Overcoming Self-Sabotage
How to Stop Yourself from Stopping Yourself

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #526: Overcoming Self-Sabotage: How to Stop Yourself from Stopping Yourself

Jeff Sanders
Are you your own worst enemy?

Yeah, probably.

And I'll show you how to flip that script.

This is The 5AM Miracle, Episode #526.

Overcoming Self-Sabotage – How to Stop Yourself from Stopping Yourself.

Good morning and welcome to The 5AM Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful, lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

In the episode this week, I'll break down what self-sabotage is and why you're almost certainly guilty of it.

Don't worry, I am too.

We'll also break down what steps you can take to overcome self-sabotage and why the methods you may have been trying need to be tweaked just a bit to get the best results.

Let's dig in.

When I graduated college, I was a little clueless.

And so because of this feeling that I had, I decided to do something about it.

So I launched a blog called graduatedandclueless.com.

It's no longer available, so don't try and find it.

Or you can try, but I'm not there.

So what I did was I found a way for me to have an outlet to try to address the fact that I felt a little bit clueless.

So I had graduated with degrees in theater and psychology, but no actual plans to pursue either one of those for my actual career, which means I had a problem.

What am I going to do with my life?

What am I going to do for work?

Why am I here?

And so I entered into this early to mid-twenties phase of, I need to figure out some stuff.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What am I doing?

What's the point of my life?

What's the point of my career?

What's the point of my relationship at the time with my girlfriend/fiancée/then wife Tessa?

All that to say, I was lost and I wanted to be found, which is a great problem to solve.

I think many of us experienced this quarter life crisis around that time period.

We have these moments where we just ask those questions.

What is all this and what am I going to do now?

So I had this blog, Graduated and Clueless, that was a bunch of articles where I was basically taking my time to ask and answer questions.

I then wrote an entire book with the same title, with the same objective.

How do I figure this stuff out for me and help other people who are on this same journey?

This is a book that was never actually published, but I wrote it with the intention of publishing it and just failed to do so.

So where I ended up though was this awesome personal growth phase of exploring what it is I wanted to do with my life.

Now, there's a problem though.

And this problem began to emerge in my late 20s, where I had been addressing this question of cluelessness for a while.

I had worked odd jobs.

I had found different outlets.

I'd changed my diet, ran marathons, tons of personal experiments, read lots of books, like really went hardcore into personal growth, which is awesome.

However, despite all the work that I did, the title, the identity, the connected nature that I had with the title of being a clueless individual had stuck.

It had become part of who I was.

So as opposed to someone who was looking for solutions to my cluelessness, it had somehow latched onto me as my identity, that that's who I am.

That, "Hi, I'm Jeff Sanders.

I don't know what I'm doing."

The problem over time was that this was never a solution that I was looking for.

I wasn't trying to latch onto cluelessness.

I was trying to latch on to getting a clue.

I wanted a solution, an answer.

I wanted to know what to do next.

But because I had yet to make a definitive decision, I stayed trapped in an old description of my younger self.

And so this identity of being clueless became over time a self-sabotaging behavior.

It was no longer serving me.

And in fact, it was actively working to undermine my potential.

My cluelessness was no longer a heightened sense of self-awareness.

It was no longer this, "Well, aren't you some smart 20-year-old who's going to address his problems.

That's good for you, Jeff."

Actually, I heard that a lot in my 20s.

People were very proud of me for addressing these issues.

And that was a problem because I latched on to those compliments.

I latched on to that reinforcement and I continued to think this is who I am.

And so it prevented me for a while from really making some definitive decisions about what to do with my life.

And I believe, looking back, without question, that it was a self-sabotaging behavior that I had the chance to get myself out of this scenario.

I had the chance to make a decision many, many times, and I failed to do so.

And we fast forward a few years and now I'm still kind of clueless, but less.

And I'm working a job that's just a job.

I don't love it.

I don't hate it.

It just isn't me.

It's not who I'm supposed to be and I know it.

And so at this point, I'd already launched my blog and website at jeffsanders.com, which is where my website still is.

I had already been launching the podcast and some side coaching.

I had some work going for me.

I had a side hustle that I was very proud of and I wanted to continue to grow.

And the intention, the long-term vision, was for that to be my full-time job.

But I didn't really have a plan for how to actively quit my job and support myself financially.

I didn't really think that process through.

And I stayed at this day job all the way through my late twenties into literally I turned 30 and 30 days later I got laid off from this job.

So now all of a sudden I'm entering into a new decade of life unemployed.

