Few people will sabotage your life as frequently and effectively as yourself. Along with an uncanny knack to achieve, people have an equally uncanny knack to fail. Frequently, there is no choice but to fail. You try to walk, you fall over, and you keep falling over until you don’t, and then you are walking. Failure is how we learn.
But as we age, we learn to fear failure. The stakes, both real and perceived, become higher, from finances and caring responsibilities to ego or environment. So, we construct our safe zones with stone walls of avoidant excuses, each supporting the other to unscalable heights. Essentially, we trap our potential selves. The dirty secret of not failing in life is not trying.
Trying to unsabotage yourself isn’t a quick fix, but it is possible. The start is admitting what you want, from learning how to play the guitar, to working for yourself or writing a book and everything in between. Articulating this, even to yourself, is incredibly difficult as it might feel like a repudiation of the life you have created so far. In coaching it can take multiple sessions to reach this point as it can require a new detachment from ego, expectations and fear. Once you say something out loud and to someone else it becomes real. You are opening yourself to possibility and maybe it won’t work, but what if it does?
