Do you keep getting in the way of your own success? Ending your habit of self-sabotage might be as simple as learning to mind the monkeys in your head.
The weight you just can’t lose. The promotion you just can’t get. The “nice guy” you just can’t meet. Sometimes, you shoot yourself in the foot – and sometimes it isn’t even accidental. More often than you’d care to admit, self-sabotage is the result of heeding the voice in your head that whispers: ‘You’re not good enough to succeed.’
As human beings, we like to tell ourselves stories about ourselves. And if those narratives are negative, we’ll convince ourselves that we’re not allowed to succeed. ‘After all,’ we’ll say, ‘my stories don’t have happy endings’.
In the West, they call it the ‘inner critic’. Buddhists have an even better term for it: the ‘monkey mind’. Buddha taught that the human mind is filled with drunken monkeys, which chatter and jump around, demanding to be heard. Meditation is an effective way to silence those monkeys for a while… but your ultimate goal should be to tame them once and for all.
But how?
In her book, Don’t Feed The Monkey Mind, psychotherapist Jennifer Shannon writes that: ‘The monkey is a force of nature, and like all irrepressible forces, what we resist persists. You cannot ignore, suppress, or debate with the monkey!’
She suggests letting that voice have its say – but that’s as far as it should go. ‘Giving the monkey full voice, however, does not mean following its lead. Simply notice the chatter without judging it or reacting to it,’ she writes. ‘By simply noticing, you are allowing yourself to have negative thoughts – yes, even big bad scary ones you’d be embarrassed to share with anyone – and training yourself not to treat them as a call to action.’
If you don’t like the monkey metaphor, maybe a mould will work better for you. That’s how motivational speaker Tania Kolar sees the narrative created by our negative inner voices. ‘I call it a mould because it was shaped and formed like soft, malleable clay, set, hardened and solidified over time, becoming fixed and immoveable until broken,’ she writes in Breaking The Stupid Mould. ‘This mould was chock full of limiting beliefs and was destroying my potential.’
Kolar writes that everyone has a mould, or a false self that runs our lives. ‘This stupid mould has been sabotaging us,’ she explains. ‘As a result, we have become our own worst critics. We incessantly beat ourselves up for the perceived mistakes we’ve made, the injustices we’ve created or even the missed opportunities that we carelessly let slip by. We continue to say terrible things to ourselves because of our old beliefs.’
Turn those old beliefs around, and try to understand where the self-doubt, self-destruction and self-sabotage is coming from. When you were growing up, if you scored 90% on a test did your parents demand to know what happened to the other 10%? Did the people around you keep on telling you that you weren’t good enough? And did you end up believing them – and repeating what they said?
Remember, when it comes to the narrative in your head, the narrator is no one other than you. If you can’t yet control what is being said, you can at least control the volume, and decide what you’re going to do with what that information. Confront it, disarm it, and realise that most of what it’s saying is simply not true.
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