When people talk about self sabotage, I often think that it could be better explained by an allegory we could call "plurality". Like when it's evident someone has actively gone against their own good and we immediately link it to a self esteem problem or a lack of sense of responsibility. I believe we fail to see what we are, as human beings.

What we call our personality isn't something static like a character sheet or even definable by vocabulary. I'd go even further and say our personality is in itself a negotiation between conflicting identities hosted within ourselves. The feeling we get of being a singular entity could be best alluded to as the Free Will consciousness. Some people call it the higher self. I say you are the witness to your own parameters, meaning the character you call by your name is not you. It's a happening to which you've constructed a psychological core of associative properties that help you navigate your given coordinates. We all have that because it's the main skill we need to develop at a young age for survival sake. We train our focus by cruising through daily tasks, reflecting the importance of our surroundings based on immediate gain/risk assessments.

Only thing is, by adulthood, we should be able to negotiate between states of survival and appreciation. We're not taught that. I think that's the blooming of the Human Flower; to recognize the parameters in which we are evolving as only that; parameters. In other words, we never restore the balance between the childlike state of openness that our right brain gives us access to after we've rationalized the world we grew up in. We see the patterns of social determinism, that shape our reality and for most of us, the world could remain at that. Idealists see the world in a equally wrong, if opposite, manner. To them, everyone is unique and completely free of their birth; blank slates that could be painted any color if they only saw themselves as the manifestation of infinite potential that they were.

I think reality is held within a symbiosis of both ideas. You are completely free, yes, but inside a set of parameters that define what you have, not what you are. See, that's the vital distinction. You've incarnated in your body not to play the role of someone else. You were given what you have and what you have is directly linked to exponentially diverse purposes as you explore the vastness of what it means to be you. You could then see yourself as a territory or a set of resources. You can hardly trade your set for something else but your possess ultimate freedom to do as you entend with the resources that are available to you. That's why I think we should focus on the idea of Free Will. Because our Will is the only thing about us that is free. I'm not free to invent an amount to be deposited in my bank account immediately. I'm not free to teleport on a beach in Mexico with the sheer power of my thoughts though I'm the complete master of where I direct my attention at. With the skill set that was given to me, with my particular talents and attributes, I can point my Will at any tiniest part of my being and inflate it's importance to any size I desire. The same way we sometimes bring microscopic objects reeeeeeeally close to our eye and for that precise moment, we can grasp the viewpoint of tiny organisms and how much their reality is different yet as viable as ours.

Attention is fractal. The level of magnification you reside at is an aesthetic choice. That means that what you consider to be true about yourself is either true or in the process of becoming true. You, unbeknownst to yourself, are setting the scene for the future you by galvanizing or restricting parts of your conflicting personalities just by the importance you are allowing them to have. You are, in other words, constructing the very fabric of your character simply by believing that some aspects of your identity are truer than others.

In fact, you are all. You are spectra across spectra. You are both courageous and a coward. You are both a success and a failure. You are both rigid and creative. It all just depends on what you think you need to be in a said moment.

That's why when we talk about self sabotage or wanting what's worse for ourselves, we could say we are simply not aware of the role we are supposed to play. We stay stagnant because we have uncovered that by not achieving any of our goals, we get drafted by the karmic tides and are given a preset role in someone else's game. We are telling life that we are not recognizing our character in the game and would rather not play. Sometimes it's because we're afraid of the next step. Sometimes it's because we think we're not ready but almost all the time, it's because we don't realize that we've been long prepared for what's to come and that it wouldn't even be given to us as an option were we not ready.

But in order to level up, we must be first confronted to a specialist personality that we all have which is the skeptic. The Skeptic is a protective instinct of ours which is necessary for our growth as it acts as a gatekeeper out of our comfort zone. Past the comfort zone, the Skeptic serves no purpose so its survival mechanism leads you to believe that you need it in order to be safe, which can be true. Within its parameters, the Skeptic gives you a 100% survival rate but it often comes at the price of self-doubt, regrets and shame. It's the personality that kept you safe as a child, doubting potentialities as dangers, preventing you to hop in every stranger's car that promised candy or adventure. That being said, Identifying too much with the Skeptic aligns you with those lower vibrations; grounded in the basic feelings of survival but never escaping our primal reflexes.

Once you traverse the gate out of your comfort zone, everything your inner Skeptic told you would happen happens. You, being Free Will incarnate, can decide it's too much and come back to safety, reinforcing your bond with the Skeptic identity or you can choose to double down and shine your focus on another aspect of your being and develop it as you start creating more and more positive memories associated with it. In the end, only you can decide what to consider a failure, what to consider a lesson.

What's to take from this is that we, essentially, are free. You are not the voices inside your head, you are the Arbiter that gives reason to one among them at a time. You get to decide what the movie of your life is about. It's a play within a sandbox and you are the play writer, trying to convince yourself you are the character for which you wrote the play.

My only advice would then become something like this : Believe yourself to be what you wish. The more people you convince, the more you'll convince yourself. After which you'll realize that there is no choice to make in creation, no doubt to have in incarnation, no rest to find in stagnation.