Episode 10 | Self Sabotage Isn't What You Think | 4th August 2026  |  35 min

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Nothing's actually gone wrong, but you're one anxious move away from blowing it all up...

Why do you self-sabotage and ruin good things, right when they're finally going well? This week we slow the whole pattern down. The relief nobody admits to when it falls apart, the four different engines that can be driving it, why the pull gets louder the closer you get to the thing you want, and the identity check running quietly underneath all of it.

Here's what the episode runs on: self-sabotage is real as a description, but it's usually weak as an explanation. Saying "I'm self-sabotaging" names what the pattern looks like. It doesn't tell you what's causing it, and it makes it sound like there's a defective part of you lurking in the background waiting to wreck anything good. Most of the time that's not what's happening. You're reaching for relief, or certainty, or distance, or control, often without realising it, and the behaviour solves an immediate problem while quietly working against what you actually want.

Once you can see the job the behaviour is doing, instead of just judging what it costs you later, you finally have something you can work with. That's where change starts. This one's for you if you've ever watched yourself do the thing, at the time, not in hindsight, and still couldn't explain why you didn't stop.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The word "self-sabotage" is doing something to you.

Calling it self-sabotage makes it sound deliberate, like there's a defective part of you lurking in the background waiting to wreck anything good. That's a heavy thing to carry while you're also trying to change. Most of the time you're not consciously wrecking anything. You're reaching for relief, certainty, distance or control, often without realising it. The behaviour is solving an immediate problem while working against the longer-term goal, and that's a very different thing from wanting to fail.

The relief is the whole reason it repeats.

When you pull back from the good thing, something uncomfortable disappears. The waiting ends, the uncertainty lifts, and that relief is real and immediate. Your brain files the escape as useful and makes it more likely next time. That's operant conditioning and negative reinforcement doing their work, and it's why insight alone can't touch it. You're not arguing with a bad decision, you're up against something that paid out fast.

One label, several different engines.

What looks like self-sabotage from the outside can be driven by completely different things underneath: reaching for relief, protecting your self-worth, a conflict between two things you actually want, or a genuine question of capacity and habit. Sometimes more than one at once. They look identical but they don't happen for the same reason, which is exactly why "just stop sabotaging yourself" never works. The fix has to match the engine.

It gets louder near the finish line, and that's predictable.

When something is both wanted and threatening, the pull toward it and the pull away both intensify as it gets closer, and the pull away climbs faster. From far off, success is an idea. Up close it gets specific, and your brain runs past the win into the aftermath: what people will expect, what it'll cost your time, whether you can hold it. That's not a fear of success. It's your brain flagging a specific predicted bill, which is a far more useful thing to look at.

You're not your own worst enemy.

Feeling relief when it fell apart doesn't mean you wanted to lose it. It means the behaviour was doing something for you. "I destroy everything good" is a sentence built for shame, and shame just makes the pattern more likely next time. The work isn't to attack the part of you that learned the strategy. It's to understand the job it's been doing and build another way to do that job, one that doesn't charge you the same price later.

NOTABLE QUOTES

" You made something certain out of something you couldn't hold."

"It's the pattern that pays out immediately, but it charges you later, and then uses that charge to fund the next round."

"Self-sabotage is real as a description. It's usually weak as an explanation."

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 The Spark

00:13 Intro

00:53 The Relief No One Admits

03:09 What Self-Sabotage Actually Is

05:00 The Moment It Happens

10:18 What's Really Driving the Pattern?

10:47 Engine 1: Relief

12:45 Engine 2: Protection

16:21 Engine 3: Conflict

19:46 Engine 4: Capacity

26:09 Why Self-Sabotage Kicks In Just as It's Getting Good

29:59 What Can You Do to Stop It?

