Snakes & Ladders Syndrome: How to Recognize and Overcome Self-Sabotage

I have this friend, we’ll call him Tom for the sake of this article. Tom and I go way back. We went to the same college, married around the same time and our kids are about the same age.

Tom’s a nice guy, always a big smile on his face, always positive and very hard working. He is a very successful professional in his field and has always worked for established names in his industry until a few years ago when he went into business for himself.

Since Tom founded his professional practice he’s become even busier so now our families get together only once every few months. We go out for dinner, have a few drinks, talk about the good old times, and of course – about business.

Every other time I see Tom, he tells me the same: “Everything was going well, then we lost a major client so we are back to square one now”. Always different reasons but the result was the same – Tom had lost yet another important client.

As we spoke about it I started to realise that this would only happen either during one of his busy periods or when he was for some reason away from the office. In other words, when he was not available to deal with clients himself.

So I told Tom that it seemed to me like he’s either hiring the wrong people (he has a small team of 3) or he’s not training them properly. Tom said that while there had been a few bad hires he had to let go, he thought his people now were excellent professionals. I asked him to try and analyse the last three instances where he lost an important client to identify the common denominator and thus may be the source of the problem. He promised he would.

A few days later I got a call from Tom and he said “You were right. Things go wrong when I cannot deal with clients myself. My people are good professionals but I realised I don’t delegate so they never learn about the business side of things. They always work on the backend supporting me and, as you can imagine, when the time comes for an important decision to be made or someone has to talk to a client, they feel unprepared. I need to start delegating some of my responsibilities.”

Tom’s case is a classic case scenario – a business owner who is reluctant to delegate tasks as he feels they are too important to trust anybody with them. Many of the business owners I work with are facing (or have in the past faced) the same difficulties and fears. I think it is safe to say that the majority do. And I get it, it is really hard to let go and trust somebody else with what is essentially your business and your source of income. What many don’t realise, however, is that not handing over work is not a long-term solution. So even when their business starts doing well and they start getting busier, they still try to do it all themselves – deal with key clients, go into meetings, do sales,  etc.

The problem with that is, that one person can only take on so much work, so your business cannot possibly grow if you’re doing it all by yourself and only delegating the “safe and unimportant tasks”. But also, as in Tom’s case, your business suffers every time you’re not there to look after it.

Many business owners don’t understand that not teaching their team to take on important clients and general responsibility, hurts their business. The real issue is that many don’t realize their resistance to handing over work. They don’t see how it negatively impacts the business.

This is a pattern of behavior and as patterns go, we are usually not aware of how we sabotage ourselves. It’s not just in our professional lives; it also affects our relationships with family and friends. It plays a role in achieving our goals and raising our kids, too. Things seem to be going well at first, but then they go wrong. It feels like everything is falling apart. And this happens over and over again. I call this the Snakes & Ladders Syndrome.

When things go wrong, they often happen in a specific area of your life. These events tend to occur under similar circumstances. It’s because of the way we act or react in specific situations which evoke our fear, prejudice, judgment, etc. If we recognize these patterns of behavior, we can choose to act or react differently. This can lead to a different outcome and break the vicious cycle.

And the logical question is – How do you go about that?

Well, the first prerequisite is your willingness to change and dedication to the task. Be mindful of your actions and reactions. Honestly assess how you act in different situations. Be willing to make changes when needed.

But first things first, here are a few steps that will lead you in the right direction in terms of awareness:

Recognise the area in your life where “the snakes” appear

Is it your personal life? Is it your professional life? Which area of your life causes you distress repeatedly? Where does it feel like you are tripping over again and again? Think about it carefully and more importantly – honestly. Where do you feel you are moving three steps forward and two steps back?

Identify the situations and behavior that lead to “snakes”

Think about the specific situations that lead to your distress. Specific situations often trigger the same behavior or response in you. This leads to predictable results. What do these situations look like? Who is involved in them? Take the last 3 times when you felt things went wrong and analyse them carefully. How did you act or react? How did others involved act and react? What were the consequences?

Kill “the snakes”

Now that you understand what causes turmoil in your life, pick your weapon. As American poet and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou said:

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

Look at the situations causing you trouble. Is there something you can change to achieve a different outcome?

It may be what you say that provokes other people’s actions or what you do that leads to adverse consequences. Either way, if this is changed, you can also change the outcome and avoid distress.

In the example with my friend Tom, what he could do is start teaching his team how to deal with clients and delegate responsibility during the quieter times. When things get busy or he needs to be away, he will know everything is under control. This will also free him up to focus on other tasks beyond work.

Although it may seem like a simple solution, one needs to go deeper to understand the reason why the self-sabotage is happening. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that it’s connected to fear, shame, or guilt. This creates the endless cycle of the Snakes & Ladders Syndrome. The pattern will continue until you address the underlying emotions.

And if you realise that “the snakes” happen because of somebody else’s behaviour, well clearly you have no control over other people. The best you could do is try to make them aware of the way they act (as oftentimes people don’t even realise) in the hope that they will change. But if they don’t…. well as Maya Angelou says – change your attitude and your response.

Thus you will, in time, take away the power these situations have over you.

Let me remind you of what Albert Einstein very cleverly said which happens to fit in perfectly with the topic of Snakes & Ladders Syndrome:

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Darn right!

The problem is, we are often unaware of our patterns of behaviour which lead to unpleasant situations in our life. This is as true for you, as it is for other people in your life. So be patient, be mindful, be awake. If your actions led to adverse results, then surely if you change your actions, you change your results.