subconscious.
And it’s all too often not the color we want it to be.
That color you’ve dyed your soul, that set of invisible rules that have been embedded in the back of your mind, in your subconscious, is what determines your path through this life. It’s not your determination, not your circumstances, and most definitely not your luck.
Luck is for those who cannot define their success, and if you cannot clearly define it, you will most likely never be able to repeat it.
THE THREE SABOTEURS—AN INTRODUCTION
If you want to start doing something about your not-so-private little head game of self-sabotage, you’ll need to first systematically uncover and then go about interrupting the conversations you have with yourself. Not the surface thoughts, but rather the repetitive, profoundly deep and dark internal dialogues that rattle around in your mental cage and guide your every thought and emotion. The stuff under the rug.
This will allow you to finally see your “three saboteurs,” three simple internal statements that do real and lasting damage to you and your life. The three saboteurs are the fundamental conclusions you have come to about yourself, the other people in your life, and life itself. I know you might find it hard to believe that your entire existence is unraveling because of three simple internal statements, but it is, and in these pages I’ll help you uncover not only why this is happening but also what your unique statements are.
How did you end up with your three saboteurs? We’ll get to that. How do they impact your life (beyond the obvious)? We’ll get to that too. How do you get yourself out of this crap? Oh, we’ll get to that one, trust me.
For those of you who “Why? Why? Why?” the hell out of life, I have some answers for you too, although that incessant search for the answer is in many ways why the question is never satisfied.
Why? Oh, puhleeeeease!
I am out to unveil the inner workings of what makes you sabotage. We’ll start at the beginning of your life and work our way to the very point of the spear. Today. In the first few chapters, we set the stage for why human beings would even have a propensity for sabotage in the first place, but it’s safe to say your penchant for messing with your life didn’t happen in a vacuum. Certain things had to happen in your life, in a particular sequence, some of which are common to all human beings, some that are unique to you. We’ll uncover what these are for you.
This will take some work, and as you move through the chapters you might find yourself wiped out or in a state of confusion or fear. That’s fine. The important thing is that you do not check out. Push through. On the other side of that state is a life you’ve always wanted to get to but somehow never could. Really.
I’m drawing a line in the sand with you right here.
You might discover that the effort you put into these pages is commensurate with the effort you have put into your life. That statement alone could change a life. Or not.
Get your head out of the sand (or your navel or wherever you currently have it buried) and make whatever you are reading here make a difference for you. You can do that at least.
“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Okay, champ, let’s get rolling.
The idea for this book began with my asking myself a simple question.
Why?
Why is my life the way it is?
When I looked at my life I could see it was, in certain areas, headed in a direction that I wasn’t particularly happy with. It seemed that regardless of the approach, there was always an inevitability about some areas of my life. My pillowy stomach. My finances. Certain relationships. I mean, damn, I’ve done TONS of growth work over the years and STILL my bank account gets overdrawn? Where’s my Tony Robbins private helicopter/jet/submarine, for the love of God?
How come I’ve never really made a difference with these areas of my life? It’s not as if I can’t earn money, but how the hell have I seemingly always struggled so much to build it? It’s not as if I don’t know how to get my body in shape, but why is it always so temporary? No matter how much I tried, I would continually go in these cycles of winning, losing, winning, losing, and at the end of it all, wind up right back where I started. There have even been times when I was actually further behind after that real-life yo-yo!
It made no difference that I knew I kept getting into the same cycle and making the same mistakes. Like you, I’m not a freaking idiot! I can see what’s wrong! However, no matter how hard I tried, it was as if I would eventually be compelled to keep doing the same stuff I had always done, and I was apparently powerless to stop it! What the . . . ? I knew what I wanted to do, but I kept getting snagged by the hook of doing things the same way, going back to old and bankrupt and destructive behaviors.
You might want to take a breath here and ponder a couple of questions for yourself. Why do you do what you do? Again, go beyond the usual answer you give yourself. Think. If you keep living this way, where is it all headed? I mean really headed? Not some wispy concept of your future but rather a down-in-the-dirt look at where your current actions are leading you. Well? You might find those questions tough to answer, but this is the kind of digging that will release you from your trap of sabotage.
Earlier, I pointed out that self-sabotage isn’t always the big, extreme things we do to screw up our lives. It’s important to understand that there are millions of tiny ways we are sabotaging our lives every day. You have to see there’s a problem before you can do anything about it. But it’s important to understand that self-sabotage can also lead to very destructive behaviors. It shatters marriages, fractures families, turns people to hard drugs, alcohol, gambling and sex addictions, infidelity, and all kinds of toxic behaviors that trash an otherwise decent life.
When it comes down to it, no one can seriously fuck up your life quite as magnificently as you can. And you do.
In my career as a personal development guy, it’s my job to help people have insights that empower them to make significant change in their lives. I’ve seen how very common it is for people to get stuck in cycles of behavior that, in the cold light of day, seem to be in complete opposition to what they say they want. Men and women the world over are trapped in a myopic stream of self-talk and patterns of behavior that keep them spinning in an all-too-predictable life.
Regardless of the number of times it seems life is on track, it always eventually seems to go off.
We are all building things only to burn them right back down. And we’re tired of it.
YOU’RE NOT A CATEGORY
In looking for a way to get our lives