But I had this side business that I had been building.

But the question I kept asking myself wasn't, can I build a full-time business out of this?

Can I make this work?

Can I be an entrepreneur?

The question that kept popping into my head was, why didn't I do this before?

Why didn't I quit my job long before I was forced out?

Why did I stay?

I could have quit years ago and figured this nonsense out back then.

Why did it take so long?

What was I doing staying at a job that wasn't my thing?

It was self-sabotage.

That's what it was.

I could have made the leap, but I sabotaged my potential instead.

I focused on things like designing logos instead of finding clients.

I became obsessed with details instead of the bigger picture vision of what I wanted to create, what I wanted to do next.

I was really honed in on tiny stuff that felt good in the moment.

I felt productive.

I was busy, but I wasn't effective.

I was productive, sort of, but I wasn't making a big leap forward.

I wasn't taking a chance, taking a risk, taking bold action, being ambitious.

It was the kind of stuff that felt sort of ambitious.

I was doing some things in the right direction.

So yes, I'll give myself some credit 10 years later.

Yeah, I was doing some things right, sure, but I was missing some of the biggest, most important moves to make.

I stayed at a job I didn't belong at.

I should have quit long before I was laid off.

I held myself back and it was my fault.

Now, we fast forward, I don't know, about 10 years or so, give or take, and all of a sudden we are where I am today.

Podcasting has been my thing for the last decade.

I've done lots of things in my business.

Podcasting has been the driving force for all of it.

Whether I'm coaching, doing public speaking, writing books, online courses, anything that I've got myself involved with in my business in the last 10 years has been somehow or another directly tied to this podcast, to this show, what I'm doing right now.

Now, for years, and this is inclusive of the COVID pandemic, it's inclusive of me having kids, it's inclusive of my life in my 30s, that what I thought the best solution was for a long time was to double down on podcasting, to take the thing, to amplify the thing.

That had been working really well and really give my all to it.

There are so many reasons why that was a great decision.

So many reasons why that has been awesome and I'm so glad that I did that.

But recently, it has become apparent that I have made some pretty big mistakes in my business, that I have made some foolish, foolish mistakes that I'm now paying for.

I'm not going to discuss the details of those because frankly, it doesn't matter.

It's kind of nonsensical for you.

But what is important for you is to understand that I did the same thing again.

I sabotaged my own potential again, but this time the stakes are higher.

I have a wife, a house, two kids, a dog.

Oh, I had a dog, he died.

Two kids, a house, a business.

I have a life, right?

A life of a guy in his late 30s, going to turn 40 this year.

I'm going to turn 40 in August.

And there's something profoundly different about where I am today versus where I was in the past.

Something profoundly different about what it means to sabotage my potential that in the past, I felt like I had time on my side.

I felt like I had plenty of years to mess around, make mistakes, figure it out.

Something's changed.

Something has shifted in me and I have this realization that time is ticking away.

And as a guy who's about to turn 40, as a guy who has built a career, I have been missing a grander opportunity to do the work I was always supposed to do.

There was an episode of this podcast I recorded recently where I had discussed this concept of this story that I told of my friends visiting Nashville at my apartment in my mid twenties.

And my friend Pierce asked the question, you know, if you could do anything with your career, what would you do?

What's the thing?

And I blurted out public speaking.

It just came out of me.

Now at the time I had thought about that as a possibility, but in this moment it was this grand sense of clarity.

That's who I am.

That's what I should be doing.

So if you look at the last 10, 15 years of my life and ask the question, well, Jeff, have you been public speaking?

And the answer is yes, I definitely have.

I've done quite a bit of it, but it's not my main thing.

Hasn't been my main thing.

My main thing has been podcasting, which is great, right?

I'm not, you know, going to tell you that that was a mistake, but it was a mistake.

It was a mistake because there was something better all along.

Public speaking was always my thing.

Always the thing I was supposed to do.

Always the vision for my future that I had.

And I just didn't do it.

I didn't make the leap.

I didn't jump in.

I didn't say yes.

Sabotaging of that potential was real over and over and over for years.

And yeah, you could rationalize and then have excuses for all of it.

I've done that a lot, but I think my point I'm making here is that you may have that same thing.

There's a thought in the back of your head of, man, there's this thing I should be doing.

There's this thing I should be saying yes to.

There's this opportunity, potential, dream, vision.

There is something that for whatever reason I have made the intentional or unintentional decision to just never pursue.

To sabotage your own potential.

I don't want this episode to sound like super downer.

