The Real Reason You Self-Sabotage When Things Are Going Well

Think about the last time that you truly blew something up. I'm willing to bet it wasn't in your worst week. It was in one of your best weeks. You have the best month that you've had in your business and then the next month is crap. You finally get consistent at the gym. You're down 15 lbs. You feel amazing. And then out of nowhere, you have the worst 4 days of eating that you've had all year. Or you're in a great relationship. You meet somebody incredible. They're healthy. They're good for you. They're actually like calm for once. There's no chaos or drama. They treat you well. And then you find yourself picking apart everything that they do and starting a fight over something that does not matter. Do you see the pattern here? Nobody self-sabotages at rock bottom. You self-sabotage during the good times when things start going better than they've ever been before. And if you don't understand why that happens, you'll spend the rest of your life setting bigger goals, chasing harder stuff to do, hiring a coach, buying a program, and then resetting yourself back to the same place over and over and over again, year after year, and you'll think there's something wrong with you, but there's nothing wrong with you. There's just a ceiling that is invisible to you. And today, I'm going to talk to you about how to find yours and what to do about it. So, here's what I want you to understand. You don't have a ceiling on your goals. You have a ceiling on your identity. Your identity of who you actually think that you are. And your goals are never allowed to go higher than your identity for very long. If you achieve more than you think it's possible for you to achieve for a little while, you will eventually self-sabotage and bring yourself back to quote unquote normal. So, you can want a $2 million a year business. You can want a great marriage. You can want an incredible body. You can want peace in your life. Wanting is the easy part because wanting costs you nothing. But you will only ever get and achieve what matches who you believe that you are. And I've talked about identity being like a thermostat before, right? Like you set a thermostat at 72°, the house heats up and eventually the AC clicks on and drags it back to 72°. That's exactly how identity works and how self- sabotage unconsciously brings you back to your 72 degrees. But here's what I want to add to it today because I don't think most people take it far enough. It's not just your income and your success that is set at 72 degrees. It's not just your weight. It's also like your happiness has a set point. Your peace that you think that you're allowed to feel has a set point. how loved you're willing to feel and what love you're allowed to let in, quote unquote allowed to let in, has a set point. How much ease you'll tolerate in your life has a set point. And if we go a level deeper into it, because I really want you to truly understand what's happening in the brain, because once you actually see this, like you can't really unsee it. There's something that's in psychology that's called cognitive dissonance. And most people have heard of it, but they've heard of it kind of in the wrong context. like they think of it as holding two beliefs that don't match, which is true. But here's how this actually matters to you. When there's a gap between what you believe about yourself and what's actually happening in your life, your brain experiences that gap as like genuine discomfort. It goes, "No, no, no. This is wrong. Sound the alarms." And it will not stop working at self-sabotaging you to get you back to that normal place until that gap is closed. And we will be right back. Hey, real quick. If you're someone who sets a goal, gets really fired up for a couple weeks, and then somehow ends up right back with the same habits that you swore that you were done with, this is for you. Listen to me for just a second. It's not because you're lazy. It's not because you don't have enough discipline. It's because you're trying to create a new life with the same identity that you've always had. See, you have to understand you will always act in alignment with who you believe that you are. So, if deep down you see yourself as somebody who quits, someone who never follows through, someone who always falls back into the same old patterns, then you will keep proving that story true over and over again. And until you change that old identity underneath it, nothing will change. That's why on August 27th, I'm hosting a completely free live workshop where I'm going to show you how to identify the patterns that have been controlling your decisions without you even realizing it. How to break those patterns and then how to shift your identity so that the actions that you want to take finally match the life that you say that you want. So, if you're ready for change and you don't want to stay the old version of you, go to 2026workshop.com right now or scan the QR code that's right here to save your free spot for August 27th. So, go ahead, save your seat and I'll see you there. And now, back to the show. This will change your life if you truly understand is that your brain has two ways to close that gap. Number one is it can update your longlasting beliefs about yourself or it can just self-sabotage you and change reality. And guess which one is going to pick on default? It's going to change your reality cuz that's going to happen the fastest because your beliefs about yourself have been running for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and they have tens of thousands of repetitions under them. And the new identity of you working out for as long as you have been or