How to Stop Self-Sabotage + Overcome Negative Core Beliefs in Your Business with T.I.M.E. Techniques 

Last Updated on September 5, 2023

We’ve all been there: you’ve got a desire or goal, but every time you get close, you do something that keeps you from realizing your dreams. Why do we do it? And more importantly, how can we let go of these negative core beliefs that lead us to self-sabotage in the first place? If you’ve ever wondered how to top self-sabotage in your life and business so you can start powerfully creating your future, T.I.M.E. Techniques can help.

A quick note: T.I.M.E. Techniques are not a time-management tool, even though the name might suggest that. If you want to learn more about effective time-management, you can check out these resources from past podcast episodes and posts:

• Zapier Review: An Amazing Automation Tool That Can Save Your Biz Time + Money
• 004: Part 2, Time Management Tips + Productivity Tools for Women Entrepreneurs
• 050: How to Get Out of Time Scarcity Mindset with Carla Reeves

What is Self-Sabotage? 

It’s not difficult to think of a scenario in our own lives that epitomizes the frustrating cycles of self-sabotage:

• You’ve got a sticky personal or work relationship that you want to set better boundaries with … but when the trigger happens — you get an upsetting email, or something happens that makes you feel small or frustrated — you suddenly find yourself repeating patterns that leave you feeling drained and discouraged.
• You want to finish writing that book or getting that website live … but you just can’t seem to build up the steam to start a daily habit that would make it possible.
• You desperately want to get out of the feast-or-famine cycle (or maybe just the straight-up famine cycle) with your biz … but you can’t seem to break free from business choices that you know keep you spinning your wheels.

These are just a few of the countless ways we as humans tend to get in our own way.

In other words: how we self-sabotage. 

Self-sabotage is what happens when your logical, conscious mind (the part of you that wants to have healthy relationships, live your dreams, and save money) gets overridden by your subconscious mind (the part that procrastinates and can’t stop buying shoes).  

It might feel like these patterns don’t make much sense. After all, why on earth would you stop yourself from feeling well or making money?? But when we understand what’s going on subconsciously, we can begin to understand how to stop self-sabotage.

The primal need for safety + familiarity

Before we get into the work of learning more about what these behaviors can look like in your everyday life and how to stop self-sabotage, I want us to first acknowledge the beauty of self-sabotage.

Yes, I said beauty — hear me out. 

See, we don’t get in our own way out of a sense of self-hatred or animosity. Your brain isn’t trying to keep you from enjoying success or feeling great or having healthy relationships.

There are several big reasons we self-sabotage, but at the root of these behaviors is a subconscious clinging to self-preservation — it’s because we love ourselves and want to survive.

Our unconscious minds see change as dangerous, and that part of us that senses the danger in changing works really hard to protect us from change. If you learn nothing else from this post, I hope that you learn to see these exasperating patterns for what they are: a totally natural, primal human reaction meant to protect you.

There is nothing wrong with you and you are not a failure, no matter how many times you self-sabotage. Like a lot of tendencies that are connected with our “old” brains (that is, our wiring that’s still with us from our ancient ancestors), we just need a way to work with this mental habit that has it working for us instead of against us in our modern context.

Signs You Might be Self-Sabotaging 

Sometimes a self-defeating behavior is very obvious. You know that you’re doing it, you just struggle to break the cycle. Other times you might be completely unaware of the fact that you are sabotaging yourself. You just know that something in your life isn’t working the way you want it to. 

One of the first key steps in creating your future free from self-defeating patterns is awareness. Acknowledge that it’s happening and then work to uncover how and why you’re doing it. 

Think about some areas where you’ve struggled to find success, or continue to repeat the same unwanted patterns, and consider the following signs that you might be self-sabotaging: 

• Avoiding people or situations that make you uncomfortable, even though they would bring you closer to your goals. 
• Never moving outside your comfort zone or avoiding change. 
• Setting goals that are too easy to reach vs. setting goals that stretch you. 
• Needing things to be perfect before you’ll take action.
• Creating conflict with romantic partners, loved ones, friends, or coworkers. 
• Trying to control others.  
• Attempting to gain the approval of others. 
• Making excuses for your choices or lack of success.  
• Taking actions that don’t align with your values and goals. 
• Comparing yourself to others — especially unfavorably. 
• Social withdrawal or isolation. 
• Participating in risky behaviors (such as substance use, gambling, or overspending). 

Specific Ways Self-Sabotage Might Show Up As An Entrepreneur 

Often our limiting beliefs about money or negative core beliefs about ourselves will lead us to sabotage our success in business. There are entire books written on this particular subject because limiting beliefs about money are nearly an epidemic these days. Money blocks often run deep, and for complex and sometimes even surprising reasons. But the good news is that they can be overcome, and you can have amazing success when it comes to your business! 

Your struggles with your business might not be about limiting beliefs about money itself, but it is possible that it could be that you’re afraid to succeed in business for some other reason.

Maybe you grew up with a mom (or dad) who hated and regularly bad-mouthed their boss, and you’re subconsciously afraid that to become a successful business leader, you have to become the person your parent despised. Your subconscious is saying: It’s better and safer to stay small, so you’ll underperform or even make mistakes that ensure you don’t advance.

Perhaps at some point you got the message that successful, wealthy people aren’t good people — and deep down you want to be a good person. Your subconscious is saying: It’s virtuous to be poor, so you might repeatedly make business choices that leave you struggling.