32:29 Wrapping Up

34:34 Outro

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KEY REFERENCES

• Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 405–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.4.405

• Galla, B. M., & Duckworth, A. L. (2015). More than resisting temptation: Beneficial habits mediate the relationship between self-control and positive life outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 508–525. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000026

• Kelly, R. E., Mansell, W., & Wood, A. M. (2015). Goal conflict and well-being: A review and hierarchical model of goal conflict, ambivalence, self-discrepancy and self-concordance. Personality and Individual Differences, 85, 212–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.05.011

• Kotabe, H. P., & Hofmann, W. (2015). On integrating the components of self-control. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 618–638. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615593382

• Schwinger, M., Wirthwein, L., Lemmer, G., & Steinmayr, R. (2014). Academic self-handicapping and achievement: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(3), 744–761. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035832

• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3), 482–497. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.482

• Sirois, F. M., Molnar, D. S., & Hirsch, J. K. (2017). A meta-analytic and conceptual update on the associations between procrastination and multidimensional perfectionism. European Journal of Personality, 31(2), 137–159. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2098

• Sirois, F. M., & Pychyl, T. A. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011

• Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65

• Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., Nigg, J. T., Faraone, S. V., & Pennington, B. F. (2005). Validity of the executive function theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A meta-analytic review. Biological Psychiatry, 57(11), 1336–1346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.02.006

• Wood, W., Mazar, A., & Neal, D. T. (2022). Habits and goals in human behavior: Separate but interacting systems. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(2), 590–605. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691621994226

COMMON QUESTIONS
Why do I self-sabotage and ruin good things right when they're going well?

Because pulling back removes something uncomfortable, and that relief is immediate. When a good thing gets close, uncertainty and pressure build, and ending it early or wrecking it makes that feeling stop. Your brain registers the escape as useful and repeats it. The behaviour isn't proof you want to fail. It's a short-term fix that quietly costs you the thing you were working toward.

Is self-sabotage a real psychological thing?

Self-sabotage is a useful everyday phrase, but it isn't a single recognised psychological process. Researchers talk about narrower mechanisms: procrastination, self-handicapping, perfectionism, goal conflict, habit, and difficulties with emotion regulation. They can all look like self-sabotage from the outside while happening for very different reasons, which is why there's no one-size fix.

Why do I pull back right before something good happens?

When something is both wanted and threatening, the urge to move toward it and the urge to escape both get stronger as it gets closer, and the urge to escape rises faster. Up close, success stops being an idea and gets specific, and your brain starts predicting the aftermath: what it'll cost your time, your relationships, whether you can maintain it. That prediction can register as a reason to bail.

Is "fear of success" real?

The idea of a single, distinct fear of success has been contested in the research for decades, and it's not a particularly useful explanation because it gives you nowhere to go. A more workable version: your brain has predicted a specific cost of succeeding, more visibility, more responsibility, a changed relationship, and flagged it. A vague fear can't be examined. A specific predicted cost can.

How do you actually stop self-sabotaging?

There's no single fix, because there's no single cause. The response has to match the job the behaviour is doing. If it's giving you relief, the work is building capacity to stay with discomfort long enough to choose rather than react. If it's protecting your self-worth, it's separating the outcome from your identity. If it's goal conflict, it's naming both sides honestly. And often it's getting support, because it's hard to see the shape of a pattern while you're standing inside it.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] The Spark

Jodi: Ever noticed how nothing actually has gone wrong, yet suddenly you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, reading into everything, and one anxious move away from wrecking the very thing you wanted

[00:00:13] Intro

[00:00:53] The Relief No One Admits

Jodi: So here's the thing. Part of me was relieved when it fell apart. There, I said it. That's the thing that people don't usually say out loud. We'll say that we were devastated, that we can't believe it happened again. We use words like frustrated and disappointed and angry or confused. But underneath all of that, sometimes there may have been a little bit of relief because the waiting was over, the pressure dropped, and the uncertainty of that whole thing just kind of disappeared.

You no longer had to find out whether you were capable of actually doing the thing, holding that space, maintaining the relationship, finishing the work, or even becoming the version of you the goal required you to be. In an instant, all of that pressure was gone.