making more money or having the best month of your life has only been running for just a few weeks. So when you look at your your conscious and your subconscious mind, your subconscious is running 95% of your daily cognitive processing. Your conscious mind, the part that sets the goal, the part that wants to be successful, that wants to be a millionaire, that wants to be happier, that's only about 5%. And so your subconscious is roughly like 19 times more powerful than the part of you that wrote down your goals. So when that 5% of you says, "I want to make $200,000 this year." Now, the other 95% will say, "Nope, we're not doing that." Like, we're not the person who can do that. We're the person whose dad worked two jobs and still couldn't cover it. The one who has worked since they were 14 years old and they've still struggled their entire life. And so if that's the case, if it's the 5% versus the 95%, who do you think is going to win that argument? The subconscious. And here's the thing, the way your subconscious wins is not by like talking you out of it. It's like much sneakier than that. Like you'll barely notice it. It just like quietly makes you the kind of person who doesn't follow through this week. Or it just quietly makes you start eating things that you shouldn't be eating in order to lose the weight that you've been losing. or quietly makes you the person that doesn't go to the gym this week when the past 3 weeks you've gone four times in a row. So, you don't like consciously blow up your entire life. you just like lose a little bit of motivation or you don't feel very good or you get busier than normal or you get into a bad mood or you you accidentally sleep in because you didn't get good sleep last night or you start an argument or you forget to send the email to that customer who wanted to buy a big order and you're not following up with them or you just like scroll on your phone for an extra 45 minutes in the middle of the day, right? It's like these little teeny tiny things that you do and then you look back 6 weeks later and you're like, "What the happened?" like I was doing so well. When you start doing well and you start self-sabotaging, I call it getting a case of the I deserve it. The I deserve it. Oh, I've I've I've lost 15 lbs in the past month. I deserve to have an extra ice cream. Oh, I lost 15 lbs in the past month. Oh, I'll have a little slice of pizza. It will always bring you back down to your 72°. And you have to understand your identity did its job perfectly again. it brought you back down to the temperature that it thinks that you're supposed to be at. And so, let me get specific because I know that knowing that you have a ceiling doesn't really help you. I want to actually try to help you identify which one is yours because in my experience, like I've been in personal development for over 20 years and I've coached thousands and thousands of people. I found there's kind of like three beliefs, three main buckets that create our ceilings. And I want you to listen to all three of them and just notice what one resonates with you most. That's probably yours. Okay, so trigger number one is this is the feeling of I don't deserve this. This one's super common. Something good happens and instead of feeling joy, you kind of feel like a weird lowgrade guilt like you don't deserve it in some sort of way. Kind of like you you got away with something and eventually someone's going to check out the receipt and make sure that they bring you back to where you're supposed to be. It's like some people will say this like making money means that you took it away from someone else or your success means someone else is unsuccessful or you feel bad for your success when you saw your parents work so much harder than you do and they still struggled and so you think like I don't deserve it. So what do you do? You unconsciously if you're not paying attention start messing it up. And it's because deep down like your identity says I don't deserve to have things this good. I don't deserve to have things work this well for me. So, the second trigger is this. If I'm too happy, something bad is going to happen. And this one usually comes from some sort of a childhood where good moments were followed by bad moments. Like things were calm in your household and then somebody came home in a bad mood and the whole house just changed in 10 seconds. And so now you as an adult when everything is genuinely fine, like you can't allow yourself to relax into it. You know this one that I'm talking about like you you feel this one you start like scanning for what the problems are like things are not supposed to be this good what the is off like you start bracing internally and so you start like bracing for these bad things and when you brace you pull back it's not expansive to embrace you contract is what you do and you don't just contract in the moment you contract in all areas of your life as a protection mechanism so you don't go all in on anything you hold just a little bit in reserve You don't fully invest into a relationship. You don't go all in in your business. You don't go all in on the opportunity in front of you. And then when it doesn't work out because you didn't go all in on it and you only gave like 60 70%, your brain goes, "See, I told you. Good thing we didn't get our hopes up and it's more than anything else. