How do you manage your saboteurs?
Have you ever played a game called Quoridor? The goal is to be the first player to move your pawn to any space on the opposite side of the game board from which it begins. To do this, you need to slow down your opponent from making progress so every player tries to block their opponent when they are about to make a move.
Coming to think of it, there are many aspects of our lives where we feel blocked or slowed down. These blockers come mostly from our own thoughts but sometimes they come from others who belittle our dreams intentionally or unintentionally.
Marshall Goldsmith in his book triggers says “Getting better is its own reward.” So, the questions I want you to ask yourself are:
1. What would it take for me to get better at X?
2. What is that X for me?
3. What’s stopping me from getting better at X?
I wrote briefly about the first and second questions here and here. This article is about the third question. In the world of co-active coaching, the things that stops us from doing something we want to do are referred to as saboteurs (aka inner critics). This is because they tend to sabotage our dreams and aspirations.
When I think of saboteurs, I think of the Quoridor game I described earlier and the blockers that prevent us from moving forward. The blockers are usually the saboteurs. The thing is, most of the time, these saboteurs or inner critics are in our head. They tend to appear when we decide it’s time to make a change.
How do you overcome your Saboteurs?
I was reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some instructions on Writing and Life. Here’s what she had to say about the voices or “saboteurs”:
“Quieting these voices is at least half the battle I fight daily. But this is better than it is used to be. It used to be 87 percent. Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren’t there. I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip or pretending I’m on their TV talk show or whatever.”
She goes on to say that when she mentioned this to a hypnotist, he gave her the following exercise:
“Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop in the the jar. And so on. ”
If you ever embarked on doing something or making a change and found a million reasons why you can’t or you won’t right now, you know about these voices or saboteurs. Marshall Goldsmith details them in his book triggers and call them belief triggers.
Next time you are about to make a change (big or small), notice the voices or sabatours. Ask yourself, What’s stopping me? What are my sabatours? Pick them up one by one and drop them into the mason jar or lock them into your basement. Don’t worry, they will be there when you complete what you always wanted to complete.
Also, here’s a short video to know your inner saboteurs. Labeling them is the first step to better manage them.
