Blocking your blessings

It was a beautiful, overcast day (a blessing, when you live in the Caribbean) as we sat down in our favorite chocolate-based cafe.

My friend Mike is in the world of online business.

And after a few minutes of light chit-chat, we got into the real conversation, which he gave me permission to talk about.

He started talking about some of his self-sabotaging behaviors. How he'll be on a good run where he's dialed in... sleeping well, working steadily, no porn, no drinking... and then one day, after weeks or months stacking things up nicely, he'll just get this impulse to go out and be wild.

So he'll go drinking.

Talk with a bunch of girls.

Get all worked up, bring a girl home.

Or not bring a girl home, be disappointed, and end up watching porn.

Sacrificing sleep at the same time.

One thing leads to another and before he knows it, a few weeks have gone by and he's still in that more hedonistic mode and has totally undermined the momentum he'd been building.

This is a pattern that used to be much worse, often stealing months of his time.

But it still comes up sometimes.

And it's pretty classic self-sabotage.

Where, probably, some part of him doesn't actually want to create the success he's been working towards. Some shadowy part of his unconscious wants to stay the same.

He used an interesting term to describe this pattern:

"Blocking his blessings."

And I liked that description.

Because I think everyone does that sometimes, even if they don't realize it, and even if they don't have the words to describe it as such.

I, personally, spent many years blocking my blessings.

Because despite being relatively intelligent with a desire to grow, a broad knowledge base, and the infinite information on the internet...

I had been using porn for years.

Totally burning out my dopamine reward center.

Undercutting my mojo, motivation, discipline, and creativity.

Because it was literally physically damaging the parts of my brain that control those things. And surely many more blessings could have arrived in my life much sooner if I hadn't been neurochemically hamstringing myself every few days...

Eventually I figured it out, thank God.

So I could start accepting the blessings that were meant to head my way.

But to say I could relate to the story would be a bit of an understatement, and I was happy I could give him some first-hand perspectives on how to break those patterns with a combination of mental rewiring techniques + shadow work — the same things I used to break my own bad habits and use every day with my clients, which I can share more about later.

But for the moment, to wrap this up, 2 questions to reflect on:

1. In what ways have you been blocking your blessings?

2. What can you do to fix it?

And if, like my old self, you know that a certain particularly bad habit is part of what's been blocking your blessings in business, love, and more...

I'm here to help.