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The reasons why successful women self sabotage are very rarely random. And if you’ve ever found yourself doing brilliantly for a few weeks and then suddenly slipping back into old habits, I want you to know this: it’s not because you’re lazy or incapable of change.
More often, it’s a protective response rooted in identity, familiarity and what your nervous system thinks is safe.
In this episode, I unpack why self sabotage can show up just when things start going well, how fear of failure, fear of success and all or nothing thinking keep pulling you off course, and why learning how to be more consistent has far less to do with willpower than you think.
If you’ve been wondering how to stop self sabotage and create real, lasting consistency, this will help you see the pattern differently.
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Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Fitness and Wellness, where we celebrate you exactly as you are and help you to be the fit, strong, confident woman you deserve to be.
We tackle everything from diet, culture and body image through to how to let go of the hustle, the pressure and the overwhelm and find your balance and energy in a busy life.
I'm Alix, women's fitness and wellness expert, therapeutic coach, founder of Life Edit with Alix and mum of two, and I'm here with your weekly dose of inspiration, helping you to rewrite the rules and live, live life on your own terms. Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. This week in this episode, all about self sabotage. And this one's huge, isn't it?
Because I think we've all been there, things are going great, we're making changes, we're feeling good, we've got these new habits stacking up, and then all of a sudden something happens or we do something that derails our progress and we feel like we're back at square one again. I think we can all relate, can we not? And I have noticed this so much over the years that it's not a random pattern.
There is a reason that this is happening.
And I've seen this with so many personal training clients over the years where they will come to me, they will say, right, I'm in a good place, I'm ready to go, feeling motivated. I'm going to make these changes. I want to start exercising again, want to eat better. And they'll do really well for a few weeks.
And then something will happen.
Either they will have a weekend where it just all goes completely to shit for whatever reason, or something will happen in their lives, they'll get ill. That's a classic one, actually, that happens more than you would actually believe, is that people start, and three or four weeks in, they're like, oh, I'm really sick. I'm going to have to cancel today. That happens a lot. So much so that I'm. I'm like, that's not random. That is happening for a reason.
So they get ill, one of their kids gets ill, and they have to cancel because the child is off school. Something else comes up in life that just derails them. And so, like I say, this pattern happens way too much for it to be a random occurrence.
So I really want to talk about it today because it's not a character flaw when sabotage happens. And I want you to carry that with you throughout this episode.
I want you to understand that it's often an Indication that there's other stuff going on underneath.
So that we are getting ourselves into a position where it almost becomes inevitable that once things start to go well, something is going to get in the way.
And I know that you might be sitting there thinking, yeah, nodding away, going, always happens to me, whenever I'm getting into a good groove, something happens. So there's a reason for it. And the good thing is because there's a reason for it, it means we can do something about it.
So the pattern that I see all the time is you're eating better, you're feeling stronger, you're feeling more in control, you're feeling cal, feeling consistent. And then suddenly we've missed three workouts in a row. Suddenly we have stopped paying so much attention to what we're eating.
Suddenly we start procrastinating and finding reasons to not do the thing. And oh, I can't quite do that today or I'm a bit busy today, so I'm just going to start again next week. That happens a lot.
And because you are very likely a very self aware woman, it makes it even more frustrating, doesn't it? Because you just think to yourself, why the hell am I doing this? Like, intellectually I. Intellectually I know what I want.
But you can't seem to connect the steps to get there for long enough. You can do it for a short amount of time, but you can never seem to do it for quite long enough. And it feels like something always gets in the way.
Whether it's yourself or whether it's things outside of you, they get in the way. And so a lot of women go through this and today we're going to really unpack what is going on here. Because like I say, it happens to the best of us.
It happens to all of us at certain points in our lives. But the good thing is that there is a way, there are ways to get past this and to stop this from happening to you all the time.
Because like I said before, sabotage is not a character flaw. It's not. It doesn't mean that you can't do the things that you want to do. It's just that we keep activating a pattern.
