Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success Podcast, episode forty-five. I’m your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way. 

Are you beginning to second guess yourself? Was that just a little misunderstanding with your boss or were they trying to tell you something? Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether these incidents are little annoyances that can be easily dismissed or whether there’s a problem here for which you are to blame. Or maybe these are the warning signs of a more destructive pattern happening. 

In this episode, we’ll identify how becoming aware of your own tendencies to make career decisions out of fear can leave you susceptible to a form of workplace bullying known as gaslighting, where people use your own self-doubt and feelings of imposter syndrome against you, to make you question your own capabilities, and whether you are good enough to be in the role you were hired to do. 

Kids are naturally more connected to their self-expression, intuition, and freedom. They’re less afraid to be who they are. They’re way more willing to follow what lights them up and see the good in people with more of an open mind. They are more ready to find a more positive explanation for what’s happening. 

As we become adults, we seem to leave this behind, and then we tend to feel more jaded and lost. I realize now that I must have somehow stopped listening to my own intuition at some point and stopped paying attention to who I was as a person and how things felt in my body.

I realized that I was making career decisions out of fear, morphing myself to fit in with the people around me. It became more a matter of surviving in the short term, but certainly not thriving. I wasn’t paying attention to the signs that it was time to reevaluate my life, those feelings of anxiety, panic, frustration, and pain. It was real feedback that it was time for me to make a change, to take action. 

It’s almost laughable when I think about how far I went only to come back to what I’ve always known about myself. Isn’t that what life’s about? The journey to becoming who we really are? 

When circumstances seem to make things more difficult, we can choose to react in a way that boosts our happiness and look for ways to look at things with more compassion, which would allow us to respond in a different way from our default of self-protection or attack. 

The secret is in our ability to reframe a situation. 

There’s always a choice to interpret the same circumstances differently. When people say things to us, they are really just words that have been said. It only bothers us when we interpret these words to mean something about us.But we can choose to understand the words they’ve said in a more positive way. It may not be the only interpretation, nor the way they might have meant us to take it, but that’s the one we can choose to have. 

Often, there’s more than one way to interpret someone’s actions or words. I try to remember this principle in my own life when I feel angry, hurt, annoyed, or irritated. Could there be another way to interpret what they said or what they did? Often there is. 

Our past experiences color how we interpret the present. It’s easy to get stuck in memories and beliefs from the past. What’s happening around us is really neutral, but how we emotionally relate to it is not. 

Once you’ve been in this industry a while, you can develop a negative mindset because there may have been a lot of things that have happened that didn’t go the way you would’ve liked. Our negative thoughts about it create memories that then form our limiting beliefs about whether success is actually attainable for us. 

We start questioning whether we’ve got what it takes to do the job and have a successful career in this field. We create our own blueprint with limitations that affect how we operate in the world. Our own thinking is what makes us susceptible to gaslighting. 

Gaslighting is a form of workplace bullying that can be profoundly destabilizing. At first, you’re able to laugh off the cutting remarks about your capabilities and your professionalism. You’re asking yourself, what are they talking about? Because you know you’re good at your job. Why else would they have hired you? 

But after weeks, months, or even years of relentless criticism, you start to doubt yourself. Eventually, you start thinking they may have a point. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I am too sensitive. Maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I shouldn’t trust my instincts. But you have a sense that you used to be a very different person, someone who was more confident and more relaxed, and now you’re feeling as though you can’t do anything right. 

This is how strong, smart, confident, powerful, high-achieving, successful women start to question themselves and their own perception of the world of work. You used to feel competent, but now you don’t. You have a feeling that you’re tolerating being treated in a way that you shouldn’t be, but it’s hard to put your finger on any one thing that is happening. You find yourself arguing with your boss in the hopes of proving that their criticisms aren’t true, and that you really are still competent after all. 

