When Self-Awareness Becomes Self-Sabotage - ep. 233

You've done the work. You know your patterns, you can name your wounds, you have a whole vocabulary for why you do what you do. And yet....here you are. Still hitting the same wall.

This episode is about the thing nobody in the personal development space really talks about: self-awareness, on its own, isn't transformation. 

What get into:

• Why self-awareness and staying stuck are not mutually exclusive
• What productive tension is and why it matters
• Spiritual bypassing vs. spiritual gaslighting 
• The identity of "someone who does the work" and how it can quietly become its own trap
• The one question to ask yourself that doesn't lie

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Limitless Life, or welcome if you're new here, I'm your host Brennan Johnston. And if you keep showing up here, it's probably because you think deeply, you do the work, and you still hit walls that you can't quite explain. Maybe you're building something and hitting a ceiling you can't push through. Maybe you're asking yourself, is this still it? I spent over two decades in advertising and corporate marketing, learning exactly how people make decisions, what moves them forward, and why. And the last 12 years I've spent in the subconscious and energetic space, which means I can see through the noise faster than most, and I know what's actually working underneath the surface versus what just looks like it is. This is a space where we go deep into the subconscious, the body, your energy, because that's where the patterns that are running your life actually live. Who you had to be to get here can't take you to where you want to go next. And this show is about life leadership and becoming the version of you that lives fully expressed and doesn't shrink to fit. After all of my years doing what I do, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that there is a particular type of person who will never run out of reasons why they are not ready. They have read books, done courses, they know their attachment style, their human design, their Enneagram numbers, and exactly which childhood experience is responsible for their relationship with money and all the other things. They can pretty much articulate every pattern they have with very impressive clarity. They know why they do what they do, and they are still not actually moving forward. They keep repeating the same patterns, they manifest the same circumstances over and over again, and they may look slightly different every time they show up in their life, but the underlying pattern is always the same. And I should know because for 10 years I was one of those people. While I was working in advertising and corporate marketing, I had a side hustle for over a decade that never quite became a thing. And for a really long time, I told myself, oh, it was timing, it was the market, I just needed to learn more first. And then it was, well, I'm getting divorced and I'm only gonna have a single income. But underneath all of those things that I was telling myself, there was a story that I had been carrying since I was a kid, and I've talked about it a little bit before, but the story was that I was bad at math. Because when I was in elementary school, I had a teacher who told me I was bad at math, and I believed her, and so I filed it under facts about Brenda, and then I moved on. And she had told my parents that I was bad with math, so then they were reinforcing things. Except here's the thing I wasn't actually bad at math, I was so bored by it. I loved art, and those are two completely different things. I spent years making decisions from the belief that I was bad at math. It I kept myself small in business because somewhere in my subconscious, numbers felt like enemy territory. And that's the thing about self-awareness. It can absolutely coexist with staying completely stuck. Sounds strange. I know, because you're like, but I'm so self-aware. Why can't I move forward? Well, that's what I want to get into today. Because for a lot of people, especially ones who have done significant work on themselves, the awareness has become the thing that they do instead of changing. And it's not a conscious choice, but it is a very sophisticated pattern. I feel like this is the part of the personal development conversation that doesn't usually get talked about, or it doesn't get talked about enough. Because if we're looking at things as a whole, this entire industry is built on selling you more awareness. Another framework, another modality, another layer of understanding yourself. And look, I'm not exempt from this. I work in this space, but I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't say what I want to say about this. Because the truth is, self-awareness on its own is not transformation, it's the beginning of it, and a lot of people have mistaken the beginning for the whole thing. I did. I just told you I had a side hustle for 10 years, and it can be the sneakiest form of staying exactly where you are because you feel like you're doing the work. So let's talk about for a second what overanalysis or like too much self-awareness actually looks like in real life. Okay, not like you can have too much self-awareness, but you know what I'm trying to say here. And I want you to notice if this sounds familiar and be honest with yourself. You can see the pattern clearly, you know where it came from. You could probably explain it to somebody else in a way that would genuinely help them. But when the moment comes, when there's an opportunity in front of you or a decision that requires you to move or take action or it's step out of your comfort zone, you instantly find yourself back in research mode. You are feeling like you need more information, more clarity, more time to make sure that you're acting from the right place and not from the wound. And six months later, you are still right there in the exact same spot. Every hour you spend examining instead of moving is an hour that you've chosen the known and the comfortable over the unknown, which in itself is its own decision. It's made by default, and it's usually disguised as some form of