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8 Things to Stop Beating Yourself Up About

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Have you been trying to change certain habits or routines for years, and you’re not sure why you’re not moving forward? Do you wake up every morning to an alarm clock that you turn off five times before getting out of bed, make endless to-do lists that never get done, and feel like your career is unfulfilling at best?

If any of the above ring true for you, the problem isn’t you, it’s that you’re working on solving the wrong problem. Instead of asking “Why the f*** am I still doing this?!” let’s change the inquiry and end the self-sabotaging behavior. Once you get to the root, you’ll be able to change absolutely any behavior. I promise. If you struggle with sticking to a plan and making real, sustained change, this article is going to be a huge relief for you.

It’s time to stop beating yourself up if you’re stuck in old patterns. I’m going to show you how with science-backed tools that are proven to help you identify the root causes of your stress, and allow you to move forward with your life.

1. Procrastination

Some really smart people have devoted their lives to researching procrastination. The findings? Procrastination has nothing to do with laziness, lack of work ethic, or your ability to be productive. It has everything to do with the stresses in your life. If you procrastinate, stuff like making to-do lists, buying new planners, and trying all of the time-management hacks will never work.

Until you go to the root cause of why you procrastinate — which is stress in some area of your life — you’ll keep blowing off work in order to binge on cat videos. Cat videos relieve your brain of stress in the moment, making your brain feel like the overall stress in your life is gone. Whether your stress is related to something simple or serious, the same rule applies. Go to the root and take those stresses out of your life. And if you experience repeated stress related to things in your past, you may struggle with PTSD. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the best solution for your procrastination problem is EMDR or other targeted therapy. (Editor’s note: Agreed! Reach out to your favorite medical professional to explore your treatment options.)

2. You’ve tried to quit bad habits but you can’t.

Habits are behaviors that get encoded into our brains. They are regulated by a trigger. When you feel, hear, smell, sense, or taste the trigger, your body automatically, without thinking, starts what researchers call a “habit loop.” The relief: all habits can be broken.

The first step is to understand that the root of a habit is a trigger.

If you’re trying to quit smoking, just using the patch will never be enough. Even after the physiological dependence leaves your body, all of those million triggers are still there. With cigarettes, there’s the trigger of “the alarm goes off, I need a smoke.” There’s the “I just brushed my teeth, I need a smoke.” There’s the “I just poured a cup of coffee” and the smell of the coffee, the time of day, the sound of it hitting the cup, that all triggers the part of your brain that goes into automatic.

With this understanding, you have a little bit of compassion for yourself and realize that you’re in a situation where everything in your house is going to remind you of a cigarette. Instead of trying to get rid of the triggers — which is impossible — you need to find a new, adaptive behavior that you turn to as soon as you are triggered. An example might be changing the flavor of your coffee or replacing having a smoke with going on a three-minute walk. If you can’t break a habit, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just going about it in the wrong way.

3. You don’t know how to find your passion.

Let me tell you a little secret: you will never just “find” your passion. We talk about passion as this woo-woo thing that’s supposed to come into our lives. If you’re struggling to figure out what you’re passionate about, that’s totally normal. Your passion isn’t what you “love” doing. Passion is simply energy. If something energizes you, follow it. If it depletes you, stay away from it.

If you want to figure out what energizes you, you need to get out there and start doing things. Trial and error. If you are trying to “find your passion” do everything in your day with this question in mind: Does this energize me or deplete me?

You won’t discover that you love carpentry if you’ve never tried making something out of wood. You won’t know if you’re a good speaker until you get up on stage. You won’t know that you’d make a great bakery owner until you volunteer or work at one. You have to try a bunch of things and find out what you don’t like before you can be 100 percent positive about what you’re here to do.

4. You never have enough time.

Instead of saying “I don’t have time,” start saying “It’s not a priority” and see how that feels. By changing just a few words, you’re forced to get clear on what actually matters and what doesn’t.

Understand that you’re ultra-busy for a reason. Oftentimes, we’re busy — but busy spinning in circles. One of the reasons people stay so busy is because if they were to slow down, they would be forced to deal with whatever they are dealing with underneath the disguise of “busy-ness”.

