How to Counter Self Sabotage to Succeed in Business

Click the play button to watch the video above.

This week I focus on what I believe to be a much neglected aspect of business coaching and helping people succeed in business; the power of the unconscious mind to drive decision making. 

Most decisions are driven from the unconscious realm. All the science shows that today, yet most people are unaware of how this affects their behavior. Because the unconscious mind is irrational, it can question great rational decisions and stop us from achieving what we want out of life. 

Today I will show you how you are not just a single “I” but that you are made up of different parts that question the decisions that other parts make. I give you examples to show how you can build self-awareness and move forward from self-doubting and self-sabotage to build a successful business.

You will learn:

• How your unconscious mind questions and controls much of your decision-making
• How to become aware of the different parts of you that influence how you behave in business
• How to self-inspect to see what’s happening on the unconscious level
• How to build a self-awareness that allows you to play to your strengths whilst delegating your weaker aspects to others
• How to stop YOU being the roadblock in your business

Free Strategy Session

Tired of knowing you need to change something in your business, but not knowing exactly what to do?

Apply for a free coaching session with Perry today, and leave the call with a clear plan you can easily put into place to start seeing the growth you want in your business... but while working less hours and with less stress!

Click here to apply now. 

Perry Mardon

Hi and welcome to this week's show. 

If you want to make better decisions as a business owner or as an investor or just in life, you're going to want to watch or read this week's show. 

I'm sure you can see that the quality of the decisions that you make dictate the outcomes in your life, in your business, with your bank balance, with the state of your relationships. 

So, understanding the decision-making mechanisms is really important. 

What Drives Your Decision Making?

The first question I want to put to you is this; what in you makes your business decisions? What's in you that makes your investing decisions? Your decisions about how you are and what you do in relationships? Many of you will answer “I do.” I'm going to say that's not enough. You need to dig deeper. In fact, when you say “I do”, it's not a very wise answer because who is the “I” anyway? 

If you start to break up this concept of I, you'll see that there are many parts to you. These different parts have different values and different belief systems. 

Now one of the reasons that I wanted to do this show today on this topic is several days ago, I saw a video by a gentleman called Jocko Willink, I think that’s what he's called. I see a bit of his stuff around the Internet. He is an ex-Navy SEAL. He has achieved an incredible amount for the US Army. He is an award winner for his service in Iraq. And he is an amazing gentleman with what he has achieved. But in this video, he was debunking self-sabotage. Let me show you this video now because then we can come back to looking at parts and who makes or what in you makes your choices for you. Here we go...

Jocko Willink

 - So, I get to hear a lot of excuses from people. Lately, there's been an excuse I've heard, which is actually getting traction, which is pretty disturbing for an excuse for people to start actually believing an excuse. 

The excuse that I've been hearing is self-sabotage. Self-sabotage. Well, you know, look, I was okay, but then, you know, you get close to winning, and he just, he just, you know, does self-sabotage. 

What's that even mean? Actually, a rhetorical question. I'll tell you what it means. Self-sabotage means lack of discipline. Self-sabotage means “oh he didn't do what he's supposed to do to win because he was too lazy to do it.”

That's what's going on. People say along the same lines. “Oh well, no, he's afraid to win.” Afraid to win? Negative actually. What this person's problem is, they're not afraid to win, they're afraid to work! Never mind the self-sabotage. Play to win. It's Monday. Go get some, y'all. Have a good one. Out.

Perry Mardon

- So, as you can see, this gentleman is overtly in his warrior consciousness. But his video shows a complete lack of understanding of the human mind. 

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, follow him. Activating warrior consciousness and working harder isn't going to help someone who has self-sabotage. 

Explaining Self-sabotage

Self-sabotage is a real thing. You understand that when you understand the concept of “parts”, which of course is why I started this show. 

Let's dig into parts a little bit further. One of the opening questions was, “what in you makes your decisions?”

If you dig deep, you'll see that a part of your personality is making the decision. 

Oftentimes you'll see that another part of your personality doesn't like the decision that is made. 

I'm gonna bring this into business for a second because I work with this all the time with my clients. Now my role with my clients is to help them build businesses that run independently from them so that they can have a far more profit and a lot more free time.