It's not.

It's not.

But it is a wake up call.

In the process of me preparing for this episode, I discovered a few things about myself.

One of them is that I'm super guilty of self-sabotage.

Abso-fricking-lutely.

I wrote down in my notes that you can call me Jeff Self-Sabotaging Sanders.

That's a really dumb idea I wrote down.

But there it is.

That's what I wrote in my notes.

Because that's how I felt, right?

That's a pretty accurate description of what I've done in a number of ways.

If there's a way for me to avoid the obvious, I'll find it.

If there's a way for me to become super busy with being "productive", I will make it up.

If there's a way for me to blame someone else or explain away poor results or find a scapegoat, man, I'm your man there.

I can do it.

I have the skills and abilities to point fingers.

Now, I can say all that, but that used to be who I was.

All of this was true for me until recently.

Because recently, I've made a change.

I've made a decision to be a different person.

To live a different life.

To actively rewrite my own story.

I am changing my future by changing my present.

I am no longer looking back and pointing fingers.

I'm not doing it.

Instead, I'm looking forward, but also looking inward.

To fix what's broken.

To plan better.

To have a better future because I have a better present.

Self-sabotage is an addiction.

It's a lifestyle choice.

It's the worst kind of habit.

Ultimately, it's a fool's game.

Because it has a sneaky comfort element to it.

Where all you want to do is avoid the man in the mirror.

You avoid looking at reality.

You avoid the self-awareness because it is nerve-wracking.

And it is guilt-ridden.

And it's really obnoxious because you just get reminded, yet again, I didn't do the thing that I said I wanted to do.

Now, I've become all too familiar with this version of myself.

I let the self-sabotaging actions and inactions dictate my to-do list, my future goals, even my own identity through my job title.

That's very important for a lot of people, myself included, that you get wrapped up in.

How you define your whole life through the work you do.

And the title you give yourself or is assigned to you, or you apply for, but you wind up with these job titles that in many ways are indicative of how you view yourself.

Now, if any of this sounds familiar to you, I want you to buckle up a little bit because this episode is going to challenge you more than probably most I've created, possibly ever.

We'll see.

Okay.

Let's dig into more of these specifics here with overcoming self-sabotage.

That's the goal, right?

To stop yourself from stopping yourself.

We are action-oriented here, which means we're going for solutions.

Not looking backward, not regret, not pointing fingers, not blame, not negativity.

No, no, no, no.

That's more no's.

We're looking for yeses, right?

The overcoming, the success, the good stuff.

So we're going to begin more specifically here with what self-sabotage actually is, why it's probably part of your lifestyle right now, and then we'll get to the specifics on how to overcome it.

So first, the definition.

Self-sabotaging behavior refers to intentional action or inaction, and there's both there.

Inaction is part of it, that undermines people's progress and prevents them from accomplishing their goals.

Self-sabotage occurs when people hinder their own success.

So that's really all it is.

It's very simple, very straightforward.

It's behavior that prevents your success.

It holds you back.

It's an obstacle.

And in this case, self-sabotage means you're the one doing it.

You're the one taking action or avoiding action, that either way, it winds up as an undermining of your own potential.

Your goals are never realized.

Your dreams are not fulfilled because you didn't do what needed to get done, and potentially you actively hindered that potential.

Now, here are some examples of self-sabotage.

The first area is probably the most obvious to most of us, which is seeking distraction.

Checking your phone, getting trapped in the doom scroll of social media.

Really, it's entertainment in nearly all of its forms.

Those are distractions from doing the things that are going to push you forward.

Now, I'm not a guy who hates entertainment.

I love entertainment.

I love my phone.

I love watching TV and great movies.

Those are great things.

But the problem, of course, is when it takes over.

The problem is when it's too much.

We can go way back if you want to in this podcast, probably almost 10 years, where I discussed the concept of the EVE ratio, the education versus entertainment ratio, which is an idea that I stole from good old Brian Tracy, one of the most famous personal growth speakers in the world.

He discussed this concept from the very simple perspective of you only have so many hours in a day.

Some of those hours are spent towards education, productivity, goal achievement, and some of those hours are just pure entertainment, just comfort, distraction, noise.

And it's okay to have both.

In fact, I would argue a healthy life includes both in some forms.

But the question has to come down to how much time is spent on one versus another.

And if the entertainment side of that equation gets too big, if it takes up too much time, too much distraction, if it crosses the line and now is too much, that's a problem.

It has to be addressed.

