3 Ways You Are Sabotaging Your Own Success

I have a lot of experience with self sabotage. It’s only recently that I’ve started to turn my life around. The biggest contribution to my success has been that I’ve stopped sabotaging myself. I’ve picked up some good habits and I’m putting in more effort. As a result, things are starting to look up for me.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you might be self sabotaging.

You try to take on too much.

A common thing that I would do is get very, very motivated and start making grand plans. The scope of these plans was always big, and I also loved to just stack thing after thing on top as well. This was a mistake. It often leads to me losing motivation by simply having too much going on. I rarely kept doing ANY of the things even a few days later.

Yeah, you may want to improve and the easiest way to do that is all at once, right? Not really. If you want to lose weight, for example, it’s considered better to start small rather than going all in instantly. It’s better to pick one, maybe two things to focus on. Turn those things into habits before making more changes.

Slow and steady wins the race. If you put too much on your plate, it can become really difficult to maintain. Create a habit or two and THEN make another change or two. That’s the recipe for success.

Your expectations are too high.

Yet another one of my own personal foibles. This is something you have to be careful about. While you want big goals that are worth striving for, you need to balance that with reasonable expectations of what you’re actually going to achieve. At least, at first.

An example would be my writing online. If I had come into this believing I was going to make money hand over fist immediately, I likely would have quit fairly quickly. I made a whopping 87 cents my first month. Luckily, I’ve learned my lesson the hard way many times before.

I knew that this was going to be a slow process. It also helped that I read a lot of advice and it was made clear that writing online is usually a slow burn. Some people CAN take off quickly, but that isn’t the norm. My goal is to make 1000 dollars per month, eventually. I know that could be years off, but as long as I put in the work and don’t get discouraged, I’ll get there.

Set your goals high, but keep your expectations reasonable.

You give up too quickly.

I touched on this in the last two but it’s rather important. Many people will quickly quit something if they don’t see instant success. They decide it must not be worth their time. This leads to you trying lots of things but never really diving deep enough to really learn anything about it.

This was yet another of my own personal failings. If something was too hard, I’d give up. If I didn’t see the success I expected right away, I’d quit. The problem is that anything worth doing is rarely a quick process.

If you want to do something, you just have to keep doing it. Setbacks are just that, setbacks. You should keep going regardless of the obstacles in your way. You might be surprised just how much you’ll get out of going all the way.

Final Thoughts

So, we covered 3 of the things that you might do to sabotage your own success. The most important thing to remember is that you can fix it with some easy changes. Don’t give up, set reasonable expectations and don’t take on too much at once.

Once you do these things, success will come your way. I should know, I’m living that reality. I’m not a success yet but I am getting there. My goal is high, but my expectations are reasonable. I’m not giving up on this, that’s for sure!

What do you guys think? Got anything to add? I’d love to hear from you!