Your subconscious listens even when you’re joking about your own limitations.

The part of you that stores beliefs does not detect irony. When you make a joke about being hopeless with money, terrible at relationships, or the one who always ruins things, the humour registers as tone while the content registers as data. It goes in the file with everything else. Said often enough in company, it stops being a joke and starts being a self-description you defend.

Pay attention to what you make fun of yourself for repeatedly. If you would not say the same line seriously, notice that you are still saying it. Try dropping one of those jokes for a month and see whether anything in your behaviour quietly loosens.