You have enough natural predators in your work life without adding…yourself. 
             Do you consistently complain, “Life is not fair,” “I am supposed to get what done by next Tuesday!” and “I could succeed with this project if he/she wasn’t on my team.”
            Undoubtedly, you consider yourself a very competent, intelligent and ambitious person who is often bushwhacked by nefarious circumstances and people.  Do you often say to yourself, “I just cannot get a break here!”
            I am the first one to openly admit life does deal out a bad hand.  You can wake up tomorrow with a pain or an unexpected lump on your body that will radically rewrite the script for your life.  And, yes, there are people with occupational positional power who stride into our well-designed careers and create a landfill of workplace havoc.
            But, there is another destructive force lurking in the shadows we often choose not to address:  ourselves.
            That’s right; we may be our worst enemy.
            Here is an important question to answer, “What attitude or behavior do I regularly employ to self-sabotage my best dreams?”
            You see, self-sabotage is a convenient, and foolproof, excuse for failure.  Self-sabotage never leaves fingerprints…our fingerprints.
            We can silently sabotage our dreams by subconsciously deciding not to return a phone call, procrastinating the completion of a difficult assignment, using inappropriate humor, making promises we know we cannot fulfill, giving vent to anger in the wrong place and…well, the list goes on and on.
            Down deep in our cranium we know we are pulling the plug on our best intentions for the future, but the self-sabotage continues to give us star power as the “victim.”  So we keep repeating the same starring role in our personal drama and blame our ways into our graves.
            We have other choices. 
            If you want to stop the practice of self-sabotage I am convinced you have to embrace the following four principles.
            First, a little “reality-testing” would be in order.  When you know you have been responsible for the disaster on your doorstep, openly admit this by standing in front of a mirror and say with conviction, “You are responsible for this failure.” 
            This will be a cleansing moment.  No excuses.  No blaming.
            Second, immediately leave the mirror and go to a desk with paper and pen in hand.  It is essential to write down what you should have done differently.  Unless you have a written account of how you would replay your role as the terminator of this dream, the nightmare will only be repeated again and you will find new people and circumstances to blame.

Third, find another person, who you trust, to verbally rehearse what you are going to do to make sure the self-sabotage does not make a repeat performance.
I am committed to this third stage.  If I do not verbally and emotionally engage another person to join me on stage, I will again slip into the backstage role of the complaining victim.  In other words, I need someone who will keep me honest in my history of dishonesty.
Finally, I have to keep dreaming…and decide what I will do when an exterior voice says, “no.”
Dreamers often slink back into self-sabotage when they get close to the front door of what could be.  They do not have a plan for rejection.
Here is the ultimate question for people who dream great dreams:  “What will you do when you hear ‘no’?”  If you do not know your answer to that question then be prepared to silently kill your next great dream with the punch line of the pathetic victim, “Why can’t I get a break here?”