Self Handicapping
Self-handicapping was studied extensively in the 80’s and 90’s. It’s fully recognized by psychologists that has been found to have a serious effect on people’s lives.
Some people purposely sabotage their chances of success. Sounds strange doesn’t it?
Why would they do this?
It’s all about protecting your self-esteem. I’ve got an idea that if you are reading this still then you probably suffer from low self-esteem.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I use to suffer massively from it.
Excuses, excuses
I used to come up with every excuse in the book to justify why I did or didn’t do something. In certain situations the reasons may have been justified but the vast majority of the time they were just bull-shit excuses that I made up to stop me having to do something I didn’t want to do.
But self-handicapping goes a little further than just making up excuses. It’s putting yourself into a scenario that makes it easy for you to pass the buck, so to speak, so that you don’t blame yourself for your downfalls. We call this ‘Ego Protection’.
It’s a way of preserving your self esteem cos’ you are making it seem as though failure is not your fault.
Here’s a fascinating (and brief) look at how this is viewed by psychologists, this video is called ‘The Ego Will Fuck You’…
Let’s take a look at an example
Imagine someone has just started learning how to meet and attract women. They arrange to go out with their friends on the weekend to approach some hot sexy women and all seems good.
Now what they should do the night before is have some dinner, maybe do some research on how to approach women if they feel the need, have a little chill-out and then get an early night so that they are all rested for the night out.
However instead they stay up late the night watching films or playing on the computer. They get to bed around 4:00am and have to be up early cos’ they are playing football.
Why would they do this?
When they go out with their friends that night they have a great excuse as to why they are unable to approach. They might say, “Man I am to tired to approach tonight. I was up till 4:00am last night and then I had to be up early for football practice. I am just too tired.”.
They are blaming their failure on something they feel is not their fault so that they don’t feel bad about it. They are, in essence, protecting their self-esteem.
Don’t do this
You need to take responsibility for your actions. If you stay up late playing computer games or watching films when you know you are up early the next morning then that’s your fault.
Don’t give yourself any reasons why you can’t do something. At the end of the day you might protect your self-esteem, but it’s doing absolutely nothing to help you achieve your goals in life.
Plus remember one thing. Failure is not a bad thing. You need to fail in order to learn. So the quicker you realize this the quicker you will accept your failures and look for ways to prevent the same mistakes happening in the future.
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