Whether in relationships, at work, or with oneself, there are a multitude of ways to sabotage yourself from getting what you want in your life.

In undermining our own success, we set up scenarios in which we fail, or hold ourselves back unconsciously from what we really want, often out of negative emotions or beliefs that fail to hold up under scrutiny in the real world. In effect, we hold ourselves back, and often don’t know how we do.

If you think you self-sabotage yourself, might any of these things characterize your behavior?

• Constantly beat up on yourself
• Let yourself believe the negative or worst case scenario
• Let others decide for you, including women
• Succumb to and make decisions out of fear
• Prevent relationships from developing because you’ve got walls, armor, or other barriers that keep others out

Lacking in self-support and inner resources, those men who self-sabotage seem to constantly make decisions that are bad for them, or at the least, make them deviate from their own path to success in life.

What does self-sabotage look like?

• Believing you’re no good, or worthless, and then choosing behaviors that align with that belief, like being underemployed, choosing a wife or girlfriend who likes you “enough”
• Not having confidence in yourself and your abilities to have success, whether as successful relationships, good self-esteem, or in one’s professional aspirations
• Attacking others in our lives, and those close to us, because we hide, protect ourselves and fend off from really showing others our genuineness and authentic self.
• Not moving forward, staying stuck, or failing to make good decisions, out of fear of failure, fear of success, low self-esteem, or any number of other reasons.

People are attracted to those guys who are confident and not at war with themselves. Self-saboteurs are in a war with themselves, so it’s going to be difficult to attract healthy, growth-oriented people into the realm or the self-saboteur. Even if we say that we want them in our lives, we may be attracting the wrong kinds of people, whether those be women, jobs, friends or the like.

To want health is different from attracting health: if we’re still at war with ourselves, we end up attracting others (read: intimate partners) that conspire in our self-abuse. And that’s not what we want for ourselves. That’s not how we see our lives as healthy and growth-promoting.

What can you do to stop the saboteur in you?

1. Develop self-support: start a new relationship with yourself by being kind to yourself, getting to know yourself more and work at easing up on yourself.
2. Practice being genuine with others, even if that means letting them inside your fortress a bit
3. Tame the self-critic: Get counseling, journal, channel your anger in other, more productive outlets, get physical exercise, and try meditation to focus the mind. You need to admit to yourself that you and your self-critic are different entities, and that you’re at war with him. most people don’t see this or admit it, and it’s the first step to becoming whole.
4. Understand how you sabotage yourself, Whether through anger, fear, jealousy, insecurity or inferiority. Maybe it’s a mix, or maybe it’s all of them together.
5. Seek out the support of others: Attract heathy people into your life that support your journey of health, not enable it or undermine your health. Yeah, we’ve all got people in our lives that feed the self-sabotaging we do, so reconsider some of those relationships through this process.

Unhappiness usually begins with ourselves. Other people may trigger us to feel negative or down, but were largely responsible for our own selves. How we communicate with ourselves is often an indicator of personal happiness. Self talk, or the inner dialogue that we have with ourselves, is something that people are not always aware of as it’s happening. We’re usually pretty reactive to people and situations, and tend to forget what’s happening behind the scenes, or how we’re talking to ourselves. The reality is that so often, we are wrapped up in negative self talk and verbal abuse towards ourselves. Being caught up in this kind of self talk makes it really difficult to connect with ourselves in a healthy way, and, consequently, to relate to others in a kinder, friendlier fashion.

Upon his first experience of Western self-criticism, the Dalai Lama was puzzled. In Tibet, where he’s from, there was no concept of a self critic. When I read this, I was impressed. As Americans, we’re so embroiled in negative self talk and beating up on ourselves, it never occurred to me that other cultures might find this a curiosity.

When we get into negative self talk, it’s usually centered around the idea that “I’m just not good enough.” we may have grown up with these messages, from our families of origin, and have been reinforced through other institutions, like school, church, and sports. We internalized these messages so many times, and after enough repetition, began to believe. So, as adults, we identify strongly with that negative inner critic. The problem is, we’re much more than that.

When you find yourself speaking harshly to yourself, beating up on or generally feeling negative towards yourself, remember that there are ways to deal with this. Here’s some important ideas to remember:

• The inner self critic is not truly who you are
• It developed over continual messaging and reinforcement while growing up
• We often strive to quiet the voice, usually with working harder to overcompensate
• This negative self critic is often a symptom of how we feel inferior, or just not good enough, to ourselves or others.
• There is most often times pain, fear or sadness underlying the experience of the negative self critic. Sometimes, it’s important to get in touch with the felt sense in our bodies, rather than continuing to intellectually feed the negative self critic with more negative thoughts.
• Practicing kindness with your self is the best gift that you can get yourself. It will spill out onto how you treat others. rehearse validating yourself for doing good work, setting aside time to take care of yourself or have downtime, and generally start to improve the relationship with yourself first.
• Remember that if you’re feeling critical overly critical or judgmental of others, you may be doing that to yourself first.
• Building positive self-esteem and better confidence comes from learning to change the inner verbal dialogue with ourselves.

Dealing with our inner self critic is tricky. It’s easier sometimes to just say what’s wrong with other people, or put our problems on the world, but looking inward and seeing the inner mental chaos that often drives us, we see a different picture. Changing the nature of how we relate to and treat ourselves is the first step towards more happiness and personal freedom.