And at that point, at least you knew where you stood. I'm more than sure you've done this. I know I've done this countless times, especially back in my 20s.

Things were going really well, and suddenly you start looking for the problem. The client is interested, but you convince yourself that they're pulling away. The relationship is becoming more serious, and every small incompatibility starts feeling like it's enormous. You're making progress with your health, but one disrupted week or meal or cheat meal becomes like the reason to abandon like the whole darn thing. Or what about this? You finally have the opportunity you've been asking for, and instead of feeling excited about it, you become kind of restless or even irritable and strangely unmotivated.

Maybe you send the message or you pick the fight or you miss the deadline. You stop replying. You spend that money. You pull out of the things that you said you were gonna do, or maybe you quietly stop doing the things that were actually working, whether that was in your life, relationships, or business.

Then that tiny little annoying voice chimes in. You know the one that sits on your shoulder? "Why do I always do this? Why do I ruin good things? Why am I my own worst enemy, and why do I keep sabotaging myself?" And that's what we're unpacking today.

[00:03:09] What Self Sabotage Actually Is

Jodi: Self-sabotage is a useful everyday phrase. We hear it thrown around all the time. However, it's not actually recognized as a psychological process. So researchers are more likely to talk about things like procrastination, avoidance, self-handicapping, perfectionism, conflicting goals, habits, rejection sensitivity, impulsivity, executive functioning, or difficulties regulating emotion. All of those can look like self-sabotage from the outside, but they don't all happen for the same reason.

When we say, "I am self-sabotaging," or, "I'm sabotaging myself," whichever way you wanna put it, that describes what the pattern actually looks like, but it doesn't actually really explain what's causing it in the first place. It also kinda makes it sound deliberate, as if there's a-- some defective part of you hiding in the background just lurking there, waiting for the opportunity to destroy anything good that comes close to manifesting in your life.

Often, that isn't actually what's happening. You're not consciously saying, "Hey, it's just getting good, so I'm gonna go wreck this now." More often, you are reaching for that relief or a certainty, a feeling of certainty, or even distance, maybe even comfort, approval, or control, sometimes unconsciously without even realising that you're doing it. It's kind of like an escape from evaluation or a break from that emotional discomfort.

And that behavior may work against your longer term goals while still solving an immediate problem that your body and your nervous system is currently undergoing.

So until we understand the problem it's solving and choose an intervention or a protocol or modality that actually matches it, simply telling yourself to stop sabotaging yourself won't actually do much.

[00:05:00] The Moment It Happens.

Jodi: I wanna take one of these moments, and I wanna slow it down, right down, because when it unfolds across a day or two and you're right in the middle of it, like the thick of it, you don't get to see the full shape of the pattern and how it plays out.

So say there is something really good in front of you, like let's go with a client conversation that's been building for a few weeks and you know it's going somewhere good. They're really keen and you're excited about it, and you know it's a great fit, and every reply so far has been warm and, and it's like it's... You know that it's gonna go the way that you want it to, right? And it's, it's so close now. It's just days away from becoming real.

You might notice that your body is more tense and tight and your eight-hour a night sleep pattern you finally nailed just starts disappearing. You read their last message, say four times, and you're looking for the thing that's not actually in it. Something sits in the background all day, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

And if someone said what was wrong, you probably wouldn't know what to say. You'd probably say, "Hmm, nothing much is wrong at all," because nothing has actually happened yet.

And these things are happening because, say, your client takes two days or three days to reply instead of the usual one. So you're getting kinda like itchy, you're getting anxious, and that little voice on your shoulder is running a bunch of different scenarios through your head.

So you sit down and you write an email, and you know the one, you know how it goes. Something like this. It's like, "Hey, I get the sense that this might not be the right fit for you right now. It's absolutely no hard feelings if you would rather leave it here." Or something to that effect, right?

