Podcast: How to Stop Self-Sabotage Using the Story You Tell yourself
With Rachelle Ramirez & sue campbell
Sue Campbell, a mindset coach for writers, reveals the hidden inner narratives that quietly sabotage creative progress — and shows how to rewrite them so you actually sit down and finish your work.
This episode is full of practical, moment-by-moment strategies: how to surface limiting beliefs, neutralize them, and replace them with believable, emotionally motivating alternatives. If you’ve ever told yourself “I’ll write tomorrow,” or “I hate social media,” this episode gives you the tools to change the story and get writing — even if it’s just one sentence.
Who this episode is for: Writers who feel stuck, procrastinate, avoid revision, dread marketing, or want concrete mindset tools to finish a book and grow an author platform.
Why listen
Learn why the story you tell yourself matters as much as the story you’re writing.
Get a simple, repeatable method to expose and loosen limiting beliefs.
Walk away with tactical moves you can use immediately: journaling prompts, a “one sentence” rule, and mindset reframes for tech and marketing resistance.
Key takeaways
Two stories: the book you’re crafting and the story you tell yourself about your ability to write it. The latter often undermines the former.
Writing your thoughts down reveals hidden beliefs; reading them aloud turns vague resistance into actionable insight.
Don’t rely on hollow affirmations. Create rewrites that feel believable and carry emotional weight — even if the first step is neutral (“maybe this could help”).
Use low-friction actions (e.g., one sentence) to defeat procrastination and build identity as someone who shows up.
With technology and marketing fears, aim for “just enough” competency to move forward rather than perfection.
Memorable quotes
“The story that you tell yourself as a writer is just as important as the story you’re writing.”
“Your inner saboteur is laying out a binary that you can’t possibly do both at the same time.”
“One sentence today can become a stepping stone to a much bigger writing session.”
If this episode moved you, try the one-sentence rule for the next three days and notice how it changes your momentum. Subscribe, leave a review, and share with a writer who needs to rewrite their inner story.
Subscribe for weekly writing insights at https://pagesandplatforms.com/subscribe.
transcript
Anne Hawley: You're a writer, so I bet you know a thing or two about telling stories, but have you ever thought about the story you tell yourself? Hello and welcome to The Write Anyway podcast from pages and platforms and the Happily Ever Author Club. In today's episode Rachelle Ramirez interviews pages and platforms founder and certified professional mindset coach Sue Campbell about the subtle ways you may be telling yourself a story that's holding you back in your author career.
Rachelle Ramirez: Hey, Sue. Welcome. How are you?
Sue Campbell: I am doing well. How are you, Rachelle?
Rachelle Ramirez: I am so glad you're here today because one of the challenges that I've been running into with clients is that they often come to me and they say, I'm stuck. I know I'm self-sabotaging in my writing. I don't exactly know why or how or what to do to stop it, and you have a really fresh and straightforward approach to that. So I was hoping you could speak a little bit about that today.
Sue Campbell: Yeah, so my whole drum that I beat pretty endlessly is that the story that you tell yourself as a writer is just as important, if not even more important than the story that you're writing. Because without a story that you're telling yourself that keeps you going, you're not gonna finish the book much less build yourself an author platform and be able to sell that book.
So. When a writer sits down to work on a book and they're in that excited mode, they consciously know they're telling a story. Even if it's memoir, but especially for fiction, we know, okay I'm crafting this. I'm trying to create an experience that's gonna generate emotion in my reader. What they don't realize is that all of their beliefs that they have about what they're capable of and how talented they are and how good the book is gonna be or not going to be, all of those are stories that they're telling themselves, too, and they're not really examining them in a way that allows them to decide for sure if that story is serving them or not. And most of our stories are not serving us as certainly as well as they could be.
So I like to have writers really unpack that of like, what stories are you telling yourself right now about the writing and about the marketing, and what impact is that story having and do you wanna keep that?
Or do you want to rewrite that particular story so that you can actually accomplish the goals that you're setting?
Rachelle Ramirez: So what might that look like? If you're gonna say let's identify that story and let's rewrite it. What might that look like?
Sue Campbell: I do a lot of coaching of writers. We do webinars with thousands of writers on them, and we do smaller groups in our Happily Ever Author Club. So someone comes to me with a problem, they come to me with, you know, I'm stuck on my manuscript, I finished the first draft and now I hate revising, so I can't revise.
