Self Sabotage

This is a topic I wanted to discuss for some time now, but never attempted to write about.  Maybe it's difficult to discuss why people sabotage their own lives, or maybe it's because it's hard to admit that we all sabotage our lives. 

So how do people self sabotage?  There are different situations to consider when asking how.  There are personal relationships, office relationships, friendships, careers, and family.  Each one has many different ways to push the self destruct button and watch the countdown till the end.  But let's start with the easiest one to talk about; family.

Family is one of the easiest categories to sabotage; mostly because we know they tend to forgive more often than turn and walk away.  We find ways to pick apart relationships with our siblings due to jealousy, anger over something petty, or even blaming them for something they did or failed to do for you.  Parents are a whole other subject.  Most of the time kids blame their parents for everything.  It starts when they're teenagers that don't get their way.  Freud always attributed a child's psychological issues to be based solely on the parents' failure.  As adults we tend to gravitate to the continuation of blaming them for our issues or realizing they had our best interest at heart and did the best they could.  (The continued debate for this topic can be discussed at a later time).

In terms of careers, there are a few ways to self destruct.  For starters, you could keep all the anger and resentment you have towards your company or boss inside until you snap.  When it unleashes, it's like verbal diarrhea; spewing uncontrollably until either you have nothing left to say or you're fired and security escorts you from the building.  Another way is by being afraid to take chances because you become too complacent in your current job title and performance.  This is one of the most common ones.  People get too comfortable and don't want to to step up to the next level at work because they feel it will require more work, responsibility or could equate to a higher possibility of scrutiny. 

Office relationships and office friendships are typically a time bomb waiting to go off at any moment and are usually self explanatory.  Being friends inside and out of the business is fine as long as you remember to stay within the boundaries during work hours and not let it influence your performance or behavior during that time. 

Finally the biggest ways to self sabotage are personal relationships and personal life.  There are way too many to go into, but I will go over a few examples.  The first being the personal life.  The biggest issue people face is procrastination which goes hand in hand with laziness.  Both start when we're younger.  In today's world, most kids are too used to playing their Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation when they have free time.  It's one of the things they look forward to doing after school.  They can play what they want, interact with friends or strangers online and never leave the comfort of their bedroom/house.  But by relying on these devices, kids take their focus off of doing work and caring more about play time.  It becomes the same when they get older.  As a child, the procrastination takes the form of waiting till the last minute to do homework, reports, or studying.  As an adult, it takes the form of forgetting to pay bills, accruing high amounts of debt, going late to work, or simply letting simple tasks snowball into something bigger.   I have found myself in many of these situations in life and have learned the hard way many times you can't fall into the pit of procrastination.


Finally the personal relationships have a few forms.  The first is picking fights based on insecurities, or not getting over past situations from an ex.  Everyone goes through theses.  Everyone has baggage that they need to deal with and most of the time can't until they work through it in either a rebound, the next relationship, therapy, or other creative ways.  The next level deals with insecurities on higher levels.  The people in the relationship tend to think the other person is too good for them or think one of them is not good enough for the other.  If you put someone too high on a pedestal it makes them feel they have so much to live up to and if they can't be that, then they fail.  On the opposite hand if you view them or yourself on a lower level, the person might feel like they're not good enough and tend to walk away.  The final level has more to do with the what if situation and cold feet scenarios.  The what if situation falls on people who have been in a relationship for a while and wonder what their life would be if they were single.  It typically happens when they are either unhappy in the relationship or has many friends that are single.  They tend to go out with the single group and hang around them wishing they could live that life once again.  The cold feet scenario are found in the people who are about to get married.  They're faced with the realization they're about to settle down with one person for the rest of their life and try to come up with any reason not to. 

Now if you made it to this point, you're probably asking yourself what the hell is the point of all this or why the hell did you keep reading?  My hope is that you did read everything.  Did you see yourself in any of those situations?  I bet you did.  Maybe you found yourself listed a couple of times.  The point I wanted to create was that everyone self sabotages their life.  We all push the self destruct button at one point or another.  But there's always the abort button.  We can pull that steering wheel back, avoid the collision, and put ourselves back on course before it's too late.  My hope is that by reading this, you can notice when you're being self destructive or sabotaging and correct yourself.

Friendships

I wanted to take tonight to talk about friendships both personal and professional.  When you start out in school, you think everyone is your friend.  As you progress into your later scholastic years you either have a close circuit of friends or clique, or you are part of many groups in the confines of the school.  In college you have a new set of friends.  Some are in Fraternities or Sorrorities while others find friends through classes or school clubs.  Either way a lot of the friendships you created earlier in life have either been lost in the transitions or held together very tightly. 

In my opinion it's not until you are in the real world that you realize who your true friends are in life.  They could be current co-workers that you have known for years and spend a lot of time with.  Others could be new business associates that you come across and find common ground to start building a friendship on.  In some cases the friends you made along your journey through school are still going strong; even hundreds of miles away.

I have found that there are some people that want to be fake friends and fairweather friends.  Fairweather friends are people that come around when it is convienent for them.  Due to social media, there are now a multitude of platforms for these people to reach out and contact someone.  I myself, am one of those people where I will message people out of convience.  It's nothing to be shameful about because we all do that now.  Each day we read social status updates of people we follow or are friends with to find something we find amusing or interesting to talk about with each other.  It helps us keep up to date on people that we do or did care about and provides us topics to talk about when we decide it is the right moment.  In a way this is good and bad (but I will leave that for another topic for the future).

Onto the Fake Friends.  Fake friends are people that are around just to use others for their own selfish benefit.  They could be people that don't necessarily mean any harm but need something (advice, venting, guidance, money, or just around for the party).  I have come to know many of these people in my life.  Some were very trusted friends that got to know me pretty well, and when they got what they needed they left.  Others releaized they weren't getting what they wanted out of the friendship and decided to depart from my life as well.  Both of those are okay and I wish those people the best in their lives. 

Finally there are True Friends.  These are the people that are there for you no matter what.  They are the people that go out of their way to help you, trust you with their lives, and are always looking out for others best interest.  I can honestly say I am someone who values those traits in friends and have a good circle of close friends that I myself would trust with my life.  I may know some of them for nearly 15 years, others that I knew when I moved away, some I worked with, and others I met as of this last year. 

Regardless of who these people are, friends are the people that make every moment of life worth living.  They share in the good times and bad.  They provide inspiration and comfort.  They are the shoulder you cry on or the people you share a great laugh with.  I want to dedicate this post to all of those close friends and family that have always stood by me.


And on a side note, I would like to also post a link to my interview on the Anthony Charles Podcast this week.  I hope you all enjoy and have a great night.
http://soundcloud.com/anthonycharlesofficial/episode-20-andrew-hess-author