I have a step-by-step process that I'm able to take my clients through to achieve that. It's fairly easy to do. The principles make sense, and the strategies I give my clients make sense. When we talk about making sense, what we're really saying is that the logic can grab the principles and the strategies and make sense of it, it lines up on a logical level. 

 So, I might share a strategy with my client. Let's just take one as an example. The first thing I've got to do with a client typically when I start working, they're working in their business too much. It's what we call the technician stage. And they're doing all the things in the business, and they become a roadblock in the business. 

That means they can't scale it, they can't grow it, and they don't have enough time to work on the business. Now when you're working on the business in what we'd all call “conductor” stage, you're actually building assets that will produce income for you without you having to be there. That's just what a smart person is doing at the conductor stage. 

 So, if you're working your business all the time, you don't have time to build out these assets. Just for clarifications of assets, an asset could be something as simple as a system. Much of that system might be automated. 

 An asset would be building out a new product line or improving your marketing conversion rates because when you put time, effort, and energy into those types of things, you are building the value out of your business, you're improving the profitability therefore, and you're setting things up for the future so that when you're not in your business, when you're away on holiday, this business is making money for you. 

 That's where your time as an entrepreneur needs to go. It doesn't need to be stuck doing jobs in your business because, as I said before, you become a roadblock. 

 Again, when a client comes to work with us, we want to get rid of a lot of roles. The roles that we get rid of are the ones that don't align with their gift profiles. As an example, we want our clients to be working on their gifts and strengths. 

 That's what they're naturally good at. It tends to be what they enjoy. They're giving away these other roles that aren't in their gift profile. It will be probably in their weakness profile. Everyone here understands that. You got things that you're strong at, you're gifted at. You got other things that you're not particularly great at. 

 So, you give those things you're not particularly great at away to team members who are really good at what you're weak at. When a client first comes to us, we're going to spend probably usually the first month to six weeks depending on where that business is at or where that business person is at, getting rid of these roles to other team members, so we can get the business owner to have way more free time to think more strategically and now to start working on the business, leveraging their time, building out assets that increase the value and increase the income of the business. 

Logical Decisions vs Emotional Decisions

Again, all that lines up on the logical level for the client. But here's what happens. So, I tell the client that. They go “yes, I agree, that makes sense.” And then quickly after that, you typically get “but I can't do it because of dot dot dot.”

 Now that point, and everyone watching this understands this because the logical part of the client agrees conceptually that the strategy is a good strategy, but something else in them says well, no, it's not, I can't do it. So, you're starting to see then that there is more than one part or more than one viewpoint that your own personal consciousness carries. 

 If the client understands the rational strategy and goes “yes” and then has an excuse, typically a client who's not working with me would just stop at the excuse and not inspect a deeper level of things. 

 If you want to be a master of your decisions as a business person, you need to dig deeper and understand all the different parts involved with decision-making processes. 

 This develops emotional intelligence. I'm not going to just accept what the client says, so the client gives me their excuse, but blah blah blah blah blah. I might stop and ask them, well, what part of you thinks that. Now that question is usually a strange one to them. They might have a little bit of a moment, pause or hold their breath. 

 They're a bit shocked with the question because they're not used to being inspected in that manner. They don't inspect themselves in that manner. Therefore, they're asleep, by the way. They're unconscious. 

 With the excuse, “I don't have time” might be one that they use. “I just don't have time for the next three weeks.” I go “okay, so what part of you is saying that?”

Question Which Part Of You Is Making Decisions

Now that question is put to them because I want them to now start to introvert awareness and learn to observe themselves and then question the parts of them that are making their choice. 

 So, with a little bit of work, that person might go “ah yep, this is my planner part, my planner can see I've got all this work to do over the next three or four months or the next three or four weeks, and so I just can't possibly get it done.” I go “okay, so now you've got a logic part that says yep, strategically they make sense and now you've got a planner part of you that says you can't do it because you don't have time.” 

