How brutal self-reflection can transform your leadership
You run your business with passion, make important strategic decisions, and yet... something's off. Your projects stagnate, your team seems stuck, and despite all your efforts, growth isn't taking off as it should.
What if the problem isn't external, but comes from within yourself?
Entrepreneurial self-sabotage is more widespread than we imagine. These unconscious behaviors that push us to hinder our own success can transform the most competent leaders into obstacles to their own development.
"It's not good enough yet." How many times have you said this phrase? Perfectionism, often perceived as a quality, quickly becomes a trap. When everything must be perfect before being launched, nothing ever leaves the drawer.
Delegation becomes mission impossible. Every detail must go through you. Result: you become the bottleneck of your own organization. Your team waits for your decisions, your validations, your approval for the slightest movement.
Analyze, re-analyze, over-analyze. You collect data, ask for opinions, study the competition... but never act. Analysis becomes disguised procrastination.
"Nobody can do it better than me." This belief keeps you in a vicious cycle where you make yourself indispensable to every process, preventing your business from growing without you.
I use artificial intelligence daily to structure my ideas and organize my thinking. But generally, it validated my thoughts without really confronting me with my contradictions.
Until the day I decided to change my approach. I typed this request:
"Tell me the truth. No filter. I want the real deal."
Its response was a real shock:
"You are the main obstacle to your growth."
The problem was me.
This realization, though brutal, is paradoxically liberating. Because if you are the problem, you are also the solution.
These behaviors create a chain reaction:
The first step is identifying your destructive patterns. Ask yourself these crucial questions:
Replace "perfect" with "good enough to start." Continuous improvement always surpasses paralyzing perfection. Launch, test, adjust. This iterative approach allows you to learn and progress faster.
Start small. Delegate one task at a time. Accept initial imperfection. Train, support, then let go. Your team needs to grow, and you need to free yourself.
Set clear deadlines and stick to them. Without this time constraint, you risk indefinitely stretching your decision-making processes.
Schedule reflection moments to analyze your behaviors. What worked? What held you back? What patterns do you repeat?
Surround yourself with people capable of telling you the truth, even if it disturbs. A coach, a mentor, or even an AI tool configured to be direct and honest.
For each project, clearly define what constitutes the acceptable "minimum viable." Once this threshold is reached, launch. You can always improve later.
When you start overcoming self-sabotage, several positive indicators appear:
Sometimes, what we need most is to hear the unvarnished truth. That truth that disturbs, that challenges our certainties, but propels us toward an improved version of ourselves.
Entrepreneurial self-sabotage is not inevitable. It's a challenge to overcome, an obstacle to cross. And the first step is recognizing that sometimes, our worst enemy... is ourselves.
But we're also our greatest ally for change.