Rooting out subconscious self-sabotage
This, gentle reader, is a thing for "humans with wounds" reasons
Today, write about some kind of self-sabotage. That doesn’t have to mean behavior you personally engage in; perhaps you notice a type of self-sabotage in your orbit that’s bothering you or otherwise has your radar up, or maybe you want to recount an experience with self-sabotage in the past, or a person you witnessed doing acts of self-sabotage against themselves.
But, there’s also this…
What I’ve personally noticed, especially lately, is the disconnect between what people say they want and what their actions tell me they really want. Meaning, I regularly meet scores of creative people who claim to want to go big with the work they’re doing, or who claim they want to write that book or make that film or paint that thing or write that play or start that streaming series or whatever else, but literally all of their actions almost immediately say otherwise. They’ll do things like subconsciously create interpersonal drama to drain them so they don’t have time for creative work. Or, they’ll be disorganized and sow chaos around the project until it implodes. Or, they’ll be so dead-set on the project unfolding a certain way they’ll be inflexible and break, or they’ll say they want the thing at the finish line, but they want no part of the effort to get there.
I don’t blame or judge people for that. To paraphrase how a friend put it recently, when we make decisions, our subconscious minds get more votes than our conscious minds do. And, the only way out of that is to do the work and figure out as much as possible about what our subconscious minds believe and take into consideration when making decisions.
Because of all that, I don’t generally believe what people tell me they want; I listen to what their actions tell me. One might want to write a book or an op-ed or a collection of essays or whatever, but they might be carrying subconscious ideas about who “gets” to be a writer, or maybe they’re carrying around a childhood wound that makes them feel unworthy of their dreams or like a bad writer, or maybe they simply don’t subconsciously feel safe to move forward because of a list of perceived “what if” dangers. That doesn’t make them shitty; it makes them human.
So, when I say: let’s write about self-sabotage, you can do whatever you want, but what I urge you to do is to write deeply into the decision-making votes your subconscious mind holds every day. Let’s go.
If you want to do more reframing like in this post, sort out how bigger visibility in your creative career could benefit you and shake things up for yourself with a solid, strategic plan for your creative work, I encourage you to schedule a call with me about The Seen AF Method, my 6-month hybrid course/live-support program to challenge narratives around creative work and visibility and build a unique-to-your-art strategy to set yourself and your work up for more.
Register today and also get a 1:1 “unfuck your project” strategy call. Learn more about the whole thing here, and/or book a chat with me about it here and we’ll see if it’s a good fit for you.