"Is It Really Self-Sabotage? Rethinking the Struggle to Get Things Done"
"Why your brain might not be fighting against you—and how ADHD could explain the chaos instead."
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Have you been told or suspected you’re self sabotaging? For those of you blessed to never have had to wonder, it’s basically where part of you is working like stink to get things done, whilst a little worm in your brain is doing rotten stuff to stop it working.
For years I was reading books and joining self-help programmes to tackle self-sabotage and weedle out limiting beliefs. Basically the stuff I thought my head was doing to stop me succeeding.
It’s very unnerving to think that a part of your brain, over which you have no control, is doing things you don’t want to do, to make sure you fail. Very unnerving.
But, what if it’s not self-sabotage? What if there’s another explanation? Here are a few examples of things you might do, which MIGHT mean you have ADHD and so there is a physiological reason behind the struggle:
You’ve written 100 business plans, and lost them.
You set goals but can’t find them, let alone work towards them; or,
You can’t set goals for your business
You spend weeks setting up yet another new project manager and with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual to-do lists (in all of the available colours, labels and tags; in alphabetical and numerical order - and then cross referenced by context, location and time of day). Two days after you’ve finished you can’t bear to look at it. After three days you can’t find it. By day five you forget it ever existed. You find it two years later and think what a fantastic plan, I wonder who did that?
You’ve been told you can’t delegate because you won’t relinquish control - a control freak (nice), when really you find it so hard to tell someone what you want that you might as well just do it yourself.
You set intentions for your day, but don’t do any of them. You do however achieve a load of stuff you had no idea even existed before 7am that same morning.
Your working day could be sitting looking at the computer whilst opening and closing hundred’s of random tabs; 4 hours of work; or, you get 40 hours of work done in 8 hours. But you won’t know until you get back into bed that night.
Every now and then you gather up all your papers and stick them in a big pile do deal with later. After 5 years, you feel ok throwing the whole pile in the bin without even glancing at what’s in the pile.
You’re anxious a lot of the time. Hardly surprising when you can’t trust yourself to finish anything.
You have a to-do list but ignore it (even if you can find it) and produce a ta-da list instead. “Ta da! Look at what I’ve done today!”
I could go on as there’s loads of examples. You don’t have to relate to all of the above, everyone is different, and these are just a few things you might catch yourself doing.
Generally we’re talking about tasks that are affected by your executive function and which are around your personal or business organisation. These are very different behaviours to self-sabotaging, such as by literally telling a client to fuck off, instead of acting professionally by helping them to move on to another service provider. Or deciding to go to the shops instead of meeting your business partner.
So, now what? Well, my advice is to have a chat with someone who will challenge what you do so you can move past your coping mechanisms to reveal what’s happening below.
People with ADHD and Autism often mask their symptoms from the rest of the world, and themselves very well, and you may need to delve deeper to find out what’s going on. As an example, when I did a self-test for ADHD, it came out as a big no - not got it, carry on being disorganised. However, years later someone who knew what they were doing deliberately pulled the mask aside by asking deeper questions. For example, when asked if I was repeatedly late for appointments, I could honestly answer that no, I was never late. A little delving showed that I wasn’t late because I deliberately arrived 3 hours early and found a cafe close by, just so that I wouldn’t be late.
What this is about is looking at other options before you spend years on self-improvement trying to unravel and repair what isn’t wrong.
Apparently 30% of entrepreneurs have ADHD so it’s certainly worth considering.