diligence. Listen, your nervous system isn't stupid, okay? It knows that as long as you are still figuring things out, you're safe from the thing you're actually afraid of or from the big thing that you're moving towards, which is not the wrong decision. It's the exposure that comes with making any decision at all. The awareness isn't the problem. The awareness is being used as a reason to stay still. That's the problem. There's a subtler version of this that I see even more, I see it a lot more often in people who've been in the personal development space for a while, and it's where the awareness itself becomes the avoidance. You know exactly why you do the thing. You have crafted a beautiful origin story for it, and you can trace it back, name the wound, explain the pattern, and you still do the thing. Except now you're doing it with a running commentary. Oh, there I go again. Shrinking because of my conditioning around visibility. This is my anxious attachment showing up. Oh, this is my classic upper limit problem. Does that one sound familiar? The awareness is real, the pattern's still running, and somewhere along the line, the awareness became a way of watching yourself without being responsible for changing. Because if you're observing it, you're not really in it, right? You're just noticing it. That's avoidance, and it's very sophisticated, and it's the kind of thing that is very hard to call out because it looks a lot like growth. And honestly, it can feel a lot like growth. True awareness, the kind that actually leads somewhere, creates what I call productive tension. So you see the pattern, you can't unsee it, which means now you have to do something about it, or consciously choose not to. And if it's not there, then something's off. Awareness that doesn't create any tension isn't awareness at all. It's a great, well-developed story about yourself that you've just gotten really comfortable telling. And this brings me to something else I want to talk about, which often gets called spiritual bypassing. Honestly, I think we could also call it spiritual gaslighting because that's what it actually does. It takes something real and unresolved, and it convinces you that you're handling it when you're not. You're not avoiding it, you're integrating it. You're not stuck, you're in the process. And look, those things can genuinely be true. I am not dismissing the real work of integration because it is so important and it is built into the foundation of everything that I teach people. But we have to get really honest with ourselves about the difference between integration, like true integration, and avoidance. And I'm going to give you uh an indication of how you can tell, like tell a difference. How to tell whether anything is actually changing, not whether you feel like you're growing, because feelings of growth can be generated by insight alone. And insight is the cheapest thing in this industry. I'm talking about whether your actual life, your actual decisions, your actual patterns are actually shifting. That is the measurement here. And then there's the layer that I think is the most important thing that I'm going to say today. Some people have built an entire identity around being somebody who does the work. The books on the shelf, the courses completed or not completed, but purchased, the retreats attended, the vocabulary developed, it actually becomes a personality. It's an identity. And like all identities, it will protect itself, which means the work itself can become a way of avoiding the thing that the work is actually supposed to produce. Because if you're always in process, you never have to arrive anywhere. Arriving somewhere, like actually changing, actually showing up differently, actually claiming the life that you say you want, that can be genuinely terrifying. In human design, there's this concept of the not-self. It's the version of you that's been so shaped by conditioning that it's running the show while your actual self just sits there pretty much untouched. And I see this play out constantly. And also I've experienced it. People who've done enormous amounts of work on their not-self. They've analyzed it, they've understood it, they've given it a very detailed biography. Well, their actual self, the one that's supposed to be emerging through all of this, just remains pretty much unexpressed. The not-self is very good at pretending that it has grown. Your actual self is the one who has to live differently, though. So here's the question I want to leave you with. And I mean this genuinely, this is not rhetorical. What are you aware of that you've been aware of for more than a year that has not changed? What is something that you've been working on for many, many years that has not changed? Not something new, not something you're still figuring out, something you know, something you've known, something you could explain clearly to somebody else right now, and it's still there. That is not a knowledge problem. We don't have knowledge problems. It's also not an awareness problem. That thing that you know you have, that's a subconscious belief that hasn't been touched yet. Because insight doesn't reach the subconscious, it lives one level up, and the subconscious is where the pattern actually lives. If you're sitting with this question that I just asked you, the thing you've known for more than a year that still hasn't shifted, and you're done waiting for more awareness to fix it, that's exactly what my subconscious strategy sessions are designed for. It's a free 30-minute call. We're gonna have a real conversation and help you get clear on what is really driving the disconnect between where you are and where you want to be. So I'm gonna link that up in the show notes. And if you're not quite ready to dive into that yet, but you want to keep pulling on this thread, I would love to see you over on Substack with me. I have a paid membership, which is $97 for the whole entire year. And that gives you access to not only great articles that I'm writing in there, but you're getting access to some of my custom hypnosis programs and tools that usually you need to be working with me one-on-one to get access to.