Episode Summary:

Do you have a brilliant idea or a clear calling from God, only to find yourself stuck in a cycle of procrastination and perfectionism? This isn't a character flaw—it's self-sabotage, and it's one of the most common struggles for Christian leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators. Jim Burgoon reveals that this behavior is often a symptom of a much deeper wound: self-abandonment.

In this episode, discover why it feels safer to control your own failure than to risk public success. Learn to spot the three biggest warning signs in your life and uncover a simple, 3-step biblical path to break free. The solution to getting unstuck isn't trying harder; it's healing the wound that makes you trade your divine calling for the temporary comfort of hiding.

Key Takeaways:

• The Illusion of Control: Self-sabotage isn't about wanting to fail; it's about controlling the outcome to avoid the pain of public failure or rejection.
• The Deeper Wound: The behavior of self-sabotage (procrastination, perfectionism, people-pleasing) is a symptom of the deeper wound of self-abandonment.
• The Esau Principle: Trading your God-given purpose for comfort or approval is the modern-day equivalent of Esau trading his priceless birthright for a bowl of stew.
• The 3-Step Healing Path: Overcome the cycle with a biblical framework: Reconnect with your purpose, Re-Anchor your identity in Christ, and Re-Engage with small, faithful actions.
• The Power of Small Beginnings: Breaking the paralysis of self-sabotage doesn't require massive leaps, but tiny, intentional steps that invite God into the process.

Favorite Quotes:

• "You don't self-sabotage because you want to fail. You self-sabotage because it gives you the illusion of control."
• "Perfectionism is nothing more than self-sabotage in fancy clothes."
• "Every time you say 'yes' to the wrong thing, you are implicitly saying 'no' to your own calling."
• "The problem isn't that you are lazy... The problem is that we've learned to be okay with abandoning ourselves."

Scripture References:

• Genesis 25 (The Story of Jacob & Esau)
• Proverbs 24:16 (Though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again.)
• Ephesians 2:10 (We are God's masterpiece, created for a purpose.)
• Zechariah 4:10 (Do not despise the day of small beginnings.)
• 1 John 1:5-7 (Bringing things into the light.)

Action Steps & Reflection Questions:

• Which of the three warning signs (procrastination, perfectionism, or people-pleasing) is most active in your life right now?
• What "bowl of stew" (comfort, approval, avoiding fear) are you tempted to trade your calling for?
• What is one small, five-minute action you can take today to re-engage with the project you've been avoiding?

Resources

• Join the Newsletter: www.leadwithjim.com/nl
• Full Episode Show Notes & Transcript: www.leadwithjim.com/podcast

Connect with Jim

• 🌐 Website: www.leadwithjim.com
• 🎙️ Ask a Question: leadwithjim.com/ask
• 📱 Instagram: @leadwithjim
• ▶️ YouTube: Lead with Jim
• Facebook: @leadwithjim

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✅ For more faith-driven leadership content, visit leadwithjim.com.

Thanks for listening!

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You don't self sabotage because you want to fail.

You self sabotage because it gives you the illusion of control.

It feels safer to control your own failure than to risk failing in public.

And if you're ready to break that illusion and finally get unstuck, then this episode is for you.

This is the Unshakable Life Mindset.

Resilience.

Action.

No.

Strive.

Break free from the burnout.

Find your true noise.

This is the Unshakable Life.

Hey friend.

Welcome to the Unshakable life.

Today we're going to talk about something that I know that many of you have felt things that I have felt.

And that's the feeling of being stuck.

You know, it's that brilliant idea you had, that clear call from God and then suddenly you just can't bring yourself to follow through on it.

This, my friends, is self sabotage at its finest.

And if you've ever felt it, we're going to dive into it together and have a conversation because I want you to get on the other side of it.

So picture this.

Let's give you two names, Alex and Jordan.

And we're going to give you a quick, quick 30 second story on each because I want you to get connected to this picture.

So Alex has an inspired idea for a new project.

And that project is truly going to be something special.

It's going to make an impact.

But as the days go on and suddenly he gets busy, the logos answers the emails, including the old emails.

You know, you've got old emails.

He cleans his desk, but you know what happens?

He does everything except the actual project.

Is that something you guys have ever experienced with like Alex?

Well, let's look at Jordan maybe.

You know, Jordan is a team leader.

She knows the tough changes that has to happen in organization.

She's prayed about it, she's planned, but when it's time to act, she freezes.

She just keeps saying, I'll get to it next week.

But whether you're like Jordan or Alex, on the surface this looks like a procrastination problem.

This looks like what we call laziness, but it's not.

In truth, this isn't procrastination or laziness at all.

It's symptoms of something much deeper.

So I know you're asking, why do we do this?

Why do we sabotage ourselves from the very things that we want, the very things that God has called us to?

