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

by Gary John Bishop

Whatever truth you own doesn’t own you.

You are in a perpetual state of fucking yourself over so that you can repeatedly save yourself from what fucked you over in the first place!

If you need to, go back and review to make sure you’re set and ready for what’s next. Specifically, think about what you were thrown into in your life. What are the things you couldn’t control? In what ways have you been telling yourself that these things have shaped you? What established truths do you have about things in your past? Where have you gotten stuck?

You see, there are three pivotal and everlasting items, three fundamental cornerstones of life that came out of that thrown-ness, that arose from that myriad of established truths that became locked in that magic little sponge. Immovable and permanent stains on your subconscious that shape and contort everything you see and everything you hear. I call these the “three saboteurs.”

A saboteur is a subconscious conclusion that you made at a definitive point of your life, the kind of indelible mark that stays with you to this day. It will remain with you until the day you die.

When I encounter them, they’re a warning that I’m about to start drifting into my predictable default life. My self-fulfilling prophecy. When I recognize them, I’m able to pivot. When I use the words “awareness” or “self-aware,” this is what I’m referring to. An up-close and very personal relationship to your own wiring; a relationship that gives you in-the-moment options instead of just fate.

Your actions are always in alignment with your conclusions. You might not immediately see the pebble drop into the pond, but you will see the ripples it leaves behind.

By the end of the first two decades or so of life, the

arrived at a set of fundamental conclusions about three things: • Yourself • Others • Life

You’ve become so fascinated by your own temporary solutions, so seduced by the mirage of the future, that you can’t see it’s an illusion.

The first saboteur we’re going to dive into is what you’ve concluded about yourself. I call this your “personal conclusion.”

This is the first and most primary conclusion you will need to understand to finally get yourself out of this pattern of sabotaging your life.

Here’s how your personal conclusion came to be. During your formative years, you inadvertently captured a handful of “treasured” items in that magic little sponge—some you picked up in early childhood, others a little later—about who you are and how you see yourself, your capabilities, and, most significantly, your shortcomings. Especially those shortcomings, because conclusions are never positive.

It’s a criticism, an internal, repeating criticism of self. The flaw that people are referring to when they roll out the old “I’m not perfect” line to make themselves look good to others.

Your negative conclusions don’t mean you can’t experience happiness or joy or optimism.

You don’t walk around with these conclusions constantly on your mind or at the very top of your to-do list

(Unless you’re failing at something. Oh, if that’s the case, then it’s right in your face and choking the life out of you.) Your personal conclusion is like a never-ending, never-changing internal guide. It keeps you pegged to the life you have, and it always comes back to mind, no matter how good life gets. It’s kinda like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. You can do it for a while, but eventually, up it comes.

In many ways, your circumstances are nothing more than context that your conclusion gets to dance with. Everybody’s working on their circumstances. Is it any wonder the conclusion remains?

Your conclusion about yourself always begins with an “I.” It’s stuff like this: “I’m not smart enough.” “I’m a loser.” “I’m different.” “I don’t matter.” “I’m incapable.” “I’m not loved.” Or even all the way down the hole to “I’m worthless.”

The question you need to answer is “What have I concluded about myself?” This is the fundamental experience of yourself, the inherent design that you continually try to overcome and yet somehow always end up with again. Your particular conclusion. It’s the thing you say to yourself when no one is looking, when there’s nothing to prove, no one to impress. Just you and your thoughts.

Think about that for a moment. Think about that persistent, pressing experience you have of yourself in this life. Connect the dots here.

Every time you’re pressed, stressed, or fail at something, up it rises.

It produces a stream of connected thoughts and emotions, all automatically.

Now you can see why positive thinking or personal affirmations of “I am enough” or “I am successful” seem so fake, so fucking useless and weak, because deep down, at the very heart of you, there’s a gnawing pain.

And guess what? Not everyone who has that kind of internal conclusion lives in a van down by the river! No!

They’re keeping it hidden from view, guarded, pushed out of mind, out of sight. That’s their struggle. The daily battle between their worst

self and the limit of what they see as possible, a limit that has been pulled down, shrunk, and diminished over days and weeks and months and years. Is it any wonder we have become so resigned to the lives we have? “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” —Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Again, it’s not as if you are going around in life constantly in that dialogue with yourself. It’s more that your life is systematically organized around what you have concluded.

Try on the idea that your life—how you look, how you speak, where you live, how you live—is all to project a certain image of yourself while at the same time hiding another version of yourself from public view—the one you really believe to be true.

Right now, get straight with yourself. Take a look behind all the BS, all the hope, all the wants, needs, and plans for the future. Forget the past, forget the reasons, justifications, and excuses—what is the underlying dilemma you face with yourself?

Take a long, hard look at those times in your life when you’re most struggling, most tested. What is it that comes up for you? You cannot move from this chapter until this is solid.

What are the automatic, reactionary thoughts you have when you suffer setbacks in life? What popped into your head when you got fired from that job or passed over for that promotion?

Again, set aside all the surface stuff. What do you say to yourself about you in those situations? Okay. There yet? Once this is absolutely clear for you, you have the first critical piece of this important jigsaw in place.

PERSONAL CONCLUSION—“I’M _______________________.” Go ahead, write it in here.

You share your life with people! That includes the people you don’t talk to anymore.

The next step as we fill out this picture of yourself is that you’ll need to do some work to unveil what you have concluded about people. Not just some people. All people.

It takes as much effort to live a crappy life as it does a great one. And you’re the only one who can choose which you want to live.

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

From all of those life experiences, THIS is what you have concluded about other people. This is who they are for you. Again, not who they actually are or who they could be but rather who they definitively are to you.

The most important thing to get here, like everything else in this book, is that this is not something that was done to you.

Your social conclusion is the perfect mode of survival.

Unfortunately, you’re often focused on surviving events in life that just don’t need to be survived!

So, what do these social conclusions look like?

This is stuff like “People are controlling” or “People can’t be trusted.”

We’re constantly viewing the people around us through the lens of these conclusions. Meanwhile, we’re manipulating and shaping ourselves—how we act, talk, dress—to keep people from exposing our most painful truth, that which we have concluded.

THROUGH THE FILTER THEY GO

When I say that we view people through the perspective of our conclusion, what we’re also doing is testing them to see how they measure up to what we’ve concluded. Do they conform? Do they conflict?

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.

Remember, you are the nature of what you talk about.

Whatever someone else does to you, it doesn’t mean you automatically change who you are, because when you do, you become a smaller human being.