We need to slow down and tune in into our emotions in order to see the problems we’re scared to face.

Instead of being stressed about your schedule, take a look at why you’re taking on so many commitments in the first place. If you “never have enough time,” I challenge you to slow down today and see where there’s an opportunity to say “no” to new things at work or in your personal life so you can start to make time for your priorities.

5. You don’t do the things you need to do.

If you are somebody who is smart, is able to identify the things you need to do, and yet you constantly don’t do them, there is an underlying story that you have about yourself — and it keeps playing out. You become a self-sabotaging, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Instead of asking why are you aren’t able to do the things you need to do, I want you to look at what happened to you. I remember a time when I was super stuck, and the one thing that marked that time period in my life was a ton of shame and feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing.

Maybe you’ve been there. Maybe you’re there now. We all have different reasons for being there. Maybe you were in an abusive relationship, maybe you haven’t recovered from a huge setback in life. Whatever it is, you’ve got to stop being so mean to yourself. With self-sabotage, we take something that someone else used to do or say to us, or something life has done to us, and we do it to ourselves. The reason you don’t carve out time for yourself, and blow off the things that mean the most to you, is because of this underlying feeling that you’re not important or worthy of happiness.

And the only way to break this story is through action.

Today, start being kind to yourself and change your story about the kind of person that you are.

Take one small action on something that matters to you, try this every day for a week, and I promise your confidence muscle will start to take shape.

6. You quit what you start.

If you’re a quitter who has trouble following through on things, I can guarantee this is a pattern encoded in your brain since you were young. The first thing to do is take a look into your past. When was the first time that you quit at something? And, when you quit at that thing, why did you do it? What feelings led you to quit?

Most likely, when those same feelings rise up today, you quit, again and again. These are sneaky feelings because they subconsciously trigger us to execute the same reaction: quitting. The habit has become your way of life. Today, instead of wondering why you can’t stick to anything, have some self-compassion and realize quitting has become your coping strategy for when things get hard.

Once you get familiar with the feelings that rise up before you quit, you can start to push through them and become someone who gets shit done.

7. You’ve been complaining about the same problem for years.

If you have a problem that you have been trying to fix forever and you’re not making any progress, I’ve got a prediction. You don’t have any interest in fixing it. Accept that you don’t want to change. In fact, you might be using that problem as a way to get out of taking responsibility.

If you’ve been bitching and moaning for years about your job, your weight, your relationships, but you haven’t done anything to actually change anything, I bet complaining is actually your way of manipulating others to feel bad for you. Stop complaining about the problem and realize changing doesn’t really matter to you.

If you decide you truly want to change, you need to stop complaining and get to the root of why you still have that problem.

It’s probably because you gain support (or the ability to manipulate) from others with your complaining. Ask yourself why it matters to you without needing external validation. This will help you make sustained changes, starting with ending the habit of complaining.

8. You are not your past.

Many of us get hooked when thinking about the past. Even if you’ve changed and today no longer have the destructive habits and mindsets that you once did, it can be incredibly hard to make peace with your past. However, when you’re making yourself wrong about your past, you’re not being proud of how far you’ve come.

If you want to be happy, you need to forgive yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made and embrace and be proud of where you’re at now. No matter where you are, I know that in several areas of your life you have come a long way. How could you possibly move beyond the mistakes that you’ve made in the past if you’re not proud and celebratory of how far you’ve come?

Right now, I want you to acknowledge yourself for how far you’ve come. Just like you, I’m a work in progress who is working on taking my life to the next level.

Motivation is a myth, but taking control of your life is simple with action.

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Finding Your Attitude Indicator

In flight dynamics an important concept is taught called "Attitude Indicator." Also known by other names like Gyro Indicator, Attitude Director Indicator to name a few, this instrument is used to tell the pilot of the orientation of the aircraft with reference to the ground among other things. The pilot keeps a constant check on the Attitude Indicator during take-off, landing and throughout the flight. Obviously, I've over simplified the explanation and the science behind it. But my goal is to help you understand how there is an "Attitude Indicator" that we all have within us, which we all use or could use while we navigate through the journey of personal relationships, professional careers, and social lives.

