Understanding Your Inner Saboteurs

Saboteurs are negative inner voices that create automatic patterns of thinking and reacting to daily challenges. They generate stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness, damaging performance, well-being, and relationships. The first step to overcoming them is identifying them through the Saboteur Assessment, which helps expose their false beliefs.

The main Saboteur is the Judge, a universal inner critic that focuses on mistakes, worries obsessively about the future, and highlights what is wrong in yourself, others, or life. The Judge triggers other Saboteurs and is a major source of emotional suffering and reduced effectiveness.

The Judge is often supported by accomplice Saboteurs, such as the Avoider (escapes difficulties), Controller (needs control to reduce anxiety), Hyper-Achiever (depends on success for self-worth), Hyper-Rational (over-relies on logic and disconnects from emotion), Hyper-Vigilant (constant fear of danger), Pleaser (seeks approval by helping others), Restless (always chasing the next activity), Stickler (extreme perfectionism), and Victim (focuses on suffering for attention and validation).

These Saboteurs originally developed in childhood as survival mechanisms, but they remain ingrained through neural pathways and can “hijack” the mind automatically. Although they claim to be helpful, negative emotions are only useful briefly as warning signals. When they persist, they reduce clear thinking and problem-solving.

To overcome Saboteurs, the program focuses on building new neural pathways through three mental fitness skills: catching Saboteurs when negative emotions arise, strengthening self-command to shift the brain into a positive mode using short exercises, and activating the Sage, the calm and clear part of the mind that uses positive powers to handle challenges effectively.