Self Sabotage edited
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[00:00:00] Hey, guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda. I'm Laura. And I'm Kindra. And today we are gonna talk about self-sabotage, and it turns out it actually has two forms. One that we're more familiar with, the one that shows up before you take a risk, that meaning, like, you delay, you procrastinate, you undercut, or you hand yourself some sort of excuse before anyone can judge you.
That's the familiar one. The other one, though, shows up after something actually goes well, like a good week, or a strong review, or a manageable schedule for once in the past decade, And something in you brings it back down. That one gets misread as realism. I'm just being realistic, or you're being cautious instead of self-sabotage.
So today what we're gonna talk about is what each form actually is, how they sh- can show up in physician lives, and one way to catch each one before it finishes
self-sabotage is really anything that we do that works against the outcome that [00:01:00] we say we want. And most of us might only recognize the version that shows up before we're gonna do something hard or risky that might talk us out of it. like procrastinating on an application for, like say we're like we're done with our current job, but we're not applying for a new job.
We're just procrastinating that. Or maybe we know we're giving a talk, but we're procrastinating that and underpreparing for it, so we don't show up feeling confident. Or maybe it's picking a fight with your spouse on the morning of your board exam. Like those, they're just not gonna get us what we want.
And psychologists Edward Jones and Steven Berglas studied this in the 1970s, and he, they named it self-handicapping, which I don't think that we use that... I think handicap is not a cool word anymore. But that's what they called it, [00:02:00] self-handicapping, which was creating your own obstacle in advance so that a failure has a great explanation.
And the explanation isn't that I wasn't good enough. It's because, well, I got in a fight before the board exam or- Like I was too busy or- whatever that excuse was. It wasn't that I wasn't good enough. Mm-hmm. And this shows up a lot for doctors because we, we put a lot of weight in the idea that we're good enough, that we're really good, that we win gold stars, and if we don't, ooh, it does not feel good.
So it's like a shield that is built before the test, and that's, aimed at protecting our own reputation. And there's a reason that that feels necessary to us. Educational psychologist Martin Covington has some- it was called self-worth theory, and that argues that people equate their ability with their worth as a [00:03:00] human being.
So if effort and outcome are directly linked, full effort that still fails is read as proof of low ability and, and then low worth. This actually shows up a lot in the work of Carol Dweck who is a Stanford psychologist who wrote Mindset, and it shows up a ton in people with maybe natural gifts of intelligence who are told over and over again how smart they are instead of, being praised for how hard they work.
It messes us up because then when we think, "Oh, if I didn't do well, I'm not as good." So my son did this. When he was in middle school on one of his sports teams, I think it was basketball, I can't remember. But he came home one time, and he was like, " So-and-so's such a try-hard." And I'm like, "Bro, that is the whole point of sports.
You have to try your hardest. And you might not succeed- What are you, Michael Jordan? Yeah. Yeah. This is really [00:04:00] uncomfortable. You're gonna have to try your hardest, and you might, you might still not be the best one. That is the whole point of this. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? And, you know, culturally, I, I don't know.
When I was growing up, people got praised for being smart. They didn't get praised as much for working hard. And in fact, it did somehow say something negative about you if you had to work harder at something. But that research shows that the outcomes are so much better for those of us who are able to overcome that that idea that being smart is better than working hard.
And this idea of self-handicapping or self-impairing, it breaks that link between the idea of, our ability Is not in question here. It was external circumstances that had nothing to do with me, or I only gave half effort, so if I fail, then it doesn't mean [00:05:00] that I'm not capable. It's ... I'm not
You know, it, it, it could be called laziness. It's not laziness. It's really a self-protection, a worth protection strategy Not technically laziness, just looks like laziness from the outside. so that was the first version of self-sabotage. That less recognized version shows up after success, and psychologist Gay Hendricks named it the upper limit problem.
And he wrote about that in his book called The Big Leap. He uses this image of a thermostat where the, maybe the temperature's set to 68. If the room drifts a little too warm or too cold, the system will correct it, meaning it's not gonna let us get too far out of our comfort zone, either for bad or for good.
So it's not set for temperature, but for how much success, ease or good feeling we f- believe we're allowed. And, you know, our brains are just really like the [00:06:00] same thing over and over again, even if it completely sucks. Like, our brain's just like stable misery over getting out of our comfort zone and trying something new that might actually be better.
And the reason for that is that the brain is wired for survival. What has been going on has kept us alive thus far into our sweet little brains. It thinks that that's good enough. Like, we're alive. What more do you really want? We're ... Like, let's just keep this thing going, no matter how bad it feels.
And so that idea of thermostat is just keeping us at stay alive setting it can really limit the, the ease, the success, the development that we can, that we can experience. So if we drift past that setting and maybe have, like, a really genuinely good week, or if somebody gives us a really nice compliment, then that [00:07:00] thermostat gets set back down You know, nothing is broken.
That's just where it's set, and that's where it seems to be comfortable staying. And social psychologist William Swann has a theory as well. I love all these theories. They just are so fascinating to me. His theory is self-verification theory, and it offers a mechanism for why that reset happens. He says...
