When is the last time a thought went through your head that contained some wish or hope that you could change something in your life? Very recently, I bet. (Maybe right before you came to this site?) We think about making change all the time. Yet we rarely make changes. Why is this? One [...]
Authority figure issues anyone? Oh, yes. We've got them. I've posted before about our complicated relationship with authority figures (in college, it's professors, in the work world, it's our bosses, our new "moms" and "dads"). Mainly, I wrote about authority figure issues in the context of handling criticism but I also mentioned it in terms of our [...]
If it’s regular criticism that you’re receiving from on high, use a similar approach to turn that plain criticism into constructive criticism. Let’s say your supervisor says, “Your work performance is inconsistent – some days you’re “on,” but other days you’re aloof, locked up like a clam shell. Your coworkers have noticed, too.” First off, you’re definitely going to have an internal emotional reaction because you are hearing this for the first time. That’s OK. Take a breath. You might feel a bit defensive. Don’t let that part of you take over, because you’ll miss out on the lesson. Your best bet is to ask a question. Keep asking till your surprise and defensiveness ease up.
Making decisions has everything to do with self-sabotage. Much of the time self-sabotage stems from not making decisions at all and allowing ourselves to have decisions made for us through the passage of time — deadlines will come an go if we do nothing. If you want to apply to graduate school and do nothing to make it happen, your inaction is a form of self-sabotage. Deadlines will come and go; it’s up to us to set things into motion. Think of it as watching a conveyor belt roll by — and jumping on that conveyor belt. Become one of the people moving forward.
No wonder so many people take the path of least resistance. No wonder so many people avoid success and, instead, veer toward self-sabotage…toward the comfortable familiarity of the old. Self-Sabotage is a form of clinging to your security blanket. Stop blaming yourself for sabotaging yourself and instead focus on the real, deeper issue: you’re afraid of changing your life. You’re afraid of the unknown.
Self-sabotage is on people’s minds. It’s a popular topic. It’s a frequently searched term on Google, believe it or not. More frequent than self-esteem or self-confidence. To me, that’s a good thing and a bad thing. In my ideal world, in which Google would still probably rule the consumer technology landscape, people would search terms like ‘joy’ or ‘getting happy’ or ‘laughing’ and so on. (I did a search for ‘laughing’ and found the video of a baby laughing, which is hard to watch without, at the very least, chuckling. You can see the video, which is at the end of this post.) But, then again, the reason people are searching ‘self-sabotage’ is because they want to know what it is, why it is, and how to get away from it. And that’s good.
We find it hard to finish things–but not just projects, relationships, and jobs, but conversations, too. We tend to stay too long and wind up saying Yes when we mean No. Yes, Keep Talking, we say when wed prefer to have the ease of saying Goodbye. Failing to end a relationship is saying Yes, I Still Want This when, truly, you mean to say Goodbye. Staying in a job when you’d prefer to find a better one is saying Yes, This is Good Enough, when you wish you could say I Quit. Because we don’t know how to finish-up projects, we abandon them instead, incomplete.
Done reading Janet Geringer Woititz’s book, “The Self-Sabotage Syndrome.” Though, I don’t think it’s a book that I’ll ever finish reading in the sense of read, shut, and return to the shelf. I mean “finished” in that I’ve completed my first of many reads of a book that I’m going to be reading again and [...]
I just began reading Janet Geringer Woitiz’s book, “The Self-Sabotage Syndrome: Adult Children in the Workplace,” and it’s pretty good. I’m surprised to find a book that focuses on the issues of adult children as they are played out in the work place. But, it makes sense to do so. How much time do we spend at work? Most of every day of every week of most of our lives. The tone of the book is a lot like her New York Times bestseller, “Adult Children of Alcoholics.” They’re published by HCI, which publishes most of the literature available about us.
nar cis sism/nar cis cism. n. 1. Excessive love or admiration of oneself. 2. Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one’s own body or self, esp. as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development. (American Heritage College Dictionary.) Alcoholics, and all adicts, suffer from unhealthy narcissism. So do [...]
