How to Handle Self-Handicapping

Self-handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem. In these cases, if the person doesn't fail but rather succeeds, they feel self-enhancement and manage the impressions of others about them. The term was first coined by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas.

So what can we do?

One of the most interesting discoveries related to psychological anxiety is that avoidance strengthens and mints them. Self-handicapping often creates a dynamic that reinforces anxiety and the use of excuses. Because we don't try hard enough, we don't succeed as we hoped, and the failure reinforces the feeling that maybe we can't succeed, and maybe that's just what we're worth. This feeling of course ignites our lack of confidence in our abilities, and pushes us to make more and more excuses in an ineffective attempt to protect our self-image. Sometimes we even face situations where we don't even try something to begin with, because we're afarid we're going to fail.

When faced with this dynamic, it's important to remember that the willingness to identify what causes us anxiety takes the sting out of it, and helps to gradually reduce the fear. Different psychological approaches differ in the way they understand the causes and treatments of anxiety, but they all agree that it is important to know what scares us, understand it and challenge it. The initial encounter with the thing that scares us will of course be difficult and charged with emotion, but when managed correctly – we can learn to bear the anxiety better.

When dealing with self-handicapping we need to first understand that we've adopted an ineffective strategy in order to protect our self-worth; a strategy that provides us with temporary and partial protection in the face of failure. It is important to prove to ourselves that we can manage failure without excuses, and learn to enjoy success related to investment and hard work. Initially it might be difficult to deal with the feeling that 'we gave it all and this is what happened', and that we've finally maximized our hidden potential. We might have to deal with cracks in grandiose fantasy that claims 'if you really try you will succeed'. The ability to handle these moments is crucial in successfully achieving our goals.

The use of self-handicapping leaves us frustrated, and with glaring questions like 'why couldn't I raise resources for something important', and a feeling of missing out and wondering what we could have achieved. These feelings oftentimes stay with us longer than the feeling we would experience if we dared to fail. Additionally, self-handicapping doesn't allow us to learn or challenge or limits, makes it difficult for us to do our best, and causes us not to learn from our failures and successes.

A big part of learning to succeed depends on learning to try, fail and keep going without preparing a mound of excuses. It is also important to analyze failure without running away or making excuses.

Based on a Wikipedia article by Amos Prywes