Why We Sabotage Our Own Goals (And How to Stop It)

There's a really fascinating thing that happens with actually important goals. The ones that matter most, the ones a leader will tell you they're serious about, are often the ones that go nowhere for months or years, despite real effort and real intelligence being thrown at them constantly.

For a long time the explanation on offer was some version of not wanting it enough. Try harder. Get an accountability partner. Break it into smaller steps. Eat the Elephant … and other platitudes. These things can help a little, but they are not addressing the root cause.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, in their work on organisational and personal change call it an immunity to change. The idea is that alongside the stated goal, a person is often running a second, unstated commitment that actively works against it, and that this second commitment isn't laziness or sabotage in the usual sense, rather it's a protective reflex that exists because somewhere underneath the goal sits fear, and the behaviour that looks like resistance is actually the mind what it’s supposed to do, which is keeping that fear at bay.

For example, take a leader who wants to delegate more. She knows it intellectually, she'll say it in a coaching session without hesitation, and yet six months later she's still the bottleneck for the entire department. The immunity to change model would ask a different question than "why can't you delegate." It would ask “what are you protecting by not delegating?” Perhaps there's an underlying worry that if she's not indispensable, she's not valuable. Perhaps letting go of a task feels, underneath everything, like letting go of proof that she's good at her job. Perhaps it goes even deeper. The failure to delegate isn't a failure of discipline. It's a working system, just one that's optimising for the wrong thing. And most of the time we don’t even realise there are two conflicting goals at play, because we haven’t been asked the question before.

This reframe matters because it changes where the work happens. Pushing harder on the stated goal, with more structure or more willpower, runs straight into the competing commitment and usually loses. The more useful move is to get curious about what the resistance is protecting, and to test whether the underlying fear is actually true. Often it isn't, or it's true in a much smaller way than it feels.

So how do you actually work with this, rather than against yourself?

Start by writing down the goal exactly as you'd say it out loud, and next to it, write down what you're doing instead, like the specific behaviour that keeps undermining it. For example, Goal = delegate more. Current Behaviour = doing tasks that my team can do.

Then ask what would worry you if you simply stopped doing that thing tomorrow. Not the practical consequence, the emotional one. What would it mean about you if the task got done without you, or the conversation went badly, or the inbox sat unread for an hour. Sit with that answer rather than rushing past it, because it usually points to a belief you've been treating as fact without ever testing it.

The last step is the one most people skip, and it's the one that actually creates movement. Design a small, low-stakes way to test that belief. I like to call these micro-leaps. If the fear is that delegating a task will expose you as replaceable, hand over one small task this week and watch what actually happens, rather than what you've assumed will happen. Most competing commitments are built on assumptions that have never been properly checked. Once you check them, they tend to lose a good deal of their grip.

None of this makes goal-setting pointless. It makes it incomplete on its own. A goal without an honest look at what's quietly working against it is a plan built on top of an unexamined assumption, and unexamined assumptions have a way of winning, right up until someone finally puts them to the test.