Right from our childhood, our behavior with our friends, relatives, and everywhere we go is under constant scrutiny by our parents. Bad attitude is brought to our attention right away and we're told to correct it. Good attitude is (generally) rewarded with praise among other things.

By adolescence most of us are capable of distinguishing between good and bad attitude. In school and college we pay close attention to our attitude as well as the attitude of others. By now we know how to distinguish between people with good and bad attitude. We tend to be friends with the ones who fall in our good attitude classification and often stay away from the one's who we see to have a bad attitude. Later, we use our Attitude Indicator with most people in our professions, personal relationships, our friends and acquaintances.

So what is your Attitude Indicator? What does it look like? Obviously, it's not like a physical gauge with numbers and needles like the one used in flight dynamics. The indicator you carry within you is intangible. Your Attitude Indicator is the feelings you experience. A good attitude indicates the feeling of positivity. You experience this when you or someone you're in the presence of possesses good attitude. Whereas, a clear indicator of a bad attitude is the feeling of negativity.

Whether you choose to have a good or bad attitude in any domain of your life, it is not something that you decide based on the events that transpire in your life or the people that you're around. Your choice is independent of the external circumstances. Without a doubt, your attitude is your choice and not something governed by your environment.

You and I all use our Attitude Indicator to learn, monitor and even transform our attitude as well as understand the attitude of others. 

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Simple Steps to Success: How to Own Your Zone and Unleash Your Genius

Have you ever found yourself asking:

“How do I work Smarter? Not Harder???

Wishing you had 30 hours in the day to get everything on your to do list done?

Wondering how you can grow your business without working 80 hours a week?

Or just plain flabbergasted questioning what needs to change so you can work more efficiently and effectively? When you get the feeling that you’re pushing rocks up hill, spinning your wheels and not reaching your goals, it’s a good time to pause and see what’s working, and more importantly, what’s NOT working to grow your business.

As you take inventory, look at all the aspects of your work that you LOVE.  You know, the parts that flow with ease, where time disappears and next thing you know it’s time to go home. Write all of those things down. Then, look at all the parts of you work that you dread, procrastinate doing or even stick your head in the sand to avoid doing those things.

Write all of those things down. Once you’ve created your two lists, then ask yourself:

'Of all the things on my Don’t Like list, what can I delegate, reconfigure or cross off the list all together?'  

Really looking at what’s vital for YOU to do, versus what could be done by someone else.  Then move on to your Do Like List, asking yourself:

'Of all the things on my Do Like list, how can I spend more of my time doing these parts?'

Be sure to notice how you feel in your body with each of the things on your Do Like list. The more it resonates in a good way throughout your body, the better.  You see, the things on your Do Like list, tend to be the place where you’re operating from your natural strength and talents – The place where it’s almost as easy as breathing.

It’s also often the place that we take for granted and think “well everyone can do that, can’t they?”

Truth is, that not everyone has your natural strengths and talents in these areas.  That’s why I like to call this place Your Genius Zone.

Your Genius Zone is the place from which you operate most effectively, efficiently and with the greatest amount of joy and ease.

Signs you’re in the Genius Zone include:

- You’re mentally and physically relaxed
- You’re confident and optimistic
- You’re focused on the present
- You’re highly energized
- You have a sense of extraordinary awareness
- You feel a sense of control and ease

The key is to learn how to operate more and more from your Genius Zone and less and less from the places of resistance that drag you down and drain your energy.

Once your clear on where your Genius Zone is, you can much more easily reassess your short-term and long-term goals, reconfigure roles and responsibilities, delegate tasks and make sure you have the right people on your team to compliment your strengths versus duplicating them.

This allows you to Own Your Zone.

And, when you’re clear on the natural strengths and genius of everyone on your team, then your team can begin to fire on all cylinders as well!

You see, as everyone is working from the areas that they do most easily and instinctively, their job satisfaction will go up as they too, get to work smarter not harder.  This creates a powerful ripple effect: as job satisfaction rises, so does productivity, which then elevates the customer experience. This naturally raises the perceived value of your product or service, which increases demand and with it so does your profitability.