Or I know I need to build a author website and start a newsletter, but I can't get myself to do it. So usually they're identifying a problem in being able to get themselves to do something.
And so the first step that you can do on your own without me there, like pulling it out of you, is to grab a pen and paper. And write down all of your thoughts about whatever it is that you're stuck on.
So if you're writing a manuscript, you'd write down all your thoughts that come up for you when you think about writing that manuscript. If you're trying to do something marketing related, you write down all of your thoughts about marketing, because we have stuff kicking around inside of our head that we don't even realize is there a lot of the time. It's just the way we're used to thinking and when we think something over and over again, it becomes our belief.
So if I ask you to write all that stuff down and then read it, it's a different experience and you can look at it and go, well, no wonder i'm not writing this book right now, because I've been telling myself I'm a talentless hack and I've got no business doing this, and I didn't go to school for it, and this other person I know writes two books a year.
So when you write it down and read it, it becomes very apparent that you're telling yourself a bunch of stuff that's not helpful, whether or not it's true. Most of the time it's not true. Just a little hint there. But sometimes you'll have a thought that you keep thinking, a story you keep telling yourself, that you're like, for sure this is true.
And you can keep that. But the question to ask if you're sure that it's true is it may be true, but is it serving me to think this all the time? Like we had one writer who I coached recently who doesn't like revising, and so she kept telling herself, this is not the fun part. This is not the fun part.
And for her that was true. I'm not gonna try to change her mind. She could. She could like try to tell herself a new story that would make it fun. You can choose that route if you want, but she doesn't even have to give up the thought. This isn't the fun part. She just has to stop chanting it at herself all the time and find a new thought pattern that's gonna enable her to do something, even though it's not the fun part.
Rachelle Ramirez: And what might that look like, say in her case?
Sue Campbell: In her particular case, we unpacked a little bit. Okay? Like, what are the fun parts? The fun parts were drafting, and the fun parts were also getting reader feedback. And getting her story out into the world. Well, what has to happen between those two things in order for that second thing to happen?
So the first was just getting her to have that aha moment of, oh I'm continuing to tell myself this isn't the fun part. And it turns out that's very demotivating for me. Because our thoughts cause our feelings. Our feelings are what allow us to take action or prevent us from taking action. So by her constantly chanting, this isn't the fun part, then she was demotivated. She was demoralized about the part of the process she was in, and therefore she did not take the action of actually doing the revision.
So we talked about what are the things that you do look forward to about getting the book out into the world? Okay, we gotta get to the fun part. And then we talked about, all right, how do we gamify it and bring a little bit of fun into it and like rip the bandaid off as quickly as possible so you don't have to sit in the part that isn't the fun part for you.
So she committed to a timetable where she felt she could do it, but it was like an accelerated, like fun. I wanna see how fast I can get over this part that I don't like so I can get to the next fun thing, and I can get to the next manuscript that I wanna write where that is the fun part.
So once you have the stories like listed in front of you, it's helpful to unpack them, and loosen, I call it loosening the grip of those stories.
But really you're taking out your editor pen and you're like, all right, I'm seeing this isn't working for where I want my story to end up, right? So I therefore have to go in with my red pen and slash these pieces of the story. But you really, on a more psychological level, you've gotta loosen them up, 'cause you can't just automatically stop thinking something because you decide to. Maybe with hypnosis or something like that, you potentially could, but for most of us, we can't just stop thinking something, even though we've identified it's harmful, but we can loosen that up. We can identify that it's harmful and go, okay, I'm gonna label that as not helpful, and then I'm going to have a way to redirect myself to something that is helpful.
And this is a practice. There's not one session of journaling that's gonna totally get you out of this. This is practice just like the craft of writing and just like learning how to market.
Rachelle Ramirez: What are some of the things somebody might rewrite? How what, how they might rewrite what it is they're thinking for themselves. Because I think some people might not quite understand what you mean by, oh, you know, they might say, oh, just change your thinking. What? What does it mean to rewrite something?
Sue Campbell: Well, a lot of people think that, oh, you're just gonna go to the opposite. So I'll use a marketing example. A lot of the writers that I work with, they'll say, I hate technology, or I hate social media. And so when I say, you have to change that story, they're like, oh. Then I have to tell myself I love technology and I love social media because we're used to sort of the traditional affirmation type language.
