This post is a mix of the ideas taken out of the Netflix movie Stutz and my own knowledge on psychology, evolution and creativity gathered over the years.

The first step to overcome our brain’s intention to self sabotage important decisions is to embrace the reality. There are three aspects of the reality that no one can avoid. Those three aspects are:

  • Pain - no matter what you do in life, no matter how good your intentions are - the pain is inevitable
  • Uncertainty - even if you try to thoroughly plan every step you take and every thought you think, there will always be stuff out of your control. It will have an impact on you - either positive or negative but you won’t be able to control it
  • Constant Work - work on yourself never stops. Whenever you think you are it means you start going backwards

So, what is the origin of Self Sabotage. We humans have been living in a rather safe environment for the last couple of hundreds of years. Before that for thousands of year we lived in a state of constant danger, which lead to our brain developing the protection mechanism against everything that it sees as a danger.

Although the intentional idea has been very good and helped us to survive all this thousands of years as a species, we need to overcome this protection whenever we have to develop a new habit. See the Self Sabotage as your comfort zone that actively holds you back from any changes - negative or positive ones.

Self Sabotage is coming from the primal part of our brains and cannot be avoided. There is no known way to switch it off, whenever there will be uncertainty there will be self-doubt. The greater the uncertainty and adversity the bigger the opportunity and the more your brain will try to sabotage it.

If you can learn to overcome your fears, it will change your life. Let’s examine some of the tools that can be helpful in overcoming Self Sabotage.

The shame and embarrassment is the glue that holds the humanity together. We were created to make mistakes. Making mistakes is the only way to accomplishing anything in life.

The Tools

The Tools are a set of exercises that can help you to turn an unpleasant experience into an opportunity.

String of Pearls

Don’t devalue the small steps you’re taking. Even the smallest ones. Doing every small thing the best as you can, will definitely yield results.

Imagine your life as a string of pearls. Every pearl is one action. Every action has the same value. It doesn’t matter where an action is a failure or a success - the most important thing is to keep going and put the next pearl on the string.

You got out of bed - you just put a pearl on your string. You brushed your teeth - boom - next pearl is on the string. You wrote one sentence of your new book - there is your next pearl etc. etc.

As we already learned uncertainty is one of the three aspects of reality we cannot avoid. The winner is someone, who keeps putting pearls on his string ignoring the uncertainty and pain.

The true confidence is living in uncertainty and moving forward. – Dr. Phil Stutz

Every pearl on the string will have an imperfection inside and that’s ok. Perfection kills productivity and can even kill the best intentions. Do the best you can right now and keep going.

The Shadow

The Shadow represents the part of yourself you’re ashamed of - the time when you were fat or the time when you were skinny, the time when you chickened out or the time when you were extremely indecisive. But all these times in the past it was also you. This part of you won’t to be recognized as well.

As long as you will try to avoid confronting your past, imperfect self - you won’t be at peace with it and it will appear at the most inconvenient times and block you again. Recognize yourself, be at peace with yourself and the next decision you must make will fall easier.

The Snapshot

The world is not perfect and neither are we. Understanding all that our brain is still able to trick us into the illusion of the perfect experience. We are searching for it even knowing that it doesn’t exist. The perfection only exists in our mind. It’s not to be found in the real world.

No matter whether you’re looking for a perfect partner or a perfect movie - you are destined to fail. There will be nearly perfect moments in your life - no doubt about it but these will be just moments - the snapshots. The snapshot is a still picture. It has no depth - the depth is added by the imperfections. We are chasing the perfection that doesn’t exist ignoring three aspects of reality - pain, uncertainty and constant work.

Money and success won’t remove three aspects of reality. Stop chasing the phantom and start living.

The Maze

The Maze is the by-product of Self Sabotage because Self Sabotage wants fairness. A classic example of the maze is when you spend lots of time talking about someone who mistreated you in the past. You’re looking for fairness but at the same time the endless search for fairness blocks you from moving forward. It blocks you from taking the next step because you’re afraid that you will get treated unfair again.

Request for fairness puts your life on hold. – Dr. Phil Stutz

The Work

Constant work is one of the three aspects of the reality. What is the constant work that we have to do to not dwell on the past, don’t get stuck on the things we cannot change and keep being creative.

The Grateful Flow

The sun is always out there above the clouds even if you don’t see it. There’s always light, love and positivity. The question is: how do you penetrate the clouds so that you can see the sun.

You can penetrate the clouds with gratefulness. Gratefulness gives you the feeling that there’s always something positive out there.

Gratitude is the way to break through the haze of negativity. The Grateful Flow is the process of creating the concentrated gratitude in your own mind and use it to break through the clouds of negativity until you can see the light again.

Radical Acceptance

The concept of Radical Acceptance was initially introduced by Marsha Linehan.
She learned it first when she visited a Buddhist Monastery. The basic message is to try to radically accept everything and let go of desires or what you want every single morning. The example would be letting go of wanting a particular job.

The recognition that you don’t always have to have whatever it is you want - is very liberating.

Suppressing what you want is not the way to go. You have to radically accept that you don’t have what you want and it’s not a catastrophe.

Radical Acceptance has to be a regular practice. Radical acceptance doesn’t mean you don’t try to change things because you only have to radically accept the moment you’re in and the past but you can try to change the next moment. You can’t change anything if you don’t accept it in the first place because you will try to change something that you think is reality.

Radical Acceptance is about accepting the reality it is what it is.

Active Love

Active Love is the love that’s independent of your immediate reaction. That’s the love that’s bigger, better and more powerful than fairness.

Imagine that you accumulate all the love in the world and use it whenever you feel an unfair treatment.

Whenever you feel that you’ve been treated unfairly you have the choice of either entering the state of deprivation or put the accumulated love out.

Active Love helps you not to get stuck by constantly pursuing the state of ephemeral fairness.