Another way to look at it: as you own your zone and allow those on your team to do the same, you create a win-win-win.

Happy team = Improved results

Improved results = Happy clients

Happy clients = Improved profitability

Here’s to Owning Your Zone!

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Developing Your Extraordinary Mindset Opportunities

Just like artists who unleash their talent for being creative, you too can develop your own inspired creativity using the talents you have. Since your thoughts, attitudes, and expectations affect everything you do as a leader, you need to also look at your priorities as well as identify success factors for your company. Your critical goals and strategies to achieve these talents and successes are good places to begin. Experience new ways of thinking, not just about leadership, but about everything you do.

But business is business, and you want to get to the top and stay there. What do you do to make that happen? In paving your way toward becoming a better leader than you have been, the following tips are what I found for Developing an Extraordinary Mindset of Opportunities for those of you who want to become extraordinary leaders and those of you who are leaders and want to become even more
extraordinary leaders:

1. Develop Extraordinary Mindsets: Since your beliefs or the way you think produce the specific results you want, ask yourself, "Do I have a solid understanding of my game plan?" If so, begin to create attainable goals that will generate powerful results. If not, begin by writing down what you have already accomplished, and then add to that list what you want to accomplish as a business leader.

2. Develop Leadership Bench Strength: Be ready to strengthen your leadership capabilities. Tap into your natural strength areas of high performance management, articulating and implementing your vision, inspiring your people, having integrity, being accountable, as well as even more importantly, make things happen.

If you feel that some of your skills need a helping hand, build on them. Leading a team or a department is different from managing a team or a department. With that in mind, having a foundation of leadership skills on which to build gives you the opportunity to strengthen those skills when you use them and to gain other skills in the process. By integrating your new skills with the skills you already have, you are able to perform your job more effectively. It is vital that you acquire new skills that will enable you to perform effectively. Do not ignore any weaknesses you find either - work on improving them.

3. Focus your Mind: Evaluate your skills, knowledge, and competencies. Start by writing down a list of the things you have accomplished that were so exceptional that they gave you better results than what you expected. Manage your time according to your priorities. Also, when you make a decision, make sure you have both short- and long-term goals in mind. (Your legacy is also on the line here).

4. Take Control of Your Creativity: Do not analyze the reasons that something did not work to the exclusion of improving the situation so that it will work the next time. That is a waste of energy and time. At times you may need to go beyond traditional thinking when you are met with a challenge. Thinking more creatively by first brainstorming about how to solve a problem or in implementing a policy might be what is needed. Having an exchange of ideas with others can trigger the beginning of what you are looking for regarding a solution to a problem or even a new product or service that your company is looking to produce.

5. Exceptional People Skills: Have you ever wondered how some people can walk into a room full of strangers and leave with new friends and business acquaintances? This is where your interpersonal skills come into play as they are related to all of your other competencies. Look at how your skills are compared to those of Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. (See Goleman's book entitled: Working with Emotional Intelligence as there are just too many to list here.)

6. View Obstacles as Opportunities: Do not think of the downside of what is holding you back or of how this is going to stop you from getting to where you want to go. Instead, think of obstacles as stepping stones and think of ways to get over what is stopping you. Learn to develop new ways of thinking about opportunities. You will be amazed of your improved communication skills, team-work, commitment to your work, as well as your increased organizational performance.

7. Forward Thinking: Knowing what to lead and aligning your skills with confidence and practical ideas to challenge issues with practical and creative solutions encourages the leader to think beyond the confines of traditional leadership. Since it provides you with different perspectives, your insights become unique for solving the issues at hand.

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The Unusual Ways To Break Any Habit

Mindset · Growth · Self-Leadership · 2026

Your Habits Are Building Your Destiny. Here's How to Make Sure They're Building the Right One.

Every significant result in your life — positive or negative — is the accumulated product of your daily habits. Understanding exactly how habits work is the beginning of being able to change them deliberately and permanently.

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There is a principle that appears throughout history in various forms, attributed to thinkers across centuries, and it has endured because it is simply, undeniably true:

Sow a thought — reap an action.
Sow an action — reap a habit.
Sow a habit — reap a character.
Sow a character — reap a destiny.

