10 Questions to Diagnose Your Self-Sabotage Patterns

Accurate diagnosis is the foundation of effective pattern work. The questions below are designed to produce specificity — moving from the general sense that “I sometimes sabotage myself” to a workable map of what the pattern actually is, where it lives, and what it is protecting.

Work through them with a commitment to honest observation rather than quick answers.

1. Where does your revenue or growth consistently stall?

Not where you’d like it to be — where it actually stalls, repeats, and returns after temporarily exceeding. Is there a specific income level, a specific number of clients, a specific level of visibility that appears as a consistent ceiling across different strategies and time periods?

The ceiling’s location is highly diagnostic. It tells you the threshold the pattern is managing.

2. What happens in the period immediately following your best results?

Review your five best months or best outcomes in the past two years. What happened in the following period? Did the momentum compound or did something interrupt it? Was the pattern of follow-through consistent or variable?

The post-success period is where success sabotage becomes visible. If the pattern appears, its consistency across different best-results periods points to the pattern rather than circumstance.

3. In which territory does the internal resistance feel most visceral?

Not which territory you avoid — which territory produces the most intense somatic response: the most constriction, the most energy drop, the most inexplicable urgency to do something else when you approach it.

The visceral response is the somatic signature of where the pattern is most strongly held. This territory is the primary worksite.

4. What business action have you understood you should take for more than six months but haven’t taken?

The insight-behavior gap is one of the clearest indicators of a self-sabotage pattern operating at the somatic or identity level. The understanding is complete; the behavior hasn’t followed.

What specifically is on your list of “I know I should be doing this”? That list is a map of where the pattern is active.

5. When your pricing comes up in a conversation, what happens in your body?

Before the other person responds — when you state the rate or when you know you’re about to — what does your body register? Where is the activation, and what is its quality?

The somatic response to the pricing moment reveals the level at which the economic pattern is held. A strong, specific somatic response points toward somatic-level work. A cognitive discomfort that resolves when you rationalize the rate points toward the Narrative layer.

6. What success scenario specifically worries you when you imagine it?

Imagine the specific expanded success you’re working toward — the income, the visibility, the recognition, the client relationships. As you hold that image, what concerns arise?

Not the strategic concerns — the relational and identity concerns. What would be different? Who might respond differently? Who might you become? What might you have to give up?

The answers reveal what the pattern is protecting and which function it is serving.

7. Who in your life would be most affected if your business reached the next level?

Not affected in an abstract sense — specifically which relationships would change, and how.

Self-sabotage patterns with a relational dimension are organized around these specific relationships. The nervous system is protecting belonging with specific people. Identifying those relationships makes the relational prediction structure visible.

8. How consistent is your most important business behavior?

Choose the single business behavior most correlated with your results — content creation, outreach, offer conversations, revenue-generating activity — and assess its actual consistency over the past six months.

Not the consistency you intended or aspired to. The actual consistency, tracked against the records you have.

Inconsistency in high-leverage behaviors is one of the most reliable indicators of a pattern operating in the background, creating variance in the behavior that willpower and commitment alone can’t fully stabilize.

9. What preparation do you engage in most consistently before you feel ready to launch?

Name the preparation activities: the additional research, the refined positioning, the improved infrastructure, the one more iteration. How long has each been “almost ready”?

The perpetual preparation pattern is visible in the duration of the preparation relative to its stated purpose. Research that has been ongoing for eight months without producing a launch is diagnostic information.

10. What does the version of you without this pattern look like in specific behavioral detail?

Not generally — specifically. What does the version of you without the economic sabotage pattern do differently in a pricing conversation? What does the version of you without the visibility avoidance pattern do differently in a week of content creation?

The difficulty of answering this question specifically — as opposed to generally — is itself diagnostic. When the future-self version is vivid and specific, the identity expansion work has a target. When it is vague, the identity level is where the work needs to go.

Using the Diagnostic

After working through these questions, three things should be clearer:
– The primary territory where the pattern is most active
– The level at which the pattern is primarily held (cognitive, somatic, identity, relational)
– The specific function the pattern is serving (threat avoidance, identity preservation, relational preservation)

This specificity is the entry point for level-appropriate work — work that addresses the pattern where it actually lives rather than where it is most visible.

The Invitation

The Abundance GPS community provides the diagnostic framework and the structured approaches for working with whatever the diagnosis reveals.

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