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

by Gary John Bishop

This wee book is my take on finally uncovering and transforming your bullshit. The kind that constantly sabotages your life.

People are little more than a living conversation, both internal and spoken. A dialogue in a body. A skin-and-bone bag that talks, and it talks about everything, and the limit of that talk is the limit of that life. Period.

In short, you are what you talk about, or rather you are the nature of what you talk about.

The confusion is that you think life is a certain way and you are just reporting on what you are seeing. But that’s actually backward. The reality is, you create your experience of life in your self-talk and then act accordingly. And you’re doing it all the time. You’re never (like never, ever) acting upon life itself. What you are actin...

It’s not the sucky life you seemingly have but your dialogue about your life that has you by the throat, and the vast majority of that dialogue is blissfully unnoticed and therefore unexplored by you. It’s running in the background.

In the day-to-day living of our lives, we mostly just experience the moods and emotions of our internal chatter without doing the work to determine what it’s really saying.

The problem with that approach is that it doesn’t address the muck. You just can’t be one way to overcome another way that you don’t like. You can’t short-circuit the process.

The way we work is that we can only ever be one way at a time. You can’t be angry and loving simultaneously in a single moment. It’s one or the other. You can’t be forgiving and resentful or indifferent and sad. At any moment in time, you’re always being one way and ONLY one way.

A big part of living the life you want is taking ownership of your choices, now and in the future. This book is more like a voyage of self-discovery, of thinking about and uncovering and ultimately revealing your true nature. When you finally understand where you are coming from, you are giving yourself a greater shot at changing how your life will go.

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

You’re not up on your toes, awake to your potential. You’re not alive to what it is that truly lights you up or engaged with the kind of life-changing stuff that will make this all worthwhile.

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

It’s always much easier to measure the decline of others than your own.

But here’s the thing. The sabotage I’m talking about isn’t limited to those blatantly obvious examples. It’s also something that happens in lots of little ways throughout the day. It’s something we all do, and we’re doing it pretty much all the time.

It can be something as simple as constantly hitting that snooze button in the morning, or the tendency to show up a little late to places you’re scheduled to be.

There are probably examples in your relationships too. Think about the times when you argue over nothing, hold onto grudges too long, hide or lie about your emotions, judge yourself or others too harshly, or just don’t call your mom or dad or friends as much as you should. Surely that’s not self-sabotage?

We become disconnected from the people we care about. And we feel justified. Oh boy, are we justified. There’s nothing quite so damaging as the human desire to be right.

There’s a reason why so few make it out of the trap of their own mind. The trap all too often seems to be just fine from day to day.

But ask yourself, if you really wanted to advance in your career, why would you be giving all of your attention to crappy little problems like not being able to get up in the morning? Why are you getting wrapped up in petty no-difference crap rather than the kinds of issues and actions that are going to move mountains, that are going to authentically engage you with real progress, real accomplishment, and real purpose?

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

It’s not a feeling or an attitude. It’s more like a sick-of-your-own-nonsense approach to certain areas of life. If that deflates you, look again. It needs to enliven and inspire you. Telling yourself the truth is rarely easy, but it’s a surefire way to free yourself from your own subconscious self-sabotage trap. What makes self-reflection challenging is that you’re both the con artist and the one being conned.

THE THREE SABOTEURS—AN INTRODUCTION

If you want to start doing something about your not-so-private little head game of self-sabotage, you’ll need to first systematically uncover and then go about interrupting the conversations you have with yourself. Not the surface thoughts, but rather the repetitive, profoundly deep and dark internal dialogues that rattle around in your mental cage and guide your every thought and emotion. The stuff under the rug.

This will allow you to finally see your “three saboteurs,” three simple internal statements that do real and lasting damage to you and your life. The three saboteurs are the fundamental

conclusions you have come to about yourself, the other people in your life, and life itself.

Why do you do what you do? Again, go beyond the usual answer you give yourself. Think. If you keep living this way, where is it all headed? I mean really headed? Not some wispy concept of your future but rather a down-in-the-dirt look at where your current actions are leading you. Well? You might find those questions tough to answer, but this is the kind of digging that will release you from your trap of sabotage.