Or maybe you witnessed a loved one trying so hard in business and continually losing money, and the thought of replicating those losses is terrifying to you. Your subconscious might be saying, You’ll probably fail just like your grandpa, and maybe that’s just what you’re meant for, so you’ll keep selling yourself short, or turning down new opportunities, or not following through on developing work goals that could take you to the next level. Sometimes, we unconsciously feel that our staying small is a way of “honoring” the struggles of our ancestors and that to break free from those patterns and really soar would be to somehow betray them.

It might sound strange to think of things happening in the past, to other people, as having such an outsized impact on your life and work — but it’s not at all uncommon. We’re affected by these messages we pick up on as young people, and it’s not difficult for those messages to become negative core beliefs about what we’re worthy of, what we’re capable of, and what we “should” want.

Living up to your full potential is risky — and our brains don’t like risk

I want to be clear here that I understand that not all struggles are the result of self-sabotage. Sometimes our struggles with health, money, business, or relationships are the result of things that aren’t within our control: genetics, opportunity gaps, chronic stress, lack of access, or something else.

My purpose in discussing self-sabotage and limiting beliefs is to simply invite curiosity and to highlight the fact that our subconscious is a powerful force that can work in ways that seem counter-intuitive but that actually make sense at a deeper level if we exercise our awareness.

Deciding to say “yes” to yourself in life and in your business can be a huge risk on multiple levels. It requires believing in yourself in a way you may not have a lot of practice with. It means putting yourself out there in ways that are totally new to you. It requires dealing with “failure” and mistakes and all kinds of uncomfortable things. It means developing work goals and life goals that might feel intimidating.

It makes sense that our subconscious brains will kick in with some negative core beliefs and some good ol’ self-sabotage to keep us from taking on these big, bold goals.

But I want to offer some serious hope: this doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

Let’s look at how you can work with this primal self-protective mechanism so you can actually healing messages of unworthiness, developing work goals, and start creating your future.

How to Stop Self-Sabotage + Eliminate Negative Core Beliefs

There are lots of techniques you can do on your own that can help you begin to identify where your limiting beliefs are coming from and how they’re affecting you. Journaling, self-reflection, and mindfulness can all be immensely helpful, but sometimes we also need an impartial, caring professional to look into our lives and help us get to the next level of healing. 

A coach, therapist, mental health professional, or someone certified in any number of healing modalities can help you break your cycles of self-sabotage. 

There are a few techniques I’ve written in detail about before.

I practice these for myself and I am also certified in these practices, so that I can incorporate them effectively into our mindset work inside the Incubator:

• Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)
• Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
• Hypnosis

In addition to these, I also want to share about another set of powerful techniques that have been proven to be very effective as a tool to help you set meaningful goals, overcome negative core beliefs, and help you learn how to stop self-sabotage. They’re called T.I.M.E. Techniques.

T.I.M.E. Techniques: What They Are + Why I Use Them 

I have found some of the best success with overcoming my own negative core beliefs and emotions with T.I.M.E. Techniques. 

T.I.M.E. stands for Time Integration for Maximum Empowerment™, and it borrows tools from several different modalities such as NLP, hypnotherapy, age and life regression, and others. 

What makes T.I.M.E. Techniques unique is that it incorporates the way we perceive and experience time, both semantically and neurologically, into the healing process. This makes it an incredibly effective tool for dealing with self-sabotage, because so many times our core negative beliefs stem from something in our past. In essence, it allows us to go back to the origins of those core negative beliefs and eliminate them where they began. 

One of the things that works so well is that while T.I.M.E. techniques allow you to release things from the past, you can do that without having to associate with, or even consciously remember, the root cause.

So, while you’re revisiting moments and looking at them deeply, you’re not emotionally captive to that moment from the past. It’s more like you’re floating above it, so you can see it clearly, but it doesn’t have the same power over you that it might have when it happened. Rather, you’re recruiting the power of your subconscious mind to heal old stories, write new ones, and affect your conscious choices in the present.

Part of the reason T.I.M.E. Techniques are so effective is that they’re working on multiple levels:

• Psychological. T.I.M.E. Techniques are an example of reframes. Switching the perspective on the timeline reframes the emotion into non-existence. Once the reframe occurs, the emotion loses its context and disappears.
• Metaphysical/Spiritual. According to the book A Course in Miracles, there is only one true emotion – that of love. All negative emotions are simply an illusion derived from fear. Switching the temporal perspective shows the negative emotion to be an illusion, and it disappears.
• Quantum Physics. Approaching the past event with the specific methods in the T.I.M.E. Techniques causes the client to experience a sort of anti-emotion. The negative emotion and the anti-emotion cancel each other out, leaving them free of the negative emotion.

It’s this combination of subconscious and conscious work that makes it possible for T.I.M.E. Techniques to create the most powerful shift.

While they’re powerful in releasing, T.I.M.E. Techniques are also great for goal setting. Why? Because when that past event doesn’t have power over you, you’re free to create and live into a new reality.

Dealing with self-sabotage is part of the journey

As you overcome each form of self-sabotage and reach each new level of success, you’ll likely find another limiting belief waiting for you at that level. This is totally normal, and the good news is that you’ll have the tools and practice to overcome whatever new limiting beliefs that may come up for you at each new level.

---

Ready to Go From “Stuck” to “Sprint”?

---

Frequently Asked Questions About T.I.M.E. Techniques + How to Stop Self-Sabotage