Transform Your Life - Just Count Me In
Just Count Me In is a podcast designed to help us navigate and flow with our lives through conscious awareness. When we live with less resistance and more receptivity it is easier to express who we came here to be and enjoy life. We are all walking each other home.
Transform Your Life - Just Count Me In
#11 Breaking Free from Self-Sabotage
Have you ever felt like every time things start going well in your life, they mysteriously fall apart? There's actually a neurological reason behind this frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, and understanding it is the first step to breaking free.
Self-sabotage isn't a character flaw or bad luck—it's what happens when your brain's need for familiarity clashes with new positive experiences. Your subconscious mind, programmed largely before age seven, runs the show 90% of the time. When success or happiness feels unfamiliar, your brain can perceive it as threatening, triggering behaviors that return you to your comfort zone—even when that zone isn't actually comfortable.
Through powerful real-world examples I share insights into how these patterns form and, more importantly, how to overcome them.
This New Moon in Aries offers the perfect cosmic backdrop for releasing old patterns and embracing renewal. If you're ready to increase your capacity for joy, shift from scarcity to abundance thinking, and finally allow yourself to thrive without unconsciously pulling the emergency brake, this episode provides the roadmap. Don't let your limiting beliefs continue writing your story—it's time to claim the success you've always deserved but perhaps never allowed yourself to keep.
Thank you for joining me!
Welcome to Just Count Me In, a podcast designed to help you break free from your limitations and step into the life that you actually were meant to live. I'm Sari Stone and I'm a holistic coach with a background in education. For the past six years, I've been guiding people to transform their lives from the inside out. My journey, to be honest with you, was not always clear out. My journey to be honest with you was not always clear. For years, I actually felt like I was living someone else's life, checking all the right boxes but never feeling quite truly fulfilled. That all changed when I experienced a few miracles, met some incredible teachers and had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. And had a major wake-up call that forced me to shift my entire perspective. Wayne Dyer once said when you change the way you look at things, the things that you look at change. And that is exactly what this podcast is about Helping you see your life in a new way so that you can start living with authenticity, purpose and passion. Each week, I'm going to bring you 30 minute episodes filled with insights, practical strategies and inspiring interviews to help you uncover what truly lights you up and identify what's been holding you back. Eventually, this is going to ignite your motivation and create real change. Are you ready to step into the life you were meant to live? Then just count me in, hit, subscribe and join me on this journey. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend who needs a little inspiration today. Let's do this together. Hi, welcome back and happy new moon. New moon in Aries today and it's an eclipse day, big day astrologically.
Speaker 1:So have you ever felt like every time things start going well, they fall apart for you? Well, you're not really alone in this at all. Can you think of a time when you actually sabotaged your own success? If you feel ready to create an identity and a new identity and increase your capacity for joy and success, this episode is absolutely for you. Join me. So why does this happen? Why do we sabotage? I have clients and I love the people that I work with, so it is hard sometimes, even as a coach, for me to remove myself and just watch and then coach them through these situations.
Speaker 1:But literally in the last month, I had somebody who achieved a huge accomplishment and she's actually recovering. She's a recovering addict and as soon as she got paid for her first work opportunity where she was speaking her truth, working in her strength, literally that night. It triggered her and she went back to using and we're now coming out of it. She's now coming back out of it. But so we explored what was still in there, what was still in there that we hadn't cleared, and it's the same thing that isn't in, wasn't in a student that got promoted to a higher math class and did well, and then, within about a month, started going back to the same habits because she almost didn't feel comfortable, she was almost scared to succeed. It was so unfamiliar to her.
Speaker 1:So these things happen, and it reminded me of my initial introduction to self-sabotage, which was in my own relationship, my marriage and the two of us. We would go along really well for quite a while and one of us inevitably one or the other of us would do something to trigger the other person or something that we knew would create a fight, or we would just get anxious or depressed or feel withdrawn and not know why, which really drove me nuts. And he wasn't happy either. And we knew we loved each other. We knew that we loved each other. We knew that we needed to work through this and so, luckily, through the research and through the school I attended and the classes I did and the workshops and all the psychology through my career and the coaching that I was receiving, we figured out what it is, and it's due to a few different reasons. It's due to a few different things when you sabotage your success.