 Automatically we've got now two parts. Now the planner part will have a particular tone to it. The person who is self-inspecting and learning to understand themselves would soon get to know this planning part. They would see that the planning part's really organised. It's really into structure. It takes time out every morning to go through task lists. This is the part that would run the project management systems. When the person was in that part of them, they would notice that they're very cerebral, very analytical, that they're somewhat calm because people use the planner because it helps alleviate their stress. 

 Again, two parts: logic, get the strategy, so you could say that's their strategist, the strategist part, it goes “that makes sense,'' the planner says “I don't have time.”

 Now this point, I've helped the client see two different parts. I might say, “so when will you have time from the planner part?” And they'll go “oh yeah, in four weeks, I should be able to do it.”

 I might say “do you often say you don't have time to get these important things done?” They would say “yeah but I've gotta get through my task lists.”

 At this point, I'm pretty guaranteed that there is another part that they can't see involved in the decision-making process. 

 This is what, if I come back to Jocko's video, all machoed up, right, all machoed up, we all have parts of ourselves that we can't even see. 

The Power Of The Unconscious Mind

They exist on what we call the unconscious level of the mind. The same way as you have a liver doing all sorts of things in your body right now, you have unconscious mental processes and emotional drives. 

 It's really important to say that the unconscious is irrational, not rational. When you start to inspect the unconscious, you really get to understand that. 

 It is irrational. It will do things that don't make sense to the conscious mind. 

 It will make decisions that don't make sense to the conscious mind. 

 Okay. Let me get back to the story, which I'm using to illustrate the need to understand parts and what self-sabotage is and why you can't just use will to override. 

 It takes greater sensitivity to self than that to change. By the way, when you watch Jocko talk, he is talking from the dominant warrior part. He can maybe identify with that. 

 Maybe that's all he thinks he is, but he will have other parts that he can't even see or doesn't even know about. 

 What I will do, here's the strategy, to delegate it appeals to the business owner. They've now worked out they've got the planner, the strategist. I'm not going to stop them there because I'm going to dig them deeper, because I'm going to go “okay, so I've asked the question, do you use not having enough time often to delay doing the big important things in your business?” They might say yes. I might say “do you know why?” No. 

Most People Don't Know Themselves

Because this is really important, most people don't know themselves at all. They just don't know themselves. This concept that yeah, I am this thing. No, I'm not this thing. I am many different things with many different parts and many different impulses. So, if I want to make good decisions, I’d better see what's really making decisions for me. Most decisions are driven from the unconscious realm. All the science shows that today. 

 When you consciously think you make a decision, between six and nine seconds before you consciously think you made a decision, your unconscious has made the decision for you. 

 So, we know the unconscious is really involved in decision-making processes, which is why we want to surface what is in the unconscious. 

 I'll give you a grounded example of this. Coming back to our example, I will start to dig a little bit deeper. Because of my ability to read and see, I'm going to have a real idea about what is in the unconscious pulling on the planner to rationalise why they shouldn't delegate right now. 

 What I will find typically, I'm using a real-life client as I communicate this, I'll find a part in the unconscious that believes this, “I cannot trust anybody, no one will support me.”

 The client in front of me doesn't know that they have this part on the unconscious level that's pulling the strings because they are not aware and they have not been taught to bring up unconscious parts, to see what is making decisions for them. 

 So, this part on the unconscious level that believes “no one will support me, I can't trust anyone” is deeply terrified at bringing more team on to delegate to. 

 Again, if we dig deeper, maybe this person, growing up, had some experiences, which created this belief system. Maybe their parents weren't there for them or maybe some things happened in childhood where they felt left alone and abandoned a lot. 

Independent People Don't Want To Let Go

They just had to do everything for themselves like a lot of really independent people who just do everything and are control freaks and won't let people support them. They tend to become very good at what they do because they've spent their whole life having to do everything themselves and not look for support because that belief system that was created as a young person drives this independence. That's great. That's great on many levels. But if you've got that as a business owner, it's not going to work, it can't work because to build a business so that it runs independent of you requires you to have a team. 

 You are employing people with highly conscientious value structures, which means they'll perform when you're not there. They perform just as well when you're there as when you're not there in the place of work. 

 But you're employing them, you're employing really good quality people who will build your business for you, so you don't have to. You've got other roles to do in the business. 

