I want to look at a version of self-sabotage that is different than the last example. In the previous case Mary knew she was in her own way and didn’t fully understand how, why or what to do about it.

In Mike’s case he does not see himself as the obstacle and is therefore unable to start to identify the presence of the Saboteur until asked to examine his day in detail.

A Typical Day in Mike’s Week

“I have always been able to do a lot of work and get a lot done. I used to love work. But lately I’m worn out, less productive, and starting to hate my job. Most mornings I have a highest priority, but I start with all the unfinished stuff that’s piled up over the last few days.

Often, before I can make any headway, people start contacting me with last minute “emergency” work and questions and problems. I almost never turn them down, and a lot of the time I’m the only person who can fix the situation (or the person who should is incapable). It does seem to be true that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself. Whenever I’ve tried to train someone to take some of the work I shouldn’t have to do off my hands, I end up feeling like it would have been faster and easier to do it myself.

Plenty of days I lose track of time and forget to eat. Or I’ll be surprised it’s already so late in the day when my 3 o’clock appointment calls. By the time I get to what should be the end of the workday, I’m only just starting my highest priority.

I always took a lot of pride in my ability to “push through” and get things done. But lately I’m finding it takes longer and I’m not as confident in the quality.

Two things I noticed when I closely monitored my day:

1. How often I could be finished with something for the time being and I say to myself “just one more.” Or, I’ll intend to just take a quick look at something, and before I know it, I’ve gotten all caught up and it’s midnight.
2. How much time I spend rewarding myself by going and looking at something fun on the Internet (watching videos, reading about sports, checking e-mail). On the one hand I know I’m wasting time; on the other I feel a part of me rising up and saying “I need an occasional break, for God’s sake, and I deserve it!”

I feel perpetually worn down, I spend hardly any time with friends and family, I constantly dream of a long vacation that there’s no way I can take, and I feel like it’s never going to end.”

Do you recognize Mike’s Saboteur? How about the “possibility –> go unconscious –> habit –> no responsibility” cycle?
Next time I’ll share with you what I saw in Mike’s situation.

I want to build on the example I used in my last e-zine. I get the sense that most of you are no longer committing everything I’ve ever written to memory, so I’m going to suggest you refresh your memory by reviewing Mary’s case here.

Now that Mary is starting to get a sense of how the Saboteur works in her case, what can she actually do with this information?

First, she can organize the information to help her anticipate, or at least recognize, when and how the Saboteur is likely to attack.

For example: Mary already knew that the feeling of “too much to do” would shut her down. What she didn’t realize was that its opposite, an open day with lots of unstructured time, could be just as dangerous. This also suggests that, like a lot of people, one of Mary’s primary challenges is balance (more on that in a minute).

Now she can bring awareness to the situation. Mary now realizes:

“I don’t deal well with unstructured time. It puts me in a wandering mode. I collect new tasks which put me into overwhelm which leads to the desire for avoidance and escape.”

Knowing this allows her to recognize it as it’s happening, so she can break the pattern and make a new choice.

If she notices herself chasing red herrings or getting caught up in secondary priorities, she can remind herself:

“These are behaviors that are designed to create overwhelm. They cause things to pile up in my inbox while nothing ever gets completed. This makes me feel like I’m ineffective and running out of time, and that is not productive.”

Not only can she now make a different choice, Mary can actually choose to feel encouraged (this takes practice). Remember the Saboteur doesn’t come out for no reason. So, while it wants you to feel like things are going nowhere, its mere presence suggests otherwise.

Any thought or action she now recognizes as one of her particular self-sabotage strategies can work as a red flag to bring her to consciousness. The thought, “I certainly can’t be expected to be productive when I’m overloaded or unclear,” or the impulse to do something besides work because “at least it will be productive,” can work for Mary instead of against her.

Second, Mary can put structures in place to support her in her efforts to deal with the Saboteur and be more effective in her business.

Scheduling your time, ahead of time, is a great tool for most people. As I mentioned before, often the real challenge is creating balance in a variety of areas. For Mary the thing to experiment with is the ratio of structure to free time. “Overwhelmed” and “wandering” are the two poles that teach Mary the borders of a balanced state.

Pop quiz: Would Mary work better with long work periods where she can get focused, get in a groove, and ride the momentum? (hint: no, it’s the next one)

Or, would she benefit most from lots of short burst, manageable work periods separated by brief off-time with a variety of chores, periods of rest or exercise, and a few fun things included.

In fact, Mary will do much better with every task being broken down into manageable pieces that have assigned time periods. This creates lots of easy wins for her and gives her a sense of progress and momentum.

How will Mary know to try this?

Because her Saboteur showed her, when she carefully examined her day, that when projects, situations and time periods seem too large, they take on a monolithic, unmanageable quality that blocks her connection to “possibility.” By better understanding what causes her breakdowns, Mary can learn to work with who and how she is, her strengths and weaknesses, and not put herself in bad positions.

