49. Stop Self-Sabotage With Pat Pearson

by | Mar 8, 2021 | Podcast

LACO 49 | Self-Sabotage

🏃‍♀️ Self-sabotage is the way we trip ourselves up, as we’re racing to the finish line. We can sabotage every aspect of our life. 3:21
🤷‍♀️ We unconsciously set ourselves up to a level which we believe we deserve to achieve in life. 5:22
🗨️ The four psychological realities that create your ‘deserve’ level. 7:45
🤩 The differences between self-esteem and self-confidence. 12:20
👍 When starting a new business, implementing a system that includes a small number of tasks and rewards is great. 18:38
😵 Five patterns of self-sabotage: Fatal Flaws, Resignation, Throwing it Away, Denial, and Settling for Less. 21:42
🤕 Pre-achievement and post-achievement sabotage. 26:20
🤔 Difference between resistance and sabotage. 28:00
💻 All forms of resistance and the free assessment test on Pat’s site. 30:20
🎙️ Pat’s podcast is called Stop Self-Sabotage. 32:04
💜 Invest in yourself, learn a few new things, and incorporate it all into your life. 35:45
💫 Deb’s own success story. 36:22
✍️ Pat saw exponential growth in success when people and companies apply things they’ve learned. 37:55

Connect with Pat: http://www.patpearson.com/
Take a free Self-Sabotage Test: http://quiz.patpearson.com/
Pat’s Success Story: http://www.patpearson.com/success-stories/
Podcast: https://hotpiemedia.com/podcast/stop-self-sabotage/
Join the Life After Corporate Facebook Group

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Listen to the podcast here:

Stop Self-Sabotage With Pat Pearson

If you are new to the show, welcome home. If this is your first experience reading our blog, get ready to be blown away. We are continuing our theme of no holds barred breakthroughs. The path to becoming an entrepreneur will kick up all of your insecurities. All of the demons you thought were dead and buried can rear their ugly heads again and you may discover ways to sabotage your success that you haven’t even been aware of until now. That ends today. No more self-sabotage as my incredible guest will show you how to get out of your way once and for all.

Pat Pearson is a clinical psychotherapist, business coach and speaker. She travels around the world sharing her methods of professional development, sales success and leadership with some of the world’s leading companies. Pat is the author of three books, You Deserve the Best, Passion! Reclaiming the Fire in Your Heart and Stop Self-Sabotage!: How to Get Out of Your Own Way and Have an Extraordinary Life. That’s why you are going to love this episode.

Pat provides concrete practical methods for igniting your resources to reach your life and business goals. Blending her experience and expertise gained from her practice of business coaching with an in-depth understanding of the issues and blocks that color the sales success of most people, Pat brings a unique perspective to her presentations and she helps create breakthrough moments for her audiences. I promise you will likely get a breakthrough today. Pat, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the show.

Thank you, Deb. I’m glad to be here.

LACO 49 | Self-Sabotage

Stop Self-Sabotage: Get Out of Your Own Way to Earn More Money, Improve Your Relationships, and Find the Success You Deserve

I remember the first time we met and I heard you speak at the EBW, Empowering a Billion Women retreat. I was completely blown away by the insights you were dropping on us at that event. I bought the book, consumed it, underlined it, wrote in the margins, and did the exercises. My eyes were open. It made a difference in my life on how I was getting in my own way. Let’s help our readers understand their own patterns of self-sabotage by understanding how do you define self-sabotage, Pat. What does it mean in your perspective?

First of all, let me honor the amount of effort you put in. You bought the book, read it, used it and apply that to your life. I can’t tell you how many of the thousands of people I’ve talked to have done maybe the first two but it’s the application. It’s making it your own that sings the song. You were a wonderful soprano rigging out in the night. Self-sabotage is the way that we trip ourselves up as we’re racing to the finish line. It’s the ways that we unconsciously and consciously make sure we don’t get what we say we most want.

Why in the world would we do that? It makes no sense. However, we do it all the time. We do it with our diets, careers and choices. We do it in our lives, relationships, health and careers. The limitation that we self-impose is our own internal glass ceiling. Nobody puts it there but us. It’s not because your mother said bad things to you. It’s not because you and your husband had a fight. It’s not because of COVID. It’s not because of the environment or the economy. It’s because we stop ourselves. That’s essentially what I’m talking about.