It feels reasonable in the moment, actually generous. So you hit send, and here's the kicker of this. Sometimes that move makes you feel better almost immediately. All of that restlessness that you were having, like, disappears. You sleep, you get your eight-hour sleep back.

The tightness in your body kinda lifts, and because that waiting, the anticipation, or even the anxiety, if you will, is over, everything sort of settles. And whatever happens now, you're no longer sitting inside that uncertainty that's been building up. You made something certain out of something that you couldn't hold.

You didn't have the capacity to hold it yet, and that relief that you're feeling is real, which is why this is so powerful, and one of the main reasons that this pattern can repeat. Your brain just learned that it worked, even though we have a pretty strong logical argument that it didn't really work.

Like, it's a temporary fix can you say hello operant conditioning and negative reinforcement? And when I say negative in this instance, I don't mean bad. It just means that something was removed. And in this context, that unpleasant feeling, that uncertainty, anxiety, or vulnerability was taken away. It just disappeared after you sent that email.

So that behavior becomes more likely to feel useful the next time that that state appears. But the cost, the cost comes later

So a week passes, the opportunity's gone cold, or it's changed shape. It's not the same as what it was. That done deal is just not a done deal anymore. And now you're doing the math on what that email actually did. This is the cost after the fact. So then comes the part that can seal this pattern completely, is that you, you decide what it meant. You give it a story or a narrative, if you will, about what just happened, trying to logic your way around it. "See? I always do this. I can't be trusted with a good thing. I have this habit of mucking it up."

And when you say things like that, right, words are powerful in this respect, it lands like proof and evidence to your brain that it's a part of who you are. It's an identity that you carry.

In reality though, you never really checked in with your client. Maybe their internet dropped out or their kid was sick. Maybe your email disappeared underneath the sea of messages that flood all of our inboxes every day, and they just missed it. Maybe they were simply taking an extra couple of days to make a decision and get their finances sorted before they signed the contract.

And you may never know because the verdict was already in, in your brain. And the next time something good gets close like this, you arrive carrying that verdict with you. So you become more watchful and your confidence potentially has taken a bit of a hit.

So the shame and the loss of confidence make that uncertainty even harder to tolerate next time. And remember, it was that uncertainty of sitting there waiting for that email that that drove you to do this in the first place. So if that's worse the next time, you are more likely to do this again, and probably quicker and that's the loop, that's the Groundhog Day.

It's the pattern that pays out immediately, so you feel good in that moment, but it charges you later and then uses that charge to fund the next round, and that's why it's so hard to break.

[00:10:18] What's Really Driving The Pattern?

Jodi: The mistake we make is assuming every version of this pattern is being driven by the same thing, hence the self-sabotaging. We just say it's self-sabotaging, but often it's not.

There are at least four broad engines that can sit underneath this behavior that we call self-sabotage, and sometimes more than one of them are operating at the same time

So first up, we have relief, then there's protection.

The third engine is conflict, and the fourth is capacity or habit

[00:10:47] Engine 1 - Relief

Jodi: That relief in the client email example is exactly what researchers studying procrastination and emotional regulation have been describing. Psychologist Piers Steel pulled together hundreds of findings on procrastination in a major 2007 meta-analysis. He found that procrastination was strongly connected with things like task aversiveness, distractibility, impulsivity, distant deadlines, and low confidence in your ability to actually perform the task. In other words, the more unpleasant, unclear, overwhelming, or far away that that task feels, the easier it becomes to choose something that feels better now in the moment.

Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl took this even further, arguing that procrastination is often less about poor time management and more about short-term mood regulation.

You're not necessarily avoiding the deadline, you're avoiding the feeling that the task actually creates now. You might understand the consequences perfectly, but the future consequences still has to compete with the relief that's available immediately, and the present version of you gets comfort, and that future version of you gets the deadline. The shame of avoiding it makes the task feel worse the next time round, and round, and round, and round you go

The answer here is not simply just better motivation. It is increasing your ability to experience that uncomfortable state without immediately using the familiar escape route. It doesn't mean sitting there in extreme distress or forcing yourself through it. That's a different thing. It means creating enough capacity to stay present, to take a smaller action, and discover that discomfort doesn't always require an emergency response. You can hang on a little longer before you send that email, or the content of the email is different.

