Snakes & Ladders Syndrome: How we sabotage ourselves?

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 real nice guy, always 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 own 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 really 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 in 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 are excellent professionals. I asked him to try and analyse the last three instances where he lost an important client in order to identify the common denominator and thus maybe the source of the problem. He promised he would.

A few days later I got a call from Tom and he says “You were right. Things go wrong when I cannot deal with clients myself. My people are good professionals but I realised I don’t really 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. In fact, 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, 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 by not teaching their team to take on important clients and general responsibility, it hurts their business. But the real issue is – many of them don’t even realise their resistance to handing over work and how it is in fact bad for business.

This is a pattern of behaviour and as patterns go, we are usually not aware of the ways in which we sabotage ourselves. And it is not just in our professional life, it is also in our relationships with family and friends, in achieving our goals, in raising our kids, etc. What happens is, everything seems to be going well for a while and then things go wrong and it feels like everything’s falling apart. And this happens over and over again. I call this the Snakes & Ladders Syndrome.

If you look at these occasions when things go wrong, chances are you will realise they tend to happen in a particular sphere of your life and under similar circumstances. It’s because of the way we act or react in specific situations which evoke our fear, prejudice, judgement, etc. And if we learn to recognise these patterns of behaviour, we could decide to act or react differently and hence achieve a different outcome, thus breaking the vicious cycle.

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

Well, the first prerequisite is your own willingness to change and dedication to the task. You need to try to be mindful about your behaviours (actions or reactions), you need to be prepared to honestly judge how you act in the different situations, and be willing to change it.

But first things first, here’s 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 behaviour that lead to “snakes”

Think about the specific situations that lead to your distress. Normally the same situations unlock specific behaviour or response in you, consequently leading to the same 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.”

So as you look at the specific situations that cause you trouble, is there something you could change to achieve a different outcome?

It may be what you say that provokes other people’s actions or what you do which 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 it start teaching his team how to deal with clients and delegate responsibility during the quieter times. Thus, when things get busy or he needs to be away he will know that everything is still under control. It will also free him to do other things than work!

Although it may seem like a simple solution, one needs to go deeper to understand the reason why the self-sabotage is happening. What you will find if you dig deep enough is that it will be connected with a fear, a shame or a guilt about something, which will cause the never ending pattern of Snakes & Ladders Syndrome, until such time as you deal with the connected fear, shame or guilt.

And if you realise that the “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 own 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 own 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.