Are you your own worst enemy?
Self-sabotage is a nasty thing, and the worst part is most of the time people don’t even realizing they are doing it.
Yesterday, I had to come face to face with self-sabotage in a way that I didn’t expect: my health.
For years I have been struggling with the after effects of having my thyroid removed due to autoimmune thyroid disease. Post-operation, I have found myself desperate to reclaim the energy, mental clarity, mood, and physical health that I had before the gland was removed.
These past six years have certainly been a journey, where I’ve gone through good periods and bad periods of functioning. Sometimes I feel almost normal, other times I feel like a train that has totally run out of steam.
So in my continuing efforts to improve my condition, I visited a natural health store to pick up some vitamins I’d read are important for my condition. There, I ended up spending over an hour discussing therapies with a natural health practitioner (who happened to be the store manager), that not only helped me get different (and supposedly better) vitamins, but also exposed many of the daily habits I have that self-sabotage my efforts to get well.
Under the advice of the naturopath (hey, I’ve got nothing to lose!), I am removing caffeine and dairy from my diet for a few weeks to see if that improves my constant fatigue, sluggishness, and mood. While I am not convinced the answer is this simple, I am willing to try this approach since what I’ve been doing hasn’t been working.
Yet this morning as I planned out my meals for the day, I realized just exactly how much caffeine and dairy I eat on a daily basis. Lots of coffee, chocolate, diet soda, milk, cheese, yogurt, etc. I must eat a dairy product at every meal!
As I realized how much of a dietary transformation this would require, I simultaneously realized the extent of self-sabotaging I have been doing over the years in terms of healing myself. While my search for supplements and habits that would improve my condition occurred on a daily basis, so did my unknowing sabotage of those same efforts.
Many of us self-sabotage in some way or another. I think that people who are endeavoring to live Uncommonly have a higher tendency to self-sabotage because on a subconscious level there is a fear of success and a guilt for living better than those around us.
The ways we sabotage ourselves and our Uncommon Efforts may be subconscious or completely ignorant. Did I know that dairy and caffeine were disrupting my medicine and aggravating the things I was trying to heal? No, I honestly didn’t. But I was still acting on them on a daily basis and causing my success to be hindered, which to me is the definition of sabotage.
The moral of my story: for six years I’ve been trying to find success at a certain thing, and that success has been elusive. If what you are doing continues to not achieve your goal, step back, ask for help or advice from others, and get an outside opinion about what you might be doing that is hindering you from reaching your goal. Then, be willing to try a new approach.
Part of living an Uncommon Life is to continue to strive for not only reaching your goals, but learning and growing as much as you can while reaching them. Don’t let self-sabotage, whether it is unconscious or ignorant, hinder your Uncommon Life!
Here’s to your Uncommon Life,
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