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that you unconsciously created because of your identity." Okay. And then the third trigger is this. I don't know if I can handle it. You're not like actually afraid of success. You're afraid of being the person who has to maintain it because everything changes, right? Like once you're successful, right now you're just the person who's trying and trying is safe because trying has no like real standard to it. The second that it works out, you become a person who has to keep it going. But now the difference is you might have a bigger team. There's more expectations on you. There's people that are depending on you. You know, you have to lead other people. You have to be more organized. You have to be on time. You have to manage your money. You have to have hard conversations. You have to hire people. You have to fire people. You have to be consistent when you don't feel like it. That feels like a burden to a lot of people. And that burden that we start feeling is the self-sabotage. And somewhere inside of you, there's a voice that goes, I don't think I'm built for all this. And so you sabotage so that you never have to fully bear all that responsibility. And I've seen this hundreds of times. Somebody has like the best quarter that they've ever had in their business and then completely falls apart the next quarter and they're like, "What the what the hell just happened?" Well, what happened is they got a glimpse of how great life could be and then they went, "I don't believe I'm the person who can actually handle all of it." Right? And so, how do we start to change all these things? because I don't want you to just intellectually understand it. I want you to actually work through it and change yourself. Okay. The first one is this. Feel the discomfort and don't fix it. This is the most important one. The next time something goes really well or better than what you're used to and you get that weird like feeling in your stomach like something's wrong, that feeling of discomfort and wanting to change something in that moment like the urge to like pick a fight or to eat that thing or to cancel the plan, whatever it is that that's discomfort, like you you feel discomfort, you feel like you're supposed to do something about it, don't act on it. Like just do not try to make it go away. Just sit in the discomfort for five minutes. You're it's going to be like nails on a chalkboard, right? But for five minutes, like set a timer on your phone if you have to try to float in the absolute discomfort. Feel how uncomfortable it is to have things going well without having to do a single thing to try to bring your temperature back down. That's the whole rep. Five minutes. That's the repetition I want you to get used to. That's it. And it's going to feel weird and awkward and maybe awful for the first 10 times and then it's just going to go away. Like then one day you're just going to realize like you can hold on to something good without flinching. Like you don't need to bring yourself back down to 72°. So you don't get comfortable with discomfort by doing something about it. You change it by staying in the discomfort a little bit longer each time. and then you just get used to it. Okay, so that's the first thing. And the second thing I want you to do is update your beliefs with evidence, not with affirmations. Like you can't talk yourself into a new ceiling. You've tried it. You've tried, you know, looking in the mirror and saying, "I'm a millionaire." When you have $412 in your bank account, it doesn't work because there's 95% of you in the background going, "Uh, no, dude. That's a lie. You're full of crap." But your brain accepts evidence more than accepts anything else. So collect evidence, small, undeniable pieces of evidence that you're becoming a new person. Things like, I said I would do the thing and I did it. I had a great week and I didn't blow it up. I felt the urge to pull back and I stayed. I let something good happen and did nothing about it. I said I was going to wake up at 6:00 a.m. and I woke up at 6:00 a.m. I said I was going to work out today and I worked out today. Every single one of those is a tiny piece of proof that there's a new you that's being built. And if you do that enough times, the identity that you have of yourselves has no choice but to update because you've made the old story indefensible. They can't say like, "Oh, no. We're not the type of person to follow through when you showed up four times this week to the gym. When you made a 100 cold calls when you said you didn't want to. When you keep doing the thing that you don't want to do, the old version of you, the old story, the old identity has to eventually start to die off. And so what we want to do is start collecting evidence for the new person that we're building oursel into. And so I want to leave you with this. If you spent years wondering why you keep getting so close and then finding a way to end right back to where you were before, if you've been doing this over and over again, you've just been living inside of a ceiling that somebody else installed of you a very, very long time ago. And you've been calling it like your personality. It's not your personality. And I want you to understand this. You're capable of so much more than you've accomplished. So the next time things start going well for you and you feel that pull to like hit the emergency break and let it stall out, don't like let it be good for a little bit longer than you're comfortable with and then a little bit longer than that because your life will not change if you want it to change. Your life will change when your identity of who you actually think you are changes and that new reality fits inside of the new identity. Hey, thanks so much for watching today's video. If you love this video, click this one right here. This is the one that you need to watch next. And if you want to make sure you don't miss any more of these episodes, click that button right there. Make sure you subscribe and check out the next