Read that chain again. It moves from something as small and invisible as a single thought all the way to something as large and defining as a destiny. And at every step, the previous level determines what is possible at the next.

This means something profound: your destiny is not fixed by circumstance, background, or luck. It is being actively shaped, right now, by the thoughts you habitually think, the actions those thoughts produce, and the habits those actions become. Every day, through every choice, you are quite literally building the person you will be — and the life that person will inhabit.

The question is not whether your habits are building your future. They are. The question is whether they are building the future you actually want.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Aristotle

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What a Habit Actually Is

Most people think of habits as things they do. But habits are more precisely things the brain does on their behalf — automated behavioural sequences that run without conscious decision-making once they are sufficiently established.

This is one of the brain's most sophisticated capabilities. By automating repeated behaviours, it frees up conscious cognitive resources for novel challenges. You do not think about how to walk, how to drive a familiar route, or how to brush your teeth — those behaviours run on a deeply embedded loop, leaving your mind available for other things.

The problem is that the brain does not distinguish between helpful and harmful habits at the level of automation. It simply learns to run whatever sequence has been most consistently reinforced. Which means the habits that are running your life right now — your default responses, your morning routines, your coping mechanisms, your patterns around food, money, relationships, and focus — are being maintained with the same neural efficiency as the most productive habits you have.

Understanding the structure of a habit is the first and most important step to being able to change one deliberately.

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The Three-Part Loop That Runs Every Habit You Have

Researcher Charles Duhigg, in his landmark work on the science of habit formation, identified a three-part structure that underlies every habit — helpful or harmful, conscious or unconscious. Understanding this structure is genuinely transformative because it shows you exactly where the leverage exists to change behaviour.

1. The Trigger
The signal that activates the habit loop. Triggers can be a specific time of day, a location, an emotional state, another behaviour, or the presence of certain people. The trigger does not cause the behaviour — it initiates the automatic sequence that leads to it. Recognising your triggers is the beginning of having power over your responses.

2. The Behaviour
The automatic response that follows the trigger. This is the habit itself as most people think of it — the action taken, the food reached for, the phone checked, the run completed. This is where most habit-change attempts focus, and where most of them fail, because changing the behaviour without addressing the trigger and reward produces the path of maximum resistance.

3. The Reward
What the behaviour delivers — the reason the brain encoded it as a useful sequence in the first place. Rewards are almost always emotional: relief from stress, a sense of control, comfort, social connection, stimulation, escape. The reward is why the habit formed, and it is why willpower alone is almost never enough to break one. You cannot simply remove a behaviour that is meeting a genuine psychological need without replacing what it delivers.

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Why Willpower Is Not the Answer (And What Is)

The standard approach to breaking a habit is willpower — a simple, sustained decision to stop doing the thing. And occasionally this works, particularly for habits with shallow roots and limited emotional rewards.

But for the habits that matter most — the patterns around food, substances, avoidance, self-sabotage, negative self-talk, or compulsive behaviours — willpower has a consistent and well-documented failure rate. This is not a character weakness. It is a design limitation. Willpower is a finite resource that depletes with use. Habits, by contrast, are driven by deeply embedded neural circuitry that willpower is genuinely ill-equipped to override in the long term.

The approach that actually works is not suppression. It is substitution. Keep the trigger. Keep the reward. Change the behaviour.

If you reach for food when you are stressed (trigger: stress, reward: comfort and distraction), the solution is not to white-knuckle your way past the impulse through willpower. It is to identify another behaviour that delivers comfort and distraction without the unwanted consequences — a walk, a phone call, a few minutes of deliberate breathing. The trigger and reward remain. The path between them changes.

This is the mechanism behind every genuinely successful habit change. And understanding it puts you in a position of genuine agency rather than perpetual struggle.

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How to Change a Habit: A Practical Framework

Stage 1: Identify the complete loop
For the habit you want to change, map all three components explicitly. What is the trigger? What is the automatic behaviour that follows? What does that behaviour deliver — what emotional need does it meet? Do not assume you know. Observe yourself over several days and be genuinely curious rather than judgemental about what you find.

