The Real Reason You Keep Self-Sabotaging

Have you ever noticed that the moment your life starts getting better, you somehow find a way to ruin it? In this episode, I'm breaking down why self-sabotage doesn't happen when you're at rock bottom—it happens when your success starts pushing beyond the identity you've created for yourself. I'll show you how to identify the invisible ceiling holding you back and give you practical tools to finally change the beliefs that keep pulling you back to where you've always been. Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin designed to help you break through what’s keeping you from your next level. Get $100 off your ticket: https://robdial.short.gy/freedomlive The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life. Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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• 1:48Speaker 02

  Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're somebody who wants to build yourself into a high performer, but you can't figure out how to stop procrastinating or self-sabotaging, I am running a free live workshop the evening of August 27th to teach you the psychology of high performance. And I'm going to teach you how to break your old fears and limiting beliefs that are limiting your capacity to succeed. Go to 2026workshop.com right now. It is absolutely free. I will be live and I'm going to be doing a Q and A after. So once again, go to 2026workshop.com and I will see you live on the workshop. And today I want to talk to you about why you self-sabotage

• 2:32Speaker 02

  at the exact moment when things start going well in your life. And I want you to actually think of your own life for a second. Think about the last time that you truly blew something up. I'm willing to bet it wasn't in your worst week. It was in one of your best weeks. You have the best month that you've had in your business, and then the next month is crap. You finally get consistent at the gym. You're down 15 pounds. You feel amazing. And then out of nowhere, you have the worst four days of eating that you've had all year. Or you're in a great relationship. You meet somebody incredible. They're healthy. They're good for you. They're actually like calm for once. There's no chaos or drama. They treat you well. And then you find yourself picking apart everything that they do and starting a fight over something that does not matter.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Do you see the pattern here? Nobody self-sabotages at rock bottom. You self-sabotage during the good times, when things start going better than they've ever been before. And if you don't understand why that happens, you'll spend the rest of your life setting bigger goals, chasing harder stuff to do, hiring a coach, buying a program, and then resetting yourself back to the same place over and over and over again, year after year. And you'll think there's something wrong with you, but there's nothing wrong with you. There's just a ceiling that is invisible to you. And today I'm going to talk to you about how to find yours and what to do about it. So here's what I want you to understand. You don't have a ceiling on your goals.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  You have a ceiling on your identity, your identity of who you actually think that you are. And your goals are never allowed to go higher than your identity for very long. If you achieve more than you think it's possible for you to achieve for a little while, you will eventually self-sabotage and bring yourself back to quote unquote, "normal." So you can want a $2 million a year business. You can want a great marriage. You can want an incredible body. You can want peace in your life. Wanting is the easy part, because wanting costs you nothing. But you will only ever get and achieve what matches who you believe that you are. And I've talked about identity being like a thermostat before, right? Like you said, a thermostat, it's 72 degrees.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  The house heats up and eventually the AC clicks on and drags it back to 72 degrees. That's exactly how identity works and how self-sabotage unconsciously brings you back to your 72 degrees. But here's what I want to add to it today, because I don't think most people take it far enough. It's not just your income and your success that is set at 72 degrees. It's not just your weight. It's also like your happiness has a set point. Your peace that you think that you're allowed to feel has a set point. How loved you're willing to feel and what love you're allowed to let in, quote unquote, "allowed to let in," has a set point. How much ease you'll tolerate in your life has a set point.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  And if we go a level deeper into it, because I really want you to truly understand what's happening in the brain, because once you actually see this, like you can't really unsee it, there's something that's in psychology that's called cognitive dissonance. And most people have heard of it, but they've heard of it kind of in the wrong context. Like they think of it as holding two beliefs that don't match, which is true. But here's how this actually matters to you. When there is a gap between what you believe about yourself and what's actually happening in your life, your brain experiences that gap as like genuine discomfort. It goes, no, no, no, this is wrong. Sound the alarms. And it will not stop working at self-sabotaging you

• 6:08Speaker 02

  to get you back to that normal place until that gap is closed. This will change your life. You truly understand is that your brain has two ways to close that gap. Number one is it can update your long-lasting beliefs about yourself, or it can just self-sabotage you and change reality. And guess which one it's going to pick on default? It's going to change your reality, because that's going to happen the fastest. Because your beliefs about yourself have been running for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and they have tens of thousands of repetitions under them. And the new identity of you working out for as long as you have been, or making more money, or having the best month of your life, has only been running for just a few weeks.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  So when you look at your conscious and your subconscious mind, your subconscious is running 95% of your daily cognitive processing. Your conscious mind, the part that sets the goal, the part that wants to be successful, that wants to be a millionaire, that wants to be happier, that's only about 5%. And so your subconscious is roughly like 19 times more powerful than the part of you that wrote down your goals. So when that 5% of you says, I want to make $200,000 this year now, the other 95% will say, nope, we're not doing that. Like, we're not the person who can do that. We're the person whose dad worked two jobs and still couldn't cover it. The one who has worked since they were 14 years old and they've still struggled their entire life. And so if that's the case, if it's a 5% versus a 95%,

