Spotting your Saboteur

It would be quite fair to say that most of us sabotage ourselves on a daily basis. But because sabotage takes place at both a conscious and unconscious level, we may not even know we’re doing it. Regardless of whether we’re aware of it or not, our saboteur plays an enormous role in all of our lives.

This thing called a saboteur is a part of us, not some sort of external negative force that plays havoc with our very existence. It may seem that its sole purpose is to destroy and destruct, but if we learn to understand our saboteur it can help us to confront the fears we have of maximising our potential and feeling empowered.

The saboteur in action

At first glance it may seem facetious to say we don’t want to maximise our potential. But whether it’s in our relationships, our work, our health, our finances or our hobbies, there are always implications to making changes and the saboteur challenges us every step of the way.

Consciously or not, when we imagine living at our highest potential we say to ourselves ‘I don’t want to be/do xxx because then I will have to be/do yyy…’. The saboteur pricks up its ears and jumps in to make darn sure we abort our repeated attempts to make changes.

An example

Jane decides over the weekend she wants to be healthier. She’s been feeling tired and sluggish and keeps snapping at her colleagues. She decides she’s going to go to bed earlier, eat breakfast every day, cut down to just one coffee in the morning, exercise three times a week and stop her excessive drinking at the weekends.

On Monday morning the blast of her alarm wakes her up, but she presses the snooze button and turns over. By the time she drags herself out of bed it’s too late for breakfast so she just runs out the door to get to work on time. Jane’s so tired after a late night on Sunday that she has a couple of coffees before mid-morning and because she was late leaving home she left her gym bag in the kitchen.

Already Jane has sabotaged almost every resolve she had to live a healthier life and it’s not even Monday lunchtime.

Why do we sabotage?

Why we sabotage is the million dollar question. That’s exactly the question we continually need to ask ourselves to understand the inherent fear we all have of maximising our potential. It’s not enough just to acknowledge a fear, though that in itself is hard enough. What’s more important is really getting to understand what drives our choice to remain less empowered than we all know we can be.

This takes time, effort, resolve and practice.

Listening out for the saboteur

We know we are sabotaging ourselves when we say things like ‘I would have…’, ‘I should have…’ and ‘I could have…’ . Words such as ‘but’, ‘if’ and ‘when’ are also favourites of the saboteur. When you hear yourself saying this – to yourself or to others – your saboteur radar should be working overtime.

Paying attention

The starting point to working with your saboteur is to pay attention to how your saboteur operates:

·       What sort of language do you use?

·       How often have you made excuses and broken your word to yourself?

·       When have you resolved to do something only to break your promise to yourself the very next day, week or month?

·       In what areas of your life does your saboteur have the strongest hold?

·       How frequently do you let yourself off the hook?

Taking the first step

So often we make a strong resolve, such as Jane in the example, only to go into overwhelm because of the amount of change we want to make. This is shortly followed by sabotage behaviour, and the cycle continues.

Do you really want to make changes that will positively impact your life right from this moment?

Then take the first, small step by thinking of a decision you can make by the end of today that would immediately make you feel more empowered and improve your self-esteem.

This could be anything but it should be one small change. This one small change, and each small change thereafter, is symbolic of your decision to move yourself forward in some way. You are choosing to change your life, and each time your saboteur comes forth you are also choosing to look at why you are aborting your own attempt to get one step closer to your highest potential.  

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Filed under life skills | Comment (1)