Why do we do that, Pat? Why do we stop ourselves? Why has this become a lifelong practice of yours to help people get out of their way?

Let me answer the second part of that question first. I was a practicing therapist in Dallas for many years and what I kept noticing is bright, achievement-oriented, smart, lovely and well-educated people would come into my practice and over and over again, they would hit a place in themselves in which they couldn’t go past. They kept repeating and they might repeat it in different forms. It might be in a relationship that they get in one and it wouldn’t work. Eight months later, they’d been in another one that wouldn’t work. It might be in their inability to ask and move up the corporate ladder or make the money they wanted to in their home-based business or get healthy, lose the weight and keep it off that they truly want it.

We all have some degree of this. Whether you’re rich or poor, happy or unhappy, bright or not bright, you are going to run into self-sabotage. Why? Because it’s unconscious. It’s part of what I call your deserve level. We all have a level to which we believe we deserve to achieve in life. If we don’t believe we deserve it, whether it be in our health, relationship, or career, we will not go after it. If you do go after it and you get it and you don’t believe you deserve it, you will give it away to get within that comfort zone that we all have inside of us. Self-sabotage becomes the thermostat that we set to keep us at the temperature that we feel comfortable.

Self-sabotage is the thermostat that we set to keep us at the temperature that we feel comfortable.

That is rich and visual, the internal glass ceiling. Our readers probably can identify at least one area in their lives where they’re not allowing themselves to receive as much as they want because inside, they don’t deserve it. Where does this deserve level come from?

It certainly comes from inside of us. There are four psychological realities I talk about the create what you believe you deserve. They are your belief system, positive and negative about getting what you want. We have beliefs, both positive and negative, about any goal we set. Your level of self-esteem, your level of self-confidence, and then permission from your past. Those four components go together to create this reality I’ve dubbed your deserve level. We all have an intuitive feeling about that and we hear people say things about it. It’s interesting because when I’m watching movies, I’ll hear someone say, “You deserve that.” It’s an interesting statement because almost always in that context, it’s you deserve something good for yourself.

You can also hear it in the negative context like, “You’ve been bad so you deserve to be punished.” Without any clear definition of what deserve is, we all have an idea. We have a sense of that. We have a sense of what we deserve. Most of the time, we don’t go past our limits. We go up to our limits and then we back away. That’s the functionality of self-sabotage. It pulls us away from breaking through our limits. My work for over 30 years has been predominantly to help people break through those limits and up their deserve level and then to create the support around them to keep it there, even to go higher as you do with your success.

For me, there’s no stone left unturned, Pat. You get to a certain age where any barrier is no good barrier. I have an openness and a willingness to do whatever it takes to bust out of these unconscious patterns. One of the things that you mentioned in the book was the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence. I get that question a lot from my clients. Can you give us some insight into how you define the difference between self-esteem and self-confidence?

I find that people tend to throw those into the same bucket but not intentionally. They know it’s two different words. They think if you have one, you automatically have the other, which is not the case. Self-esteem, as I define it, is created by unconscious acknowledgment for who you are as a human being because you’re a good, lovable, and likable human being. That creates self-esteem. It’s given to you as you grow up through hugs, kisses, and approval from your parents. It’s given to you by yourself. That’s the new word out there, self-care. That’s essentially loving yourself enough to care for yourself, which is self-esteem building.

LACO 49 | Self-Sabotage

Self-Sabotage: Self-sabotage is how we trip ourselves up as we’re racing to the finish line and how we unconsciously and consciously make sure we don’t get what we say we most want.

 

It’s given to you by your primary partner in life, friends, and anybody who likes you and loves you. Unconditionally, without you doing anything, creating anything, or developing anything, gives you that acknowledgment. That creates self-esteem. Self-confidence, on the other hand, is created by conditional acknowledgment for performance. You do a great podcast and you get all this feedback from people who follow you, Deb, and they say, “Great podcast. I loved it. You are great.” When you’re growing up, you get an A on your biology test. You make a great sale and/or you create something like art that you feel good about. You do something to make it happen.