It feels very important to you that your boss know that you are good enough, so you’re doing things to prove yourself over and over again. You’re an easy target for gaslighting when you think that whether you are a smart, competent person depends on what your boss thinks of you. You start to blame yourself for your boss becoming easily annoyed or irritated with your performance. You start questioning whether your boss has a point, that maybe you are feeling threatened or sabotaging yourself, but deep down, you know that isn’t true.

So you think that the way to prove that you’re not is to seek your boss’s approval. But in order to not let what they say about you affect you so deeply, you need to stay strong, centered, and grounded in your own knowledge of what you’re capable of. You can’t let whether or not you receive your boss’s approval set the tone for whether you belong here or not.

It would be nice for your boss to like you and give you good assignments, but in the end, what they think of you doesn’t really affect your sense of who you are or what you’re good at. You’re able to shrug off other people’s interpretation of your work. You’re able to see their behavior as more a reflection of their own insecurities rather than having anything to do with you. You know it’s their problem, not yours. And whatever it is they say to you, it doesn’t matter because you can interpret it in a more positive way, even if that wasn’t how it was intended, and you know it. 

Stop asking yourself who is right, your boss, or you. Instead, ask yourself whether you like the way you’re being treated. It’s not that you’re being too sensitive or making too big a deal out of something. You don’t have to be vulnerable to another person’s manipulations. 

Focus on how you’re being treated. That will help you cut through the confusion. And don’t take the bait to get into a discussion about what you know to be true. Hold fast to the fact that you know you’re right and nothing they can say will change your mind. 

It’s important to always tell yourself the truth about yourself. Resist the temptation to internalize their criticism. Do everything you can to maintain a true, balanced, and compassionate view of yourself in order to preserve your own sense of who you really are. You don’t have to be perfect, and if that’s what they’re expecting, that’s their problem. Allow yourself to be angry, but don’t get drawn into an argument about your feelings, or your right to be heard.

Gaslighting tends to be powerful in that it’s pouring gasoline on our self-doubt and the imposter syndrome we’re already feeling. So that’s how we can protect ourselves by getting to the root of our limiting beliefs and choosing a new belief system that is more reflective of our true capabilities. 

Here are three steps to shifting your own mindset on your success: 

1. noticing your subconscious programming
2. increasing your awareness by observing those thoughts you’re having
3. creating a new belief system that is more aligned with what success means for you 

So back to number one. Notice your subconscious programming. I was becoming trapped by all the negative stories I was telling myself, most of which were fear-based. With so much repetition of the same ideas, they were becoming deep-seated beliefs about the world of work and what was possible for me in a male-dominated profession. I was buying into all the limitations that would hinder my career that others were leading me to believe. It was contributing to my mindset about what little possibility there was for me in the years ahead. 

Our limiting beliefs influence our choices and behaviors. They stay with us until we become aware of them and challenge them. Our limiting beliefs sometimes have veto power over our conscious desires, which is why we don’t always get what we say we want. We only get what our beliefs tell us we deserve. This is what leads to self-sabotage. 

We all have an image we hold for ourselves. It’s that belief system we’ve created, sometimes unconsciously, that we’re committed to. And when our outer reality, which is our jobs, relationships, and our health, isn’t matching our inner reality, our limiting beliefs, and our subconscious programming, we’ll find a way to sabotage our results so they align with who we think we are or what we think we deserve. 

This is what led to my exploration into personal development, which is really the art of aligning what you want to have happen with the mindset that it takes to actually execute on it. For me, it looked a lot like healing. I was developing a lot of awareness of what had been going on in my own mind, which was driving the actions I was taking, which led to the results, or lack thereof, that I was achieving. 

I realized that so much of what I attributed to being outside of my control was, in fact, very much within my control. But our beliefs become habits. We spend so much time hearing them from those around us, and thinking them ourselves, that they become how we see the world and what is or isn’t possible. 

What do you really want to create in your career? And what are you believing about yourself or the world that is keeping you from having it? 

