I just got off an amazing coaching call with an extremely insightful Bloody Good Life 101 client who is also a friend of mine. As it commonly happens (for some unknown reason),
she is struggling with the exact thing that I’ve been thinking about lately.
My client feels (and I wholeheartedly agree), that if she were to truly fulfil her highest potential, she would do truly epic things in the world.
And that scares the bejaysus out of her.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” – Marianne Williamson
To play it small we need to employ our trusty friends procrastination, Facebook scrolling, and spending-too-long-on-menial-tasks.
When we do these things, we lose trust in our ability to follow things through.
We’re scared that if we did make it big, we’d be overwhelmed with things to do, and since we’ve now lost trust in our ability to stay motivated and focused (BECAUSE we’ve been playing it small in order to avoid such a thing), we conclude that playing it small is the only option to avoid failure. So we continue to self sabotage and hold ourselves back.
It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that makes no sense at all.
Except in the mind.
If there’s any of danger of failure or embarrassment, the mind will try to stop us doing it.
So how do we get around this shemozle?
Well, from experience, I’ve concluded that I’m not totally sure.
But I think, as in anything, awareness is key. The mind will continue to do what it does best. But sometimes it can be enough to recognise that we’re self sabotaging and to become aware of why we’re doing it, so that when we catch ourselves, we can choose to take a different route.
Once we can see the obstacles, we can work out how to climb over them.
Until we know they’re there, we’ll continue to hit invisible brick walls on the path to greatness, and we’ll eventually give up and stay on the couch.
So have a look at your life and see if you can notice patterns of self sabotage.
Are you playing it small in order to stop overwhelm because you’ve played it small so long that you’re not sure if you can handle playing it large?