[00:12:45] Engine 2 - Protection

Jodi: Sometimes the behavior is protecting more than your emotional state. It's protecting what the outcome might actually say about you. This is where a research concept called self-handicapping comes in. Psychologists Steven Berglas and Edward Jones first demonstrated self-handicapping experimentally in the late 1970s. So self-handicapping describes what happens when somebody creates or claims an obstacle before they are evaluated, so that if things go badly, the failure can be blamed on the obstacle rather than on their own ability. So say you don't prepare properly. You stay up all night, you tell everyone that you've barely looked at the work. Now, if the result is poor, you have an explanation for it. "Of course it went badly, I didn't prepare." And that may feel less threatening than, "I tried as hard as I could, and it still wasn't good enough." and if you do well despite the obstacle, you get another payoff. "I achieved that without even trying properly."

Where are my uni students at? Ever pulled off a last-minute paper and it went way better than expected?

Like sometimes even better than what you would do if you had have taken the time and planned it out and been done like way in advance. Mm.

So either way, the belief about your potential gets some protection of this, but your actual performance can pay the price.

A 2014 meta-analysis by Malte Schwinger and his colleagues looked at 36 studies involving more than 25,000 students, and they found that self-handicapping was linked with poorer academic achievement. So in academic settings, the short-term protection was associated with poorer achievement, and that strategy may protect the story about your ability while interfering with the performance itself.

This is also where some forms of perfectionism fit. Not high standards on their own, but high standards can support good work. The more difficult form of perfectionism is the one that's built around the fear of mistakes, harsh self-judgment, doubt, and the belief that anything less than exceptional says something terrible about you.

A meta-analysis by Fuschia Sirois and her colleagues, this is a separate one, found that perfectionistic concerns were positively connected with procrastination, whilst perfectionistic striving or high standards had the opposite relationship. So it is not necessarily like I care too much about doing this well. It's more often I can't tolerate what doing this imperfectly might mean. You endlessly prepare. You restart the thing a thousand times over. You refuse to release the work. How many entrepreneurs are in the room right now? Because that's a big one. You turn a straightforward task into a gigantic production, or you abandon the whole plan after one imperfect day. If the work is never truly finished, it never receives a final verdict. If you withdraw from someone or something before the other person decides, they can't fully reject you. If you don't give the task your best effort, you can preserve the possibility that you could have succeeded.

Again, it's not like you're trying to fail. The person isn't trying to purposefully fail. They're trying to protect themselves from what failure, criticism, or imperfection might mean to them.

[00:16:21] Engine 3 - Conflict

Jodi: Sometimes you're not working against yourself. You're experiencing a conflict between two things that you actually want. Humans don't often have only one goal operating at a time. You may have many goals, and some of them are in conflict with one another.

So you may want your business growth, but you also value your privacy.

Hard in this day and age, right? You may want a close relationship, but you might also want the independence and protection from being hurt.

You wanna set really good boundaries, but being liked is also really important to you.

And you might wanna improve your health, but you may also really like the convenience and the comfort and full participation in social occasions.

Or even if you wanna rest, you might have built your identity around being useful and productive and dependable.

Research on goal conflict supports this idea that competing goals can actually create real psychological strain. In a 2015 review, Rebecca Kelly and her colleagues brought together research on goal conflict, ambivalence, self-discrepancy, and well-being. Their work showed that when important goals pull against each other, it can affect both the progress and the psychological well-being of that person.

And that is why it's not always helpful to assume there is one true goal and one irrational behavior just getting in its way. Sometimes two legitimate needs or wants or even values are actually competing, and when that moment of action arrives, the goal with the strongest emotional force can actually win.

