and Pantry Overhaul. I am going to get pop my trainer hat on here and get a little nasty. I could easily write a book on this topic so will try keep this brief. If you have food in your house that is lacking in nutrition such as chips, lollies, biscuits, soda/fizzy drinks and so on, you WILL eat them! If your health is important to you, you need to do this and to educate and support other people in your household about it so they can cope too. I plan to write more detailed articles on nutrition, but here is a list of things I want you go go put in the bin right now. If you don’t think they affect your weight, your mood, your behavior, your fitness, your relationships,  be sure to check back for my other articles soon outlining this.

• Any foods with preservatives, added colours, flavours. I literally mean check every packet, jar, bag, box and read the ingredients. If there are any on there, throw it in the bin. This request will cover any nasty food in your home as that is one thing they all have in common. By only eating unprocessed, fresh foods you have solved the problem in one go!
• Out of date food

You can and will survive quite easily on preparing food with the following as a basic stock:

• Fruit/vegies
• Bread (home baked in breadmaker is easy and preservative free)
• water
• dark chocolate
• chicken
• fish
• small amount of red meat
• tofu
• nuts
• herbs (fresh/dried)
• coconut milk
• rice pasta/pasta
• brown rice
• fresh peanut butter (health food shops can usually make it for you while you wait)
• skim/low fat milk
• low fat yoghurt
• canned beans/chickpeas/lentils
• cheese

It is SO easy to make your own biscuits, dips, bread, muffins etc. They taste better and  you know what went into them! I only spend $90 to $120 a week on food and our household of 4 adults and 1 toddler eat a lot. Fresh food is cheaper!

EXERCISE:

Get a display folder – fill it with recipes you try and like for a couple of types of biscuit, dip, muffins and meals. Any you like as you go along should be copied or typed up and put in here for easy access so you are not flicking through a stack of books when trying to find a recipe. Try at least one new recipe per week in case it deserves to be in your folder!
Take a photo of your bag of food you are purging. I want evidence!

It can take a little while to get comfortable and organised enough to cook with fresh food all the time, but once you do, it is well worth it and can be just as quick as cheating! You will never go back once you start feeling the effects of being additive and preservative free!

CREATING NEW HABITS

So by now you should be at a point where you can identify aspects of your behavior and thinking that contribute to your lack of forward momentum. You have made the effort to live, and interact with people and spaces that contribute to a better sense of calmness, organisation, motivation and achievement. Now it is time to cement in some new habits to ensure you don’t start edging your way back to the dark side and taking the easy option all the time.

Put everything away – right away. Don’t be tempted to leave something on the kitchen bench and take it to your room with you later. Don’t leave the rubbish till the morning. Be strict with pushing this new habit for a couple of weeks. You will soon convince yourself quickly every time you see something that needs to go away, to do it immediately. Knowing you just have to do it later should be motivation enough. Also remember that if you can keep your environment clear, clean, unobstructed and organised, that attitude will flow through to all areas of your life. Respect the space you live in.

Say Thankyou! If someone gives you a compliment, thank them! Being comfortable accepting compliments will go a long way to helping you notice and be thankful for your little improvements you are making and build on them.

Educate yourself. It is easier to sustain new habits in your life if you know why it is worth creating them. If you want to eat better – jump online and go read up on what antioxidants are, or what protein does, or what foods contain essential fatty acids. The more knowledge you have the better equipped you are to combat the aspects of your behavior that got you into that rut in the first place. If it is depression that is making life not worth living, get online, even if you have to be in your bed, and seek out people who have recovered from depression and talk to them. There are plenty of blogs and forums out there on this topic, with plenty of people only too happy to give you advice. Whatever it is that you are driven towards or wish you could do, have or become – go learn about it. Connect with people doing it. Information truly is power, so make the effort to learn all you can so you can move forward in your life instead of staying stagnant and void of any motivation.

Stay aware. If you catch yourself engaging in negative self talk, or looking for excuses, taking easy options, nip it in the bud early. Take each day as it comes and stay on top of your thought processes. Relapses are not an option. Don’t let one slip up take you all the way back to the beginning. Just get up and pick up where you left off. Some things in life are 2 steps forward, one step back. You can’t control everything so be accepting of whatever gets thrown your way. Look at what you can learn from it, and move on. If you find it hard to stop something that you know is contributing to a build up of negativity, ask a person close to you to make you aware when you are doing it. They will find it much easier to notice than you doing it yourself.

Take baby steps. In the beginning,you will be fired up. Your motivation levels will dip and rise after the novelty of your new idea, direction, plan, diet, program wears off. Be reasonable about your goals, give yourself time to create new habits. Don’t expect or try to be bouncing off the walls with passion every second of the day. Accept that you won’t always be excited about slotting papers into their new folder or cooking that new stir fry recipe, or going for the early morning walk. As long as what you are doing, saying, learning or trying is contributing to your overall wellbeing, it is worth doing.

You officially have no excuses anymore. If you have made it to the end of this article, you now possess enough information to start the process. There is no such thing as tomorrow, you only have the present moment in your control. If you are already thinking to yourself, I might start next week on Monday,  or I will quit smoking after my birthday, you are just cementing yourself into that hole. Start TODAY, make some changes that can secure you a better future. You CAN change your ways, it is never too late! Every day you wait, adds another 24 hours to how long it will take to achieve your goals.