I don't think affirmations really work that well for most people because your brain's bullshit detector just goes off and like, no, I don't. Right? You push back against that. So when you're creating a new story, because you want to loosen up the old one and not intentionally think it anymore, you wanna intentionally think something else and tell yourself a new story, it has to have a couple of components. It has to be something that you do actually believe, so we're not going from, I hate technology to, I love technology, but it has to be something that is either a more neutral thought. So it doesn't have the negative of, Ugh, the hatred. The hatred of the technology.
It has to be something that either gets you to neutrality about whatever that circumstance is, in this case, technology, or it has to get you to positivity if you can get there. And sometimes you have to create yourself a little story bridge where you're starting here, and then eventually it evolves.
So for something like technology, I'll often tell people, okay, what's also true about technology? Aren't we lucky as writers to have far fewer gatekeepers between us and our audience, thanks to technology? And most people are like, well, yeah, that's true. Like, do you wanna go back to the days 40 years ago when you had to type it up on a typewriter and put it in an envelope and kiss a goodbye?
So I'll walk them through what are the advantages of technology? And how can we get to feeling like, oh, maybe this isn't a bad thing. Maybe it's actually a good thing. And then how do we get you to actually move forward on the tasks?
Maybe we realize that technology interfaces usually get easier and easier. Maybe we realize that amazing people on YouTube have already created a tutorial for any damn thing that we need to learn how to do. Maybe we realize we could trade someone for help, who knows technology better than we do, or we could hire someone to help, or that it's worth just sucking it up on this learning curve because I want the result that technology can get me.
What is also true, but is going to serve me better to actually get towards the end of the story that I want? Because if you keep thinking the same thing, you're going to keep spiraling and self-sabotaging and not doing the thing. We cannot expect a different result to come out of that. So we have to forge a new story intentionally and on purpose.
And when the old one pops up, we go, yep, I remember that, but not helpful. I'm gonna go over here instead.
Rachelle Ramirez: So specifically, what are some of the things somebody might tell themselves about technology?
Sue Campbell: Well, just that of like, maybe I can get somebody to help me with this. Maybe this isn't my favorite, but maybe it's worth it in the long run to do this. Even just a maybe, right? Even just adding some possibility to the story that you're telling yourself can loosen it up enough for you to be willing to move forward. And you want the what, however you choose to rewrite the story. It has to have emotional weight to it. It has to have some emotional fuel because again, that's what gets us to take action. But sometimes we can only get to neutral at first, and then we just take that little baby step forward in actions and we can build on it from there.
Rachelle Ramirez: So it might look like technology is helping me get to my readers more efficiently, faster, or to more readers
Sue Campbell: Yeah. Giving me direct access to my readers, which I never would've been able to do before.
Or I don't have to be. Here's an, here's another great example. I was coaching someone who had a book project that she hadn't looked at for quite a long time, and technology was quite different from what it had been when she first started the project.
She was really pulling this out of the archives. And so in her mind when she was thinking about how to tackle this project, she kept saying, oh, I need to really get up to speed and master Scrivener and EndNote . she didn't wanna master Scrivener and Endnote. She just wanted to write the damn book, right?
So she was telling herself a story that she needed to master technology, when I was like, do you really need to master it? It's so subtle, but we're writers, the language is really important. I'm like, what if you just needed to know just enough to write your story? Just enough. And so first thing we did was actually sent her back to pen and paper so she could start on the writing part.
And she didn't feel like there's this big barrier of getting between her and her work of mastering the software, which she didn't wanna do, so therefore it was never going to do . So that was the first step, and then it was like, okay. Just do enough of scrivener, and you don't need an EndNote yet. That's gonna come later. You can hire a student to do EndNote for you if you want to. Let's just get you back into the book, because that's far more motivating.
Rachelle Ramirez: What's the most common thing that people say to you? When you say, oh, we here we are. This is an opportunity to help somebody change the way they're thinking. Is it the I hate social media piece and technology. Is that what you hear the most or is it, I'm stuck writing.
Sue Campbell: I would say there's two categories. So on the writing side, it's, I don't wanna be on social media or I'm worried to put myself out there, or I don't wanna brag. Like those kinds of things, where there's a lot of fear around being out there, or fear around feeling like a fool because you don't know how to do things.
As adults, we don't like to feel stupid because we've reached a certain level of competence. So another story you can tell yourself is, I'm willing to be uncomfortable and feel a little stupid in pursuit of, you know, getting this done. So that's the marketing side. Those are the ones I hear most commonly.
