Self Sabotage

Hey friend, in this episode of the Emotional Revolution Podcast, I’m diving deep into self-sabotage, a struggle so many of us face. But instead of just viewing it as a bad habit, we’ll explore the deeper reasons behind it and why it often feels safer than stepping into your full potential. 

I’ll guide you through understanding why self-sabotage keeps you in familiar but limiting spaces and share actionable steps to break free and embrace growth—yes, even when it feels terrifying. By the end of this episode, you’ll gain a new perspective on self-sabotage, recognize your triggers, and learn how to replace those old habits with empowering actions. Ready to stop holding yourself back and start moving forward in your life and business? Let’s dive in! Don’t forget to grab the free resource to guide you deeper into this work and share your breakthroughs with me using #EmotionalRevolution. Hit subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Transcript

Hey friend, welcome back to the Emotional Revolution Podcast. I'm Kayla Birch and today we're talking about something that I know so many of us struggle with and that's self-sabotage. But we're looking at it from a little bit of a different perspective because self-sabotage isn't just a bad habit. It's not just something that you have. It's really created somewhere. So it doesn't mean that you're lazy or incapable. It's actually a way of keeping yourself safe and in control. So in today's episode, what we're doing is we're really breaking down why self-sabotage feels safer than stepping into your full potential and how you can start letting go of what you are perceiving as control and really embracing growth. So even when it feels terrifying, even when it's a little bit uncomfortable. So by the end of this episode, you're gonna have a whole new perspective on self-sabotage. You're also gonna have some really actionable steps to stop holding yourself back and finally start making real progress. 

So whether that's in your life, your business, or anywhere in between, we are going to dive right into sabotage. So what is self-sabotage? Self-sabotage is something that we do whenever we are feeling momentum and then we come out of nowhere, it seems, and we just derail that progress. So we get into these habit cycles and these loops where things are going really well for us and then either our thoughts or our actions change or our beliefs start to shift that really get us off track. And they pull us back and they shrink us down back to these really comfortable and familiar spaces. And it shows up in so many different ways in our life. It can show up in our relationship. So you can just be having a conversation with your spouse or your significant other and 

And things are going really, really well. And then out of nowhere, you're not used to this kind of peaceful interaction. So out of nowhere, your brain reminds you of something that then triggers a deep emotional response. And then things start to go a little sideways because now you're bringing it up. And now you're attacking the other person. And the reasons why you're doing that actually have nothing to do with the other person and really nothing to do with that calm emotion. peaceful state and everything to do with maybe your need for chaos or your inability to be comfortable when things are going well, because you're not familiar with that yet. And so when I talk about, we hear a lot of people talk about comfort zones. I always like to challenge that because if I ask you right now about a situation you feel like you're sabotaging in, and I ask you right now, if you're comfortable, the answer is no, you're not comfortable where you're at. 

You have this urge and this need and this desire to kind of get somewhere else or be somewhere else or experience life differently. So you're not necessarily comfortable with where you're at, but you are familiar with it. So all of the discomforts are familiar to you and they're known and that feels safer. And so when it's safer, that's why we just stay trapped in that cycle because it's better to be safe than to step into another unfamiliar space that's unknown and you don't know what that's So we keep spinning in these ways. It comes up in our business a lot. It comes up in our business when we have a lot of momentum and things are going really well. And then all of a sudden, those thoughts and those actions creep up. So I'm getting a lot of clients, but then what's happening is maybe I'm pulling back from different areas. I'm not paying as much attention or I'm doing this or I'm not doing that. And that's my self-sabotaging mentality behavior coming in telling me that I'm not good enough or I'm not capable of maintaining this success. So you really have to explore what that looks like for you. 

I used to do this a lot early on in my business where I'd be putting myself out there. I would say, yes, I'm going to do it. I'd put myself out there. I'd get that momentum going. And then when that momentum started, it wasn't even always a conscious thought, but what would happen is my action started to pull back and So I stopped being as consistent. I stopped posting things. I stopped creating new things. Or for me, sometimes I would start creating more things. That was another part of my sabotaging cycle. So it's not always just the absence of action. Sometimes it's just hyperdrive for more action. Well, I have to do more. I have to do more. I have to do more because I have to prove to everyone else that I'm worthy and capable and able to do this. 

