How We Self-Sabotage
Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions as you handle life’s everyday challenges. They represent the automatic patterns in your mind for how to think, feel, and respond. Your Saboteurs cause all of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness. They sabotage your performance, wellbeing, and relationships.
The Saboteur Assessment is your first step to conquering your Saboteurs — identifying them to expose their lies and limiting beliefs.
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.
At the heart of our mental sabotage lies the Judge, the universal Saboteur that afflicts everyone and amplifies all others[1]. This internal critic is relentless, beating you up over mistakes, obsessing about future risks, and fixating on what's wrong with yourself, others, and your circumstances[1].
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.
Origin of the Saboteurs
Saboteurs start off as our guardians to help us survive the real and imagined threats to our physical and emotional survival as children. By the time we are adults, we no longer need them, but they have become invisible inhabitants of our mind.
Our Saboteurs’ patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting become soft-coded in our brain through neural pathways. When these neural pathways are triggered, we are “hijacked” by our Saboteurs and instantly feel, think, and act using their patterns.
But Aren’t They Good for Me?
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 why life is so hard.
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 PQ®️ 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 PQ Reps in order 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 PQ Reps, you’ll have access to these powers.
Conquer Your Saboteurs
Our app-guided PQ Program guides you step-by-step in building lasting new positive habits that transform your performance, wellbeing, and relationships.
Discover Your Saboteurs
You can’t defeat an adversary that you don’t see or one that successfully pretends to be your friend. The first step to conquering your Saboteurs is to identify them and expose their lies and limiting beliefs.
The Judge operates in three distinct modes:
1. Judging Self: Badgering yourself for past mistakes or current shortcomings[1].
2. Judging Others: Focusing on faults rather than appreciating positive qualities[1].
3. Judging Circumstances: Insisting outcomes are "bad" instead of seeing them as opportunities[1].
While everyone has a Judge, its strength and how it interacts with our other Saboteurs varies[1]. Recognizing the Judge's presence is crucial in preventing its takeover. By weakening our Judge, we create a positive feedback loop, diminishing the power of our accomplice Saboteurs and boosting our mental fitness[1].
The Judge is the root cause of guilt, shame, disappointment, and much of our anger and anxiety[1]. It justifies its existence with lies, claiming it prevents laziness, ensures learning from mistakes, and protects our self-interest[1]. In reality, it's our greatest internal enemy, causing stress, unhappiness, and reduced effectiveness[1].
Our program equips you with research-based tools to quiet your Judge, strengthening the part of your brain that serves you while silencing the part that sabotages you[2]. By mastering your mental fitness, you'll handle life's challenges with a more positive mindset, experience less stress, and achieve more while having more fun along the way[1][2].
Conquer your Judge and unlock your potential for clearer thinking, better decision-making, and improved relationships. Start your journey to mental fitness today and transform your approach to life's challenges.
Citations:
[1] https://support.positiveintelligence.com/article/108-judge
[2] https://www.positiveintelligence.com
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHpqgV4CsXk
[4] https://www.positiveintelligence.com/saboteurs/
Here's an improved version of your blurb about the accomplice Saboteurs for your website/landing page:
Accompanying the Judge are nine accomplice Saboteurs, each turning our strengths into liabilities through overuse or misuse. These mental patterns often develop in childhood as protective mechanisms but can hinder our growth and success in adulthood.
The nine accomplice Saboteurs are:
1. **Avoider**: Focuses excessively on the positive, avoiding difficult tasks and conflicts.
2. **Controller**: Needs to take charge and control situations, leading to anxiety and impatience.
3. **Hyper-Achiever**: Depends on constant performance and achievement for self-respect.
4. **Hyper-Rational**: Exclusively focuses on rational processing, often perceived as uncaring.
5. **Hyper-Vigilant**: Continuous anxiety about potential dangers, never able to rest.
6. **Pleaser**: Gains acceptance by helping others, often neglecting personal needs.