 Again, just coming back to this example, if I can't help the client see this part that holds the belief systems, I don't trust anyone or no one will support me, it will stay in the unconscious level, and they'll believe the lies and justifications of the more surface parts because that's what we do. When we say we, we as human beings do. That's just part of our traits. We tend to not understand what's really driving us. 

Our Ego Tries to Protect Us

We believe our rationalisations, which are designed to protect the ego and keep us from our deepest fears. Coming back to this example, the deepest fear is having team who, based on their belief systems, will let them down, cause them more pain than they're worth and who will betray them based on this person's belief systems in this example. 

 Now again, they don't know they've got that sitting on the unconscious level. Until they know, of course they're going to stay half asleep, controlled by these unconscious belief systems. 

 My job is to help them see it. I don't tell them it's there because yes, I do see what's in people, but that doesn't help them, me just telling them. 

So, I'll start to ask a series of questions where they will come up with their own answers, but I know where I'm heading them or what part I'm wanting them to see. In the questioning process, they will have a revelation because they will start to see that they can't trust and they don't believe anyone will support them. 

 At that point, they now see what was controlling their decision-making from the unconscious level. So, it's no longer unconscious because it's now conscious. 

Surfacing From The Unconscious

Here's the amazing thing about the unconscious. When you are willing to pull up a part from the unconscious, what we call “surfacing” it to bring it into the light of conscious awareness, the unconscious almost gets the kinda concept and idea that “oh this person wants to evolve.”

 If they're willing to have a look, I will show them more. All of a sudden, after I've done that work with a client, that afternoon and probably for the next two days, their unconscious is processing and they'll have all these memories about things that happened to them and times in their life where they were betrayed or times in their life where they couldn't trust. 

 So, we know that once we start to surface things from the unconscious, the unconscious keeps the job going. Now this is step one in transformation and change because all of a sudden now, the person sees what was really pulling the strings from the unconscious level. 

You Need Sensitivity To Overcome Your Blocks

Now here's the problem with someone like Jocko and his statement. It takes a sensitivity, and you have to develop a sensitivity to understand what is going on within your own system - and that you have these multiple parts and that some of these parts don't agree with the parts that other decisions have made will go to sabotage you. 

 Everyone here has experienced this, right? This is part of human development, by the way. One part of you says I want to do this now. Let's imagine. It might be like “ah I wanna go out and I wanna build a bigger business, I'm gonna change my business model and build a bigger business.” Now that part of you might be the ambitious part of you. It might be the achiever part of you. 

 But the moment the decision was made, what you'll experience is a backlash from other parts. The first one you'll tend to meet is self-doubt. The self-doubting part will come up and go “oh can I do this?”

 Now an unconscious person doesn't even know the self-doubting part is coming up because they're shut down to their feelings. They don't understand themselves. But many people watching this, you'll relate to it. 

 You make the decision from the achiever part. The other part goes no, and you feel nervous and fearful as the other part gets triggered. That's actually part of life. 

 This is how we evolve and change where one part wants to make a change in life or in business and you go and you make that intent based on that part, and then all these other parts in your consciousness come out screaming because they're afraid, they’ve got negativity, they’ve got self-doubt, they think you might get hurt as an example. 

What happens is you got to face those parts, see them, understand them. 

Analyse Your Uncomfortable Feelings

If you aren't aware of those parts, because they'll be sending you some uncomfortable feelings, but you're not really aware of them, you're not really connected to self, these parts will get you to give up on, right, that choice from the achiever part, from the driver part, from the ambitious part, and then you wouldn't evolve because you'd stop. 

 But if you were honouring the achiever part, these other parts will come up. If you're an aware person, you'll see them, you'll understand them. Oh there's that part again, I know that part. And you'll continue. Over time, those voices of those parts subside as you move through the challenge, and then you evolve as a human being. Again, back to Jocko, it takes awareness of self. You can't just use will to override something in your unconscious you don't know about. It will control you. It will control you. 