• 7:36Speaker 02

  who do you think is going to win that argument? The subconscious. And here's the thing, the way your subconscious wins is not by like talking you out of it. It's like much sneakier than that. Like you'll barely notice it. It just like quietly makes you the kind of person who doesn't follow through this week. Or it just quietly makes you start eating things that you shouldn't be eating in order to lose the weight that you've been losing. Or quietly makes you the person that doesn't go to the gym this week when the past three weeks you've gone four times in a row. So you don't like consciously blow up your entire life. You just like lose a little bit of motivation, or you don't feel very good, or you get busier than normal, or you get into a bad mood,

• 8:20Speaker 02

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• 11:16Speaker 02

  And now, back to the show. When you start doing well and you start self sabotaging, I call it getting a case of the I deserve it's, the I deserve it's, oh, I've, I've, I've lost 15 pounds in the past month. I deserve to have an extra ice cream. Oh, I lost 15 pounds in the past month. Oh, I'll have a little slice of pizza. It will always bring you back down to your 72 degrees. And you have to understand, your identity did its job perfectly. Again, it brought you back down to the temperature that it thinks that you're supposed to be at. And so let me get specific, because I know that knowing that you have a ceiling doesn't really help you. I want to actually try to help you identify which one is yours. Because in my experience, like I've been in personal development for over 20 years, and I've coached thousands and thousands of people. I found there's

• 12:01Speaker 02

  kind of like three beliefs, three main buckets that create our ceilings. And I want you to listen to all three of them, and just notice what one resonates with you most. That's probably yours. Okay. So, trigger number one is this, is the feeling of I don't deserve this. This one's super common. Something good happens, and instead of feeling joy, you kind of feel like a weird, low-grade guilt. Like, you don't deserve it in some sort of way. Kind of like you, you got away with something, and eventually someone's gonna check out the receipt and make sure that they bring you back to where you're supposed to be. It's like, some people will say this, like, making money means that you took it away from someone else. Or your success means someone else is unsuccessful. Or you feel bad for your success, when you saw your parents work so much harder than you do,

• 12:46Speaker 02

  and they still struggled. And so you think, like, I don't deserve it. So what do you do? You unconsciously, if you're not paying attention, start messing it up. And it's because, deep down, like, your identity says, I don't deserve to have things this good. I don't deserve to have things work this well for me. So, the second trigger is this, if I'm too happy, something bad is gonna happen. And this one usually comes from some sort of a childhood where good moments were followed by bad moments. Like, things were calm in your household, and then somebody came home in a bad mood, and the whole house just changed in 10 seconds. And so now, you, as an adult, when everything

• 13:26Speaker 02

  is genuinely fine, like, you can't allow yourself to relax into it. You know this one that I'm talking about? Like, you, you feel this one? You start, like, scanning for what the problems are. Like, things are not supposed to be this good. What the fuck is off? Like, you start bracing internally. And so you start, like, bracing for these bad things. And when you brace, you pull back. It's not expansive to embrace. You contract is what you do. And you don't just contract in the moment, you contract in all areas of your life, as a protection mechanism. So you don't go all in on anything. You hold just a little bit in reserve. You don't fully invest into relationship. You don't go all in in your business. You don't go all in on the opportunity in front of

• 14:08Speaker 02

  you. And then, when it doesn't work out, because you didn't go all in on it, and you only gave, like, 60, 70%, your brain goes, see, I told you. Good thing we didn't get our hopes up. And it's, more than anything else, it's a self fulfilling prophecy, that you unconsciously created because of your identity. Okay? And then the third trigger is this, I don't know if I can handle it. You're not, like, actually afraid of success. You're afraid of being the person who has to maintain it. Because everything changes, right? Like, once you're successful, right now, you're just the person who's trying. And trying is safe, because trying has no, like, real standard to it. The second that it works out, you become a person who has to keep it going. But now, the difference