7. **Restless**: Constantly seeks excitement, rarely content with the present.
8. **Stickler**: Perfectionism and need for order, causing anxiety and frustration.
9. **Victim**: Uses emotional expression to gain attention, often focusing on pain.
Most individuals have one or two dominant Saboteurs, while some may grapple with several. It's rare for a single individual to be strongly affected by all nine. Recognizing your unique Saboteur profile is the crucial first step in weakening their influence and reclaiming control of your mental landscape. This self-awareness forms the foundation of true mental fitness and personal growth.
Our program equips you with the tools and techniques to identify and weaken these Saboteurs, fostering a more positive mindset and unlocking your potential for clearer thinking, better decision-making, and improved relationships. Start your journey to mental fitness today and transform your approach to life's challenges.
Citations:
[1] https://support.positiveintelligence.com/article/108-judge
[2] https://positivepsychology.com/positive-intelligence/
[3] https://www.positiveintelligence.com/saboteurs/
[4] https://www.empowering.space/en/our-saboteurs/
Here are detailed descriptions of the 9 accomplice Saboteurs, contextualized for executive leaders, tech leaders, and leaders in software development, IT, and operations:
**Avoider**
The Avoider Saboteur manifests in tech leaders as a tendency to sidestep difficult conversations, delay addressing team conflicts, or postpone tackling complex technical challenges. In the fast-paced world of technology, this can lead to accumulating technical debt, unresolved interpersonal issues within teams, and missed opportunities for innovation.
For software development and IT leaders, the Avoider might cause procrastination on critical system upgrades, reluctance to address underperforming team members, or hesitation in making decisive architectural choices. This Saboteur can significantly impede project progress and team growth, as it prioritizes short-term comfort over long-term success and necessary change.
**Controller**
The Controller Saboteur is particularly prevalent among executive leaders in tech, often manifesting as micromanagement of development processes, excessive oversight of project details, or reluctance to delegate important decisions. This can stifle creativity and autonomy within teams, leading to reduced innovation and employee satisfaction.
In software development and IT operations, the Controller might push for overly rigid methodologies, resist agile practices that empower team members, or insist on being involved in every technical decision. This approach can slow down development cycles, create bottlenecks in decision-making, and ultimately hinder the organization's ability to adapt quickly to market changes or technological advancements.
**Hyper-Achiever**
The Hyper-Achiever Saboteur is common among tech leaders, driving them to pursue constant performance improvements and achievement milestones. While this can lead to impressive short-term results, it often comes at the cost of work-life balance, team burnout, and a culture of unsustainable pressure.
In software development and IT contexts, the Hyper-Achiever might push for unrealistic deadlines, prioritize quantity of features over quality, or create a culture where overtime is the norm rather than the exception. This can lead to increased technical debt, decreased code quality, and higher employee turnover, ultimately undermining long-term success and innovation.
**Hyper-Rational**
The Hyper-Rational Saboteur in tech leadership manifests as an over-reliance on data and logic at the expense of emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. While analytical thinking is crucial in tech, this Saboteur can lead to neglecting the human aspects of leadership, resulting in poor team dynamics and communication breakdowns.
For software development and IT operations leaders, the Hyper-Rational might dismiss the importance of user experience in favor of technical elegance, or struggle to empathize with team members' personal challenges. This can result in products that are technically sound but user-unfriendly, or high-performing teams that lack cohesion and long-term stability.
**Hyper-Vigilant**
The Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur in tech leadership manifests as an excessive focus on potential risks and threats, leading to overly cautious decision-making and missed opportunities. While vigilance is important in areas like cybersecurity, this Saboteur can paralyze progress and innovation.
In software development and IT operations, the Hyper-Vigilant might insist on excessive testing that delays releases, or implement overly restrictive security measures that hamper productivity. This can result in slower time-to-market, reduced competitiveness, and a culture of fear rather than innovation.
