Imposter Syndrome, Inner Critic, Good Angel vs Bad Angel on your shoulder….whatever the form it takes, we’re all familiar with that voice that says we’re not good enough, that we’ll fail again, that we can’t possibly achieve our goals. That same voice is the voice that tells us so-and-so is such an ass for flaunting their new promotion or that secretly says “hah!” and delights in someone else’s failures (i.e. schadenfreude).
Why is that? What is this powerful voice that tends to sabotage us and keep us down from achieving our maximum potential? You can call it whatever you’d like but for the sake of this article, we’re calling them Saboteurs.
Saboteurs are exactly that — they sabotage you in making you second guess your potential. Rather than opening up your possibilities and tapping into your creativity, empathy, innovation, and ultimately spurring you to action — these voices paralyze you into inaction by tapping into your fears and apathy, ultimately making you feel “stuck.”
Does this sound familiar?
According to Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence, there are 10 Saboteur archetypes.
The Judge — master Saboteur, the one that compels you to constantly find fault with yourself, others, and your circumstances.
Any of these resonate with you?
Saboteurs help you in the short-term but ultimately hurt you in the long-run. Here’s a couple of examples:
Pleaser: When your Pleaser Saboteur runs the show for you, people get used to you giving, giving, giving and after awhile, they don’t give back because they don’t even know what you need.
The result? You become resentful. After awhile, people stop trusting you because you only focus on the positive, pleasant stuff to make them happy.
Controller: In most situations, you feel compelled to take over because you can’t give up control to others. This might make the project/work/task go well at first but then people stop pulling their own weight because you keep taking it away from them. Leaving you stressed, exhausted, and burnt out.
Hyper-Achiever: This Saboteur tell you that you’re not worthy of love/respect unless you achieve. And any time something goes wrong on your way to achievement, your mind goes to a negative place and gives you tunnel-vision, exacerbating each small mis-step. In the long run, you’re less likely to meet your goals because each derailment becomes this huge thing.
Hyper-Rational: This voice tells you that everything can be rationalized and you’ll have better outcomes as a result. The problem here is that most of life’s questions are not rational questions — case in point, anything dealing with humans! As a result, you don’t pay attention to others’ feelings or yours and ultimately relationships get damaged.
In Chamine’s Positive Intelligence, he talks about how the brain is made up of 2 parts: your Survival Brain and your Positive Intelligence (PI) brain. And in fact, these two brains are entirely different regions of your brain.
The Survival Brain’s focus is to simply survive. The emotions that the Survival Brain evokes are Anger, Anxiety, Disappointment, Fear, Paranoia, Shame, Guilt, Regret and Blame.
The Positive Intelligence Brain’s focus is to thrive. The emotions that this part of the brain evokes are Curiosity, Empathy, Joy, Creativity, Peace, Calm, Resolve and Gratitude.
So why do we have these emotions? Think about our ancestors — the ones with anxiety, fear, paranoia; these ancestors were biased towards the negative. And they survived! When they heard something rustling in the trees, their negative bias had them bolt away before anything could happen.
Sure, 99% of the time they would be wrong, it’d be a harmless bird. But for that 1% that they were right, they survived to continue passing their genetic materials.
The optimistic ancestors? Well…for that 1%, they probably died.
So we all have a predisposition for survival. Unfortunately, negative bias and negative emotions tend to have a cascading effect: feeling stress causes anxiety, fear, shame, regret, and so on. It’s great for figuring out what’s wrong but the Survival Brain is terrible at creativity, resourcefulness, and seeing outside of the box.
The good news is that the Positive Intelligence Brain is great at these things! Rather than narrowly focusing on what’s wrong, our PI Brain allows us to expand our vision, to see possibilities that our Survival Brain doesn’t.
If you’re wondering what part of your brain you’re residing in, a great tell-tale sign is your emotions. If you find yourself anxious, fearful, full of shame, regret, blame then most likely, you’re in your Survival Brain a majority of the time.
“But Bea, isn’t Survival Brain good? It’s what gets me to push myself harder, it’s what’s gotten me to my success, etc.” And yes, Survival Brain’s emotions can be useful.
When you put your hand to a hot stove, it’s very useful for us to feel that physical pain. But we get that message very quickly, within 2 seconds. We don’t keep our hand there and go on and on about how hot and painful it is!
Similarly, if we experience a big failure at a project, it’s useful to feel those negative emotions. To feel anger or sadness or regret. But how long is it helpful to stay in that mode? A minute? A day? A week? It’s the PI brain that allows us to switch modes, to help figure out what to do in a creative, resourceful way.
Simply knowing and being able to recognize when it’s the Saboteurs talking in your brain versus internalizing and thinking it’s YOU talking, can be super powerful.
There’s other exercises and actions you can take beyond simple recognition (like exercising that PI brain) and if you’re interested, enroll in my free 14-day email course that tells you what to do about it on the daily.
BUT this knowledge alone, directing your attention to the Saboteurs and saying “you’re not me, thanks but no thanks” will start diminishing that Inner Critic’s power.
So here’s my tldr; you self-sabotage because of Saboteurs. They were once helpful to us but not helpful anymore. Simply knowing about the origin of these thoughts and identifying the ones applicable to you can be hugely powerful.
If you’d like to do a quick 5-minute assessment on your Saboteurs, you can go here.
By the way: I am in no way connected to Shirzad Chamine or financially motivated to send you there except that I think it’s a great resource.
Finally, it is super difficult to write anything nowadays with the dumpster fire events that are happening in this country like this, this, and this. It’s important to acknowledge that as human beings, we can’t compartmentalize one aspect of ourselves (e.g., being a working professional) from other aspects (e.g., being personally impacted by world events).
If you’re a manager, please let your teams know that it’s ok to bring that part of them to work. Here’s a wonderful article on how to manage teams through political trauma by my amazing co-founder, Michelle Kim.
Sending lots of love and light to you all today.
If you enjoyed this article and want to learn more about my coaching services, feel free to reach out and schedule a chemistry call with me here.
