Self-Sabotage: The Most Damaging Myth In Personal Development (Here’s Why It’s Wrong)

Darren Stehle 🏳️‍🌈
2 min readMay 7, 2022
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Have you ever read a personal growth guru who claims the reason you haven’t achieved your goals is that you’re self-sabotaging?

Sabotage is defined as:

Deliberately destroy, damage, or obstruct (something), especially for political or military advantage.+

That’s heavy stuff! Can you imagine a coach saying to you, “Hey Darren, you’ve been deliberately destroying and damaging your progress and obstructing the path to achieving your goals?” If you were paying that person, you’d fire them on the spot for shaming you!

Why have we accepted this idea that we self-sabotage?

It’s about safety (knowing how to respond).

How often have you bailed on doing something that was new, difficult, or unpleasant — even something you wanted more than anything?

It’s not that you deliberately chose to destroy getting or doing what you wanted.

Rather, you didn’t have productive neuro-associations to do so with confidence.

Neuro-associations are the links made in our brain between our experiences and our corresponding emotions…

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Darren Stehle 🏳️‍🌈

I coach leaders, changemakers, and social entrepreneurs to make a difference by ethically supporting a common humanity of dignity and equity. DarrenStehle.com