So instead of asking yourself like, "Why am I sabotaging this goal?" Um, a better question would be to say, "What other goal wins when I do this?"

Or, "What am I protecting?" Is it belonging, privacy, rest, control, autonomy?

Maybe succeeding would mean that people expect more from you, or becoming visible would expose you to criticism. Maybe earning more money would change a relationship dynamic, or setting a boundary would force you to face the possibility that somebody only liked the version of you who always said yes.

Now, they're not reasons to abandon the goal automatically, but they are real costs and predictions that need to be acknowledged.

And occasionally, the pattern is telling you something just maybe a little bit more uncomfortable. That the goal doesn't genuinely belong to you

Psychologist Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot describe something that's called self-concordant goals, and these are goals that are aligned with your genuine values, interests, and sense of self.

They're not goals driven mainly by guilt, pressure, comparison, or somebody else's expectations on you.

Their research found that people tend to put more sustained effort into self-concordant goals and experience greater wellbeing when they achieve them so when you repeatedly resist a goal, it's worth checking where it came from.

You may be pursuing a goal because of guilt, comparison, or family expectations, or even an old idea of who you were supposed to become.

So before calling that self-sabotage, it's worth asking, is this resistance or is this some sort of information I need to be aware of?

[00:19:46] Engine 4 - Capacity

Jodi: Now, before deciding you have a deep unconscious fear of having a good life, we also need to check your actual capacity. So we're talking about emotional regulation and self-control, your executive functioning and your stress tolerance, your habits, those kind of things and also the ability to hold a goal in mind while something uncomfortable is happening around you.

Psychologists Heidi Kotabe and  Wilhelm Hofmann proposed an integrative model of self-control that included far more than willpower. Their model looked at things like desires and high order goals, goal conflict, motivation, actual capacity, effort, and external constraints as well. So when a person does not follow through, it's not always because they simply chose badly.

Something may have broken down at several different points. They may have lost access to the goal under pressure. The emotional cost may have outweighed the motivation that was available in that moment. They may not have had the practical capacity or environmental support or the skills needed to carry out the behavior itself.

And when I talk about capacity, I mean how much emotion, uncertainty, activation, responsibility, or discomfort can you hold while still having access to choice? Not how much can you endure whilst like white-knuckling your way through it. That's not what we want. Or not how much you can pile onto yourself before you just collapse and burn out.

So capacity is the space between, "This feels uncomfortable," and, "I need to make it stop immediately."

because when that space is small, discomfort creates urgency. So imagine a, a very thin rectangle, and in that rectangle, you'll have ebbs and flows that go up and down. And now if that's a thin rectangle, you don't have a lot of capacity. If you doubled that thinness and made it a thick rectangle, you've got more capacity to have the ebbs and flows happen.

So when that space is small, that thinner one, that discomfort creates the urgency, right? You feel like you have to move. You'll get more of that anxiety and that activation happening. So you feel like you need to send that email, like now, or make the decision now under pressure, or end the conversation straight away, or pull the offer, or spend the money like right here, right now, and get the answer now, or like it is the end of the world.

Anything to resolve that feeling. But as your capacity expands, so that thin rectangle becomes thicker and wider, the discomfort may still be there, but it doesn't have to make that decision for you. You're not gonna get pushed or pressured into running into that stuff. You have a little bit more room to pause, to check in with what's actually happening, to separate the facts from predictions of the past, perhaps, or to regulate your actual state.

You might notice that you're starting to peak, but you've got enough space to go, "Hey, I know how to bring myself back down before I handle this." So you might even realize that you, you've got more space to go and have a chat with somebody that you trust that can help you

It helps you to let the situation unfold before you make a move that may actually hinder or completely tank the thing that you would've wanted to create, or the goal you're going after, or whatever it might be that you're doing.