When it comes down to it, no one can seriously fuck up your life quite as magnificently as you can. And you do.

What is “willpower,” anyway? A feeling? An emotion? A mood?

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

In other words, acting in a positive way when you most likely feel negative. When I say “acting” I don’t mean “pretending”; I mean TAKE THE FREAKING ACTIONS! So, if you’re waiting for the energy or positivity or enthusiasm or for your chakra to glow a bold yellow, enjoy the wait. It’ll be a long one.

Whatever you are out to accomplish in this life, you’ll have to get more than a little okay with the experience of struggle or, hell, even overwhelm. In many ways, your all-out insistence that real-life change should be comfortable is what’s holding you down. Growth—real, seismic growth—hurts. Sometimes a lot.

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

Ponder this: What if the point of your life (not anyone else’s, remember? YOURS) is to continually and subconsciously set up “the game” of your life, a relentless cycle of sabotage and recovery?

You predict your relationships, your finances, the weather, politics, your health, your career, you name it. You have an opinion about how all of that (and more) is going to go.

It’s all automatic, spun out by your subconscious in an instant. Hell, there are even things in life you won’t take on because you’ve already determined they’re a waste of time for you. Predictably.

In terms of survival, what better way to live a long and relatively safe life than to continually barf up the same kinds of issues and problems and then apply the same tired and useless solutions? Your own personal Matrix of old emotions, old complaints, old experiences. Your “no reality” reality. Every day is a new day, right? No, every day is the freaking same day.

You apply the same eyes and ears to every situation life throws at you and spin in your own mini tempest of the same old dramas and upsets. Circumstances may change, but what stays the same is you and how you see them, as well as how you deal with them and ultimately how you participate in life. The problem here is that it’s often hard to see those automatic predictions we’re making every day in an effort to survive. It’s hard to uncover the themes and story lines that underlie our life events.

Wanting and lusting after change while gripped by the anxiety of keeping life safe, certain, and survivable. Minimize the judgment, minimize the failure, crush the pain and the uncertainty and the chaos of real change. Safety eventually wins. Survival is the victor.

That’s what we call a life. Wanting new; addicted to the familiar. Even when the familiar is as dull as dishwater. When it comes down to it, you’ll willingly trade in what you want for what you know. You’re doing it right now in your life!

Underneath it all, it’s not about the kids or the family or the money or the risk or the judgment of others. It’s all survival. Safety over aliveness. Predictability over joy or love or freedom or the life of your dreams.

What makes it so hard to see is that you never fully witness the trap you are stuck in. You only get to live with the consequences of that trap. Your entire life to this point has been a series of actions subconsciously driven to trap you in the same bubble of life.

Take a minute to allow yourself to take stock here. What has been the underlying experie...

Do the work here. Start to see the issues of your life through the lens of what I’m saying—your repetitive and destructive behaviors are supposed to be that way! Your life was set up to repeat them. They’re also what keeps you being that familiar you, living with the same constraints, weighed down by the past, always in the same, tired struggle for a better day but occasionally sedated by a glimmer of hope or optimism.

It’s not a lack of something on your part. It’s more like the presence of something in the shadows.

As with most people, it probably didn’t happen overnight. It was a series of seemingly unconnected events in your life where you made some important shifts in your perspective until they all came together and left you with a very distinct experience of being alive. Your experience of this life, what it is to be you and live life this way, was constructed by you. Period.

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

As you age, your view becomes more and more restricted; you become a narrow, constrained, polarized version of what you started out with. In short, you are addicted to the version of yourself you have become, and your entire existence is about perpetuating that myth.

In your earliest years, your life was all about what was going on around you. It wasn’t about you. You were gripped by a compelling curiosity about the world you’d been dropped into.

These days? These days your life is completely about you, how you’re doing, how you’re not doing, how others are affecting you and have affected you. It’s about fixing you, improving you, altering you, changing you. A life of trying to get to that day in the future when it will all turn out in that perfect happy ending you’ve always imagined.

That day in the future when you’re like a fucking ninja and you finally get everything you wanted. And the birds are singing. Yeah, the birds would be there too. And that’s what keeps you stuck.