Five Self-Sabotaging Behaviors that are Getting in the Way of Your Money!

by Amanda Abella  - September 27, 2022

Get ready to up your game because today we are talking about five money beliefs that are definitely getting in the way of you making money. How do I know that? Because these money beliefs threw me for a loop in 2022.

Avoid Letting Your Negative Money Mindset Affect Your Business

When you go into sales and put yourself out there for your business, you’re trying to collect money and create conversations. But, unfortunately, all your money mindset kicks in at this point, and it doesn’t always help you in sales! And in addition to that, let’s say you start hitting certain levels in your business and your life; all your money mindset and habits are going to come up and affect how you do business.

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Last year I had my first six-figure month in the business! However, even though I had a successful month, many irrational fears around money started coming up, and then came the self-sabotaging behaviors (uh-oh!). I had to take six months to figure out what was happening.

I’ve come to learn through the help of a mentor that I had a lot of subconscious beliefs about money that were keeping me stuck and keeping me more diminutive than I wanted to be.

Now that I’ve had a year of processing, I’ve discovered what was going on in my money mindset and how I could change those negative beliefs into positive thinking regarding money. So here’s what I did – and you can do it too – to change my thoughts and break through my glass ceiling!

Five Money Beliefs That are Holding You Back in Life and Business

Belief number one is that making money needs to be complicated. This is a widespread one that everybody has to varying degrees. So many of us grew up with the story that making money is difficult.

And although making money is not easy – it can be challenging. But the reason making money is challenging is that we have many stories baked into our brains about making money and sales. Not because making money is hard. Making money is actually really simple. You solve a problem for a group of people who have money and give it to you for your services. So the concept is actually straightforward.

What’s hard is our overcomplication when we think about making money. Because we’ve been taught to believe that making money is extraordinarily hard and challenging, we believe it is, but this is false.

So the way that this showed up for me, and maybe it showed up for you in this way (if any of this resonates with you, please let me know in the comments) is when things started getting easy in my business, I got very suspicious about why making money was easy for me.

And not only did I get suspicious, but I also felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t really understand why I felt like this. Then I figured out that I thought I was being lazy. And there were lots of reasons for my feelings. Still, I realized later during an interview that I was efficient at making money, so that’s why it was so easy for me!

I started laughing because it was such a vast aha moment! In my household, growing up, being lazy was one of the worst possible things you could be! I’m also Cuban. There’s a saying that lazy people work twice because being lazy and not working hard is seen as one of the worst things you could possibly be in life.

So growing up, when I would do things very efficiently, or I was that kid who would get the correct answer in school without showing their work, why would I do all this work if I could get the answer without doing it? I don’t understand. I just wanna get to the point.

And, of course, I would get in trouble for not doing my work. Even at jobs, I would make systems better to get to the result faster and get in trouble. So obviously, when things started getting more straightforward in my business, I started making a lot more money. And there was my little girl freaking out inside of me, thinking she would get in trouble!

I posted about this on Facebook, and people lost it! They were like, oh my gosh, I understand! So if you resonate with that one, let me know in the comments.
Another self-sabotaging belief about money was after experiencing the most significant success in my career.

I felt unsafe because I made lots of money. I felt that people were going to be out to get me or someone was coming to take it away. I’ve come to learn through the help of one of my mentors, Angela Bell, that I also received this as a child due to being under the Communist dictatorship.

We lost everything when the Cuban revolution came in, and communism took over. My mom remembers the day that the Cuban government knocked on her door and the government took away their family farm.

And even though I didn’t grow up in that system, my parents and grandparents lost everything. They literally started over in the United States with nothing. And on my mom’s side of the family, my grandparents were already in their forties. So imagine being in your forties and fifties, losing everything, and having to move out of your country to start over again!

And you’re starting over in a country where you don’t even speak the language. It’s tough. It’s hard. It’s challenging. And at this point, you’re scared. You’re suspicious. You start doing well, and you start getting suspicious because of your previous experiences. That mentality was passed on to me as a child.

And I didn’t realize that I picked up on this mindset and that it caused self-sabotage. Remember, your family may have had a similar experience, but they have a different fear from a similar experience. It’s all in how we perceive our situation and what we take from it.

How Survivor’s Guilt Can Self-Sabotage Your Money Mindset

Survivor’s guilt is common, and this one really shocked me and surprised me to my core when one of my mentors figured out that I had survivor’s guilt. Within 30 minutes of our first session together, Angela Bell asked, “did you know you have survivor’s guilt?”

And I was like, what do you mean I have survivor’s guilt? What are you talking about? I don’t understand. And she put two and two together and found out that I had inherited survivor’s guilt from my family.

Your family has a pattern that they can pass on to you. Then when you’re successful, you start to feel guilty. I didn’t know that my negative money mindset was also linked to survivor’s guilt. I grew up in a pattern of self-sabotage of feeling guilty because we’re doing well. All this while we have family members in another country that we literally left behind who are not doing well.

Not Feeling Worthy When You Make More Money

When you start hitting your money goals, one of the self-sabotaging feelings you may have is not feeling worthy of making good money. At a certain money threshold, you start self-sabotaging. Many times you can link it back to not feeling worthy.
Now, this is something I have seen in myself and my clients and colleagues. One of our biggest fears is not being enough and not being loved. And we, for whatever reason, as a society, usually don’t feel worthy of good things.

Even if you didn’t grow up feeling that way, many advertisements in society could make you feel that way. So many marketing tactics telling you why you’re not good enough. A lot of marketing is about why you’re not good enough and not doing enough.

Women have been told they’re not good enough. And I got that story. So I’m gonna have to work twice as hard, and life’s gonna be more difficult for me because I’m female, brown, black, or indigenous.

I see clients who finally get the five-figure sale and will proceed to mess it up in all ways possible. Then, they’ll start by emailing their clients or over-service them on weekends and holidays.

I even had a client once who was finding clients for her client. Remember, that’s not your responsibility; your client’s responsibility. But she was doing that because she didn’t feel worthy of the client’s money.

We have to work on our worthiness. The most complex sale you’ll ever have to do is selling yourself on yourself every single day.

Becoming Aware of Your Own Self-Sabotage

When I started making a series of bad decisions to try and prove myself, I asked myself why I was thinking like this. So, finally, I did get down to the root cause of my money mindset issues. Once I could make that shift, things started to shift quickly.
The last self-sabotage that I became aware of is the belief that I couldn’t rely on other people. And when you’re trying to run a business, you’re scaling and snowballing. When you have fast growth, the ride can get wild. So I quickly realized that I did not have enough support. I felt that much of the workload was on my shoulders.

I’m not okay with that anymore. I need to share the responsibility. And I was on the right track, but getting to the point where I felt comfortable doing that proved to be way more difficult than I imagined.

Those are five money beliefs that will cause you to self-sabotage and either not make money, or even if you make money, once you hit a certain threshold, you may start self-sabotaging and losing the money you’ve made.

In many ways, self-sabotaging affects your relationship with yourself and your money. I want to hear in the comments if this resonated with you!

Now go out there and Make Money, Your Honey!

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