According to Shirzad Chamine, founder of Positive Intelligence, Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions as you handle life’s 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.
"We need to just really acknowledge the fact that we are all experiencing too much change for the typical human being to be able to handle. And the reason that we need to invest in mental fitness is that it massively increases our capacity to handle change in a way that’s not stressful — but joyful."
- Shirzad Chamine, founder and CEO, Positive Intelligence
Meet the Judge, Your Master Saboteur
Positive Intelligence explains that 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 Judge accomplishes its staggering destructive sabotage by having us feel negative and unhappy through faultfinding with (1) ourselves, (2) others, and (3) our circumstances.
Characteristics:
- Self: Badgers self for past mistakes or current shortcomings.
- Others: Focuses on what is wrong with others rather than appreciation. Gets into inferior/superior comparisons.
- Circumstances: Insists a circumstance or outcome is “bad” rather than see it as a gift and opportunity.
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 Sage Leader
The counterpart to Saboteurs is the Sage. Your Sage taps into your wisdom, deeper insights, and often untapped mental powers. When your mind is acting as your best friend, it's because the Sage is in control. Saboteurs and the Sage are powered by different regions of the brain and can be weakened or strengthened depending on which region is activated.
The Sage represents a leader's inner wisdom, strength, and clarity, driving them to foster a positive, innovative, and resilient work environment. Chamine identifies five key powers that enhance leadership and personal growth:
- Empathize: Feeling and showing appreciation, compassion, and forgiveness — for yourself and others — builds social awareness and cultivates a sense of service. With practice, empathy leads to healthier relationships, better conflict management, and more effective teamwork and collaboration.
- Explore: As a child, you knew how to explore purely, experiencing great curiosity and fascination in discovery. By grounding yourself in that innate sense of curiosity, openness, and wonder, you become more open to new ideas, more deliberate in the face of crisis, and more likely to effect positive change.
- Innovate: While the Explore power is about discovering what is, the Innovate power concerns inventing what isn’t. True innovation is about breaking out of the boxes, the assumptions, and the habits that hold you back.A mindset of innovation sparks adaptability, self-management, and optimism — all key to workplace wellness.
- Navigate: Every employee has their internal compass — as does your organization. By creating a consistent compass, your organization invites employees to align with it, relax, and find purpose in their work.
- Activate: When all your mental and emotional energies are laser-focused on action and not distracted by the Saboteurs, you
The Mental Muscles
To overcome Saboteurs and access your leader’s inner wisdom, you need to develop three mental muscles.
- Saboteur Interceptor Muscle: Recognise and label negative emotions as Saboteurs, discrediting their lies and limiting beliefs.
- Self-Command Muscle: Use 10-second PQ®️ Reps to quiet the Saboteur region and activate the Sage region of your brain. A PQ rep is very simple, it involves shifting as much of your attention as you can to your body and any of your five senses for at least ten seconds. That counts as 1 PQ rep. These reps activate and grow your 'self-command' muscle which helps you self-regulate your thoughts and feelings.
- Sage Muscle: Your Sage handles challenges with clarity and positivity, utilising the powers of Empathise, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. Once you’ve activated your Sage brain through PQ Reps, you’ll have access to these powers.
Would you like to uncover your Saboteurs?
Saboteurs are universal. The question isn't if you have them, but which ones and how strong they are. Initially, they act as guardians to help us survive childhood threats. As adults, these Saboteurs become invisible inhabitants of our minds, shaping how we see and react to the world without us realizing it. The Saboteur Assessment is your first step towards conquering them. By identifying your saboteurs, you can expose their lies and limiting beliefs. Take the saboteur assessment now to begin your journey.
Would you like to measure your Mental Fitness?
Your PQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient) measures the relative strength of your positive versus negative mental muscles. PQ is the key indicator of your mental fitness. Take the PQ Score Assessment to discover how often your mind is serving you versus sabotaging you.