And you know, as I was scrolling, I found this quote that I want to share with you and it says the reason you self sabotage is because it allows you to predict what is going to happen, and it gives you the illusion of self control.

It's better to fail on my terms by not starting or allowing myself to be distracted or whatever that looks like than it is to risk failing on the world's terms, which means trying and not being able to accomplish it, trying it and being rejected, or just keep trying it and it just doesn't work out.

And this is where we have the problem, because we're trying to control, or at least have the illusion of control in this.

But it's not a control issue.

It's a self sabotage, which is the behavior, but it leads to the deeper conversation, the self abandonment.

And that's the wound, because the wound is producing the behavior.

And just for a context, self abandonment is when we reject, we suppress, we ignore a part of ourselves in real time.

And it's based on what we went through as children.

A lot of times we've had traumatic issues or traumatic challenges where people in our lives have abandoned us.

And because that abandonment hurts so deeply and has.

Has lasted so long, we never dealt with it.

We have subconsciously decided to abandon ourselves so that nobody else can abandon us.

That if we abandon ourselves, we don't get hurt, you know, basically by anybody.

But that has created a lot of problems.

It means we have.

It's the ideas, the impact, the word from God, all of these things that we get, we put on the shelf.

We make excuses for them or we leave them behind saying that wasn't for us, because we're actually trying to conform our life, not consciously, to the place where we've abandoned our own heart.

This is the challenge.

And I know you felt this, I felt this.

I feel this from time to time because it's the times when we plan our day.

We're like, hey, I'm going to write, I'm going to record, I'm going to do a podcast.

And then a friend calls with a favor, and you know the guy, they're like, hey, I need this quick favor.

And instead of protecting your time and energy, you.

You say, sure, no problem.

And you abandon your plans and you never get back to it because we have abandoned ourselves and we don't want to be hurt.

And we don't want the responsibility of having to steward the pain of what may happen.

But we also miss out on the stewardship of the joy of what happens if this touches the person that meant to change.

It's the.

It's the times when we're in these meetings, like, here's another scenario for you it's the times when you're in a meeting and you could be a virtual meeting, or you can be a meeting that's inside of your business business.

And you have this great idea.

You know, you've prayed and God has given you this idea.

And your colleagues rolled their eyes.

They believe God like you, but they rolled their eyes.

So you know what you do instead of engaging it, you hide it, you bury it.

And it was stupid anyway because it's in those moments, guys, it's in those moments that we are chasing after the illusion of control, trying to find comfort and approval when we should be pushing out into something impactful.

And we see this in the Bible, actually Genesis 25, you know, you know the story of Esau and Jacob.

Esau was entitled.

He had this birthright, it was priceless.

And in one day, driven by hunger, he traded the entire future of his brother to his brother for a bowl of stew first.

And forest, that better be a good bowl of stew.

But the fact is he traded his calling for comfort.

And when we self abandon ourselves, we are really kind of like Esau.

We're trading our God given birthright, our authentic self, our mission, our calling, our purpose for a bowl of stew, or whatever that stew looks like for you, because it's on.

We're looking for someone else's approval because we're trying to avoid the fear of rejection, the fear of doing it.

And this is at the root.

The problem isn't that you're lazy.

The problem isn't that you have neurodivergence.

The problem isn't that you are anything of an imposter.

No, the problem is that we've learned to be okay with abandoning ourselves.

So I'm going to give you three warning signs on how to spot the fact that you've abandoned yourself.

Because these are things that I have gone through that I've abandoned myself.

And I want to encourage you and tell you we're healing from these things, that you may find yourself constantly fighting with them.

But the fight becomes less when we lean into God to heal us from the problems that caused them.

But I'm going to start with number one, which is awareness.

But I've got a different name for it because it's signs.

So what's the first thing we're going to talk about in our journey towards awareness is chronic procrastination on what matters.

Now.

This is the easiest, lowest hanging fruit that if you're a chronic procrastinator.

This is a self sabotaging woo based on the self Abandonment.

It's not based on you avoided your taxes like we all avoid on doing the detail of those things.

So this is perpetually delaying the projects that are closest to your hearts.

This is saying God told me to write and you decide to do something else.

This is God told you to start the podcast and you decided to do something else.

This is saying that I'll get to it at some point.

But that point is not today because there's a chronic procrastination.

Psychology says actually that it's out of pure fear.

Fear of discomfort, fear of failure, fear of actually being success.

Because it's safer to put it off than dealing with the realities of both the fear and the reality of actually being able to do what God's called you to do.

Like, so we procrastinate.

We put it in this loop of I'm just going to keep pushing it off because that leads into a less, less low hanging fruit that's often more sneaky.

And number two is the warning sign is perfectionism as a hiding place.