Confidence is based on doing. Esteem is based on being. You can have a person with high self-esteem and low self-confidence or vice versa, high self-confidence and low self-esteem. Whoever those people are, they will perform and will live in different ways from each other. First of all, let me tell you about me. If I give a story, it’s helpful. I grew up in Columbia, Missouri. Every summer, I would get up there and I would have my little red wagon and I would sell my comic books. My dad, who was a National Book salesman, would come by and he goes, “Attagirl Pat, chip off the old block. You sell those comic books.”

I knew if I was selling my comic books, picking up my room, and getting A’s, my dad would be happy with me. I wasn’t so sure he loved me or be happy with me if I got an F. I knew if I performed, my dad would acknowledge me and be proud. That builds some self-confidence. My mom seemed to love me no matter what I did. I could sit in my room, eat M&Ms all day, watch senseless TV, and be unproductive and my mother would love me. From my mom, I developed some self-esteem. I had some levels of both of those qualities going in my life. However, because I didn’t feel I got a lot of self-esteem from my dad, I felt I had to earn men’s approval by doing things for them.

In college, I did their homework, wrote their term papers, cleaned their rooms, and did all kinds of stuff to get them to “love me.” What I tried to do is use my confidence to build my esteem. What I found out, through many years of therapy, is that these are two different channels. You can’t use one to make up for your lack in the other. You’ve got to address each one. Let me give you a quick quiz here for you and anybody else here. Give yourself a rating from 1 to 10, ten being the highest and one being the lowest, in terms of self-esteem. How loved, liked, and approved of do you feel right now? This can change. Do you have someone who tells you that? Are you feeling high in that self-esteem? That’s your being.

How do you feel about your ability to produce and do whatever it is that’s important to you right now? Whether it’s to write a book or create a new source of income or do a podcast like you’re doing, do something that you want to do and make it successful. Easily go in your head and give yourself a rating. You need both. Whatever area is the lowest, is the one that bugs you the most. When you’re walking around your house or taking a shower or whatever and you’re thinking, that’s the area you’re good to go to because there’s a need within all of us to finish our unfinished business. To correct and balance that which we feel unbalanced.

It’s funny because my upbringing was similar to yours, except I got unconditional positive regard from my mother. It was from my great grandmother who loved the bejesus out of me. My self-esteem is high. I’ve got a loving man in my life, great friends, learned to love myself and practice good self-care. Sometimes I fall off the wagon and that’s the only reason why I would give myself some lower marks. Confidence is high unless I’m doing something brand new. I have a deserve level. I’ve achieved that. Now I’m setting it even higher. Does the confidence barometer bounce up and down depending on if you’re stretching yourself in new areas?

Confidence is based on doing. Esteem is based on being.

Yes. Anytime we take on something new, whatever the new is, and it could be learning how to cook. It doesn’t have to be productive. A lot of people during COVID time have taken on new challenges like writing or learning a language. Whatever it is that is new for you that you haven’t accomplished before that you don’t have in your wheelhouse, your confidence will be lower in that area until you have enough hours put in to feel like, “I got some of this.”

It’s relevant for the readers of this podcast who are successful women leaders in business, in the corporate world, a nonprofit, or education, and then they make the leap to starting their own business. Suddenly, it’s like, “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not sure anyone would hire me.” With all the success and experience they’ve attained up until this point in time, the confidence goes from 10 to 2. It makes total sense.

What needs to happen if they’re doing that, and kudos to them that they’re doing that, is that they need to then find ways to do a small task and reward.

Tell us more about that.

For someone successful in one area, that’s difficult to do. Why? Because they’re used to having a big portfolio of themselves. They’re used to being successful, calling the shots, and being the top dog or the higher up on the platform dog. Now, they’re beginning to rebuild, so it’s a whole another psychological construct, which means you take small tasks that are doable and achievable and you reward yourself upon completion of those tasks, whatever the task happens to be. I have no more than 4 or 5 things on my to-do list every day because what I used to do is have an 8,000-page to-do list and then want to lay down. I don’t do that to myself anymore. Four or five critical things a day for me to get done and one of them has to be exercise. I don’t get them all done but I get the majority of them done. Even if I don’t get one of them done, I celebrate the 3 or 4 I did get done.