And from this perspective, through this lens, that level of entertainment and distraction becomes a self-sabotaging behavior when you actively know for sure you could be doing something else with your time.

That's a better use of your time.

Another example here of self-sabotage is to latch onto a false identity.

Now, to the example from before, that could include an old job title.

It could be a relationship status.

It could also be a skill gap.

One thing that I've seen very frequently in my own line of work is that if there's something I don't know how to do or don't know how to do well, I just assume that's not who I am because I don't do it and I can't do it or I can't do it well.

But that's a huge, huge red flag because skills are easily learnable.

You could go do them, get better at them, practice them, become an expert in them.

It's an excuse, right?

This false identity where you associate yourself or don't associate yourself with some version of success because you haven't done it yet or haven't done it well yet is just nonsense.

All that means is you're in the beginning.

You're a newbie.

You're a freshman.

And all you have to do is take some time to dig into this area and all of a sudden you're going to grow and develop and become the expert.

That's how everything happens.

So if you latch on to a false identity, a job title you used to have, a cluelessness you used to feel, maybe a status of your relationship of you used to feel like you were single and unworthy of a partner, right?

These are false identities because these things are not true.

They are lies we tell ourselves.

A huge part of self-sabotage is lying, lying to yourself about who you are and what's possible for your future.

That's what this is.

And it's such, such a big deal.

Another key example here of self-sabotage is believing success is for someone else.

This ties directly into the skill gap area.

Believing success is not for you is the very first way to quit.

It's the very first way to guarantee failure is you just never try.

You just assume from the outset it is impossible.

You give up, it's over.

That's the probably the best example of sabotage I could imagine.

Is there is zero effort given towards the thing that you know, you know, if you gave even a little bit of effort, you'd get results.

Not the results you're expecting, you know, in an ideal world, but you're going to get those first initial results.

You can then improve over time.

Of course, you could also have a false sense of your own inabilities, right?

A false sense of weakness or ineptitude or this false sense of I'm not worthy.

I'm not good enough.

I don't belong here.

That kind of inner monologue that is not helpful and not true.

It's possible it could be true in some scenarios, but the best enjoy the time.

If there's something that you're after, it's because you believe you have in some sense, a natural interest or skillset that could be amplified to be, to put you in the game, put you on the field, in the arena.

Otherwise, we wind up using excuses and rationalize our own lack of success or lack of achievement.

And we just try to find ways to once again, point fingers.

If it is arbitrarily just saying out there in the world somewhere, someone doesn't want me to succeed.

But the someone is you.

Always has been.

And that's why it's an opportunity because we can change that.

Now, the last example here of self-sabotage to really drive this point home is an obsession with security and comfort.

This is a big, big deal because this is the thing that holds people back so much.

This is the example from before of me saying I didn't quit my job to build my business.

I had to be forced out of the building for me to not be there anymore.

Right?

They had to lock the door on me for me to not come back.

But all that was for me for not quitting in the years before when I should have was the fear of losing the paycheck.

A very simple thing I could have overcome with some simple actions I could have taken earlier that I wound up, I did it after I no longer had the paycheck, but it took someone forcing me into that position to make the changes I could have already made.

I was obsessed with the security, the comfort blanket of where I was.

And the silly thing was, was back then, I really didn't have any good excuses.

I especially know that now.

Like there was not a lot to lose.

There just wasn't.

But I had this perception, this false perception that there was.

And so I intentionally or unintentionally didn't do the thing I knew I should do.

This obsession with security and comfort can cause us to basically never step outside the comfort zone, never take the risk, never do the thing.

Or the opposite can cause you to do things like sleeping in and missing your own 5 a.m. miracle, missing the chance to do the work that would cause the success you're looking for.

We find ways to just avoid the opportunities, intentionally or unintentionally.

Self-sabotage is not always a conscious thing.

Sometimes this is unconscious, but it's still happening, whether you're aware of it or not.

And that's why learning about this is a big step forward to then be able to have your antenna up to recognize it and call it out when it happens.

These examples are important because you want to be able to identify in your own life when you are possibly guilty of this.

Now, I'm not using the word guilty here in a negative sense.

We want to identify when these things happen so we can solve this problem.

So we can jump in and say, now here is an action-oriented, forward-moving, positive thing we can do to get us where we want to be.

That's what's going to be the mental pivot after you first acknowledge, yes, this is true, well then here we go.

We are off to make the change, which brings us to the next big section of the episode.

The steps you can take to overcome self-sabotage and be the person you know you can be.

That's what this is.