And this is incredibly important if you run your own business Business regularly asks you to hold uncertainty. So a client takes a little longer to reply, or a launch is quieter than expected, or money moves in and out and you can't always guarantee what's coming in at what point. Somebody gives you some feedback and you don't know how to sit with that, or an opportunity arrives before you feel completely ready, or a team member makes a mistake. You become more visible and suddenly more people have opinions. That's a great one. It happens all the time. And if every uncomfortable fluctuation feels like an emergency, you can start making permanent decisions from these temporary states, and you can do damage within your business. So say you slash a price, or you cancel the offer, or you pull the page, or you change the whole strategy.

How many times have you done that? You know? Or you send a defensive email, or you abandon something before it even had time to go out the door. You didn't even launch the thing. You keep adding more and more because slowing down feels too uncomfortable, whatever it might be. That ability to stay present with those uncertainties within business without racing to control, uh, all of that stuff is a genuine business advantage.

One of the best things you can do in business, and I think in life in general, is understanding and expanding your capacity and emotional regulation

And it's just as important in the context of your relationships. Like your partner's tone changes, and they need some space. A difficult conversation doesn't resolve immediately. You set a boundary, and you have to sit with the possibility that the other person might not like it. You feel exposed after telling somebody what you actually need, a bit of vulnerability in there. And when there's not enough space, when you have too narrow a window to hold those feelings, it is so easy to accuse or withdraw or over-explain, people please, demand reassurance, or make a snap decision just to stop the discomfort. It Then that reaction creates the very distance and tension or instability that you are actually afraid of.

So expanding your capacity doesn't mean becoming emotionless. I've said this before, and I will shout it from the rooftops a million times more before the day I die. Regulation is not about feeling calm all the time It drives me nuts because I hear this being taught that way all the time. You need your whole range of emotions for living and safety and threat detection and all the things.

You need to have all of it. What it is about, though, is having enough flexibility to move through that full range of emotion without becoming stuck there or automatically reacting from everything that you feel.

[00:26:09] Why Self Sabotage Kicks In Just As It's Getting Good

Jodi: So my friend, now we come to the strange part. Sometimes you do not pull away at the beginning You actually start and you put in the work. You get yourself most of the way there, like 90% of the way there even. And then when the opportunity becomes, like, super real, the, the self-sabotaging, I prefer the pattern, becomes louder.

. So classic research on approach and avoidance suggests that when something is both wanted and threatening, the reason to move towards it and the reason to escape it can become more intense as that actual thing gets closer.

So from far away, success is an idea, but up close it becomes really specific. so the opportunity didn't necessarily change, but your position to it did.

So the client might actually say yes. The relationship might actually require commitment, and the launch might actually bring in attention, and the qualification might actually lead to greater responsibility.

The weight may come off. Maintaining the change may be the next task, or you have loose skin to deal with before moving forward. So the finish line makes both the reward and the consequences more concrete.

This is where the forecast comes in. Your brain does not wait passively for life to happen. It is constantly making predictions based on previous experiences, current information, and what it believes is likely to happen next, and all of this runs, like, so automatically, unconsciously under all the things.

But the unfamiliar doesn't automatically mean unsafe either. We've talked about that, and sometimes it does. But novelty can be exciting. It can create curiosity and motivation. The difficulty with this kicks in when uncertainty, though, is interpreted through previous experiences or feared consequences.

Your brain doesn't stop predicting at the good bit. It runs past the win into what might come after. This is a big one for the self-sabotaging peeps out there. What will people expect of me? What will happen to my time? What if the relationship changes? What if I look capable for six months, and then I can't maintain it, and I fall on my ass in front of everybody?