And so what was really happening was that I wasn't really needing to prove to anyone else that I was capable. What was happening is I was needing to prove to myself that I was capable. And so I wasn't believing that I could actually sustain this level of success. So it wasn't that I was scared of failure because I've experienced a lot of failure in my life and it was completely fine and I made it through every single time. But success is what really scared me. What would I do if I was successful? What would I do if I had to maintain something that I was so unfamiliar with? How could that be? How could Kayla be attached to success? And so what I had to do is I had to start redefining my relationship with success and redefining my relationship with my thoughts around success. And so when I got out of that specific self-sabotaging cycle, which is one of many, I am sure you can relate to that. 

When I got out of that self-sabotaging cycle, it was very specifically when I started to look at my relationship with my thoughts around success. So you need to start immediately, like right now, start evaluating your thoughts associated with your action or your belief or your idea of something. So for me, it was success. So for you, what is it? Is it being seen? Is it putting yourself out on social media? Is it moving forward? Is it getting your big presentation ready to pitch it to somebody so they could potentially say yes to an investment in you? Is it getting on a public stage? What is it for you? And what is your relationship with the thoughts associated with the action? And then that's when we start to pick it apart. And so when we start to understand the thoughts associated with the action, we can start to see them a little more clearly. We can step back a little bit, right? 

So that's what we're going to go into a lot of today is really understanding the thoughts associated with our actions that lead to the derailing and the sabotaging of ourselves. And one thing that we need to really go into when it comes to self-sabotage is that why are we doing this to ourself? Well, you're doing this because there's a hidden payoff, right? There is a reward behind all of your self-sabotaging behavior and your habits and your thoughts, right? And so you have to ask yourself, one, what is a payoff? Well, the payoff is something that you're getting in return. And so this right here is where I get a lot of pushback from clients. And they're like, absolutely, I'm not getting anything from this. And every single time there's something there, because if there was not something that you were getting in return, I guarantee you would stop doing it. It would not be present in your life if you weren't gaining something in return. So now these can be very perceived payoffs, but it's something usually along the line of, protection for you. 

There's a sense of security within your payoff, right? Within your self-sabotaging habit or behavior, you are getting something in return. It is keeping you safe some way, right? So for me, it was keeping me safe from feeling this high level of overwhelm and shut down and this feeling like I wasn't smart enough and capable of being successful because I didn't think that I was any of those things. I And so what that was going to do is protecting me from actually having to experience that to be true. So for me, I had this high level protection of, I please don't want anyone to know that I'm not capable. And I definitely don't want to tell myself I'm not capable. So let me just keep creating and not really following anything completely through. So I have an out. So you have to ask yourself, what is your out? What is this protecting you from? What's the deeper fear? 

Right. So it could be failure. It could be success. It can be rejection. It can be being seen. Right. It can be the sense of being vulnerable. So there's something that helps you and keeps you safe from being something else. Right. So being seen is a big one. A lot of people don't want to be seen, even though they're like, I want to be seen. No one listens to me. Well, your sabotaging behaviors are actually preventing the real you from being seen and heard. And so you're not showing up authentically and you're not putting yourself out there. And so you're sabotaging any chance of someone actually hearing the real you because maybe you're showing up in a voice that's not truly yours because you have a level of protection because people might not like the real you. And if they don't like the real you and not just the you that you put out there, then what are you left with, right? Then you have to deal with what comes there. Now you have to be really honest with yourself, right? 

And if you're not liking yourself, guess what? Nobody else is going to like you either. And not because they don't actually like you, but because you're not going to allow them to like you. You're going to have a barrier up. You're going to have them at arm's length because you're not the one liking yourself. So if you think people are judging you, the finger points right back to you every single time. And you say, it's not other people who are judging me. How am I judging me? What am I judging me for here? What are my judgments I have about myself that I'm now projecting into the external world and blaming others for that. And so you, whenever you are safe and secure with yourself, then it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about you. So a really great analogy. I like to think about if you woke up every single day and you looked in the mirror and you said, I'm such a blue elephant. I hate being a blue elephant. I hate that my hair is blue and my face is blue. 