• 14:51Speaker 02

  is, you might have a bigger team. There's more expectations on you. There's people that are depending on you. You know, you have to lead other people. You have to be more organized. You have to be on time. You have to manage your money. You have to have hard conversations. You have to hire people. You have to fire people. You have to be consistent when you don't feel like it. That feels like a burden to a lot of people. And that burden that we start feeling is the self sabotage. And somewhere inside of you, there's a voice that goes, I don't think I'm built for all this. And so you sabotage, so that you never have to fully bear all that responsibility. And I've seen this hundreds of times. Somebody has, like, the best quarter that they've ever had in their business, and then completely

• 15:35Speaker 02

  falls apart the next quarter. And they're like, what the, what the hell just happened? Well, what happened is, they got a glimpse of how great life could be, and then they went, I don't believe on the person who can actually handle all of it. Right? And so how do we start to change all these things? Because I don't want you to just intellectually understand it. I want you to actually work through it and change yourself. Okay? The first one is this, feel the discomfort, and don't fix it. This is the most important one. The next time something goes really well, or better than what you're used to, and you get that weird, like, feeling in your stomach, like, something's wrong, that feeling of discomfort, and wanting to change something in that moment, like, the urge

• 16:18Speaker 02

  to, like, pick a fight, or to eat that thing, or to cancel the plan, whatever it is, that's discomfort. Like, you feel discomfort, you feel like you're supposed to do something about it, don't act on it. Like, just do not try to make it go away. Just sit in the discomfort, for five minutes. You're, it's gonna be like nails on a chalkboard, right? But for five minutes, like, set a timer on your phone if you have to. Try to float in the absolute discomfort. Feel how uncomfortable it is to have things going well, without having to do a single thing to try to bring your temperature back down. That's the whole rep. Five minutes. That's the repetition I want you to get used to. That's it. And

• 17:00Speaker 02

  it's gonna feel weird and awkward, and maybe awful for the first 10 times, and then it's just gonna go away. Like, then, one day, you're just gonna realize, like, you can hold on to something good, without flinching. Like, you don't need to bring yourself back down to 72 degrees. So, you don't get comfortable with discomfort by doing something about it. You change it by staying in the discomfort, a little bit longer each time, and then you just get used to it. Okay? So that's the first thing. And the second thing I want you to do, is update your beliefs with evidence. Not with affirmations, like, you can't talk yourself into a new ceiling. You've tried it. You've tried. So, you know, looking in

• 17:43Speaker 02

  the mirror and saying, I'm a millionaire. When you have $412 in your bank account, it doesn't fucking work. Because there's 95% of you in the background going, uh, no, dude, that's a lie. You're full of crap. But, your brain accepts evidence, more than accepts anything else. So, collect evidence. Small, undeniable pieces of evidence that you're becoming a new person. Things like, I said I would do the thing, and I did it. I had a great week, and I didn't blow it up. I felt the urge to pull back, and I stayed. I let something good happen, and did nothing about it. I said I was gonna wake up at 6:00 a.m., and I woke up at 6:00 a.m. I said I was gonna work out today, and I worked out

• 18:23Speaker 02

  today. Every single one of those is a tiny piece of proof, that there's a new you that's being built. And if you do that enough times, the identity that you have of yourselves, has no choice but to update. Because you've made the old story indefensible. They can't say, like, oh, no, we're not the type of person to follow through, when you showed up four times this week to the gym, when you made 100 cold calls, when you said you didn't want to. When you keep doing the thing that you don't want to do, the old version of you, the old story, the old identity, has to eventually start to die off. And so what we want to do is start collecting evidence, for the new person that we're building ourselves

• 19:05Speaker 02

  into. And so I want to leave you with this. If you spent years, wondering why you keep getting so close, and then finding a way to end right back to where you were before, if you've been doing this over and over again, you've just been living inside of a ceiling, that somebody else installed of you, a very, very long time ago. And you've been calling it, like, your personality. It's not your personality. And I want you to understand this, you're capable of so much more than you've accomplished. So, the next time things start going well for you, and you feel that pull, to, like, hit the emergency brake, and let it stall out, don't. Like, let it be good, for a little bit longer than you're comfortable with. And then, a little bit longer than that. Because your

• 19:49Speaker 02

  life will not change, if you want it to change. Your life will change, when your identity of who you actually think you are changes, and that new reality fits inside of the new identity. So, that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you loved this episode, you'll definitely love being on my workshop that's coming up, on the Psychology of High Performance. You can go to 2026workshop.com. I'm gonna teach you how to break past your old fears, your old limiting beliefs, and your old identities that are capping your success. So, once again, go to 2026workshop.com, to register for free. I will be live, and I will see you there. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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