Step one for you to overcome self-sabotage is call a spade a spade.

If you have been engaging in self-sabotaging behavior, let's just break this down, put it on paper and admit it right now.

We're going to call it for what it is.

No more lies, no more deceit, no more euphemisms or false titles, no more excuses or rationalizations, no more blaming or looking backward.

Self-sabotage is real and it really is holding you back.

This is a very important conversation because for the most part, what we achieve in life is almost entirely on our own shoulders.

In the episode every week, you have the power to change your life.

And I mean that.

I've always meant that.

Yes, there are larger societal forces at play that do have systemic issues with many populations.

Yes, yes, yes, I know.

But at the end of the day, you still have power.

You still have choice.

You still have the ability to make change happen.

You still have these things.

And if you engage in the behavior of things like lies to yourself, deceit to yourself, false titles in your head, excuses and rationalizations in your head, blaming, looking backwards, all in your brain, if those things are true of you, you can change those things and you can get better results.

That's just how it works.

That's it.

And that's the exciting part.

And that's the part where I just get really jazzed up because I know this is all possible, which brings us to the next section.

So we just called a spade a spade.

We identified it.

Yes, we know.

Okay.

What's happening?

We're there.

Now, here's where we get to do something about it.

Here's where a 5am miracle can swoop in and provide at least some sense of a beginning to wake up early and get to it, right?

To say, okay, it's sunrise.

Let's begin.

Let's change my life today.

Let's make something happen, right?

This is an opportunity to go make something out of what before it was possibly nothing to create have a new beginning.

That's the opportunity right there.

Of course, at 5am is wonderful, but you choose your own time.

They can also identify the behaviors one by one to find an alternative approach.

This is a big deal.

If you want to do things like choosing a swap, a this instead of that scenario or a this before that scenario, I use both of those quite a bit.

I'll use this before that as a good one.

One thing I'll do is I'll say, let's go back to the entertainment versus education discussion.

If I said this before that, what I'm saying is work before tv important task before lesser important task, big thing before little thing.

In other words, you're saying I have identified in my life certain key things that are valuable and important and necessary and beneficial and then everything else.

Well, let's give all of our attention to that first group first and the second group second and in that order a big problem.

A lot of us have is we'll say, well, here's this important thing.

Yeah, I'm going to get to that later.

I'm going to do that this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow.

No, no, you're not going to.

If you're not doing it right now, you're not going to do it later.

If you're not doing it right now, you're not going to do it later.

Just listen to that.

That is it.

If you're not doing it right now, you are not going to do it later.

So do it now.

Make that happen.

Make that the choice.

Make that the change.

Make that the reality and in that process, make it effortless.

I love Greg Mckeown second book effortless.

It is phenomenal because this is what we need in these scenarios where things have been difficult.

They've been challenging.

We have procrastinated.

We have held ourselves back.

But what if we had a checklist?

What if we had a way to make it easy?

What if we had a solution, a system?

What if it wasn't so hard or obnoxious or crazy?

What if it was just obvious?

You make it effortless.

It's not a problem anymore.

Just do it.

That's the point.

That's the goal.

We're not trying to make this complicated.

We're trying to make this as easy as we can.

And then when we do, we're off and running.

Now in the process of all of this, this final piece here, I want to make sure that I get in to the meat of what this is.

When you're trying to overcome all of this, there will be a tendency to beat yourself up.

I do this to myself all the time, whether it's guilt or shame or some kind of a negative emotion where we point fingers at ourselves in a negative way.

When I'm talking about acknowledging what we're doing, I want to do so in a way that is objective, that is real, that is based in self-awareness, but that pivots very quickly into positive action and doesn't stew in the negative emotion that guilt and shame then play in.

Those kinds of emotions that just spin us backwards or spin us around in circles when we get nowhere.

We're not trying to undermine our potential yet again by then feeling guilty about the fact we undermined our potential.

That's a terrible cycle to be in.

We're not going there.

So we can acknowledge, at least right off the top, that we're all guilty of this.

I am very guilty of this.

I started the episode with examples from my own life where this is my story.

But that doesn't mean we're going to stop the story there.

It's not where it ends.

There's so much more we can bring about.

So when you're feeling guilty, shameful, fearful, regretful, any of these things, we pivot to the positive and the action-oriented methods.

We actively do something to address the problem in the moment when we feel it.

One thing that's helped me a ton is by writing down what I'm feeling in the moment, positive, negative, whatever it is.

If there's something here that's related to this topic, I write it down.