Stage 2: Design the replacement behaviour
Identify a new behaviour that delivers the same reward as the old one, without the unwanted consequences. This requires creativity and honest knowledge of yourself. The replacement does not have to be perfect — it has to be available, achievable, and genuinely rewarding enough to compete with the established loop.

Stage 3: Create environmental support
Design your environment so that the new behaviour is easy and the old behaviour requires effort. This is not about willpower — it is about architecture. Remove cues for the unwanted behaviour where possible. Place cues for the new behaviour prominently. Make the right choice the path of least resistance.

Stage 4: Expect discomfort and plan for it
The established neural pathway does not dissolve immediately. There will be a period — typically several weeks — during which the old loop activates and the new behaviour requires conscious choice rather than automatic response. Knowing this in advance means you interpret the discomfort as a normal part of the process rather than evidence that change is impossible.

Stage 5: Reinforce consistently
Every time you successfully execute the new behaviour in response to the established trigger, you are laying down a new neural pathway. Consistency matters more than perfection. A missed day is not a failure — it is a single data point. Return to the new behaviour immediately, without self-criticism, and continue building.

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Habits and Identity: The Deepest Level of Change

Behaviour change is one level of habit work. Identity change is a deeper and more durable one.

James Clear, in his work on atomic habits, makes a distinction that is worth understanding clearly: most people try to change habits from the outside in — focusing on outcomes (“I want to lose weight”) or processes (“I will go to the gym three times a week”). The most durable habit change, however, comes from changing identity first — from the inside out.

The question is not “what do I want to achieve?” but “who do I want to become?” And then: “what would someone who is already that person do?”

A person who is trying to stop smoking uses willpower to resist a cigarette. A person who identifies as a non-smoker simply does not smoke — because it is inconsistent with who they are. The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between behaviour change that requires constant effort and identity-based behaviour that is self-sustaining.

This is where personal development work and habit change intersect most powerfully. When you build a genuinely new self-concept — a clear, committed sense of who you are and who you are becoming — the habits that align with that identity become natural extensions of it rather than acts of willpower against your own nature.

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When to Seek Deeper Support

For some habits, particularly those with strong emotional roots — patterns around food, alcohol, avoidance, or compulsive behaviour — self-directed change using these frameworks is possible but can be significantly accelerated with the right support.

Approaches that work at the level of the unconscious mind, including certain coaching methodologies and structured mindset programmes, can address the emotional drivers of habitual behaviour at a depth that conscious analysis alone cannot always reach. The result is not just a changed behaviour but a changed relationship with the trigger itself — so the loop no longer runs with its previous power.

Recommended Resource

Life Optimization Coaching Program

For those who are ready to change their habits at the level of identity, not just behaviour.

The Life Optimization Coaching Program works directly on the beliefs, emotional patterns, and self-concept that determine which habits you build and which ones you cannot seem to break. It addresses the identity level of change described in this article — creating the internal conditions in which sustainable new habits become the natural expression of who you are becoming.

Self-paced, deeply practical, and genuinely accessible — one of the most affordable entry points into serious personal development available. Whether you are a coach looking to strengthen your own foundation or an individual committed to building genuinely new patterns, this is where that work begins properly.

Your destiny is being built right now, thought by thought and habit by habit. The only question is whether you are building it deliberately.

Start Your Life Optimization Journey

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Your Destiny Is Under Construction

The chain from thought to destiny is not a prophecy. It is a process. And it is a process you have more influence over than most people ever exercise.

Every thought you choose to entertain, every action that follows, every habit that action reinforces — these are not random events. They are the raw material of the character you are building and the life that character will produce. The construction is happening whether you are directing it or not.

The most important decision you can make is to direct it consciously. To look at the habits currently running your life and ask, with genuine honesty: are these building the future I want? And to change, with patience and intention, the ones that are not.

Build the Habits That Build the Life

The free VIP Performance Playbook gives you the vision, identity and strategic framework that makes lasting habit change genuinely possible. Download it free — and start building deliberately.

Download the Free VIP Performance Playbook

This post contains affiliate links. I only recommend programmes I believe genuinely serve you.

Elite VIP Circle · Mindset. Self-Worth. Freedom. · 2026