Positive Intelligence

Earlier this month I wrote about THE JUDGE and eluded to the fact that their are saboteurs lurking in our psyche and ruling our life.  Here I’d like to introduce you to the ten saboteurs and offer you the chance to read more about this work and how to dis-empower the saboteurs and empower your SAGES.

The Saboteurs are the habitual thinking patterns we have developed in response to perceived threats when we were young. These immature coping mechanisms may be effective when we were young, defenceless and scared, but as you’ll soon find out, they become a major source of misery if we continue to hold on to them as adults. Why then is it so hard to get rid of these internal saboteurs? For one, they are deeply entrenched in our self-identity due to years of habitual trigger. That’s also why we accept and believe the voices of the Saboteurs so readily since we perceive them as the voices of our trusted self, and this in turn makes spotting them difficult if we are not mindful of them in the first place.

In the book, author Shirzad Chamine listed ten common saboteurs which you’ll no doubt find familiar. Those that appear regularly in your self-talk are your top Saboteurs.

• Judge:The Judge is the inner critic living in each of us that criticizes each and every thing relentlessly. It is a potent source of stress, anxiety, guilt, regret and disappointment in life. The Judge is also the master saboteur which activates the other saboteurs and use them as his accomplice.
• Stickler:In chasing after the elusive perfection, the Stickler, or better known as the perfectionist, creates a living hell for himself and those around him.
• Pleaser:The Pleaser is the doormat who doesn’t know how to say ‘No’ and thinks that pleasing other people is the way to survive in life.
• Hyper-Achiever:The Hyper-Achiever values himself in terms of how much he has accomplished. But of course with the help of the Judge, the Hyper-Achiever is never really satisfied with any of his achievements. Enough is never enough for the Hyper-Achiever. So on and on, he slogs on.
• Victim:You’ve probably met people who go around playing the role of a victim to gain special attention and care. He is not acting. It’s just that the poor me identity is so strong in the Victim that he can’t tell it is just another self-sabotaging pattern that his mind is playing on him.
• Hyper-Rational:The Hyper-Rational can be liken to an cold icy Queen who goes everything by facts and figures and leaves no room for emotions, which she deems as useless and of course irrational.
• Hyper-Vigilant:A chronic worrier, the Hyper-Vigilant jumps at the slightest sign of threat and can never be at ease.
• Restless:The Restless is like a hyperactive kid that fiddles with one toy, loses interest, and then move on to the next in the next minute. He is always busy with something because to him, doing nothing feels like the end of the world.
• Controller:The Controller is just a slightly more polite way of saying the Control Freak. Things are either in his control or out of his control, and his mission in life is to control as many things in his life as possible.
• Avoider:The Avoider always has a way to avoid or run away from something. Rationalization is his best way to ‘tai-chi away’ (the Chinese way of saying to push away) all responsibilities without making him feels bad.

Being able to recognise your top saboteurs is an important first step in preventing them from hijacking your mind. For more information on the saboteurs and how to identify them, check out Chapter 3 and 4 of Positive Intelligence.