Self-Limiting Behaviors

How much are we afraid of failing? I would maintain, we are so afraid of failure we adopt self-limiting behaviors to avoid (falsely) the possibility that we might fail. I’ve identified six self-limiting behaviors used to avoid the possibility of failure: perfectionism, people-pleasing, control, isolation, busyness, and fear of failure. The scary thing about these self-limiting behaviors is that they do as they are named: they box us in and restrain us.

If you wait to be perfect, you’ll never do anything. If you focus on pleasing others, you’ll never please yourself. Want to control everything? Great. But it’s exhausting and you will burn yourself out. Or we can isolate ourselves and pretend we don’t need help, which only means we fall apart when we do need help. Finally, we limit ourselves through busyness. While we wear it as a badge of honor—gosh, you must be important because you’re always so busy—all busyness does is distract us from our true calling and dilutes our powerful focus.

The ironic thing about self-limiting behaviors is that we do not need to limit ourselves; there are plenty of people who want to limit our power, reach, strength, and agency. Why the heck then do we limit ourselves???

This leads to a discussion on why we are so afraid of failing. Remember, we use self-limiting behaviors with the misguided notion that they will prevent failure. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work. But think about this—we use these self-limiting behaviors to avoid the possibility that we might fail. What are we so afraid of that we will confine ourselves to non-productive behaviors on the chance that we can sidestep the possibility of failure? Dissecting the failure process and the thoughts, feelings, and activities that go along with the fear of failure—note: it’s not the actual failure, it’s the possibility of failure that we’re afraid of—concludes this section.

If it makes you feel better, I’ve been stuck in each of these self-limiting behaviors at one time or another in my life. And yes, I still lapse into self-limiting behaviors when I’m not intentional about avoiding them. But knowledge is power so becoming aware of when we use these self-limiting behaviors is the first step toward healing. Let’s get started.