How to Break the Cycle of Self-Sabotage & Successfully Reach Your Goals

We’re just a few days into the New Year…how many of us have already bombed our New Year’s resolutions?  Yep, I’m raising my hand, too.

That’s ok.  I get it.  It’s so easy to get sidetracked, isn’t it?

Yes, but let’s stop right there!  Just because you got a little sidetracked doesn’t mean you get a free pass on neglecting your goals and resolutions.  We set goals and make resolutions because we want to better ourselves.  We aren’t satisfied with the current state of our being and desire a better life, so we set goals to reach and resolve to make it through to the endgame: that better life!

Let’s take a moment and look at one of the biggest reasons why we don’t end up reaching our goals week after week (and eventually year after year).

Self-Sabotage

Have you ever thought something like, “I messed up!  I ruined my (diet/exercise plan/devotional plan/insert your own challenge here), so I might as well just give up on today.  Or this week.  Or this year.”?  This line of thinking leads right into self-sabotaging habits.  Self-sabotaging habits are identified as those behavior patterns that create problems with and interfere with long-standing goals.  Psychology Today highlights a few of these behaviors, from seemingly innocent procrastination to self-harm and drug addiction.

This leads us to the big question: how do you recognize and stop self-sabotage?

Recognize it for What it is

Before you can stop the cycle of self-sabotaging, you have to identify what it is.  Most of us aren’t addicted to drugs or self-harm, so it can be hard to recognize your actions and attitudes as self-sabotaging behavior patterns.  Let’s take a moment to figure out what self-sabotage looks like in your life.

First, we’re going to do a quick exercise together.  Grab a notebook or piece of paper and something to write with.  At the top of your paper, write down one thing you want to accomplish but have had a hard time actually getting done.

Here’s one I’m working one now: Lose Weight.

Okay.  Now that you have that crazy goal on paper, let’s think about what your biggest obstacle is for reaching that goal.  My biggest obstacle?  I LOVE food!  I enjoy cooking, and I really enjoy eating what I cook.  Oh, and I really like chocolate too…

Now make a list of all the things that are holding you back from reaching your goal.  I like to eat, I like sweets, I don’t like to exercise, I get too busy to cook healthy meals.  There’s more, but you get the idea.  Now, this is where self-sabotage comes in.  I know I need to lose weight, and I even made it easy for myself by committing to losing just 5 pounds this month.  That should be easy enough, right?  Not if I maintain my unhealthy habits!

When something distracts you from reaching your goal, you have two choices: recognize the distraction and choose to return to your healthy habits, or recognize the distraction and feel guilty about it.  The choice to return to healthy habits is easiest right after you recognize the distraction.  If you don’t make that choice right away, it becomes more and more difficult to return to healthy!  Guilt sets in and guilt is a terrible monster that drags us down into unhealthy behaviors faster than anything else.

The Cycle

The cycle of self-sabotage looks like this:

• Set a Goal
• Get distracted
• Realize you’re distracted
• Agonize over the distraction
• Feel guilty for not making progress toward goal
• Engage in sabotaging behavior
• Feel guilty about sabotaging behavior patterns
• Continue to engage in sabotaging behaviors out of guilt (more distraction)
• Agonize over the distraction
• And so on…

Here’s a little graphic for us visual types:

It’s a downward spiral, isn’t it?  Once you get caught in it, it’s terribly hard to climb back out!  Now, let’s figure out how to stop before we start spiraling down!

Back to our little exercise.  You should have a nice little list of things that distract you from your goal, right?  Now, let’s take those distractions and find positive, healthy ways to redirect them back to your goal.  For each distraction, write down an action or thought process that will lead you back to the right path.

In my example, it looks like this:

• Goal: Lose 5 pounds this month
• Biggest Obstacle: I LOVE FOOD!
• Distraction: I’m too busy to prepare a healthy lunch today, so I grabbed a burrito at Taco Bell.
• Counter-action back to Healthy Habits: Do some meal prep tonight so that I don’t have an excuse to leave the house without my healthy lunch tomorrow!
• Goal – Back on Track!

Simple, right?  Well, mostly.  We all know these things are easier to say than do.  It’s one thing to write it down, and a whole other enchilada to actually make it happen!

Last week, I wrote a post called Renewing the Promises: 5 Strategies to a Better Life in the New Year.  Click on over there for some more helpful encouragement and tips to keep your New Year Goals this year!

Looking for more inspiration?  Sign up below for the Reflecting Beautiful Newsletter and stay tuned for a goal-setting worksheet coming soon!