Well, his research found that people are motivated to keep outside feedback consistent with their existing self-concept, even when the existing self-concept is negative, maybe inaccurate, and even when that means undermining a positive outcome to make it happen. What? Isn't that so interesting? So someone's internal script, which honestly might not even be their script, it might be a parent's script that, that, you know, that was [00:08:00] given to them or, or an attending, a toxic attending, or I've seen it even with, like, piano teacher when someone was very young.
if we have that script that says, " I'm the one who's always behind And we have that in it during a week where that's not even true, it doesn't feel like relief. It feels like, "Oh, something's wrong because I'm doing something differently, and the system wants to correct it." So that first version of self-sabotage protects us from trying because if we don't try too hard, then we won't look bad if we fail.
And the other one protects us from actually accepting the success that we've already achieved. It protects us from trusting what we already did so that, I don't know, maybe we don't disappoint ourselves in the future Yeah. So let's make this real. Let's apply this to a couple of [00:09:00] examples and see if we can bring it alive.
So here's a before the risk. So this is the self-sabotage that happens before we even take a leap. So we're talking about a physician who has had research idea for two years. It's a retrospective study on a medication interaction she keeps catching, and it isn't very well documented yet. So there's a real gap in the literature, and a mentor of hers is willing to co-author.
She hasn't submitted the pr- proposal yet, and each time it comes up close, something more urgent appears. It's always legitimate but it's never quite getting her to the point where she just needs to submit the proposal. And so the cost to her isn't just the paper or getting it submitted. It's two years of, "I've been meaning to," or, "There's this thing I wanna write up," or whatever you can, whatever you can fathom as the story And, and because she's not [00:10:00] doing that, we're not really finding out whether this idea holds up, right?
'Cause it's not getting put out there. It's not getting made available
So another physician wants to lead the department. He doesn't mention it to anyone, and he actually seems relieved when someone less qualified gets it. The relief is the tell. He's lost something after wanting it visibly is scarier than never even being seen to have wanted it at all, right?
Or how about another physician that's been, quote, "Too busy" to go on a second date with someone that she actually liked, but it's been months, and the schedule excuse has held, held up pretty fine on its own, but it only becomes visible as sabotage next to the fact that she actually has found time to do a lot of things that actually mattered a lot less to her.
So staying busy doesn't just protect against professional failure, it's just as effective as keeping potential [00:11:00] happiness at a safe, untested distance. Yeah, so that's self-protective. So here's a couple of examples after the success, right? That recalibration, that internal thermostat. So if we talk about our physician that finally gets a fair schedule and a manageable panel of patients.
So after week one, he's skeptical, right? He just doesn't trust it at all. Week two, he goes so far as to volunteer for extra call that nobody asked him to even take. And then by week three, he is back on that schedule that gets him to... that gets everybody around him saying, " Man, I don't know how you do it. I, I don't know how you have so many cases, so many patients."
And what, right? No one told him to do that. No one imposed him, in, that on him. He actually worked to rebuild that himself Yeah, that one hits a little home. Okay, how about another physician? Another physician gets actually a specific [00:12:00] praise in a review, right? Everybody knows about these patient reviews, these department reviews.
The, the review goes something like this: "You are excellent with families. Patients trust you," right? You have all these scores, trust provider score, all these scores, and you've scored excellent quarter after quarter. But before this sentence even lands, here's the disclaimer: " Yeah, but I missed a lab value way back in March, and that caused the patient to go to the hospital."
Right? That took about four seconds, and the compliments returned, right? Totally doesn't even land. Mm-hmm. Or how about another physician? This one might hit home. She finally pays off her last loan, a real milestone. Everybody celebrates that, right? Mm-hmm. And guess what? She actually paid it off above or the original planned payoff, and within a month, has committed to a renovation that she can't quite afford and hadn't even been plan- planning on before the payoff.
So on paper, it looks like reward, but in practice, it's the [00:13:00] surplus getting spent down before anyone has to sit with the fact that things were, for once, actually working. So neither pattern is really about the task. The first protects against being seen trying, right, being a try-hard, right, A, is what it's called-
and then failing. And the second protects against being seen as actually succeeding, but being so skeptical that you don't even trust it. Either way, the cost is the same. You don't find out what you're capable of because you intervene before the results even come in. Yeah, I like this, 'cause my husband is a fan of being a realist.
That's why. And I'm like- Oh, my gosh ... no one ever calls themself a pessimist. Every pessimist calls themselves, "I'm just a realist." No, you have an emotional home- I have another word for that ... that is on the negative side. Right? And that's... We see this. There- We do this to ourselves. Oh, yeah. Like, I'm uncomfortable with compliments, [00:14:00] so I'm always gonna throw out the I-got-it-at-Target card.
Or, you know, whatever it is. So let's say that you've gotten some awareness with some of these. I see that I am blocking myself from actually going for something because I'm scared of failing, and that would mean something about my worth as a human being. Or, wow, I notice that, like, I am uncomfortable, like, just enjoying my success.
