A Marketer’s Guide to Stopping Self Sabotage

As an online marketer, you’ve probably encountered obstacles that have prevented you from doing the things you want to do in an effort to see success. Some obstacles, though, are ones that you create yourself.

You may not realize that’s what’s happening. Self-sabotage can be found in things like negative self-talk, imposter syndrome, or habits that cause you to doubt yourself and prevent you from achieving your goals.

Once you can pinpoint the various ways you’re serving as your own worst enemy, you’ll clear the path to success and have an easier time achieving your goals. There’s no shame in realizing that you’ve caused some damage in your journey – just celebrate the fact that you’re willing to be honest about it and make some corrective measures.

Ending Your Addiction to Distractions

Distractions can be addicting. That’s because the habits you use to distract yourself create stimulation in the brain. These habits usually have a reward associated that causes dopamine to be released when you engage in them.

As a result, the more you do them, the more you crave these distractions. Common distractions include cell phone use, surfing the Internet, checking social media sites and email, chatting with friends, family or coworkers during working hours, and numerous snack breaks.

These distractions are doing more than breaking your concentration. They’re stealing your productivity, which doesn’t move you closer to your goal. Most people spend over 50% of their time checking or engaging with their smart phones.

If you know that’s one of your struggles, there are ways that you can end your addiction. Start with your biggest distraction. If it’s your cell phone, one thing you can do is to turn off the notifications.

That way, when you get a new text message, you won’t know. Remove gaming apps from your phone and social media apps if that’s been an issue for you. Not only will you notice you’re more productive without these, but you’ll have more time and be less stressed mentally because you’re getting a break from the constant flow of information.

Turn off social media notifications and email notifications on your laptop, too. Far too many marketers think that a notification means they need to address that right now. So then that “five minutes” to check turns into half an hour or longer of wasted time.

Set a schedule for returning non-emergency messages on both your phone and laptop. Then stay out of your email program until the time you’ve allotted for it. Use software to block sites, social media or otherwise, that distract you.

There are many programs you can install that will block those pages for you for a set number of hours. If you need six hours of solid working time, you can set the program to not let you on until that time is done.

Set boundaries. You’ve probably heard that you need to set boundaries to keep the distraction of friends and family from taking your working hours. But you also need to set boundaries with yourself.

Without self-discipline, you will engage in self-defeating behaviors. Create your schedule and make sure that everyone know you’re working during these times – and don’t allow yourself to interrupt your working hours, either.

Ask yourself, “Am I busy or am I productive?” If the answer is that you’re just staying busy, then you know that a distraction is claiming your time. Your actions need to be pushing you forward toward achieving your goals.

Stop Hesitating to Avoid Disappointment

Many marketers will hesitate to do something or to jump on an opportunity because they’re not sure about the outcome. So they wait because they think doing so will help them avoid being disappointed.

But hesitating doesn’t mean you won’t be disappointed. You can be just as disappointed after you’ve hesitated to take the opportunity or start that project. Doing this is a big way of self-sabotaging your goals and your future success.

When you’re hesitant about something, you need to do a quick self-check to make sure you’re not trying to avoid disappointment. Ask yourself, “Does this bring me closer to my goal?”

If the answer is yes, then push the hesitancy aside and go for it. If the answer is no, then discard whatever you were on the fence about and keep going. Another way to avoid hesitating is to train yourself to start immediately.

Procrastination is just hesitancy all polished up. When you put off doing something, it could be because the thought and planning of doing that project makes you feel a lot more secure than actually getting started does.

But marketers who never leave the starting line are stuck. They see others achieving their goals and having their efforts pay off financially and wonder why the same thing isn’t happening for them.

Hesitation is caused by your mindset. Instead of thinking about everything that could go right, you wait because you think about everything that could go wrong. Or, you don’t believe that you have the necessary knowledge, skills, or people in place to accomplish your goals.

Just remember that no one ever won a race or reached his or her goals by hesitating. When you have an opportunity or an idea, then go for it. When it’s time to begin a project or make a change in your business, just go for it.

If you find that you’re hesitating to things and that’s your biggest issue when trying to avoid disappointment, then have something that you can come back to later. This prevents the problem of hesitation.

An example of this is if you’re writing an eBook, don’t end the day by finishing a chapter. Break in the middle. That way, you have a place to begin already in place. Look at the goals in your life that you have accomplished because you just made a move.

Everyone has accomplished something. Hesitating is no guarantee that you won’t have to deal with disappointment because you can end up disappointed down the road once time passes and you realize you missed out on something by not making a move.

Quit Overthinking Every Step of the Way

By overthinking, you’re wasting time. You’re carefully checking every single option you have over and over again and then choosing the direction that you think is best. The problem is that when you think about the same situation or project over and over again, it can lead to hesitancy or even quitting because it prevents you from making a decision in a timely manner.

An example of this is if you have a business blog, but you have no idea what to blog about. So you sit for days trying to think about what kind of content you could post that will best appeal to your audience.

Or, it could be that you’ve been in business awhile and it seems like there’s nothing new under the sun. So you fall into the habit of overthinking what you should do – or which direction you should take.

You don’t feel like you have any valuable and original content that you can deliver. It feels like you’re saying or doing the same thing over and over again. What you don’t realize is that valuable content is still valuable whether a month or a year has passed.