Because perfectionism looks like having high standards, but it's really a clever hiding place.

You know, I read this quote from a writer that hit me.

It said, I realized I had been a coward hiding from failure in the safe space of conception where everything is possible and nothing gets done.

And we have to realize that perfectionism is nothing more than self sabotage and fancy clothes.

Perfectionism really comes down to you're constantly trying to tweak so that you don't have to launch, that you're in constant planning mode because we get the analysis paralysis of the analysis.

Right.

We're in constant planning mode without ever launching mode.

So this is where we get into these places that we have the fear and visibility and we feel like we're moving forward because we're doing stuff.

We want to be at the highest quality.

We want to be a living in excellence.

But we don't launch anything.

So nobody knows about the excellence because it's never perfect, it's never good enough because you can always make that extra tweak.

This is something that you've been dealing with.

I am recovering from this.

There are some challenges with it.

It's because you'll never launch.

There's always more to be done.

You'll never find the happy middle place because we're.

You're hiding behind the fact that it's not up to the standards that you've put.

But the problem with that is, is the standard is so high that you'll never reach it.

That's a Self sabotaging behavior.

Which brings us to the third self sabotaging behavior, which if you're anything like me, this is something that you've heard me on other podcasts.

It's people pleasing.

And I am a self proclaimed recovering people pleaser because of a lot of things I went through in my life.

And this is, quite frankly, you can't say no.

You can't say no to people trying to get you get your yes.

And the more you say yes to everything that isn't your purpose or isn't what you have been designed to do, the more energy drain you will have, more derailment of priorities you will face.

Because this is one of the biggest classic signs of self abandonment that leads to self sabotage is sacrificing your time and energy to keep everyone else happy and having nothing left for you, your joy or what God's given for you to do.

And I, and we, and we, we hide it in a sense that we say, oh, I'm helping people because it makes us feel good when we're helping people.

But the reality is, is we're trying to help so many people.

We're actually running from dealing with our own problems.

And because we're running from our own problems and we're disguising it as being altruistic and we're helping people, what we're really doing is we're never going back to God said for you to do this and in order for you to do this, you need to have boundaries.

I did create a couple episodes on Boundaries and Burnout.

You can check those out on the, on the podcast.

But we've got no boundaries, we've got none of these things.

So what we're doing is we're saying God, your stuff isn't that important.

Everything else is.

And I need to emphasize the fact that the deeper you are in people pleasing, the less likely you will to be fulfilling God's purpose in your life.

Matter of fact, the more you're people pleasing, the less likely you will be able to find your identity in Christ because you want to please people so much that our energy and time is never dealt, never facing the fact that we need to deal with that trauma before the holy God so that we can connect to him.

And I'm going to tell you guys, it's, it's such a self sabotaging problem.

A lot of people deal with it.

I do, you do.

And if you see yourself in any of these, take a deep breath.

You're not alone.

I want to encourage you.

We can change it and I'm going to give you a really quick three step biblical path to start you on changing it.

Because this is not something you're going to overcome in a day.

This is not something that you can take brute force and beat it out of yourself.

You can't shame yourself out of it.

You have to deal with it.

And we're going to reconnect you with your why.

So let me give you three simple things and, and I'll give it to you first and then we'll go unpack them for a minute.

It's reconnect, re anchor and re engage.

Now let's unpack it.

Step one is reconnect.

Now this comes back to the awareness.

I am always about the awareness, guys.

Because you can't heal what you don't see, right?

The moment you feel that pull to procrastinate or people please or any of those, just take a pause in, in psalms they pause.

It's called salah.

Just take a break, take a breath, take one minute and ask yourself a direct question.

No jumping around it.

Just real quick, is this action moving me towards my calling or away?

And if you just acknowledging this is huge because when you face guilt, you face shame or you face fear if you just name it.

I'm avoiding this because I'm afraid of this.

Awareness brings it into the light.

And we know the Bible says that God is light first John and that in the light the darkness doesn't understand it.

So here's the, here's the challenge.

If you keep it on the inside of you, the darkness grabs a hold of it because it's kept in the dark.

When you speak it out and you just name it the chat, the thing comes back to God is now light, you know, and, and you're speaking it into light, you're not hiding it, you're just acknowledging it.

And so we're allowing, saying and it could be simple as God.

I'm afraid of this.

Please take this.

Now I want to come against this bad theology of, you know, if you put, if you just speak it that you're going to be in this bad place.

That's bad theology.

Because if you can't hold it in because it's going to affect you and don't speak it out or it's going to affect you, what do you do with it?

How do you navigate it?

How do you heal that trauma if you can't speak it but you can't hold it in.

And this is why, friends, I always tell you, please do your own Bible research.

Don't believe every fly by night theology out there because quite frankly, when you're naming that thing, when you're pulling it out of you and you're saying, hey, listen, you're just acknowledging it.