And if we're not aware of that pattern that we keep activating, we just get trapped in that cycle. So it often happens when we're looking for solutions in the wrong place. And what do I mean by that?
Often when we sabotage, we think it's because we haven't got enough willpower, we are not disciplined enough, we're lacking the motivation we need to try harder. We need somebody to give us a kick up the bum. People say that to me all the time. I just need someone to give me a kick up the bum.
And I will always say to them, no, nobody else can do this for you. You have to be able to do this for yourself.
You, someone to support you, you can have somebody to help you, you can have somebody to hold your hand, to be in your corner, all of those things. You can't expect somebody else to give you a kick up the bum all the time. So that's the trap that we fall into, isn't it? When we keep sabotaging.
We think there is something wrong with me, it's inevitable. This always happens to me. This is just, this is just the way that it goes. But self sabotage is actually about protection.
It's actually a sign that our nervous system is kicking in and doing what it needs.
And that might feel really frustrating because intellectually you're saying, yeah, but I know that I want this, I want the result, I want to do the work, I'm ready to do the work.
But if that protective mechanism is kicking in for reasons that I'll talk about in a bit, then it becomes very hard to override that until you start to see it and you start to understand it. And the reason that self sabotage becomes protection is because.
Because real change is not just about making a decision about what you should be doing and then doing it. If it was, life would be bloody simple. We'd all be doing the exact things that we're supposed to be doing, right?
So it's not about making decision and just getting on and doing it. It's about deeper factors. It's about factors like identity and safety and familiarity.
Because we can change those habits for a certain amount of time.
But if we're not changing our identity, if we're not making ourselves feel safe in that change, if familiarity is more comfortable to us than the change that we are trying to work towards, then we're always going to bounce back. We're going to be attached like an elastic band back to our old ways and we're going to keep bouncing back.
So if we are making changes and those changes threaten identity, safety, familiarity, then it triggers that self sabotage pattern.
It's like your brain is looking for an escape route out of the situation, out of a situation you want intellectually, but a situation which is not matching up with really who you are right now, with what feels safe, with what feels familiar to you. And so that is why as soon as things Start going, well, it triggers discomfort.
It triggers discomfort around change, it triggers discomfort around visibility. It triggers discomfort around fear of failure or even fear of success, actually.
And what I really mean by that is, for example, you decide you want to eat better and you do that for a certain amount of time. But underneath there is also the fear that that might mean giving up the things that you love for good. So you bounce back.
You bounce back to your old habits because there is that underlying fear. And honestly, that happens more than you might know. And yeah, have a bit of reflection on that.
Is that potentially going on, the fear that you will have to change the way you eat for the rest of your life and you will never be able to eat a cake and without guilt again, because that is often underlying. So that's an example of what's going on around that fear of success. For example, maybe you want weight loss.
So intellectually you're like, I really want to lose weight and I want to do the things, and I'm ready to do the things. But you have a fear that it's going to make you open to unwanted attention from others.
I've definitely heard a lot of women say that before, that it has got them unwanted attention when they have been thinner when they were younger, all those kind of things. And not nice attention, but attention that felt maybe threatening, for example, going a little bit deep here.
But again, is there something in there that means that actually it feels safer to stay as you are when it comes to identity, for example? So you desperately want to be somebody who feels relaxed around food.
You're so tired of having to manage yourself all the time around food, but you also really still identify as somebody who cannot even look at a cake without putting on two pounds. Then again, that's going to trigger that sabotage pattern.
So the sabotage pattern, like I say, it happens for lots of different reasons, but definitely it's about looking at what's going on underneath here. What am I worried about? What part of this goes against my identity?
Because like I say, if your identity is, oh, my God, I can't even look at a cake without putting two pounds on, how are you ever going to feel relaxed around food? You're not. Food is always going to feel unsafe for you. For example, food is always going to trigger this identity crisis within you.
So what's going on there? Is there a sense of safety that you are trying to hold onto? Is there a sense of familiarity that you are trying to hold onto?
