Did you know you may have an undiagnosed condition?
It’s one that tens of millions of other people the world over suffer from too. It’s not diabetes. Nor is it high blood pressure. Or any stress related maladies. It’s repetitive self-sabotage syndrome.
You’ve not heard of it before? Well before you go checking out symptoms on Google there’s a reason you’ve not have come across it previously. I made it up! The name that is, not the actual ‘condition’.
Self-sabotage shows up when we reach a point of attempting to be better or happier, richer or re-visiting a scenario that we failed at or upset us before. Rather than soar and excel, we unconsciously (i.e. we’re not fully aware that we do it) trip ourselves up. This can be through poor self talk telling us not to bother. It can be through reminding ourselves how badly it went before. Or the classic sign of self-sabotage -procrastination. Ah, got it now??
Yep, we’ve all put the blocks on ourselves at one time of other. Even Tom Cruise has. Well kinda.
A trickle to a flood.
Cole Trickle is an up and fast coming young NASCAR driver. His career is on the up until one day at Daytona he is involved in a serious racing crash. When his racing adversary and now friend Rowdy Burns is then also found to need brain surgery Cole re-evaluates his racing.
He is given a chance to get in a car again but he’s a shadow of the old fearless kid who won races such a short time before. After one race where he retired the car, his chief car builder Harry sees that Trickle deliberately blew the engine. His accident and his pal’s health worry got in his head. He self-sabotaged himself.
But you see, as in this film, life often makes us face ourselves again. In his final chance race at the Daytona 500, Cole is trailing last. His short career seems over. Then there is a big smash on a turn, exactly like the time he was hospitalised in the same such incident. Cole slows down, the self-sabotage begins. But Harry breaks into his head space and tells him he can do it, he can get through this.
Cole listens and trusts, and powers up and through the wreckage, and defeats his demons. He goes on to take victory. I know it was only acting from Tom Cruise, but the manner in how he played that character, I’m sure he has suffered from self-sabotage himself in the past. Yes, really!!!
Maybe you are beginning to recognise it in yourself now?
In your mind how the past keeps coming back to haunt you in certain situations? Or that your business ideas or big plans never seem to get off the drawing board again and again?
It feels like a mountain to climb to get anywhere. But YOU are that mountain!!
The Mountain is you.
The art of self-sabotage is one many of us have perfected.
So adept are we at it that we put ourselves in situations that look like mountains to get out of. We end up stuck, blocked, isolated, alone, or trapped and blame it on these very mountains holding us where and how we are. But, WE are the mountains. We are the very thing in our way.
In her ground breaking book about this, ‘The Mountain is You’, Brianna Wiest reveals all the schemes and thoughts we construct to then pretend we would move forwards, upwards, into money, into love, and into freedom if we didn’t have too much to climb to get there.
She magnificently wrote, ‘ The mountain is often less a challenge in front of us as a problem within us’, and that, ‘There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself’.
Where Cole Trickle destroyed the engine to avoid facing an old fear, we do the same through inner beliefs and insecurities that rise up like Everest.
- We start a business idea but leave it sitting there because we think we are not good enough to make it work. Or that being successful means things can only go downhill from there.
2. We don’t have any true committed relationships because once we get close to a partner they will see we are flawed and not worth loving.
3. We don’t allow ourselves to ever explore having more money because we have the warped idea that wealthy people are hated and users.
Recognise some of these echoed in your repeat struggles? Now you can perhaps start to see that the only thing keeping you from you desire is your self-sabotage hijacking it.
No rock, no hard place.
In each occasion of our own just like those above (read Brianna’s book to discover yours!!), we open up our inner mountain and stick it slap bang in our face. We can no longer walk our path, or win our race be that to be an artist or to win Daytona. I’m asking you now to face your self-sabotage skills and finally see when and where you have always used it. Your missing career, life partner, financial success etc will be where to find it. Where you always put it when a shining life can be won. Your mountain instead of your mojo!
Just make sure you don’t end up like Cole with a glittering future ahead of him but so held back by what’s in his head he says, ‘You got me here, now what?’ Don’t be someone who blames everything and everyone else any more. Don’t look up at mountains that are not there.
It’s time to no longer be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
References – Days of Thunder – Paramount Pictures 1990.
The Mountain is You – Brianna Wiest – Thought Catalog Books.