Meet the saboteurs
Meet the saboteurs
Shirzhad Chamine is a pre-eminent executive coach and lecturer at Stanford and Yale Business School. His book Positive Intelligence explains why only 20 per cent of teams and individuals achieve their true potential for professional success and happiness.
The most common saboteurs
This is the most common saboteur. Chamine calls this the master saboteur – who afflicts us all. Everyone will recognise that voice inside their head that judges or criticises themselves, others, or their situation. The Judge is generally formed as a safety device – alerting us to threats around us and becoming so ingrained that they seem to become part of our personality when they limit our potential.
Often seen as a perfectionist, extremely detail oriented but reluctant to let go of a project until it meets their standards, or seen to be overly critical by others.
The Pleaser saboteur will work hard to ensure their interactions with others are positive and strive for harmony at the risk of their own needs, so they often have underlying feelings of frustration.
The Restless saboteur is on a journey of adventure and discovery, bouncing from one new thing to another, often hugely creative and innovative but exhausting, even confusing to others around them.
Leaders often also have a strong Controller saboteur – excellent at organising and achieving a group goal; it can be hard to leave a void in leadership, and they often need to dive in to move the situation along. But in doing so, they accidentally block other people from volunteering. Over time, if unchecked, a controller saboteur can encourage people to delegate up repeatedly. Like the Judge, these saboteurs crystallise from early childhood to achieve love and success. Indeed, look to someone’s strengths, and you’ll likely find the saboteur’s voice underneath that strength.
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: Has difficulty saying no. Avoids conflict and says yes to things that aren’t actually desired.
Controller: Strong need to take charge. Comes alive when doing the impossible and beating the odds.
Hyper-Achiever: Goal oriented and workaholic streak. Good at covering up insecurities and showing positive image.
Hyper-Rational: An intense and active mind. Sometimes comes across as intellectually arrogant.
Hyper-Vigilant: Always anxious, suspicious of what others are up to. May seek reassurance in procedures or rules.
Pleaser: Strong need to be liked and tries to earn it by helping, pleasing, rescuing or flattering others. Needs frequent reassurance and affection from others.
Restless: Easily distracted and can get too scattered. Stays busy, juggling many different tasks. Seeks constant new stimulation.
Stickler: Punctual, methodical, perfectionistic. Highly critical of self and others.
Victim: Fairly dramatic and temperamental. When things gets tough wants to crumble and give up.
Firstly, understand your saboteurs – you will find a free test here – to discover what might be driving your decisions and reactions. Check your moods and language and notice if there are patterns in your own behaviour that you could interrupt. This step can weaken a saboteur voice’s hold over your decisions and radically alter your health, happiness and relationships.
Secondly, in interactions with others, recognise that they may be hijacked by their own saboteurs and deploy other protective measures, such as empathy, curiosity, creativity, action and purpose to move beyond reacting to that voice. Bring more compassion to your dialogue and seek common ground rather than differences. Be curious about their standpoint or contribution – ask questions and explore the impacts. Doing so will demonstrate your confidence to hold a safe place for challenge and debate to build a better outcome.
Thirdly, breathe! That sounds trite, but the saboteur voices are effectively dominant neural pathways which have, in the past, created success or reward and can become automatic reactions. If you find that a saboteur has taken hold, try to stop and notice your breathing for five to 10 seconds. That’s often enough to disrupt the thinking pattern and enable you to choose your next step. Any sensory hack – touch, sight, sound – for that amount of time is enough to let the impulse pass so that you can deploy the best decision for the situation without losing momentum.