Where do Saboteurs come from?

Your mind is your best friend. But it can also be your worst enemy.

Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions in the way you handle life’s everyday challenges. They represent automated patterns in your mind for how to think, feel, and respond. They cause all of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness. They sabotage your performance, wellbeing, and relationships.

Your mind is constantly sabotaging your potential for both performance and happiness. All your negative emotions, including stress, are the result of self-sabotage.

Being able to identify your Saboteurs is the first step to defeating their lies which are stopping you from reaching your true potential in your career, your relationships, and your happiness.

Saboteurs are a universal phenomenon, formed in our early childhood. They start off as our guardians to help us survive the real and imagined threats to our physical and emotional safety.

Saboteur formation makes sense when you realize that the primary goal of the first fifteen to twenty years of life is just to survive long enough to reproduce.

As children, we also need to survive emotionally. The human brain is wired to pay close attention to our environment in our early years and adjust accordingly so we can bear any emotional strains we encounter and make it into adulthood.

Even if you didn't have a difficult childhood, life still presented many challenges that your Saboteurs initially developed to handle.

Maybe you had loving parents, but there was the scare of your mother getting sick and not knowing if she would ever come back from the hospital.

Or maybe you had a younger sibling who you thought your parents favored over you.

Of course, there were kids at school who were taller, smarter, faster, or funnier than you.

There was the time you failed publicly or got rejected, or felt betrayed.

There was a time you felt terrified by the idea of death, starvation, war, or one of the countless other dangers in this chaotic world.

And there was the time you promised yourself -- which you likely don't consciously remember -- that you would protect yourself so bad things wouldn't happen to you as often.

By the time we are adults, these Saboteurs are no longer needed, but they have become invisible inhabitants of our minds.

Our Saboteurs are the lens through which we see and react to the world, without knowing we are wearing any distorting lens.

When faced with challenges, stress or uncomfortable situations, our Saboteurs are activated, and we fall into old, negative, self-sabotaging behaviors.

Is this starting to make sense?

Your Saboteurs claim they are good for you. For example, your Judge tells you that constantly badgering you over your mistakes and shortcomings causes you to improve and achieve.

We all know that pain is good for you. If you put your hand on a hot stove, it would be good to feel pain, so you take corrective action.

Negative emotions, similar to pain, are only helpful for a quick second to alert you. But if you stay stressed, frustrated or unhappy, you will be tunnel-visioned and not capable of finding out the best solution to the problems, which your positive brain can do.

So if you’re in negative emotion for more than one second, your Saboteurs are holding your hand on the hot stove and complaining about why life is so hard.

Meet the Judge, Your Master Saboteur

The Judge is the universal Saboteur that afflicts everyone. It is the one that beats you up repeatedly over mistakes or shortcomings, warns you obsessively about future risks, wakes you up in the middle of the night worrying, gets you fixated on what is wrong with others or your life, etc. Your Judge activates your other Saboteurs, causes much of your stress and unhappiness, reduces your effectiveness, and harms your relationships.

The Accomplice Saboteurs

The Judge works with one or more Accomplice Saboteurs to hijack your mind and cause most of your setbacks. Do any of these seem familiar to you?

Avoider

Focusing on the positive and pleasant in an extreme way. Avoiding difficult and unpleasant tasks and conflicts.

Controller

Anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will. High anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.

Hyper-Achiever

Dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation. Latest achievement quickly discounted, needing more.

Hyper-Rational

Intense and exclusive focus on the rational processing of everything, including relationships. Can be perceived as uncaring, unfeeling, or intellectually arrogant.

Hyper-Vigilant

Continuous intense anxiety about all the dangers and what could go wrong. Vigilance that can never rest.

Pleaser

Indirectly tries to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others. Loses sight of own needs and becomes resentful as a result.

Restless

Restless, constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or constant busyness. Rarely at peace or content with the current activity.

Stickler

Perfectionism and a need for order and organization taken too far.  Anxious trying to make too many things perfect.

Victim

Emotional and temperamental as a way to gain attention and affection. An extreme focus on internal feelings, particularly painful ones. Martyr streak.

The Three Muscles of Mental Fitness

To conquer your Saboteurs, you need to exercise and build three mental muscles.

Saboteur Interceptor Muscle

If you’re in negative emotion for more than a second, you’re in Saboteur mode. Label your thoughts and emotions in that moment as Saboteur and let them go. To be able to do that, you need to have studied your Saboteurs and discredited their lies and limiting beliefs.

Self-Command Muscle

10-second Reps are powerful ways to command your mind to quiet the region where your Saboteurs live, and activate the region where your Sage lives. So every time you intercept your Saboteurs, do Reps to pause and choose a Sage response.

Sage Muscle

Your Sage is the one in you that handles challenges with a clear and calm mind, and positive emotions. It uses the 5 primary powers of Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. Once you’ve activated your Sage brain through Reps, you’ll have access to these powers.

Let me know if you need help,

Micky