**Pleaser**
The Pleaser Saboteur in tech leadership can manifest as an inability to make tough decisions or give constructive feedback for fear of upsetting team members or stakeholders. This can lead to unclear direction, unaddressed performance issues, and a lack of healthy conflict necessary for innovation.
For software development and IT leaders, the Pleaser might agree to unrealistic client demands, avoid necessary but unpopular system changes, or fail to address problematic behavior within the team. This can result in overcommitted resources, technical compromises that hurt long-term sustainability, and a team culture that lacks accountability.
**Restless**
The Restless Saboteur in tech leadership manifests as a constant pursuit of new technologies or methodologies without fully realizing the benefits of current initiatives. This can lead to "shiny object syndrome," where teams are constantly shifting focus without achieving meaningful results.
In software development and IT operations, the Restless might push for frequent framework changes, adopt new tools before mastering existing ones, or pivot project directions prematurely. This can result in a fragmented tech stack, incomplete projects, and team fatigue from constant change without visible progress.
**Stickler**
The Stickler Saboteur in tech leadership manifests as an obsession with perfection and order that can slow down processes and stifle creativity. While attention to detail is important in tech, this Saboteur can lead to analysis paralysis and missed market opportunities.
For software development and IT leaders, the Stickler might insist on unnecessary levels of documentation, struggle with the inherent uncertainties in agile methodologies, or delay releases in pursuit of flawless code. This can result in slower development cycles, reduced ability to iterate based on user feedback, and a team culture that fears making mistakes rather than learning from them.
**Victim**
The Victim Saboteur in tech leadership manifests as a tendency to blame external factors for challenges or failures, rather than taking ownership and finding solutions. This can lead to a culture of excuses rather than accountability and innovation.
In software development and IT operations, the Victim might attribute project delays to unreasonable client demands, blame team underperformance on lack of resources without seeking creative solutions, or resist industry changes by claiming unfair competition. This can result in a reactive rather than proactive approach to challenges, missed opportunities for growth and innovation, and a team culture that lacks resilience and problem-solving skills.
Citations:
[1] https://support.positiveintelligence.com/article/108-judge
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-self-awareness-positive-intelligence-tracy-bianco
[4] https://maricartesta.com/2023/02/01/the-other-accomplice-saboteurs/
[5] https://www.positiveintelligence.com/blog/master-the-mind-game-of-entrepreneurship/
[6] https://www.positiveintelligence.com/blog/discover-your-saboteurs/
Understood. I'll tailor the descriptions of the 9 accomplice Saboteurs specifically for high-level executives such as directors, VPs, SVPs, and C-suite roles like CTO, CIO, CHRO, and other senior technology and people leaders. Here's a more targeted version:
**Avoider**
For senior executives, the Avoider Saboteur can manifest as postponing critical strategic decisions or delaying necessary organizational changes. CTOs and CIOs might avoid addressing legacy system issues or postpone difficult conversations about digital transformation initiatives. CHROs may sidestep addressing toxic leadership or delay implementing necessary but potentially unpopular policy changes.
This Saboteur can lead to strategic stagnation, accumulating technical debt, and a culture of complacency that erodes competitive advantage. It can also result in missed opportunities for innovation and growth, as well as increased risk exposure in rapidly evolving technological and regulatory landscapes.
**Controller**
The Controller Saboteur in C-suite executives often appears as excessive micromanagement of departmental operations or an inability to delegate strategic responsibilities. For CTOs and CIOs, this might mean over-involvement in technical decisions that should be handled by their teams, stifling innovation and slowing down project delivery.
In people-focused roles like CHRO or Chief People Officer, the Controller might manifest as an overreach into departmental HR functions, undermining the autonomy of HR business partners. This Saboteur can lead to bottlenecks in decision-making, reduced agility in responding to market changes, and decreased employee engagement due to lack of empowerment.