So have a think about that side of things, because there is definitely a Lot of those factors that trigger that sabotage pattern for you.
And then what happens is as soon as you start to change, as soon as you start to feel stronger, as soon as you start to feel like you're more in control, you just get bounced back and you start skipping the habits that were helping. You start being a bit more chaotic about your eating. You start telling yourself, I've lost it again. This always happens to me.
So it's almost like making these changes, it's. It raises the stakes that you have to keep moving away from what's familiar.
And that intellectually might not be crossing your mind, you might not be thinking about that at all. But underneath, there is something that is pulling you back and pulling you back and pulling you back.
So what I'm really trying to say about this is self sabotage is not random. Self sabotage is your system trying to return to what feels known. And so the problem is not that you don't want the result enough.
The problem is not that you can't do the thing. The problem is that there is a part of you that feels safer in a familiar identity and a familiar pattern. So here's what I want you to do instead.
If you do find that once things start going well, you have a tendency to pull back and to catapult back in the other direction is first of all, use it as information.
All that's happening when that sabotage cycle kicks off again is that you have pushed into an area of growth, you've pushed into an area of change, and your system has set off a little alarm. Right now you're just reacting to that. But what would happen if you use that as information?
What would happen if you went, oh, I wonder what about this is not feeling safe at the moment? I wonder what about this is challenging my sense of identity? So use it as information.
Because when you can start to see that pattern, when you can start to relate to that pattern, you can start to shift it. And I want you to remember that being hard on yourself in these situations does very, very little to change that cycle. In fact, it makes it worse.
The more pressure you put on yourself, the more annoyed you get with yourself, the more likely you are to keep repeating that same pattern. So don't be hard on yourself. Don't let yourself sink into a pattern of shame, because that is never going to create real growth.
It's never going to create real change because you are again going to retreat into what feels safe, what feels familiar. And you know, this is not about forcing yourself to do anything either. It's about asking what feels threatened here? Am I just.
Am I out of my comfort zone? Am I secretly worried about how my life is going to have to change to accommodate this? Am I just retreating to the familiar?
So essentially you're asking yourself, what is it that feels uncomfortable about success, about consistency and about calm? For some reason those ideas feel uncomfortable to you. They feel unfamiliar to you.
I speak to a lot of women, obviously, who struggle around food, for example, and the idea that they could ever be calm around food feels so far from the realms of possibility that even though they want it, they will find ways of sabotaging themselves. Because it doesn't feel real, it doesn't feel like it could possibly happen.
It doesn't feel like their identity matches with the thing that they want at the end of the day. For a lot of women, the old pattern is painful, but it is known.
So before I head off today, if this is a pattern you relate to, you want to explore and stop that self sabotage pattern, then I have got a free 30 minute live clarity masterclass that I'm running on Monday 13th April.
And what you're going to do in there is you can discover the real reasons that you keep sabotaging your progress with food and fitness, even though you feel disciplined in other areas of your life.
And we're going to explore why trying hard has not worked for you, why a lack of knowledge is not the issue, and why making new plans can just make matters worse for you. And the idea is that you're going to come out the other end with a much deeper understanding of what are those hidden drivers of self sabotage.
You're going to identify which of the three main patterns that you fall into and then you're going to be able to use that to identify how you can find the consistency that you're craving right now in a way that feels safe for your body, so you can finally eat in a way that feels more nourishing, you can move in a way that feels more useful, you can feel good in your own skin again. I'm going to put the link in the show notes for you so you can sign up. Join me on the 13th of April. You will get sent a recording afterwards.
But if you do join live, you'll also get the opportunity to stay for some mini coaching at the end where I am going to answer your questions related to your particular pattern and help you to identify your next step. So I'd love for you to join me for that. I'm really excited about that. But with all that said I'm going to love you and leave you.
I'll see you back here again next time. Thank you as always for joining me. If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it.
And come connect with me on Instagram @lifeeditwithalix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.