How do you celebrate?

I talk to my fiancé about it and I say, “I’m proud that we got this. I got this. Together, we got these things done.” I talk about it at dinner usually. I’m always open for a hug or, “Attagirl. Good for you,” because you need that reaffirmation of your activity after you’ve done it. Even in this COVID time, if it’s just cleaning your house, it’s still important. Whatever it is you decide is important, that goes on the list and you celebrate it verbally. If you like to have a glass of wine, great, or whatever it is that you do to celebrate.

We do fist bumps at dinner. We share about our day and what we accomplished. That’s our little thing. Let’s talk about what happens when you hit your deserve level. How do we identify our pattern of self-sabotage?

LACO 49 | Self-Sabotage

Self-Sabotage: We all have a level to which we believe we deserve to achieve in life. If we don’t believe we just serve it, whether, in your health, your relationship, or your career, you will not go after it.

 

It’s going to be a consistent and repetitive inability to get more of what you want.

In the book, you identified the five patterns of self-sabotage. Can you share at least some of them with us?

Those are some of the strategies that you would sabotage yourself with. Fatal flaw is one of them. Fatal flaw means that it’s a catch-all one. Whatever you would do that would over and over again get in your way, whether it be perfectionism, anger racket, narcissism, or untreated depression. There’s a whole category of that. There’s also one called resignation, which means, “I give up before I start.” I come up with an idea to write a book, let’s say, and then I go, “Nobody’s buying books. Nobody’s interested. My personal buyer is my mother. Why am I even doing this?” I talk myself out of it before I start. Resignation is one sabotage strategy. Another sabotage strategy is called throwing it away. That means you get what you say you want. You get the guy, new job, and health goal that you wanted. Now, because you feel like you’ve gotten more than you deserve, you throw it away.

Even the great Oprah does this. Several years ago, I was interviewed by an Access Hollywood when Oprah had put on 50 pounds and had not revealed it. This is a while back. They asked me, “What do you think she’s doing?” I said, “She’s self-sabotaging.” We talked about it and then she came out with a statement and said, “I will never diet again until I understand the psychological reasons why I can’t keep this weight off.” She’d lose it and she’d put it back on. That’s what you’re looking at. You get it and you throw it away. You get the guy who’s fabulous, then you find everything is wrong with him and you break up.

Denial means that you deny that there’s a problem. You put your head in the sand and constantly don’t look at the reality of what you’re doing. People we love who are sabotaging themselves are such a painful reality for many of us because we see what they can’t see. We see our father, who’s 75 pounds overweight and won’t get out of the chair to walk. We see our best friend, who marries the wrong guy repeatedly. We see something but the person themselves is in denial. This has implications for alcoholism, drug addiction, and all that kind of stuff. The other thing is settling for less, which is you get close and you settle for less. You give up your pursuit. You’re on track. I have a little bit of that going on with weight. I get close to my goal and then I think, “That’s close enough. I can have a couple of margaritas here and there.” It’s a process by which we con ourselves.

It’s when your goal conflicts with your reward system, and then there’s a margarita at the end of the day to reward yourself. I have seen each of these in my clients, especially fatal flaw. Perfectionism and procrastination are something that when you’re doing something uncomfortable, you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone, and you’re not feeling entirely confident about it. It’s easy to fall prey to the need to having everything be perfect. It’s like sharpening your pencils, making sure your website is perfect, and making sure you’ve got a gorgeous logo. Meanwhile, you don’t have a client yet and you haven’t sold anything. The resignation is they get so close and then they’ll abandon the process right when they’re about to hit the breakthrough.

There’s a difference here, Deb. Resignation is that they don’t get started. They give up before they start. The settling for less is what I call pre-achievement sabotage. They get right up to the threshold of them having a breakthrough and getting what they want in whatever category they’re focused in. That’s when they get uncomfortable and trip themselves up. There’s pre-achievement sabotage and then there’s post-achievement sabotage. That’s the timing factor of self-sabotage.