Speaker 1:Okay, one of the reasons why is we all know that the brain likes familiar. We didn't know that 40 years ago, but we definitely know it now. The brain likes familiar and its job is to keep us safe. So if it's normal for you, let's say you grew up in an environment that was explosive or your parents fought a lot, and he actually grew up in a house with alcoholism, so it was almost more anxiety producing for him when things were going well with us. Because it's almost easier when you're in the thick of the bad times, because you know you're going to make it through at that point, than it is when things are going well and you're waiting because you know disaster is just lurking right around the corner but you don't know when. So, like you really can't even enjoy the good times at that point. Right, and when your brain is familiarized with that, you're going to bring yourself back to that, because it actually feels threatened and scared when there are prolonged periods of the unfamiliar, happy, satisfied, content, joyful, successful type emotions, which sounds crazy because it makes no logical sense. But you're dealing with the subconscious here. Unfortunately, your subconscious is what runs the show 90% of the time, so we need to address it at that level.
Speaker 1:Another reason that we self-sabotage is a lot of the scripts inside of us and there's things that we were programmed with. Usually, most of your programming I think it's 90% of your inner substance is formed by the time you're five years old, definitely by the time you're seven. You've heard a lot of these things and it's a matter of examining beliefs and flipping beliefs. So if you find yourself ever saying this is too good to last, or when things are going really well and you're saying this is insane, I mean, think about it. Is it really insane or is it really something you deserve and something you love and something you can enjoy?
Speaker 1:Okay, good times don't last forever is another one that I was told very frequently, and you know what they didn't, because another thing we know about the brain is guess what it likes to make itself right. Our brain likes to make itself right. Our brain also cannot hold conflicting beliefs. So I could be walking around with smiley face stickers on everything in the 1980s, but if I had a belief that marriage is only good for certain stages in your life and you're going to have multiple partners because the long life partners don't really last, that doesn't really exist, which was a lot of my negative programming exist, which was a lot of my negative programming. It's going to trip up because I could think I'm in love and I make vows for the rest of my life. But I know I also have that other belief. It can be like this forever because you fill in the blank. Or all men are blank, all women are blank. I don't really deserve this success. Okay, I'm not really good enough for this right now. Or this is possible, but not for me, that's for other people.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of things that we say to ourselves and a lot of beliefs that we have and conditioning that we have. Too good to be true. Well, you'll make sure to make yourself right and it won't be. So what do you do with something like that? I mean, do you notice that you have this pattern in any way? Just think about it. It can come up in your own personal goals, like getting in better shape or getting the house you want, having the relationships you want. It could come up in your job. It can come up so many different ways where you just don't let yourself feel good about something for that long and it's almost like you trip a circuit, like a circuit breaker just trips because your brain can't handle it.
Speaker 1:So now that we understand why self-sabotage actually happens, let's talk about how to stop it. What do you think you could possibly do about this? Because self-sabotage is so often a result of limiting beliefs. The good news is they're subject to change and that is the beauty in all this. I've seen the change. I am living evidence that there's change in this and I'm so happy. I'm so happy.
Speaker 1:I was raised that really a woman can do this or do that, not do this and do that well, and I can do both well. You know my mom was raised that either you were pretty or you were smart, and we know now you can be both and these things sound like no brainers, but I'll tell you what. We've come a very long way and they were believed for a very long time. I mean, women didn't even get the vote for many years. So one of the things you can do is to remind your brain what's going on and have a little conversation with yourself. You can let yourself know hey, hey, you're safe, you're not going to die. This is just something new for you.
Speaker 1:And then you notice when you learn to detect the drift. You learn to detect when you're going off course a little bit and Seth Godin talks about catching the drift and making a shift. I love that in his book. So you learn to catch that drift and you feel the trigger. Take a little space, stop what you're doing, Don't proceed, let that caution light go off and just don't do anything for that time and sit with it. Okay, you can sit with the feeling and we know, we were taught and I've taught my kids 90 seconds. You feel an emotion fully and it lasts for 90 seconds. Then it's what you're thinking about it. That can last longer if you don't feel it.
Speaker 1:And the truth is that within 17 seconds, if you can switch your thought and this is research-based you will not call in other like-minded thoughts. So, for example, if I have a doubt and I start to go into that self-criticism mode, if I can quickly recognize it, catch it and supplant it with something else within that 17 seconds. And this is measured under MRIs of the brain, right, it's measured under the scope that I will be able to change that, and if I don't, well, we all know what happens. It's that two o'clock in the morning thing where you start thinking one thing and then it's almost as if the word gets out hey, she's up and she's thinking she's solving the problems of the world and all these other problems are like, oh good, the door's open, I'm just going to come in, right, so that those are two things that you can do recognize the emotion, and you can also recognize it and flip it to something else. Just think about something else if those are harder for you to do, and sometimes just thinking about something else is harder for me. One thing that I can always do is remember my breath. So if I start to breathe deeply, if I start to slow my breathing down, but if I can breathe as though everything is okay and calm down, that will change the chemical reaction that's going on in my mind and then we can calmly tell ourselves. You know, practice is what makes this familiar and the brain likes familiar. And the more we work on restating beliefs, writing down what we believe we are. We can use affirmations, because if we change, on a subconscious level and a conscious level, what we're saying to ourselves and what we believe about ourselves and remember, your mind can't hold conflicting beliefs and those beliefs that are self-destructive will no longer be true.