I continue to write until what I am writing down is geared towards solutions and possible actions to take.

And then, of course, you can practically go schedule these solutions on your calendar, take action, and do it, and stay in that zone of action-oriented behavior.

So we're going to pivot all this potential negativity of guilt and shame into actual positive action that gets results.

And that's going to be a big step forward in this process.

Now, at the top of the show, I did mention the idea that there are probably some methods you've been trying that may need to be tweaked just a bit to get better results.

And I think that's a really important thing to acknowledge, that it's totally likely that you are aware that there are things you've been doing that hold yourself back, and you've already been trying to improve it.

You've already been trying to get better at this.

And so I want to take that as a good example to further the conversation.

One thing that I have seen myself do is take extreme positions when it comes to solutions.

So let's go to the entertainment conversation.

Imagine that you are distracted by entertainment, social media, television, whatever the case is.

And you might take the extreme approach of saying, "I'm going to throw away the TV.

I'm going to burn my phone.

I'm going to not have any of these accounts ever again.

I'm out, 100%, gone."

That's a pretty extreme position, and it's probably unnecessary.

The intention behind this conversation is not necessarily extreme action.

In fact, I would argue that's probably going to backfire.

I think the better approach to tweak the way we're handling these things is going to come through small daily decisions, little habits that will add up to better results over time.

One of those could be a reduction in social media, a reduction in entertainment, a reduction in a bad habit.

It's not an elimination right away.

There are very few people who can do the overnight, just cut it off, cold turkey, and be good with it.

Most of us do not operate that way, and it backfires, and we get worse.

I'm going to argue your better approach to directly address self-sabotage starts with the acknowledgement of it, but the second thing you're going to do are small steps to address the issue, to sneakily work in some solutions you can scale over time.

This always tends to be the best way to change your life is what you do every day, but you do so in small doses that then scale slowly as time progresses.

When that happens, you have time to tweak and optimize and improve.

Self-sabotage is pretty sneaky, and it's pervasive, and it's baked into a lot of what we do.

There are so many distractions and excuses and reasons to not succeed that we need to latch on to things that are doable, small but meaningful actions we take every day.

We can be human.

That's okay.

We're just trying to be better humans.

We're trying to be better at this.

If that's the case over time, we're going to be fine.

It's all going to work out well, but we may need just a new approach.

One thing that I have definitely latched on to in this specific connotation here is to tackle problems from many different angles over time.

A lot of problems are complicated, and they require more of a multifaceted approach.

If you're going to tackle a difficult problem and you only try one possible solution and it doesn't work that well, I wouldn't be too surprised by that because I would argue that complicated problems require more complex solutions, which could mean trying five or six different things slowly over time and seeing how they work in tandem.

Yes, this could get complicated, but that's my point.

It doesn't need to be.

We start small.

We scale slowly.

We take daily actions.

We acknowledge reality.

We begin to implement solutions.

We address the elephant in the room.

We directly address our fears.

We do so in a way that says, "Here's this thing I haven't been doing.

Yesterday, I didn't do any of it.

Today, I did something about it.

It was small, but I did something which is more than nothing.

I took a step in the right direction, which is more than I've done in the past."

That's what's going to lead to long-term successes each and every day saying, "Today, I made a little more progress."

That's what personal development is.

That's what success is, the progressive realization of a worthy goal, progressively getting better over time, improving little by little to get to where you want to be.

That's what this is all about.

If you want to take self-sabotage and conquer it, if you want to wrap this thing up and say, "This little demon of mine that I've got, it can be handled.

It can be defeated," first, we have to believe that's possible.

Believe that you have the power to change your life.

Start with acknowledging that this sabotage stuff is real, but then we pivot, and we change our story, and we define a new set of habits.

We become the kind of person who doesn't seek out distractions and behaviors that undermine our own potential, but instead, we become a better version of ourselves, a little bit sharper, a little more skillful, and a heck of a lot more confident in those action-oriented solutions that are going to define our new and more confident selves.

And for the action step this week, get out of your own way.

More specifically, identify where you are sabotaging your own progress and make a plan to stop that behavior.

Do the opposite.

If you've been avoiding a specific action, do the action.

If you've been making intentional moves to prevent progress, stop it.

There's a famous SNL skit called "Stop It."

Google it.

It's really good.

All right, subscribe to this podcast and your favorite podcast app, or become a VIP member of the 5AM Miracle community by getting the premium ad-free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

And that's all I've got for you here on the 5AM Miracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life, and the fun begins bright and early.

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