And then on the writing side, it's like I said, I was gonna write today and I didn't sit down and write. I'm stuck. it's usually not even necessarily a craft thing. Sometimes it is, but usually those people are like moving forward and they're in learning mode and they're applying it. It's the people who are procrastinating or the people who are trying to switch projects all the time.
Rachelle Ramirez: So what might somebody say if they were, oh I said I was gonna write today and I didn't, you know, dang it. If you identify, okay, is that really what you believe? And that somebody's saying that to themselves, how might they rewrite that?
Sue Campbell: So usually we have to go a little bit deeper 'cause that's like the symptom: I said I was gonna write today and I didn't, so I'll take them back to Okay. Tell me about the moment where you decided that you weren't gonna sit down and write. And then we figure out what was the story you were telling yourself at that moment.
And we try to get underneath that and really figure out what story was running the show at that point. There are definitely themes that get hit, but there are any number that are, you know, too numerous to go into for the sake of the podcast, but we can pick one and play with it.
So let's just say someone said I told myself I was gonna sit down and write, but then I was overwhelmed. I had this go wrong and this go wrong and this go wrong, and this person needed me and this person needed me, and this person needed me. So I kept telling myself like, oh, this is gonna have to wait. And then I didn't end up doing it.
Then we can start unpacking the stories that you told yourself about why whatever was happening there was more important than getting the writing done. And maybe underneath it all, maybe it's, I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm gonna stick to an area where I feel I'm getting external validation for helping someone, and I feel competent.
If I bring my kid lunch at school because they forgot it, or my aging mom called and I needed to go over and check on her, that takes precedence. Now, here's the thing. Your inner, I call it your inner saboteur, right? So really your inner saboteur is the one who's telling you the stories that are sabotaging you.
Your inner saboteur is laying out a binary for you. You couldn't possibly bring the lunch to school and write today. You couldn't possibly go help your mom and write today. The excuses that our inner saboteur is helping us manufacture are often painted in such a way that those two things couldn't possibly exist at the same time.
So then the story is, well, maybe I could write at least one sentence today, even though it feels like everything's blowing up in my life. And people are absolutely astonished when they find out that's true. Even though my car broke down and you know, my paycheck bounced, and all of these things, I could still write one sentence today.
And then when I sat down to write one sentence, I ended up writing three or four paragraphs. I ended up getting 600 words today.
Rachelle Ramirez: I love that idea of today I'm capable of one sentence.
Sue Campbell: It sounds ridiculous, and sometimes your inner saboteur will convince you, like, oh, who cares? Sometimes if your inner saboteur pushes back really hard against one sentence, it's because your inner saboteur knows how powerful it is once you just get going. Once you sit down and you write one sentence, ugh, your inner saboteur has lost a major battle.
And it's not just a trick to get you to sit down and write a whole bunch more. There are days when I only write one sentence and I still get to be just as proud of myself as a day where I write a whole chapter. Because it is showing up and it's developing the identity of being the person who shows up even in the face of obstacles.
This is why we call this the Write Anyway Podcast. Even in the face of external obstacles and my own jackass inner saboteur, I'm gonna show up and I'm gonna write one sentence, and that's huge.
Rachelle Ramirez: Because the act is of showing up and doing something, not how much you did or how well you did it.
Sue Campbell: Yep. It's that demonstration that you are committed to actually doing this. Because you're sabotaging your own relationship with yourself when you constantly say, I'm gonna do this, or This is in my heart to do. I really wanna write this book and again and again some other story gets in the way of that and you don't do it. So taking control of the storytelling up here, in your own psyche before you try to get it to the page is the way to work with all that.
Rachelle Ramirez: I love that. I love these ideas and I hope they help some of you who are listening because they've really definitely helped me and my clients. So I just wanted to say thank you so much, Sue, for coming today. I really appreciate it.
Sue Campbell: You're so welcome.
Rachelle Ramirez: will see you soon.
Sue Campbell: Thank you.
Anne Hawley: You can find out more about Sue's programs and the Happily Ever Author Club at storypath.me/hea.
If you'd like a weekly dose of writing insight and mindset and marketing tips in your inbox, subscribe to the Write Anyway Newsletter at pagesandplatforms.com/subscribe.
And that's it for this episode of the Write anyway podcast. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.