**Hyper-Achiever**
For senior technology leaders, the Hyper-Achiever Saboteur often drives an unsustainable pace of innovation or digital transformation. CTOs and CIOs might push for continuous product releases or system upgrades without allowing time for stabilization or user adoption. In HR leadership, this could manifest as implementing too many new initiatives simultaneously, overwhelming the organization's capacity for change.
This Saboteur can lead to burnout among top talent, increased technical debt due to rushed implementations, and a culture of valuing speed over quality and sustainability. It may also result in misaligned priorities, where impressive short-term achievements come at the cost of long-term strategic goals.
**Hyper-Rational**
In C-suite roles, the Hyper-Rational Saboteur often manifests as an over-reliance on data and analytics at the expense of human factors and emotional intelligence. CTOs and CIOs might focus exclusively on technical metrics while overlooking the impact of technology changes on user experience or employee satisfaction.
For CHROs and people leaders, this Saboteur could lead to an over-emphasis on HR analytics without considering the qualitative aspects of employee engagement and organizational culture. This can result in technically sound but poorly adopted solutions, misalignment between technology initiatives and business needs, and challenges in change management due to a lack of empathy for user concerns.
**Hyper-Vigilant**
For senior technology executives, the Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur often appears as an excessive focus on security and risk mitigation at the expense of innovation and agility. CTOs and CIOs might implement overly restrictive policies that hinder productivity or resist cloud adoption due to perceived security risks.
In HR leadership, this could manifest as over-cautious hiring practices or resistance to flexible work arrangements due to compliance concerns. This Saboteur can lead to missed opportunities for digital transformation, reduced competitiveness in talent acquisition, and a culture of risk aversion that stifles creativity and innovation.
**Pleaser**
The Pleaser Saboteur in C-suite roles often results in avoiding necessary but unpopular decisions. CTOs and CIOs might delay sunsetting legacy systems to avoid user complaints or agree to unrealistic project timelines to please stakeholders. CHROs might avoid addressing performance issues with long-tenured employees or resist implementing necessary policy changes due to anticipated pushback.
This Saboteur can lead to strategic misalignment, as leaders prioritize short-term harmony over long-term organizational health. It can result in accumulated technical debt, inefficient processes, and a culture where difficult but necessary conversations are avoided.
**Restless**
For technology leaders, the Restless Saboteur often drives constant adoption of new technologies or methodologies without fully realizing the benefits of current initiatives. CTOs and CIOs might frequently pivot strategic direction, leading to half-implemented solutions and change fatigue among staff.
In HR leadership, this could manifest as continuously introducing new engagement initiatives or learning platforms without allowing time for proper adoption and evaluation. This Saboteur can result in fragmented technology landscapes, inconsistent employee experiences, and wasted resources on abandoned initiatives.
**Stickler**
The Stickler Saboteur in senior executive roles often appears as an excessive focus on perfection and process adherence at the expense of agility and innovation. CTOs and CIOs might insist on exhaustive documentation or perfect code quality, slowing down development cycles and time-to-market.
For CHROs and people leaders, this could manifest as rigid adherence to policies and procedures, even when flexibility would better serve the organization's needs. This Saboteur can lead to reduced agility in responding to market changes, missed opportunities due to overly cautious decision-making, and a culture that values compliance over creativity and calculated risk-taking.
**Victim**
In C-suite positions, the Victim Saboteur often appears as a tendency to blame external factors for challenges rather than taking ownership and finding solutions. Technology leaders might attribute project failures to lack of resources or unrealistic expectations, rather than examining their strategic choices or leadership approach.
HR leaders might blame talent shortages or generational differences for engagement issues, rather than reassessing their talent strategies. This Saboteur can lead to a culture of excuses rather than accountability, missed opportunities for organizational learning and improvement, and a reactive rather than proactive approach to industry challenges.
Citations:
[1] https://hbr.org/2022/07/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most
[3] https://workforce.com/news/are-your-executives-sabotaging-your-strategy
[4] https://www.aesc.org/insights/blog/five-top-talent-challenges-todays-c-level-executives
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