Post-achievement sabotage is when you have something that’s working. Maybe you put in a marketing strategy that’s generating leads but your creative brain can’t stick with what’s working, so now you need to abandon that and start something new. You had something that was generating revenue and now you’ve abandoned that and are starting from scratch with a new strategy. That’s what I see some of my clients do as well. The other place where new entrepreneurs struggle is resistance. One of the books that are also required reading in The Launch Lab along with Stop Self-Sabotage! is The War of Art. Steven Pressfield talks about resistance and being an amateur versus being a professional. I know you’ve done your research on resistance. What’s the difference between resistance and sabotage?

I view resistance as, if sabotage is the car, resistance is the gas. Resistance is how you operationalize that you’re not going to meet your goals through self-sabotage. I view sabotage as largely unconscious. Most people wouldn’t do it consciously. If they said, “I’m self-sabotaging at this moment,” they might stop, pivot, and do something different. Resistance is essentially a universal process. Steven Pressfield talks about this in his book, which is a wonderful book, in the form of art but it’s also in the form that there’s a universality to resistance.

Everybody hits their resistance and their ability to recognize that there is no linear ascent to glory. There are pauses and stopping places along the way. Your first company may not work. Your first relationship may not work. Your first attempt to get healthy may not work for whatever reason so then you have to regroup and conquer your resistance to starting again. The point about resistance is it’s prevalent and ubiquitous. It’s always there. It never sleeps and never gives up. Your job is to conquer it every day. The more you conquer it, the less power it has.

It’s not just a nice idea to take care of yourself emotionally. It is critical to the outcomes you want and necessary for your business.

Would you say that resistance is conscious? Most of the time, people are conscious of their resistance. Instead of sitting in the chair to write their book, “I need to put in another load of laundry. I’m hungry. Let’s see what’s in the refrigerator.” Eating is a form of resistance when you should be doing something else.

Anything can be a form of resistance. We usually have our preferred modes. Resistance is something that you know is a present-centered experience. Self-sabotage is a little bit more intellectual and thoughtful in the sense that you have to take a moment, think about it, and assess. If people are interested in finding out how much they are self-sabotaging, they can go to my website, PatPearson.com, and take a free quiz. They will get an automatic response that charts their level of self-sabotage. Once they get that, they can start picking through that number and why, and they can find out the areas, if they don’t know them, where they’re resisting.

That’s an insightful assessment. I highly recommend everyone do that. Pat, what are you up to now? What’s new?

Deb, I’m following in your lead doing a podcast. I’m working with a company called Hot Pie Media. The reason they came up with the name is a group of people who’ve been in radio and advertising, a sophisticated group of people who are putting this together decided they want a name that everybody would like. Who doesn’t like hot pie?

That’s great marketing. What’s the name of your podcast?

It’s called Stop Self-Sabotage. It’s the same name as my book. It’s on every major platform such as Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon and iHeart. It’s on 30 different platforms. I’d love everybody to dip their foot into the waters. I have an hour-long entire description of Stop Self-Sabotage there. If people want to learn more without reading the book and all that kind of stuff, then go and listen. It’s a mini-seminar on there.

I also have a great interview, not because of the media but because of this woman, Jackie Pflug. She was shot in the head by terrorists, left for dead, and didn’t die with a whole bunch of other people on a plane. This is back a long time ago. She recovered and she rebuilt her ability to walk, talk, think, and everything, and became a motivational speaker. Her story about resilience is incredible. I come in with some ideas about how you can be more resilient. There are great interviews on this and a lot of good people like Dr. Jim Logan talking about pandemic stress and all these good things. I invite everyone to go to whatever you like to listen to for podcasts and find Stop Self-Sabotage by Pat Pearson.

I highly recommend you tune in. Pat, it has been great to catch up with you. It’s been too long. We’ve planned this interview on and off for a while and life got in the way but I’m glad you carved out the time to be with us. Thank you.

It’s my pleasure, Deb. Much good luck and good wishes to you with this podcast and keep helping people. It gives you great energy and a great focus in life. You’re to be much congratulated for doing that.

Thank you, Pat. We hit a year anniversary on Life After Corporate, so it’s been a great ride.

What a time to do it. Even if they were still working, it was life after corporate because their life in corporate change remarkably. I doubt that we’ll ever go back, frankly. Some of these changes have been permanently etched and not all bad by any estimation.