You can waste so much time overthinking that it starts to hamper your business and you won’t accomplish your goals by either your own self-imposed deadline or at all. Some ways that marketers overthink is they read everything they can get their hands on about the business, but take no action steps to put the advice into practice.

Or, you set up meetings and go to conferences because you’ve been overthinking what success is all about. You’re trying to make sure you know everything before you start a business or before you take on a new project.

That type of overthinking is for people who are busy, but not productive. At some point, running a business calls for you to take a step forward. You might fear failure. So that’s why you constantly overthink.

Not making a decision or not doing anything is already a form of failure. Stop listening to your brain giving you worst case scenarios and go for it. You need action steps because action steps multiply and turn into accomplished goals.

If you sit around overthinking, you miss chances that can level up your business. You don’t have to know everything. It’s not even possible because there are always variables that are completely outside of your control and no amount of thinking is going to change that, so you might as well make your move.

Set a deadline for your goal and outline the action steps that you need to take to get there. Understand that sometimes, you’re going to make a good choice, but other times, you’re going to mess up. That’s simply human nature.

Put a Halt to Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a detriment to any business. If you have this issue, it means that you’re trying to do something without it having any possible mistakes. People who struggle with this issue often feel an inner battle that who they are or the work they do will somehow not be enough.

They believe that the outcome of their work, if it’s not perfect, is a reflection that they’re flawed. This belief can cause an entrepreneur to set such high standards that they’re difficult to meet.

You’ll rarely be pleased with the outcome of a project and if someone else is completing part of the task, you’ll always find fault in their work. No one, including yourself, will ever reach your measurement because it’s impossible achieve perfection.

When you allow perfectionism to go on, you create a lot of stress for yourself. You can end up working longer hours on a single project than is necessary because even though that project may have been complete days ago, you don’t feel that it’s good enough.

You’re trying to fix an inward problem you have by projecting externally with the work that you do. You’ll end up burning out if you don’t change that behavior. Deep down, perfectionism is rooted in fear and that fear can keep you stuck.

One key sign that this might be a problem that’s sabotaging your business is if you turn down opportunities because you’re afraid of failing. You’re afraid that you can’t control the outcome, so you don’t take the chance.

Another sign is that you can’t stand change. You like things done the “right” way, which you associate with “your” way. No one else can do it as well as you can. There might be several directions you can go with a project and all of them would be suitable – but you get stuck on just the one way.

Something that’s also a sign of perfectionism is the amount of time you invest in a project. You spend so much time going over something that’s done to make sure absolutely nothing is missed that you’re struggling to get everything launched or completed on time.

The problem with a perfectionist is that the person has trouble letting go of something. It could be an idea, a project or a business plan. But at the same time, a perfectionist also has trouble even beginning a project because they keep trying to make sure everything is in place and all is perfect before taking that first action step.

You can overcome this issue and stop self-sabotaging by just getting the work done – flaws and all. Tell yourself that if you finish, you can take the time to polish the project afterward.

If part of the issue is that you get stuck on doing things your way because you’re afraid of mistakes that might happen and ruin the project, then learn to welcome the mistakes as growing pains.

You can also overcome perfectionism by not trying to have your finger in every piece of the pie. Let other people help and learn to be okay with the concept of done is better than perfect.

Give Yourself a Fresh Start

It can happen to anyone. You start your business and you’re excited about it, but then you end up doing the same thing all the time and you get the exact same results. You discover that the ideas you’re using aren’t really new, they don’t stand out and you’re not seeing the kind of conversions that you’d like to see.

That’s when you know it’s time to give yourself a fresh start. Far too many marketers fail to realize that you’re not chained to any one decision that you make for the rest of your business life.

When you give yourself a fresh start, it can work to change the way that you think about and act on your business ideas. But, it can also impact your business growth. A fresh start can bring in more traffic and turn your audience into buyers.

It allows you to set new or different goals for yourself. It’s not giving up – it’s growing in a new direction. When you’re in an online business and you know you’ve been indulging in some self-sabotaging actions, a fresh start can pull you out of that rut and set you on a better path.

Some marketers have gone in directions that may not have been the best for their business. But as time passed, their mindset told them that it was too late to change, that too much time had passed or that the business was known for one thing or a particular project they’re no longer passionate about.

It could be that you have a failure or two attached to your business and now you’re really struggling with believing in yourself and your business idea. A fresh start can be the catalyst to help you stop self-sabotaging.

You can discover a new way of doing things and a new way of running your business. For example, you might have purchased dozens of products in the excitement of running an online empire, but you later discovered they weren’t helpful or you weren’t interested in that direction after all.

Let go of products you’re never going to use and start over with ones that you will use. Stop taking courses that haven’t been useful and you know you’re not going to complete.

Sometimes people don’t want to let go because all they can focus on his how much money they’ve spent. Instead, focus on how much time you’ll gain by ending something that’s not profitable to you.

A fresh start could mean something like using a new software for your business because the old one just isn’t working for you anymore. It could also be something like learning a new social media technique to get more traffic if the old way isn’t working.

A fresh start could be creating a new product or introducing a new service for your customers. Or it could be changing your goals. It might even mean switching niches if you have something else in mind that energized you.

Be willing to make mistakes as an entrepreneur, but be committed to moving forward. That’s the key to breaking self-sabotaging habits and transforming a business into one that will last.

It’s easy to be angry when you come to the realization that you’ve been standing in your own way this entire time. But don’t dwell on it. Instead, do what needs to be done to take corrective measures and set yourself up for long-term success!