I Can and I Will

I once heard that our worst troll is the one who lives inside us. It’s probably true. Toxic social media posts, hurtful remarks in group chats, and demoralizing blog entries pale in comparison to the messages we get from our mind's limiting beliefs, fears, and anxieties. They not only carry with them disempowering emotions, but also sabotage us in ways we can't even imagine.

Positive Psychology notes that self-sabotage, also known as behavioral dysregulation, happens when we intentionally harm ourselves physically, mentally, or emotionally and hinder our own success and wellbeing by undermining our personal goals and values. This behavior might be conscious or subconscious, depending on our level of awareness. Negativity, procrastination, indecisiveness, and damaging internal chatter are all examples of self-sabotage. So are excessive eating and drinking, drug addiction, gambling, social media binge, and overspending, just to mention a few. In the long term, chronic self-sabotage affects our motivation and leaves us feeling useless, nervous, and depressed.

According to Verywell Mind, people thwart their progress for reasons ranging from childhood traumas to difficult relationships and coping issues. Self-sabotage is also linked to cognitive dissonance. It refers to the mental discomfort we experience when our words or actions don’t reflect our ideas and values. When this happens, we try to alleviate the discomfort, but we usually end up making matters worse for ourselves. Fear of failure and the craving for control are two other important contributors to self-sabotage. We avoid trying in order to prevent disenchantment. In addition, and although it sounds counterintuitive, self-sabotage helps us feel we’re in the driver's seat whenever we’re vulnerable.

Experts point out that one of the key reasons we sabotage ourselves is because we lack self-esteem. Feeling inadequate, incompetent, or doomed to fail can turn our lives into a series of self-fulfilling prophecies that confirm our own worst fears about ourselves. PsychCentral highlights that we often remain inside a comfort zone of never trying because we believe it will all go wrong anyway. When we do this, our self-perception doesn’t need to go through the often-painful process of change. Although this is unpleasant, we prefer it to having our ideas challenged. Self-sabotage can also give us a twisted sense of vindication when things don't go our way (i.e., "I knew I couldn't do it!").

Freedom from self-sabotage starts with identifying our damaging actions and understanding the emotions, attitudes, and beliefs that lead to them. After that, it's only a matter of replacing negative thinking with positive self-talk to move forward. For example, I often tell myself "I can and I will”. But words are meaningless without action, which is why we must state a clear and bold intention in an area of our lives where we want to see favorable change. Ashley Stahl emphasizes in her TED Talk How to Figure Out What You Really Want that when we give in to fear, we relinquish our power and become disconnected from who we truly are. She suggests three critical measures to counteract this. First, do a self-audit. Where are we holding ourselves captive? Over time we learn to stop taking risks so as to not get hurt. Second, follow our freedom. This entails paying attention to what feels good to us so that we can eventually be free. Finally, try new things. Action, not thought, produces clarity.

When setting our core intention, we must remember to be brutally honest with ourselves. Believe it or not, one area we frequently name as a primary desire but continually undermine is our own happiness. This, according to Brianna Wiest, author of 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think, is because many of us don't actually want to be happy. When we feel good beyond what we consider normal and safe, we sabotage ourselves as we prefer the comfort of what we know to the vulnerability of what we don’t. Furthermore, there is a degree of success and happiness that we consider to be dangerous to others, and we choose to stay below it. When we reach the point where we believe people will judge us, we cut ourselves off in order to avoid losing their love. Finally, many of us believe that suffering makes us worthy. Having nice things in life without having to work hard for them makes us feel as though we haven't fully earned them.

The practice of thinking aspirational thoughts with the purpose of making them real is many times labeled as a hoax and dismissed entirely. However, in The Source, Dr. Tara Swart outlines several principles within the bounds of evidence-based science that underpin this idea. Let me point out two of these. To begin, recognize that whatever we seek, whether it is love, money, health, or anything else, is abundant. This way of thinking boosts our self-esteem and confidence, allowing us to persevere through hard situations. Challenge and difficulty become intrinsically rewarding, as well as essential to our development and growth. Failures are reframed as opportunities and viewed as a necessary part of the journey. Our readiness to let go of old beliefs and assumptions in favor of new evidence and ideas is contagious and generative, resulting in a thriving environment and community around us (i.e., "like attracts like").

And second, we should use all of our senses to imagine what we're looking for, to see, hear, and experience it in our heads. This sets off two significant physiological processes. On the one hand, selective attention makes us hyper-aware of what is judged a priority in achieving our goal and filters out massive volumes of irrelevant data. On the other hand, value tagging assists our brain in assigning the right priority to each piece of information it encounters. Simply said, when we allow our brain to be alert to and focus on what we want in life, the increased awareness that results will act in our favor, bringing chances into our lives naturally. Swart highlights that it's not magic; we're just able to perceive alternatives for moving forward with our dreams that our brain has previously kept hidden from us.

Next time your troll appears, don't engage. Simply tell yourself, "I can and I will", "I can and I will". Then involve all your senses in imagining how you achieve your goal. Finally, get up and take action. I'm quite aware of how foolish it can feel to repeat these sentences to oneself. Keep going, it will pass. I also know how silly it might be to visualize things that may or may not occur. Never mind, it's just your ego protecting you from disappointment. And I understand how vulnerable you can feel when you move firmly toward a goal that you could not reach. Rest assured others wished they had your guts. Let me ask you then: who is the real you? The strong, brave, and inspiring person who takes chances in search of something better? Or is it that weak, scared, narrow-minded troll lurking in the background?

Author: Esteban Polidura, CFA. June 25, 2022.