Past Trauma Can Affect Your Decision Making

I'll just give you one example before we close this off. I think this is a brilliant example actually because it highlights two things that I've been talking about today. It highlights parts, it highlights how we are driven from the unconscious, and it also highlights the irrationality of the unconscious because many of the voices in your own unconscious are like from four-year-old parts of you, five-year-old parts of you. 

If you've had a trauma locked in because of something, some event, that trauma will be controlling your decision-making process. This is really important because this is why again I get quite passionate. 

 I'm working from a strategic perspective with business clients day in and day out. But unless the coach or mentor can understand what's happening on the unconscious level for the client, the client is going to self-sabotage, the client is going to limit what they can achieve. 

 That's why it's beautiful to be able to work with both tangents. Quickly, this is a story I share often because of just how great it is from the perspective of teaching those three things. 

 Fifteen to sixteen years ago here in Australia, some of you will remember the investors club. This lady was part of the investors club. Basically she had built and lost $6 million portfolios three times through silly mistakes. They sent her to me. 

 She's up in the Sunshine Coast. I'm going to her place, lovely lady. She knew she had a pattern. This was before this kind of work was considered normal. Anyway, so I'm sitting down with her. I can see that she's got a really good accountant part of her, really good with the math, very good planner. She's got an achiever. She's sick though. This is important. She's got some health problems. Anyway, she says, "I built my portfolios up." She says, "Every time," she says, "I just make a mistake "that I wouldn't normally make. "I don't know what's going on. "And then I've lost it. "I've just lost it from the silly mistakes." She said that they sort of just come out, just it's weird because just when it starts to get to that $6 million mark, boom, gone. 

 So, I start to work with her. I'm just going to go to her childhood just to show you how this stuff gets set up. 

 When she was a child, her father was away working all the time. Now her father loved her, but she's at home where they call latchkey kids. I don't know where the mom is. She doesn't come into the story. But the Dad's away all the time. I get it that the mom wasn't around. So, she's there lonely all the time, feeling alone, feeling abandoned at home until dad comes home. 

 He doesn't get home till 7:30 - 8:00 o'clock at night 'cause he's working all the time. And he loves her. He's trying to bring money in for the family. When she gets sick, when she gets sick, Dad stops business. He'll come home and look after her for a whole week and make chicken soup, read her stories in bed. 

 Then when she gets well, he would go off again. On the unconscious, she had a belief system that said this, men love me when I am vulnerable and down, men don't love me when I'm well and independent. Now that belief system was created from the experience with her father. Again, it's not true. Her Dad loved her all the time, but children make decisions like that. 

 And so, on the unconscious level, first of all, I knew that she wanted a relationship more than she wanted wealth because what you'll see as we start to go a bit further into this is that. By the way, this is what we call a victim strategy. There's another business lady I work with who, growing up, the sister was a star, star performer. She actually became a really famous entrepreneur. 

 My client, the other one I'm talking about had gone into business. Anyway, she'd get herself into all sorts of strife and trouble all the time in business. 

 When she was a child, because her sister was such an achiever and did really well at school and did really well at sport, she's like one of those families where the parents just love the one daughter, the super achiever, and they sort of ignored this one who became my client. I'm going to be honest with you. This woman was tough work because of this. 

 I wouldn't work with someone like her today. Anyway, she's just tough work because these patterns were so entrenched. She learned in early age that when she got in trouble with the police or she'd have a car crash, her parents would give her attention. So, she learned, again this is where people have victim or dramas going on because they learn at the unconscious level that I must cause trouble, I must be in danger, I must do something really wrong to get my parents' love. 

The Unconscious Mind Controls Your Behaviour

This becomes such a powerful unconscious force here. They are in their 40s. They're trying to live a good life, right, 'cause we're all parts. But this part from the unconscious level that's got all this voltage still controls all their decisions because this parts wants them to be in trouble. It knows that it gets love from negative outcomes 'cause that was the early childhood pattern. 

 This is important to understand. That part wants negative outcomes. A rational person who doesn't understand the unconscious looks at someone like that and goes, they can't have any compassion or empathy for them, right, because they go “that's ridiculous, why are they so self-destructive?”

