You may not know this, and it may come as a surprise, but self-sabotage doesn’t exist.
As Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street says: “It’s a whazy. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust.” ✨
“Self-sabotage” implies you’re consciously doing it. I think a more accurate term would be “subconscious non-commitment” – here’s why:
For the sake of argument, let’s say you buy or sign up for an online course, but then don’t actually take the course. It just sits there and you feel like a failure because you made a commitment to yourself, but didn’t see it through. Or maybe you started it, but never finished it.
Some may call this self-sabotage.
What’s actually happening is that there is a PART of you that wants to do the course, but another PART that doesn’t.
Your *conscious* mind made the decision to take the course.
But your *subconscious* mind is not on board with the conscious decision. So the subconscious begins displaying its own wants and needs (such as “I don’t see the benefit in doing this”) in ways that look like: lack of motivation, easy distraction, boredom with the course, disillusionment with the concept of self-development or the course topic, self-doubt, etc.
You are dealing with: a conscious commitment, AND a subconscious NON-commitment.
It’s a defense mechanism of the subconscious. Your inner world is holding the belief that what you’re doing this is detrimental to you, or that NOT doing this thing is “safer”.
There is a subconscious need that is being met by NOT doing this task.
You need to ask yourself: what are the beliefs I have about doing this course? What will I get out of doing it? What will I get out of NOT doing it? What do I associate with achieving this? What meaning do I attach to it?