And I, I don't want anyone to know that I'm a blue elephant. And so then you walk out into the world and says, oh my gosh, you're such a blue elephant. You're like, I knew it. I couldn't hide it. They see me for who I really am. And I hate it because you hate that about yourself. Versus if you didn't think any of those things and you walked out and someone was like, you're a blue elephant, you'd be like, yeah, I'm a blue elephant, right? Or you'd be like, I'm not a blue elephant because maybe you're not. Maybe those aren't actual characters or attributes that you have. So the point of this is really asking yourself and understanding that what you put out, what you think the most is going to be mirrored back to you. So I think I'm not good enough. If I think I'm this blue elephant that's walking around standing out and someone sees that, then I confirm that. 

But if I think that either I'm not that blue elephant or can go a different direction, we can say, I am this amazing blue elephant. And someone says, oh, you're a blue elephant. You'd be like, heck yeah, I am. I own that about myself. Right. But it doesn't matter what somebody else has to say about you. It matters what you think about yourself and how you are experiencing that through the external world. That's one of the most important things we can recognize with self-sabotage, because if we can, if we actually recognize our patterns with self-sabotage, that's great. Right. But if we don't actually know what we're scared of or what we're worried about or what we're protecting ourself from, it's just going to keep showing up in different ways and in different versions in our life. So you have to be really clear on this. And so then let's ask ourselves. So now we understand we're self-sabotaging, but how can we identify when you're in that self-sabotaging cycle? So you ask yourself, like, what are your triggers? What are your self-sabotaging behaviors? And how can you become more aware of them? 

So you really start to identify this like, okay, I'm feeling maybe happy. And how do I derail my happiness, right? How do I pull myself back from happiness? And why is it there? How do you recognize when you start to really disarm your ability to move forward? And so when you start to see that, we go back into that trigger cycle. What's the trigger that then leads to the pattern and then leads to the outcome, right? So you're staying in this cycle right here. And so how can I recognize that one? What's the trigger? And then what do I gain from this? And then of course, how do we shift it? And when I get into my self-sabotaging cycles, I have to really ask myself right now, what am I gaining? Well, right now, what am I gaining? Well, I'm gaining a sense of safety. Do I want that safety? Do I want something else? Now we're really stepping into a space where you can allow yourself to 
to make choices. We don't do that very often. We don't allow ourselves to make choices. We just go with our conditioned responses. And these conditioned responses are just always present in the back of our mind and our subconscious mind, whether we think about them or we know them or we recognize them or not. 

And so it's something that's really important to say, ask yourself, actually ask yourself if you want to keep this cycle, because here's the thing. I can't take it from you. right? I can't make you change. You have to be the one to say, yes, I want this to be different. Someone can talk to you until you, you are, they're blue in the face telling you that you keep having these same cycles over and over and over, but until you're willing to see them and address them and shift them again, they're still going to be present because you have to understand what you're gaining and you have to be honest with yourself and not judge yourself. But you 
Yes, I keep bringing this into my life. Yes, I keep the same cycle. And now I'm actually finally tired of doing it. I no longer want to keep doing this. This is not something that I want to participate in anymore in my life. I've been tired of my own shit so many times in my life. And that's what it takes. You being tired of your own shit. Same shit, different day until you decide to shift that cycle. So you start to recognize your patterns by your triggers and your responses. Always the basis of the work that we do here, trigger response. And then what do I gain from this? What is that payoff that keeps me stuck in this cycle? And what is it protecting me from? And just being really honest, right? It's protecting me from being seen, right? It's protecting me from feeling vulnerable. 

It's protecting me from being hurt again and again and again and again, because we're putting our happiness into somebody else's hands. We think that somebody else gives us happiness. We think that something else, the next project, the next book, the next this, the next business, whatever it is, we think that that's what brings us success. And so we're always putting ourselves into somebody else's or something else's in the external world's hands instead of our own. So how do all of these things contribute to your business growth or to your relationships or to your personal growth? Well, if you're not understanding yourself, then who is? How can you expect anyone to be close to you? Or how can you expect your business to really flourish when you are constantly rejecting yourself? When you're saying, I'm not good enough. 

And I'm not good enough, so I can't have this success. That's what fear of success or fear of failure comes in. I'm just going to prove once again that I'm a failure. But really, it's not the fear of the failure. It's a fear of success because you don't know what to do with it if you are successful. So what happens to you in your life when you become successful? What would that mean about you if you can't lean on all of the failures that you've had in your life? And then we start to evaluate that. And how do we break that cycle? So you ask yourself, okay, I get it, Kayla. I understand. I self-sabotage. That's why I'm here. That's why I've been listening this whole time. But I really want you to understand the why. Because there are plenty of steps out there. There's plenty of resources to tell you how to stop self-sabotaging. But the problem with all of those resources is they don't address why you're doing it in the first place and what you're gaining from it. 