 Well, unconscious forces, as we said earlier, are irrational, coming back to the story that I've just been telling about the investor. Here she is. On the unconscious level, she's got this part of her from her childhood that knows that when she's down and out and struggling and vulnerable, men will come in and rescue her and make her feel like she's loved. 

 Of course she'd end up with that belief system based on her experiences. Here she is, an adult, removed from her early childhood, from her family life. Now she's got a part of her that's a real achiever. This is a very sophisticated woman, by the way, looks sophisticated, very intelligent. She got her achiever and she's got an accountant and she's building these property portfolios, doing really, really well. 

 But the wealthier she got, which was her conscious goal, by the way, from achiever self, from accountant self, the more on the unconscious level, the unconscious said “hey, but you're getting more powerful, that means you won't get loved.”

 The more powerful you get, the less likely you are going to get a man to love you 'cause this fell outside of the childhood script. That's why her unconscious always arranged for her to make a mistake, so she could lose everything, so she could, based on the unconscious script, get a man who would care for her and look after her. 

 Until she could see that part of her, nothing could change because it would just come from the unconscious. This is really important to say because you may be going, well, “how does she make those mistakes?”

 This is really hard for me to explain, but I see it all the time. What happens is the unconscious parts will engineer whatever they need to engineer within your brain and within your consciousness to fulfil themselves, fulfil those belief structures. 

 I've seen it just dumb people down. There are powers in your consciousness that are scarily good, but used ineffectively, very damaging. So, unconscious forces that you don't see can be very damaging, which is why you need to self-inspect and see what's happening on the unconscious level. 

Learn Self-Mastery

This leads to self-mastery in the decision-making processes. Anyway, that should give you some food for thought. If you want to know some ways that you can start to do this, well, simple ways, real simple way is this, don't ignore feelings. When you're thinking all the time, you're disconnected from the body. Just observe. Sometimes you'll feel uncomfortable feelings in your body, uncomfortable emotions. Turn your attention to those uncomfortable emotions. 

 This might sound weird to you and strange when you first start this work, but feel the emotion in the body and go, well, how does emotion feel, and then you might go “ah I feel uncomfortable, it's making me feel a bit edgy.”

 Now believe it or not, when you start to turn your awareness to those feelings and start to name those feelings, you're bringing your awareness back into the body. 

 When you bring your awareness back into your body, heading it back into unconscious territory because the unconscious and the biology work together. 

 In connecting with the feelings and naming them and describing them, you are starting to practise what we call observing awareness.

 There's me that's observing the emotion, being able to name the emotion, which means there's me, the observer, and there's me, the thing that I'm observing within myself that already leads to greater wisdom. 

 Ah there's that I can feel that emotion, the more you get to do it. What's it saying? Now when I tell a rational person to ask what that part's saying, what that emotion is saying, they tend to struggle with that. 

 If you're a feeling person, you'll be able to do it in an instant. Oh this part, “oh it's saying that if I go down that path, it could be dangerous, I could lose money, or I could get rejected, or whatever it is.”

 Now at that point, you've just developed a high level of emotional intelligence, a high level of wisdom about self. You're now starting to pull things up and bring them into awareness, so you can see all these different parts that are controlling you. 

 Anyway, that's a great place to start. I hope you're loving today's show. A bit different today, we're talking certainly about beliefs, the unconscious, the parts, not so much about strategy, but this stuff is just as important as the strategy, and it will change your life if you embrace it. 

 By the way, if you're interested to come and do a one-on-one strategy session with me, I have a few free ones available at this point. 

 In the free strategy session, we will be doing a lot of strategic work on your business. 

 We will be looking at where the roadblocks are, we will be looking at what you would need to do over the next 12 months to shift those roadblocks, to get you in conductor, to get you working on your business to start building a business that runs independently from you. 

 We look at a roadmap for that. If I need to, I'll check in and touch base with, say, some of the belief systems or unconscious patterns that maybe you need to inspect because they will undermine the implementation of the strategy. 

 We won't be going fully into that deep personal work, not in the free strategy session, but we'll be touching base with it. 

 They're awesomely powerful sessions. You will experience something that you won't experience with any other business or mentor or coach. Anyway, check it out, and see you at the next show. Catch you.