Speaker 1:I use the book Atomic Habits a lot when I coach. It's one of my favorite books and he talks about your identity. So, rather than say I'm going to make sure that I exercise 30 minutes a day, six days a week, to get my cardio, I identify as a person with great cardiovascular health and I do score in that excellent range with my cardiovascular health, thank goodness, and it's because I do these things. But I don't think about it in terms of I'm going to do this that many times a week. That's just something that I do that goes along with my identity. And when I'm doing something that goes against my identity, like blowing things off for more than a couple days, I can feel it and it kind of goes against my grain. For more than a couple days, I can feel it and it kind of goes against my grain A big thing and a big part of why I think we were able to make changes is that I am very big on meditation and we're going to have more sessions with meditation because I do teach meditation.
Speaker 1:But I want to give you the why behind it. Number one your GABA levels increase and they're showing now that the gray matter, the density in your hippocampus and the frontal regions, actually gets affected when people meditate, and that has to do with the areas of emotional regulation and executive thinking, which is the big buzzword right now. It decreases the volume that goes into your amygdala, which is the stress, fear and anxiety in the prefrontal cortex, and it helps you with planning and decision making, and this is all good for you. Now, meditation has been around a lot longer than brain research, but since we're used to going to google for everything and we don't always go to scholars and people that have had this wisdom for so many years, I figured I would give you the rundown, because I do both. I believe in the wisdom and I also question things sometimes, so I love it when there is brave research on something.
Speaker 1:It makes me very, very happy. So when I increase my capacity for joy, I'm totally changing. I make a shift and I change from someone who views happiness and joy as states and emotions that are available, sometimes more than they're available for me, to somebody that believes that I can truly feel joy inside of my heart, even though all the conditions might not be happy. I can feel the joy and connection that comes with knowing that inside I have unlimited capacity to receive all that life has to give me, to receive that joy, to receive that love, to receive that abundance, to receive the money. And it's not as if I receive it so you'll get less. That's a scarcity mentality. It so you'll get less, that's a scarcity mentality. It's all around us, all around us, all the time. And, truth be told, when I receive more, I give more, so everybody benefits.
Speaker 1:The danger in not taking nipping this habit in the bud is that we can give up on something that actually is good for us. We can give up on being in the higher mouth section. We can give up on doing what we love for a living because look see what happened. We can give up on that relationship because we don't make it more than two months without a fight. We can give up on things and it's our own patterns. So self-sabotage is just a result of limiting beliefs, and they are subject to change. Change. The key to this is recognizing your doubt, reframing your mindset and then creating an identity that's linked to success. So, if you notice this pattern anywhere in your life and if you think of times that you are sabotaging your own success, I would encourage you to listen to this episode again and please subscribe, save and share. Subscribing is good and it helps to support the podcast. I know I've not been emphasizing that enough, so I'm asking, please and please, if there's anyone you could share this with, do it, and I'm hoping that you're ready to break through your limitations. If you want to pursue this further, please message me. Now.
Speaker 1:This is a new moon I mentioned that earlier and that's the beginning of a new lunar cycle, and as the moon withdraws her glow, we felt a call the last couple weeks to turn inward, and we have to do that. We have to feel that, that renewal feeling to be open to new beginnings. So it's like. It's like the ocean, it's like trees, it's it's animals that have dormant cycles, it's plants that don't flower all the time. I have orchids and they just flower, but they don't constantly flower. Okay, there's a cycle for things, there's season for things. So this lunar cycle, at this time, it's a sacred time to just release the old and renew your spirit and be open to new beginnings, so you can start thinking what is it that I want to manifest and what's been getting in my way?
Speaker 1:In this episode, we worked on releasing the blockages of self-sabotage and this will renew your energy sabotage and this will renew your energy. I hope you tune in with me next week when we work on some manifestation practices. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you like this episode, please let me know. Stop by social media, on Instagram or my Facebook page, just count me in and please leave a comment. If there's anybody that you think could benefit from this episode, please forward it to them and I look forward to seeing you next time. We're all in this together.