A Hidden Form of Self-Sabotage Almost Everyone Engages In

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Let me cut to the chase: The premise of this post is that people self-sabotage by not meeting themselves where they are.

This happens in various ways. This first example is of misaligned external expectations rather than self-expectations, but it illustrates the point.

• Scenario 1: You're a high school athletics coach. A freshman student transfers to your school and they're one of the most talented athletes you've ever encountered. You're incredibly excited about their potential. You create an aggressive training plan, but six months later the student starts experiencing repeated injuries and illnesses—their race times regress rather than progress. You overloaded them beyond their capacity to recover from the training load, and they broke down. You realize that your expectations for the student were based on your vision of the athlete the student would eventually become, not on their current level of experience and resilience.
• Scenario 2: You're a self-coached athlete returning to running after pregnancy. You've been waiting eagerly for the day you could return to the sport you love. You resume the same training schedule that worked for you before, that led to numerous personal bests, but it's a struggle.

In both these vignettes, the expectations aren't tailored to who the person is today. People often do this when managing or coaching themselves. They set goals and create improvement plans for the person they hope to become—or for the person they once were if they performed at a higher level in the past than they are currently capable of. Any self-improvement plan is, in essence, a training plan.

While the examples I shared are about physical fitness, the same applies to mental fitness: You can't set expectations and goals or create plans for yourself based on who you hope to become or who you once were, and not you of today. Doing that is self-sabotage. You won't achieve your potential, or worse, you'll stall, regress, or physically or psychologically injure yourself.

Our best or ideal self often creates our plans, and our worst or most pessimistic self second-guesses them, but our real or average self needs to carry them out.

Our culture sometimes tells us that all we need to succeed is more grit, but we can't simply will ourselves to a higher level of performance. To keep up the running analogy, we can't simply will ourselves to run a 5-minute mile if we currently run a 9-minute mile. We can't start running twice daily if we don't run at all. There is progression and callousing that needs to happen for us to handle higher loads.

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The Psychology Behind This Self-Sabotage

This pattern of self-sabotage is often driven by criticism of or impatience with the person we are today. For example, you feel frustrated with where you're at today. You think you should be further ahead or shouldn't have lost skills or fitness.

Sometimes, this form of self-sabotage is driven by aspiration. Hustle culture sets us up to follow an incorrect path like this: You watch a YouTube video telling you to "Follow this exact blueprint to achieve extreme success." Hustle culture is often premised on the idea that we should copy the success model of those who have achieved the most outsized success. However, this is like trying to copy the training regimen of an Olympic athlete.

There are talents, experiences, and skills the Olympic athlete (or other comparably accomplished person) innately has, or has accumulated, that you don't have yet. Some of their abilities or advantages you might never have. For example, part of why athletes rise to the top is often because they have an elite, genetic capacity to recover from intensive training loads. You probably can't do world-record-holding distance runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen's workouts and recover in time to run again tomorrow. Likewise, you probably can't copy someone else's model of career success, because you don't have the same innate talents and advantages they do. The good news: You have your own.

Takeaway Lessons

• Be patient with yourself. You'll achieve your best long-term success if your expectations of yourself are right-sized for the person you are today—if you don't try to run before you can walk.
• Sometimes, you'll need to rebuild your fitness after a break. This includes forms of mental stamina. (I need to do this whenever I take a break from blogging. It takes writing a few posts to get my mojo back.)
• Don't try to copy someone else's blueprint. You can be inspired by others and pick up tips and tricks, but especially at very elite levels, people's innate talents come into play in how they have achieved their success. Your path to being the highest-performing version of yourself will need to leverage your innate strengths and mitigate your weaknesses. Culturally, we tend to focus on just a few strengths that contribute to high performance (e.g., consistency, focus) but there are hundreds of different innate talents that are potentially relevant to any success goal someone has. You're exceptionally talented at something relevant to your goals, but you might not recognize what that is yet! You can discover it by meeting yourself where you are.