It comes as a surprise to many business owners that despite how hard they work, there are things they’re probably doing everyday that are undermining their success.

This truth is especially hard to accept if you’re a health professional, because you’ve built your entire practice around living a healthy life and helping your clients practice good boundaries, self-care, and yes, avoid self-sabotage in their own lives.

But still – we all fall victim to it. Despite how much we know.

And we don’t even realise it’s happening.

This is why I say again and again that you don’t need more information. You really don’t. You need to learn how to implement and follow through on what you already know.

If you’re feeling like you need to go out and get more information, more knowledge and more skills before you can take action, I’ve written this post for you today.

These are the symptoms of self-sabotage. And they will hold you back more than any other problem you encounter in your practice.

1. Procrastination

Symptoms:

• Putting things off or waiting until the last minute despite the anxiety this causes you
• Intrusive thoughts about the thing you’re avoiding
• Believing that you work better under pressure
• Delivering sub-par work because you didn’t give yourself enough time to do a good job

Outcome:

Shoddy work and the belief that I’m not good enough – “why do I always do this to myself?”

2. Perfectionism

Symptoms:

• Avoiding action until you have collected, analysed and made sense of every possible piece of information and potential outcome
• Proofreading and editing everything you create about 500 times
• Dozens of unfinished projects and great ideas that never got off the ground

Outcome:

Feeling stuck and never ready to take action, fear of being judged, rejected and ridiculed. Constantly waiting until you feel ready and safe.

3. Busyness

Symptoms

• Always emailing, on facebook, cleaning
• Or my personal favourite – baking
• Creating new filing systems and work for yourself
• Finding reasons to leave the office – coffee run, anyone?

Outcome:

You are so damn busy that there’s no way you could have got THAT THING done, right?! You feel like you have a lack of choice, freedom and a little bit like you’re stuck on a hamster wheel with no progress to show.

4. Being Unorganised

Symptoms

• Double booking yourself
• Cancelling appointments because you didn’t think it through
• Rewriting reports and notes because you couldn’t find what you had started earlier
• Having to re-educate the same team member over the same issue again and again due to lack of process
• Unable to write a report or update notes because it happened 4 weeks ago (oops) and you can’t remember the session

Outcome:

Feeling like a mad scientist, overwhelmed and like there is just too much on your plate to handle and do well.

5. Choosing “nice to have” over purposeful and strategic

Symptoms:

• Conversations that go on for too long without a real purpose
• Spending a lot of time exploring details that aren’t going to help you make a decision and move forward
• An email chain that could have been prevented with a single phone call
• Not implementing the systems in your business that you need for scheduling, invoicing and client management

Outcome:

Your head is cluttered with a lot of nice to know stuff that stops you from being able to execute with a clear sense of purpose and strategy. You’re exhausted and disappointed that nothing seems to be working out properly and everything takes so. damn. long.

6. Poor self-care

Symptoms

• Waking up with coffee and going to sleep with wine
• Flopping on the lounge at the end of the day and not moving because you have nothing left in the tank
• Less than 3000 steps a day
• Not looking after your posture (I see you slouching and sitting all day)
• No water at all during the day
• Eating out frequently

Outcome:

You feel slow, sluggish, sore, tired, hungry, tired yet can’t get a good night’s sleep. You’re anxious and annoyed that you’re not looking after yourself like you’d like to. You say no to opportunities because of how you feel about yourself.

7. Over-commitment

Symptoms

• Avoiding scheduling your time because… you don’t have any time to do that
• A belief that you don’t need to write it down because you’re a wizard who remembers EVERYTHING!
• Always saying yes out of obligation and fear of what will happen if you say no

Outcome:

You make a lot of mistakes and work tends to fall through the cracks because there is just too much of it handle. You’re embarrassed and you want to give up because you just don’t enjoy this work any more.

 

Which of these signs do you see in yourself?

This post isn’t about berating you or making you feel less than. I see these traits in myself all the time – it is a very human thing to get in our own way.

But I want you to be real with yourself – how are you shooting yourself in the foot each day?

How are we going to tackle that to make sure you see your potential in 2017?

I have two options for you:

1. Share your plan to tackle self-sabotage with us in the comments below – what will you do differently? This blog might help you answer that question.
2. If you don’t have a plan, join me, in person, where we can workshop this live together in a room with other clinicians in private practice who are ready to make 2017 a year of forward momentum and success:

If you sign up for the 2 Day San Francisco Masterclass before September 1, you’ll receive 3 whole months of group private practice coaching with me, for free.

Seriously – “I can’t afford it” is no longer an excuse, because we’ll be working together on how you can use a simple strategy that I teach all of my clients to help them get more referrals, clients and income into their business in 6 weeks – just in time for San Fran.

Learn More About The Masterclass