Stop Doing That Sh*t: End Self-Sabotage and Demand Your Life Back

by Gary John Bishop

The reality is, you create your experience of life in your self-talk and then act accordingly.

Real breakthroughs become available in your life when you interrupt yourself and your automatic responses to whatever life presents you with.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote: “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”

There’s nothing quite so damaging as the human desire to be right.

You just can’t keep responding in ordinary ways if you are truly out to live an extraordinary life.

But it’s important to understand that self-sabotage can also lead to very destructive behaviors.

Self-discipline is nothing more than doing what you say you will do, when you least feel like doing it.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” —Viktor Frankl

“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.” —Martin Heidegger

If you spend your life wanting to be happy, by its very nature you’re constantly starting from a place of unhappy.

Human beings are much more engrossed with the task of getting to the goal than actually achieving it or, God forbid, facing the horror of having to permanently deal with life AFTER they’ve done the something they’d always wanted to do.

“The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life.” —C. G. Jung

The second saboteur is what I call your “social conclusion,” or the fundamental lens through which you see and interact with other people.

Gossip is not fucking harmless or funny. You’re peddling in negative, self-righteous BS. Stop talking about other people. It’s a distraction from owning and changing your own life.

When you indulge in gossip, you are becoming the kind of human being who gets off on throwing other human beings under the bus.

“Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” —C. G. Jung

“Your perception will become clear only when you can look into your soul.”

Instead of a point of view, it’s what I call your point of experience. The place from which you experience everything.

“Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.” —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Your past dominates your potential. You don’t live a life of “anything is possible”; you live a life of “some things are possible, given my past.”

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” —Karl Marx

“In our ordinary common sense we think of time as a one-way motion from the past, through the present, and on into the future. And that carries along with it another impression, which is to say that life moves from the past to the future in such a way that what happens now and what will happen is always the result of what has happened in the past. In other words, we seem to be driven along.”

Buckminster Fuller, the twentieth-century inventor and visionary, said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

“. . . A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” —Charles Dickens