It's not even about naming it, you're just acknowledging it.

It's saying, hey, I'm afraid of Y.

That's why I'm procrastinating on X.

So God, please help me with this and take this.

That really has power.

Now the darkness is being broken up over it because God is invited in the process.

Which brings us to step two.

We're going to re anchor ourselves through identity.

Once you've named or acknowledged the fear, you can now counter it with the truth.

Once you acknowledge the deception that you've believed and you start applying the truth to it, you start changing that identification.

Now you're no longer, you're no longer attached to the identity of the deceit, but you're now attached to the identity of Christ, which is the truth, right?

And so when your identity is in Christ, that's everything, guys.

That's the battle.

I mean, haven't you thought it was really kind of shocking that the fact that we live in a society or a culture where there's this massive identity challenge, we've lost identity or been confused in identity.

And when you're confused in identity, you cannot live out your purpose.

So when we re engage our identity or re anchor ourselves into identity, what we're doing is we're saying, I am belonging to Christ.

That is who I am.

So when that imposter syndrome starts speaking to you and it whispers you're a fraud or what, people aren't going to like you when they find out, you know, when you're re identified in Christ or your identity is strengthened in Christ and the spirit of God begins to whisper, your worth is not your performance, it's in who he says you are.

He said he'll start whispering to you that you are a child of God.

It doesn't mean that nothing's going to happen.

Being found out.

What's.

What it is is that you are a child of God.

That identity that you have is in Christ, not in what people think.

And it breaks all of that anxiety, all of that tension because we're re identifying and we're acts just accepting our identity in Christ.

And so if we believe in Ephesians 2, that we are God's masterpiece, created for a purpose on purpose, you know, things like that, then your Father has already approved of you, your Father in heaven and you don't need to abandon yourself to earn a validation from people in this world.

News flash.

People don't care as much as we think they do.

But here's the deal.

We already get that self of self evaluation or validation from God, and that validation is all we need.

So this brings into action, which is the re engagement, which is step three now.

And as we move into this, we understand that it takes action or movement to break these patterns.

Because self abandonment causes paralysis.

We break it with tiny, intentional actions.

So we're going to use something called the five minute rule, right?

You're going to commit five minutes to the thing you're avoiding.

If you're writing.

If you're avoiding writing the book, you're going to write for five minutes.

Set the timer.

If you're avoiding starting the podcast, you're going to record a podcast for five minutes.

You can record on your phone, you were going to record on your computer.

Don't matter.

Five minutes.

Is there a hard conversation you've been avoiding?

Spend five minutes and jot down on a piece of paper all the things that you really want to bring up the talking points.

These five minutes seem really small, but it's.

But your brain can't rebel from over the five minutes.

It's like impossible.

But it's in those five minutes.

We're going to invite God in and say, lord, I'm giving you these five minutes.

Help me start and help me build beyond it.

It says, do not despise the day of small beginnings.

Because we have to realize that small beginnings create big action.

That the tiny act of re engaging breaks every pattern.

Because I heard it one time, Bishop Tony Miller, he said, big doors swing on small hinges.

And it's such a beautiful thing because we have the biggest doors that open up, that swing on the smallest things.

And so your actions, no matter how small you think they are, are never small because they will be something massive and big in your life.

And so when you catch yourself slipping, and we will just remember, come back to this episode or write it down.

Reconnect, re anchor and re engage.

Because we're reconnecting our heart.

We're re anchoring in truth, and we're re engaging with small, faithful action.

Though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again.

And I think this is a great way to kind of end up the conversation with you and I, because Each time you refuse to abandon yourself, you're rising.

Each time you choose that small, healthy action, you're rising, you are strengthened to that unshakable foundation.

So be encouraged.

You can stop sabotaging your calling.

You can stop abandoning yourself.

You can show up as you were called beloved, the mighty warrior, the unshakable Creator.

Because that's who God made you to be.

And so, as you're breaking the habits, allow God to help you break the wounds and heal it so that you can show up in the fullness of who God has made you to be.

Thank you for spending this time with me on the Unshakable Life podcast.

My prayer is that today's conversation helps you to build resilience, reclaim peace and step with courage into your God given calling.

If this episode has encouraged you, challenged you, or impacted you in any way, could you do me a favor?

Share it with a friend, leave a review and hit the follow so you don't miss what's next.

And if you want more tools and encouragement for your journey, head over to leadwithjim.com you'll find resources to help you grow as a healthy, authentic Christian leader, entrepreneur and creator.

And until next time, remember, your foundation is Christ, your calling is unshakable and your life can make eternal impact.

Action no stride.

Break free from the burnout.

Find your true north with your God.

Jim Buron Stepping forward this is the Unshakable life.