So before you can even get to the practical steps of stop self-sabotaging, you have to guarantee and promise yourself that you are going to really evaluate what you gain from it. And when you're honest with yourself about that, then things can shift, right? So what are some practical steps for you to stop self-sabotaging, right? Well, you go through the process that we just talked about, and then it becomes actually pretty simple when we get into something called like our habit loop, right? And so that's when we start to be a lot more tangible about our habits and our responses, but very specifically with the self-sabotaging behavior. So we have a cue. So the cue might be, we'll go simple with like posting on social media. The cue might be that you need to post on social media, not just post on social media. You need to do a talking head roll on social media. Okay. So talking head roll, if you don't know, is when you are just literally a talking head talking to the camera, right? Face... 

Your face is on the camera and that's all they see is like shoulders and above or something along those lines, right? That is what makes a lot of people cringe and they say, absolutely not. I can't do that. I'm not ready. You know, my hair is not right. This isn't it. And every single excuse in the book to not do it. Okay. That's what we're talking about. But you know that that is what your audience wants. That's what's really helpful right now on Instagram and And TikTok, that's what they want because they want that connection. They want that vulnerability and they want to see a piece of you and they want to experience it directly from you. Okay. So the cue is it's time to do that. Well, then what happens? You say, no, you don't make time for it. You don't do it. There's so many other issues that are coming up. So many other excuses and reasons. You'll just do it here. Oh, you'll just do a voiceover or you'll just do this or you'll just do that. Right. So what are you protecting yourself from? That's the cue. 

The routine is now that you don't execute, that you find a reason not to, that you do something else. You pretend you don't have time. You pretend that just going a different route, doing a carousel or something along the lines is a lot better. So that's your routine. Your routine is avoidance, right? So the cue was that you needed to do the video. Routine is avoidance. And what's your reward? Well, your reward is that you were safe. You didn't have to be vulnerable. You didn't have to put yourself out there and nobody can say you have no freaking idea what you're talking about, right? So reward was safety. It was protection. But that protection keeps you in the same box you're in. And let me remind you, like we talked about at the beginning of this episode, you're not comfortable where you're at. You want to be somewhere else. And to be somewhere else, you have to step into a different level of discomfort. That's it. You're not comfortable now. So why not just try on a different discomfort? 

So I'm not here to sugarcoat anything and tell you it's going to be easy, right? I'm not saying, oh, it's so much more comfortable on this side. No, it's not. It's also uncomfortable. But if you can be uncomfortable now, you can be uncomfortable in a more unfamiliar place and that will become familiar. And then guess what? It's time to level up again. Now, guess what? It's time to move to the next thing, right? That's what we're doing here. We're constantly evolving. We're constantly challenging ourselves, our perspectives, our experience, and we're being comfortable with who we are and we are allowing trust for ourselves to do it. That is when we stop the self-sabotaging behavior and we recognize I can do this. I'm comfortable. I can do it messy. I can get out there. I don't have to protect myself from the discomfort because I'm uncomfortable now. 

Right? And I want this life. I want to create this. I want to put this message out there. The world needs your medicine. Right? Put it out there. Do it. Right? Okay. So routine, reward. We identify that. Right? That's breaking this cycle of self-sabotage. We understand what it is. We understand our patterns. And then we understand the reward we get from it. So then what we start to do is we start to shift that habit. So now the habit loop starts to shift. Well, we could probably solve the same cue. But we start to shift the routines. The routine is, oh, there might be a little bit resistance, right? But now into our routine, we say, it's okay. I haven't done a lot of talking head videos, but I'm going to start. I'm going to start getting a lot more comfortable. Well, maybe that talking head actually is the voiceover for now, right? I challenge you just to go head on, right? Just go right into it and just start talking to your freaking camera. Nobody cares about you. 