The second step to shifting your awareness for your success is increasing your awareness. Become your own observer. Start paying attention and noticing how you operate in the world. Take note of your triggers, those moments when you get frustrated, angry, upset, or even shut down. Pay attention to the thoughts you’re having in those moments. Identify the root of your trigger, those less than ideal thought patterns that create an emotional response. 

I started to recognize that my negative behavior patterns were reflections of my own fear. And while they might have looked like healthy steps forward on the outside, each one was rooted in a different fear. And all that fear was rooted in a lack of trust in myself. 

On a conscious level, I wanted to do well and succeed, but on a subconscious level, I valued security and wanted to stay safe, which was working against my desire to create the results I said I wanted in my career. That desire for safety and security was fueling many of my decisions. Once I started questioning my fears, that’s when I realized that most of them were totally made up and not real at all. So then I started challenging them and replacing them with new, more empowering beliefs, which then fueled better decisions. 

So what limitations are you subconsciously buying into in your life? Why are you choosing to keep buying into that belief that everything has to be hard? Pay attention to where you’re creating results that you’re not overly thrilled with. 

Which brings us to step three in shifting your awareness for your success, creating a new belief system. This next step involves creating a new mindset and leaving that old version of you behind. What emerges is often a new, wiser version of yourself, one that got tired of shrinking into limitations that didn’t align with what you’re capable of, or who you truly want to be. 

It can be a powerful transformation when you’re ready, but the transition into success can be painful and difficult. And mine put me completely outside of my comfort zone. This feeling is what triggers thoughts and behaviors that cause us to unconsciously begin to self-sabotage.

Reaching a goal won’t make you happy. That’s the hard truth. Often, we think about a goal that we want to reach, without considering the time we will spend on our way to reaching that goal, and all the time we have to fill after we achieve it. The thrill we get in the accomplishment of a goal is fleeting. It’s the time you spend in pursuit of it, the journey, that counts. When you choose a goal, be sure you’re willing to go on the journey that comes along with it. 

Happiness doesn’t actually come from reaching our goals, but from making progress toward them. Sometimes success doesn’t feel like you thought it would. That might be because you’re no longer the same person who chose that goal in the first place. Or maybe your goal came with new responsibilities and realities that you weren’t aware of and possibly didn’t want. Have the awareness to do a self-audit along the way and make adjustments as necessary. 

A great career is a process, not a destination. You can’t simply set goals and follow them without questioning or shifting them along the way. Success can sometimes feel as unsettling and empty as failure. You might be chasing goals that perhaps aren’t even meant for you. 

What do you want to believe is possible in your career? 

Your limiting beliefs from the past will keep holding you back until you choose new beliefs for your future. So take the time to look at your current results and examine what belief is keeping you stuck. Let go of your old self, your old habits, and your old way of doing things, and start living according to what’s possible, instead of being confined by your past. 

Pay attention to any ongoing feeling of low-level discontent. Don’t let it fester into a feeling that there’s something wrong with you. You’re not defective or broken, and you don’t need fixing. Most importantly, you’re not helpless to what is happening around you.

Question the stories you are telling yourself. You are not your beliefs, emotions, or your thoughts. And you are certainly not someone else’s opinion of you either. Recognize the difference between what happens and your interpretation of what happens. It’s just your lens on the actual experience and your reaction to it. 

Anything that someone says or does has no impact on you until you make it mean something about you. And when those thoughts are negative, that can lead to unnecessary anxiety and stress. Instead, ask yourself what’s not wrong? Do this five times a day or more, if that’s what’s needed. It’s almost always your mind, not the situation, that makes you miserable. 

So start being kinder to yourself. Give yourself a break. Stop trying to fix yourself. Embrace the real you. You’re not broken. You’re not what’s happened to you or someone else’s opinion of you. 

And that’s it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to The Early Warning Signs of Gaslighting at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode forty-five.

Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I’m on Instagram @cindyesliger and my email address is info@cindyesliger.com. And if you liked this show, please tell a friend. Subscribe, rate, and review. 

Until next week, I’m Cindy Esliger. Thanks for joining me.