I've always gotta like... You see people, right, that, like, there's just gotta be a problem. Like, that's just the emotional home. But maybe you, if you become aware of it, then you can start to change that. It's okay to be happy. It is okay to rest. It is okay to treat yourself well. But you're gonna have to notice your own patterns, because there's a good chance that you might be contributing to it inadvertently, not on purpose.
But, like, your brain may have set your thermostat where you don't want it to be. So an example of what you can start doing, if you're doing things before you take the [00:15:00] risk. You can come up with what feels like a legitimate reason in the moment like finishing an urgent chart or a more pressing task It's not gonna feel like an intentional choice to avoid doing the thing that you really should be doing.
So the tool would be to name the pattern before acting on the excuse. Is this actually more urgent, or does this just feel more comfortable than putting myself out there, or doing the thing that's new, or the, the task that is more difficult to achieve? So first step, pick the thing that you've been meaning to do for weeks and just...
It's always just initiating the thing that's the hardest. So just put 30 minutes on the calendar this week, maybe even 10 minutes, maybe even five minutes. If it's a big paper, you can open up a doc and put the title on there, and give yourself credit for it. You made forward progress. Don't make things such a [00:16:00] big deal that it's intimidating to do it.
You can break things up into tiny, tiny, tiny manageable chunks. So the goal would be just to d- work on it five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, not necessarily to finish it, but to start to find out what it is that you've actually been avoiding. I make things into a big freaking deal in my head.
Yeah. And then when I actually start the task, it's like, like, Laura last time mentioned, it, it actually just takes four minutes to unload the dishwasher. And yet I have made things ex- exceptionally dramatic before. So if you are somebody who has noticed, gotten some awareness with this, that you might be self-sabotaging after you have...
S- something goes right, you, like my husband, are
just a realist. It doesn't register as sabotage, right? No, I, I- It just feels like- ... allow this to happen ... you're just being a realist. So the tool would be to catch the specific sensation that Hen- Hendricks describes, a nervous or an undeserving flutter underneath the surface when something's going [00:17:00] unusually well.
People do this all the time. Like, I, I'm afraid that the bottom's gonna drop out, or when's the other shoe gonna drop? So we'll ruin, like, our, our positive experience early, or we won't even let ourselves go there in the first place. Yeah. So just name it before... Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Brene Brown calls that foreboding joy.
We've talked about this in a previous podcast. We love our Brene Brown. She gives us such great language, but that's what she talks about, this foreboding joy, like, like, where you can't even sit present in the moment for that second because you're like, "Oh, nope," like, like, "What?" Like, it's so fleeting because your brain is offering up what bad could possibly happen on this, what, what's right around the corner, right?
Yeah. So just name it. Like, whoop, this is just my thermostat kicking in. This actually isn't a problem. So the next time you get a genuine compliment or a positive feedback, or you have a great week, or [00:18:00] somebody asks you on a date, or whatever it is, let it stand for 10 seconds before you start qualifying it, before you start correcting it or finding the next thing to worry about.
So ask yourself, one, what have I been meaning to do that I'm not doing? And number two, what's the real reason underneath the legitimate sounding one that I've conjured up for myself? Ask yourself, what went unusually well recently that I have not let myself enjoy? And what did I do to bring that back down?
And what would be so bad if I just let it stand So just to wrap up, one form of self-sabotage keeps you from trying to avoid failure. And if you haven't read Carol Dweck's book Mindset, especially if you have kids, this book is super helpful and just...
Or if you teach trainees, this is a very, very good book and framework to help you stay out of that trap. So that's that first kind of self-sabotage. The other keeps you [00:19:00] from enjoying what you already did. And just remember, like, this is part of that skill of metacognition, of learning how to think about our thinking.
You know, it's not gonna show up with a big banner saying, "Here comes self-sabotage." We have to learn how to recognize it as it comes, and because it's gonna sound legit. It's gonna sound- Mm-hmm ... real. that is the trick we get into, is when we believe all of the thoughts our brains offer to us. That's when we, we get stuck in story land.
that first one is gonna sound like legitimate delay. The second one sounds like we're being a realist, and both of them are just going to thwart us. We're gonna be trading this unknown outcome that could be good, could actually be good, for a manageable disappointment, which our brain thinks is preferable.
We... Just remember, we don't fix a thermostat by staring at it once. You [00:20:00] fix it by catching your hand on the dial. And so if you're stuck, and it's winter and your thermostat is set at 53, and you're shivering to death, go over there and turn that thing up. Before the excuse, before you start picking a fight to keep yourself from doing well on your test, before you hand back that compliment Just Pay attention and, adjust that thermostat before you sabotage yourself again.
And I will say, you're gonna self-sabotage. We all do it. But learning that it's actually a thing is the first thing, and then starting to become aware of it helps us to do it less over time
And that's it for today's episode, friends. And if you found this conversation helpful, the best way to support us is to subscribe, so click that button now and leave us a rating and review because it helps other physicians find our podcast, and it moves us up on the list.
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