And I mean that in the most loving way. Nobody cares what you're doing. You can make a talking head video and talk for however long and some people are gonna see it and maybe some people are sending it around to their friends and laughing, but who cares, right? You did it. You're stepping into courage. You're stepping into that next level of growth and it's going to continue to get better and better and better. And these people who are laughing are not doing the things that you're doing. They're not willing to break their self-sabotaging behaviors, right? They're not willing to reflect themselves on their internal state like you are, right? So you're detaching from what anyone else thinks about you. It doesn't matter if they are good job or bad job because you said, I did it, right? We're leaning on our own internal validation, not somebody else's. We're saying, I did something uncomfortable. It was messy. It wasn't perfect, but it was done. And that's what we lean into, right? And then it just gets better. And then we feel better, right? We're changing our, so our reward now becomes that we actually did something we said we were going to do all right we executed something that was really important to us. We did something that felt a little scary, a lot scary sometimes. 

We did something, we stepped into a new discomfort zone that was not familiar. And so we got we get to get this sense of pride and happiness, accomplishment, even if it didn't necessarily turn out the way that you wanted. Maybe it was a little bit imperfect. And that's okay. You did it. And each time you do it, it will continue to get better and better, right? So we're starting to break the cycle of self-sabotage and step into the cycle of growth, right? And so the cue, routine, and reward now start to become a little bit different because we're now rewarding ourself with that more positive aspect. And so the things that everything's working out for me, even in the mess, right? Everything's working out for me begins to be true because you're seeing all that's working out for you. 

So you're starting to shift where your thoughts are focusing on. And that's a really important part of this is that when we start to see things for what they are and not fight what is, we can actually move through this sense of perfectionism, right? Because perfectionism is a very common form of self-sabotage, right? We can't do this until we're perfect. I can't put this out until I'm perfect. This talking head rule cannot go out on Instagram or TikTok until it's perfect. Well, I'm here to tell you it's not going to be perfect. And it's not meant to be. People don't relate to perfection because they're not perfect. And so what you need to start doing is trusting yourself and loving yourself enough to say, I'm going to do this imperfectly. I'm okay. And I'm safe if I put myself out there and it's not perfect. Even if someone points out what was not perfect about it, that's the cosmic joke. 

is that we don't actually have to have it perfect and everyone else doesn't have to think it's perfect for it to be good and for it to be fine that's not what we're searching for here or we're not searching for something that's telling us that it was absolutely perfect and everyone else loved it because guess what they're not going to because other people are going through their own and when they're going through that they're going to project right just like you project onto others just like you're judging people and it's not about them it's about you All of your judgments for others always come from you. Oftentimes they're judgments that you have for yourself in one way or another. So we have to be willing to look at that. But we realize that we can do things messy. We can step into this discomfort, into another discomfort and take action. We don't have to keep pulling ourselves back. We don't have to keep making ourselves small because we recognize why we're doing it and what we're protecting ourselves from. And if you truly commit to yourself today and say, you know what? I'm done. I'm done. 

done keeping myself small. I'm done keeping myself in this familiar zone. I want a new familiar zone. I'm ready for that. I'm ready to take a risk, put myself out there, be a little vulnerable. Then things really can start to shift. So ask yourself today, how can you start taking that small actionable step to stop sabotaging yourself? What would that look like? Where are you sabotaging yourself in your life, in your business, anywhere? that you are looking at right now? What's an area right now where you can interrupt the cycle of self-sabotage today? What would that look like? I have a free resource. As always, I have a resource for you. So I have a resource that's gonna take you a little bit deeper into walking yourself through what this sabotage is and how you can identify it and how you can see these different aspects that are popping up, the different types of payoffs and the different ways to work through that. And it will also walk you through that cue, routine, and reward as well. 

So it's going to really help you get really clear on how to shift that loop into something else. So your automatic response starts to shift a little bit for you. So dive deep into that and really start to explore it. And that's a wrap for today's episode. So I hope you're really ready to break up with that self-sabotage and start stepping into your power. So I have a challenge for you before you go. Take one small action this week where you let go of perfectionism or fear or that self-sabotaging cycle. And I would love to know what those are. What are you letting go of? So share your breakthroughs with me using the hashtag emotional revolution and join our community and all those who are also going to be breaking these cycles as well. And I cannot wait to cheer you on. And if this episode resonated with you, don't forget to hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And remember that self-sabotage isn't about laziness. 

It's about staying safe and you have to recognize those cues. You have to recognize what you're gaining from your self-sabotage and really address it with love and a hug. And when you surrender to growth, that's where the real magic happens. So thanks for tuning in and I'll see you in the next episode next week.