Self-Sabotage and Your Virtual Summit with Ashley Beaudin
We can talk about virtual summit strategy all day, but if you end up in your own way throughout the planning process, that strategy isn't going to as helpful as it could be.
In this post and podcast episode, we're joined by Ashley Beaudin where we'll talk about self-sabotage and how that can show up in your virtual summit. We're digging into the good stuff by covering:
- The 8 types of self-sabotage
- How to recognize yours
- How to move forward with that newfound knowledge.
Self-Sabotage
If you experience self-sabotage, the most important thing for you to know is that it is not a character flaw. It's not because you're broken or there's something really wrong with you.
Instead, self-sabotage is a safety mechanism. It's ultimately a way to make sure that you are staying safe.
Self-sabotage is often formed and created out of painful experiences, whether that be trauma earlier in life or even difficult things that you've gone through recently. You will ultimately form your self-sabotage to protect yourself from those things happening again.
8 Types of Self-Sabotage
On the surface, it's easy to look at self-sabotage as something simple that happens, but in reality, there are all kinds of different ways it shows up.
The 8 types of self-sabotage include:
- Procrastinator: “I only feel safe when things are chaotic.”
- People-pleaser: “I feel safest when everyone around me is happy.”
- Overthinker: “I feel safest when someone else tells me what to do.”
- Shamer: “I'm safest when I feel bad.”
- Assumer: “I feel safest when things are familiar.”
- Guardian: “I’m safest when I’m emotionally guarded.”
- Overworker: “I’m safest when I’m busy and distracted.”
- Perfector: “I’m safest when things are perfect.”
Take the quiz on Ashley's website to figure out what your dominant type is! We'll go into a little more detail on a few common types next.
Procrastinator
You need to feel a sense of pressure and chaos in order to feel like you’re doing okay. A lot of times you might just be used to the cycle of stress and always push things to the last minute.
People-Pleaser
This one shows up a ton in summits. Summits are really about people managing; managing speakers, managing attendees, managing people who purchase upgrades, and really loving and serving those people well.
If you are in a self-sabotage type of people-pleasing, you might go into self-sabotage around making everything perfect for everyone. You'll spiral into thinking that people are going to be upset with you and have a hard time with the smallest piece of negative feedback.
The Overthinker
Even if you have a step-by-step plan, you're still going to be overthinking every single step. At the end of the day, it's that you don't trust yourself and you don't stretch your ability and capacity to show up for yourself in a way that's good enough or approvable and in your experience. Self-doubt happens to anyone!
You'll self-sabotage by constantly asking questions like: Am I doing this right? I don't know if I'm doing this right. Will someone please tell me that I'm doing this right?
You'll struggle to really get momentum in moving your action plan forward because there's going to be so much energy that gets sucked up by that constant overthinking and overwhelm.
The Assumer
If assuming is your primary type, you'll hold yourself back by always assuming the worst and taking action (or not taking action) based on that. For example, you might think things like:
- “I'm not going to pitch that speaker because they'll just say no anyway.”
- “I'm not going to do their summit because no one will come anyway.”
Recognizing Self-Sabotage
The first step in healing your self-sabotage is recognizing it. And the way you recognize it will depend on what your dominant type is. All of them show up with different clues.
For example, the People-Pleaser and the Procrastinator are not going to show up in the same way. Clues for a People-Pleaser might be thinking you need to make sure that your email pitch is perfect, whereas the procrastinator is going to push it off for as long as possible.
This is what makes it so important to know what your primary types of self-sabotage are. From there, you can map out your self-sabotage cycle and start to heal.
Mapping Out Your Cycle
With mapping out your self-sabotage cycle, you're looking at your 1-2 most common types, because normally those types will work in partnership together. Then, you'll look back on a previous experience where you self-sabotaged.
Very mindfully, process that experience of what happened. Why didn’t it work out? Were you procrastinating? Did you put other’s needs first?
What makes that so powerful is that once you can loosely map it out, it is a good starting point for self-understanding and we use it to help you self-support.
Then you can look at your cycle and identify two or three points in the cycle where you could self-support and almost create an exit, so you’re not necessarily going on a hamster wheel over and over again.
From there, you create exits and move out of the cycle.
For example, let's say that you're a procrastinator, and you know that you're starting to procrastinate because one of your clues to yourself that you're procrastinating is that you just can't stop scrolling on Instagram.
Another example could be that you're just constantly researching. You're looking at everyone else's summit. You're looking at all their sales pages, but not giving you any action on your own. That can be a clue to you.
In that cycle that you mapped out, you can make that one of your first sentences. You can say what you noticed yourself doing that is a cue to yourself to:
- shut off your phone
- set a micro goal and share it with someone
- leave your house and go work somewhere else
- give your phone to someone
- whatever it needs to be!
Map out that cycle, and create openings to stop the cycle and move forward.
Healing from Self-Sabotage
When you're looking at self-sabotage, you're ultimately looking at two different layers. What I just shared, what I would say is like the right now layer; that's the actionable stuff that you can do right now.
Another step in the right now layer is something called self-support layering. If you're, self-sabotaging, you can layer it with self-support because ultimately you have to look at self-sabotage as an attempt at self-support.
We can use that muscle for self-support and redirect it to a way that helps you and you can actually move forward.
Then there's the layer of healing, which is leading you to the self-sabotage in the first place. That's the more intense stuff; the trauma, the pain, the patterns from early childhood, and then was more of a long-game process. That's not something that we heal overnight, which is why I think it's so important to have both of those layers.
It's ultimately about doing the work to heal the trauma, doing the work to meet your inner child or any of these wounded parts of you that are still suffering. Use things like self-compassion and inner child work, infusing senses of safety, and self-care into your life. All of those things will help soften the need for self-sabotage.
Ashley’s Biggest Takeaway
Your self-sabotage is about safety. Look at how self-sabotage operates in your life, in that frame of mind that it's about safety, and just get as much information as you can. Once you know that, you can map it out.
Actions Steps
Take Ashley’s Self-Sabotage Quiz, and get a guide of all 8 types and how they operate, the effect that they have, what likely happened in your history to form that type, and also the gifts of each type.
There are gifts and strengths buried underneath that self-sabotage!
About Ashley
Ashley Beaudin is a trauma-informed coach and speaker who helps people shift from self-sabotage to self-support. She has spent her life creating safe spaces for humans to heal and wake up to the power of who they are. If you want to melt her heart, give her a donut, a puppy, or unexpected good news.
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