What if the next stage requires skills that I don't have? What if I get what I wanted and I'm still not happy? Every one of those is a prediction about the aftermath. And this is where I wanna challenge something that you probably hear, like, a lot, 'cause people will tell you, they-- You might even tell yourself that you are afraid of success. You have a fear of success. That is not a particularly useful explanation, and the research history behind fear of success as a single distinctive motive has been contested for decades. It also gives you nowhere to go. What are you supposed to do with, "I'm afraid of success?" it's not very empowering. So I'd like to give you a more useful question to ask yourself instead. What specific consequences of success have I predicted or am I predicting? Your brain may have made predictions about what winning could cost you, and it's flagged that bill that this is different. So a vague fear of success can't be examined properly, but a specific prediction cost can. So is that cost real or is it exaggerated? Is there a particular problem that needs planning? Is it based on an old experience? Is it something you're genuinely unwilling to trade? Those kind of questions now give us something to work with

[00:29:59] What Can You Do To Stop It?

Jodi: Like I said in the beginning, there is no single self-sabotage intervention because there is no single self-sabotage mechanism. We've seen that now. The response has to match the job that the behavior is actually doing.

If the behavior gives you relief, the work is increasing your capacity to remain with discomfort for long enough to choose rather than react. So use tools that help you bring you back into a state where you can think more clearly. Take the smallest action that keeps the door open rather than just slamming it shut.

If the behavior is protecting your self-worth, begin separating the outcome from your identity, so a piece of work can fail without you being a failure.

Feedback can show you where a skill needs strengthening without making a statement about your value as a person

if perfection is driving it, define your good enough parameters before you begin. We've talked about this in a previous episode as well. So decide what finished actually means. Place a limit on the preparation. Separate drafting from editing, and don't allow one imperfect moment to become a verdict on, like, the entire goal.

If a goal conflict is driving this self-sabotage, then name both sides. What does the goal give you? What might it cost? Which trade-offs are real, and which ones can be designed around? Which ones are you willing to accept, and which ones reveal that the goal or the way you are pursuing it needs to change?

If capacity is driving it, then the work may be both internal and practical. You may need to build your ability to sit with the uncertainty, that visibility and feedback and conflict or responsibility without reacting immediately. But you may also need reminders or visible steps and accountability, shorter work periods, fewer simultaneous decisions, or proper support.

This is also where therapy and coaching can be incredibly valuable because it is so difficult sometimes to see the whole shape of a pattern when you're standing inside of it. Like you know the saying, like you can't see the forest from the trees? So a good coach or therapist can help you slow it down, identify what the behavior's actually doing for you, work through the emotional load that's underneath it, and support you while you practice responding differently in real situations and get those reps and that integration up

[00:32:29] Wrapping Up

Jodi: So my friend, let's return to where we started. We are wrapping up. Part of me was relieved when it fell apart. I said that at the beginning.

The relief doesn't prove that you wanted to lose or wreck that thing, that good thing. It just tells you that the behavior was doing something for you.

Understanding that doesn't remove the accountability of what happened, though. It just gives you a better place to start taking responsibility for it from.

Because "I destroy everything good" is a sentence built for shame. But "when I feel this particular state, I use this particular behavior because it gives me this immediate result", is a completely different thing. It's a pattern you can actually work with then.

So self-sabotage is real as a description. It's usually weak as an explanation.

Most of the time, you are not your worst enemy. A short-term protective strategy is defeating a longer-term intention. The work is not to attack the part of you that learned this strategy. It is to understand the job that it's been doing and to build another way of responding that doesn't charge you the same price later on.

The cost is different. Because once you can see what the behavior is actually doing and not judge what it eventually costs you, you actually have a space where you can start and create that change. Awareness is the beginning

You don't have to do this work alone. If you want support recognizing these patterns, expanding your capacity and responding differently you can work with me through either Inner Spark or Sonic Success.

And if you're wanting something a little lighter, jump into the Glow Up Gazette. It's our weekly newsletter from Mind Drop HQ for the practical mindset, nervous system tools, and you get the cool aha moments and some behind-the-scenes stuff as well. You also go into the draw to win a wellness goodie pack every month.

You'll find all the details along with all of today's research in this episode's show notes.

See you next week

[00:34:34] Outro

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