Some women have taken the majority of losses in this pandemic. For some, there will be no going back to corporate. They will be left up to their own resources to create something that they can control and generates revenue. Our mission in Life After Corporate is to show you step-by-step how you do that and how you get out of your own way in the process. That’s why it was important for me to invite you here to share with our readers because there’s nothing that holds us back. You can be anything you want to be. You can do anything you want to do as long as you’re willing to put in the work to overcome things like self-sabotage, increase your deserve level, and move out all of those subconscious barriers to success. Thank you.

LACO 49 | Self-Sabotage

Self-Sabotage: If sabotage is the care, resistance is the gas.

 

I like what you said, too, Deb that you don’t have the time to put up with this stuff anymore. To that point, nobody has the time. None of us. The earlier we take it on, the quicker it’ll get done. I’d invite any of your readers to invest in themselves and learn a few new things. Tell your story about that, Deb. The fact that I have you on my website, people will see you as a star of using the material. Tell us what happened to you.

I forget some of the details of the story but what I remember was that I took your information, applied it in my own life, then I had been asked to speak to about 50 women leaders in tech in a workshop format. I created a talk largely based on your content and some of my work called Women, Success & Self Sabotage. They were blown away. At the time, I was also doing a lot of leadership coaching. I did it for Ellevate Network. In that one talk, I generated probably 30 new client relationships. It was quite extraordinary.

I’m sure the same will happen to our readers and they’ll want to get the book and want to listen to your podcast. Once you embrace that there is this inner barrier that up until now you haven’t been aware of and yet, you have infinite power to control and move beyond, then it’s like the heavens open up and the angels sing. That’s what happened to me and I applied it to my own life. All I did was share it with other people. I gave you full credit. People were signing up to coach and it was a beautiful thing to be able to support people in that way.

The quote on my website was that your income went up 35% or something like that in the next six months, which is what we found, by the way. In all the years I’ve been doing this around the country and with groups and companies, what we found is the people who apply it and have a breakthrough, which means you learn something new and you keep applying it over time. You don’t just learn it, shut the book, and forget it. They saw 25% for every new thing they learned, so if they learn two new things, they apply 50%.

We saw this exponential going up in terms of success, which makes sense because you are your business. There’s no difference between you and how you feel in your business. Are you depressed? So is your business. You’re upset and you’re angry? So is your business. You’re happy and you’re in tune to make your life where you want it to be? So is your business. It’s not a nice idea to take care of yourself emotionally. It is critical to the outcomes you want.

It’s necessary for your business. I have an update for you. In 2020 during the pandemic, I doubled my revenue and we’re going to try and do it again in 2021. That’s why it’s important. No money, no mission. You don’t get to make an impact with your work if you can’t earn enough revenue to feed back into the business and to pay yourself well so that you can take care of yourself. It feels good, so you’re happy. Pat, thank you for that addition. It’s such a sincere pleasure to have the conversation with you. Thanks for making time.

It’s my pleasure indeed, Deb. Good luck to you. Bye-bye.

That’s it for this show. See you next time.

Important Links:

About Pat Pearson, MSSW

A seasoned speaker, business professional, psychotherapist, and business builder for over 30 years, Pat Pearson, MSSW brings powerful understandings to every keynote and seminar with measurable business gains.

Her clients describe her as practical and entertaining while delivering measurable results. Pat’s life has been dedicated to helping people achieve greater success in their business and personal lives.

Pat is the author of four books: STOP Self-Sabotage; You Deserve The Best; Passion: Reclaiming The Fire In Your Heart;and Party with a Purpose. HerAudio-of-the-Month-Club series, “How the Best Become Better“, addresses all of the elements of removing thinking barriers in order to move to the next level of success. With thousands of subscribers, the series continues to be a “must-have” for those seeking to achieve success in life and business.

She is a polished storyteller with a knack for making the complex easy to understand. National, local, and regional media throughout the United States have called upon her as an “expert resource” with important principles to help STOP Self-Sabotage. She recently appeared on Access Hollywood, CNN Radio, Fox Business, ABC, and NPR providing vital messages on today’s topics to help people to achieve their goals, dreams – and expand their visions.