Have you ever felt like you were fighting against yourself to achieve success? Maybe you want to increase your sales numbers, but you just can’t seem to make the calls and negotiate the deals that will make you successful. Or maybe you want to put yourself in the running for a promotion, but you can’t bring yourself to ask for the opportunity. You want to go in one direction, but you find yourself running the opposite way every time. While you may be tempted to blame your lack of performance on some aspect of your job, if these situations sound painfully familiar, then a subconscious part of you might be sabotaging your own success.

Every human being has programmed their minds with information based on experiences, basic tendencies, and interpretations. In other words, what you believe about the world is your experience of the world. And if you feel stuck in a rut, chances are your interpretations are the culprit. By identifying these self-sabotaging behaviors you take responsibility for the consequences of your choices and you learn to live more consciously and in the moment. Then you can take the steps required to overcome the particular behavior. Consider the following self-sabotaging mindsets:

Everyone has physical, mental, and emotional comfort zones that are formed when they first experience something. Then when a person finds himself or herself in a similar situation, they automatically repeat these familiar behaviors. For example, if you were hit in the face by the ball during a basketball game as a kid, you might react to a ball passed in your direction by putting your hands in front of your face in a game today. Or, if you had a defensive reaction to an accusation in the past, you might react in the same defensive way when accused of something today. Comfort zones are the familiar, thus "the devil you know, not the devil you don’t know" prevails.

These first impressions are called imprinting, and, for the most part, form your manner of living and working. You certainly don’t have to change all your comfort zones, but what about the ones that prevent your success? Where do you feel stuck, frustrated, and want to change? People are often programmed to believe certain things, such as how much they are going to earn, what social class they feel comfortable in, how verbal they will be in some situations, and how shy they will be in other situations. These beliefs can limit you in situations because they are comfortable rather than effective. In these areas that limit you from achieving your full potential, you may need to seek some help.

The world you know today was created by you as a child and based on how you perceived it in your child’s mind at the time of any particular event or happening. As children, people absorb everything internally and, being new to the world, they have little or no personal knowledge of their new environment. As adults, people forget how they chose the tactics they used to protect themselves from uncomfortable feelings and how they were based on what appeared to their child’s mind to be available and attainable, seemed successful, and felt safe. You didn’t know you were creating a child’s successful strategy at the time; you were just behaving like a normal kid.

But as an adult, this child’s strategy often disables and buries natural feelings of power, joy, freedom, competence, and success and replaces them with limitations. These limitations established the parameters of what you felt you could be, and you adapted them to your outside world in terms of lifestyles, career choices, and relationships. The problem is that your childhood perceptions of the world may be false. For example, if your parent yelled at you as a child, your self-esteem and spirit may have been crushed. When this happens, your spirit hangs on to an assumption that perhaps you weren’t loved or you were bad. Then throughout your life, your defense mechanisms build against these bad, painful feelings. But these perceptions aren’t true; you were loved and cherished, and chances are you were yelled at because of the situation. Only through discovering exactly how, when, where, and even why these perceptions were manifested, do you have hope for altering them.

Reactive patterns are "hot buttons" or areas where feelings get in the way of thoughts. In the workplace, gossip is a typical hot button. For example, you might think that your co-workers are gossiping about you and you automatically assume the worst. Or maybe you waste time because you think that you’re not good enough and you don’t value yourself. A reactive pattern may build from this feeling if you continually waste work time to get yourself into trouble. Changing these feelings will enable the logical conscious part of the mind to establish control, make decisions about a chosen behavior, and implement it without resistance. While eliminating all emotion is not desirable, emotional baggage can disable healthy, appropriate emotions.

To identify reactive patterns and emotional baggage in yourself, consider what isn’t working in your life. Ask yourself what situations you tend to over-react to but that shouldn’t be so disturbing. List the feelings that get in the way of you getting what you want from your career. Then look for patterns that continually resurface in your life. By realizing the areas where you feel like you’re failing, you can take steps to improve.

Procrastination in any form is an avoidance technique. For example, chronically being late in the morning, playing games on the computer, and doing personal tasks at work are all avoidance techniques. The more subtle techniques are sometimes so subversive you may not even realize you’re doing it. But some symptoms can develop from procrastination, including headaches, the common cold, stomachaches, chronic sleeping or not sleeping at all, too much talking about nothing, crankiness, criticism, confusion, messiness, and avoiding responsibilities.

These symptoms of procrastination result from an inner struggle that wears on your immune system, and then take you away from doing what you really want or need to do with your time. This shows how the subconscious mind, not the conscious mind, may hold the control. If you identify procrastination as a behavior that limits your success, then perhaps you’re in the wrong job. Or maybe you need additional training or help to complete the duties you procrastinate.

Fear is the feeling underlying all forms of anxiousness, uneven breathing, shyness, rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, panicky thoughts, desire to flee, and saying things you don’t mean. For example, you may have a fear of confrontation that allows your superiors at work to walk all over you. Or you may have a fear of rejection that keeps you from cold-calling potential clients.

Fear masquerades as a myriad of forms of self-sabotage, which may lead to physical symptoms and disease. These fears are ghosts from the past that don’t really exist anymore. Current emotions are capable of being handled with logic, unlike those that frightened you in the past. By identifying the areas where you’re uneasy or afraid, you can realize that something is blocking you and take steps to overcome these fears. To be successful, you must bury the ghosts of the past, release irrational fears, and live fully in the present.

While it may be easier to blame working conditions, co-workers, superiors, or any number of outside factors for your stalled success on the job, the real limitation may actually be one of these self-sabotaging behaviors. By identifying these behaviors in yourself, you can start taking action to overcome them. Start with small steps, such as writing every evening for twenty minutes when you’re relaxed. Reflect on your self-sabotaging behavior and consider any progress you made during that day.

If you can’t overcome your self-sabotaging behaviors on your own, and many people find they cannot, then you may need to find help. While identifying the behavior is only the first step, taking it will bring you closer to the level of success you want from your career.

Jacqueline Sidman, Ph.D. is a respected author, speaker and life coach, founder and president of The Sidman Institute, Inc. Dr. Sidman has over fifteen years of experience helping others overcome life challenges. She is author of Instant Inner Peace!, an expert on eliminating phobias, addictions, relationship problems, career struggles and health issues. The Sidman Solution® is her trademark system to solving emotional and physical difficulties without medication or long-term therapy, and is hailed by colleagues, clients and peers.