10 Self-Destructive Mistakes You’re Making
How to overcome self-sabotage from “The Mountain Is You” by Brianna West
1. You aren’t looking inside
Self-sabotage is what happens when we refuse to consciously meet our innermost needs, often because we do not believe we are capable of handling them.
The habits and behaviors you can’t stop engaging in — no matter how destructive or limiting they may be — are intelligently designed by your subconscious to meet an unfulfilled need, displaced emotion, or neglected desire.
Take a piece of paper and a pen, and write down everything you aren’t happy with. Write down, very specifically, every single problem you face. If you are struggling with finances, you need a very clear picture of what’s wrong. Write down every debt, every bill, every asset, and every bit of income. If you are struggling with self-image, write down exactly what you dislike about yourself. If it is anxiety, write down everything that bothers or upsets you.
Once you start asking yourself what you really want, you’ll be able to stop battling the symptoms and start addressing the only issue that has ever really existed in your life, which is living out of alignment with your core needs and, therefore, your core purpose.
2. You don’t believe you have control
To truly heal, you are going to have to change the way you think. You are going to have to become very conscious of negative and false beliefs and start shifting to a mindset that actually serves you.
When it comes to the quality of your life, you need to be extremely careful of what you allow yourself to think. It will soon become what you feel, then what you believe, and then how you behave, and sure enough, the way you live
3. You are afraid of change
We are not held back in life because we are incapable of making change. We are held back because we don’t feel like making change, and so we don’t.
There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself.
The objective of being human is to grow.
4. You are waiting until you feel like it
It is essential that you learn to take action before you feel like doing it. Taking action builds momentum and creates motivation. These feelings will not come to you spontaneously; you have to generate them. You have to inspire yourself, you have to move. You have to simply begin and allow your life and your energy to reorient itself to prefer the behaviors that are going to move your life forward, not the ones that are keeping you held back.
We can actually train ourselves to prefer behaviors that are good for us. This is how we restructure our comfort zones. We begin to crave what we repeatedly do, but the first few times we do it, we often feel uncomfortable. The trick is being able to override that initial hesitation so we are guiding our lives with logic and reason, not emotionality.
You begin experiencing feelings of peace and joy in your life when you condition yourself to take repeated daily actions that facilitate clarity, calmness, healthfulness, and purposefulness, not the other way around.
5. You refuse to take accountability
The first step in healing anything is taking full accountability. It is no longer being in denial about the honest truth of your life and yourself. It does not matter what your life looks like on the outside; it is how you feel about it on the inside. It is not okay to be constantly stressed, panicked, and unhappy. Something is wrong, and the longer you try to “love yourself ” out of realizing this, the longer you are going to suffer.
To become a master of oneself is first to take radical and complete responsibility for your life. This includes even that which is beyond your control.
It is not what happens, but the way one responds, that determines the outcome.
6. You avoid difficult emotions
Anger is transformative, and it is often the peak state we reach before we truly change our lives. This is because anger is not intended to be projected onto someone else; rather, it’s an influx of motivation that helps us change what we need to change within our lives.
Sadness only becomes problematic when we do not allow ourselves to go through the natural phases of grief. Sadness does not release itself all at once. In fact, we often find that it happens in waves, some of which strike us at unexpected times.
The only true way to get over chronic fear is actually to get through it. Instead of trying to battle, resist, and avoid what we cannot control, we can learn to simply shrug and say, and if that happens, it happens. The second we are able to shrug, laugh, or even just throw our hands up and say, “Whatever, it will be fine,” we instantly take back all of our power.
7. You under value the little things
Breakthroughs are what happen after hours, days, and years of the same mundane, monotonous work. But a mind-blowing, singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A microshift is.
What you do every single day accounts for the quality of your life and the degree of your success. It’s not whether you “feel” like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.
You may not think what you did this morning was important, but it was. You may not think that the little things add up, but they do.
8. You spend your time worrying
Worrying sensitizes us to an infinity of negative possible outcomes. It shifts our mindset to expect, seek out, and create a worst-case scenario. If a crisis were to occur, we’d start panicking, because our brains and bodies had been preparing for this epic war for a long time. Had we not premeditated these fears so excessively, we wouldn’t be as impacted were they to actually happen. We’d see the situation for what it is and respond accordingly.
Rather than spending your time rehearsing how much you’d panic if such-and-such a situation were to come to fruition, imagine how a third party would handle it if they were in your shoes. Imagine getting to the other side of the issue, perhaps even treating it as an opportunity to create something you otherwise couldn’t.
9. You are holding on to your past
Right now, you are being called to release your old self: your prior afflictions, past relationships, and all of the guilt from the time you spent denying yourself what you really wanted and needed out of life.
10. You care too much about what other people think
Nobody is looking at you the way you think they are. Nobody is thinking about you the way you wish they would. They are looking at themselves. They are thinking about themselves.
To be a truly powerful person, you must be willing to be disliked. There is no path in life that you can take that will be free of resistance from others, and so it is important that you not only become okay with being disliked, but you anticipate it and act anyway.
Read the rest of my notes on The Mountain Is You by Brianna West ⬇️
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