In addition, Mary can identify her highest priority the night before and schedule it first thing to ensure it doesn’t get away from her. She can also schedule a time a little later in the day to check e-mail for a finite amount of time. For many people this feels very challenging, if not impossible. Try it, you’ll learn a lot. Remember: it’s unlikely there’s anything in there that’s more important than your highest priority, so why should it be the very first thing you do?

If she ever loses focus, the highest priority is a great way to reorient and make sure the most important thing is being addressed.

Another great tool I recommend is to schedule a pause to reflect several times throughout the day. It’s a really effective way to check in and see if you are on course or if the Saboteur has lured you into unconsciousness.

If you do find you lost your way, it’s a great opportunity to gather information. It’s very tempting when we stumble to go into regret, anger, self-pity, etc., but those are actually just ways to sabotage the valuable research you could be collecting.

By detaching and asking what the Saboteur has to teach us, we begin to reap the benefits of this strange and confusing relationship.

Question for you:

Want to see a different example of the Saboteur in action?  Let me know! And, if you want, suggest a version of the Saboteur (something your Saboteur does) that you’d like to see addressed.

It’s one thing to understand the basic Saboteur formula:

possibility –> go unconscious –> habit –> no responsibility

It’s quite another to know how to recognize it in your own situation. Let’s look at an example to hopefully illustrate how to start to apply this information.

When I ask people to give an example of what they are struggling with, they often describe a day that goes something like Mary’s:

A Typical Day in Mary’s Week

“I began the day feeling enthusiastic. I had a promising prospective client to follow up and a wide open day to get a lot done. Then some stuff began to pop up in the morning that I needed to take care of. One thing led to another and, before I knew it, I had way too much to do and I hadn’t even begun the things I was planning to do that day.

I was feeling overwhelmed and unable to focus at this point, so I went for a walk to clear my head. When I got back I felt a little better, but now I was feeling time pressure. I thought about following up with my prospect, but that would have been better to do in the morning. Also I started to feel like I wasn’t really prepared enough to talk to them, and that made me feel like, ‘now I have even more to do and not enough time to do it.’

I finally gave up and decided to clean the house because at least that would be productive. I have no idea what happened or how, and I’m starting to think I shouldn’t have left my day job.”

Mary went from feeling excited about a potential client to unprepared. At the beginning of the day she was going to get a lot done; at the end she was overwhelmed and falling behind. Well done, Saboteur!

Do you recognize the four elements of the formula?

1) POSSIBILITY

In this case the possibility is fairly straightforward. There was the chance to get a new client, and a lot of unstructured time in which to be productive. Many times, however, people are not even aware that this occurred.

If so, try working backward. Look at the breakdown (overloaded, distracted, confused, etc.), and then examine the period leading up to it. See if you notice a thought, an occurrence, a moment of inspiration, an impulse, or something that the Saboteur felt needed to be nipped in the bud.

2 ) GO UNCONSCIOUS

This one is usually hard to recognize at first, and sometimes just needs to be assumed for a while. What you’re looking to do is identify the thoughts, beliefs and behaviors that are used to create the state of unconsciousness.

In Mary’s example it starts with the “stuff popping up.” Notice how vague the description gets (“one thing led to another”). The more specific you get with the details, the more you can uncover. Here, for instance, you would find that the first thing she did was check e-mail. Sounds reasonable, right?

But you know how e-mail works – you can get lost in there! The underlying intention of checking e-mail was to open herself up to a flood of distractions and new obligations. The Saboteur will get you to allow, perceive or create the preconditions for unconsciousness and then sit back and let nature take its course.

In Mary’s case her Saboteur knows that the feeling (real or imagined) of “way too much to do” combined with “time pressure” is a reliable way to send her into overwhelm, where she has no hope of remaining conscious.

Similarly, the impulse to go for a walk to clear her head, a seemingly harmless and reasonable choice, is actually going to make things worse. Her Saboteur is going to use it to feed the mounting sense of time getting away from her. There is nothing wrong with e-mail or a good walk, but in this case both are excellent disguises for what will turn out to be counterproductive choices.

3) HABIT

Mary’s Saboteur knows that when she feels overwhelmed she will habitually become unclear about how to recover and what next steps would be most productive for her business. She will be susceptible to avoidance (going for a walk, cleaning), which will feed her sense of not enough time, continuing the vicious circle.

In addition she will be susceptible to negative beliefs (“I’m not good enough”, “It’s better to call in the morning,” “I’m not prepared”). Notice Mary didn’t feel under-prepared until she pressured herself into unconsciousness.

Some of these details may be accurate or valid, but the real question is: what do you do with them? Maybe it’s true that it would have been better to make the important call in the morning, but that thought wasn’t accessed until late in the day when she could use it against herself. And is it better to make the call at a less perfect time than to never make it at all?

4) NO RESPONSIBILITY

Sure, Mary can tell she’s doing something wrong. The key, though, is that she will begin the next day with no idea what she could do differently, or that it’s really even possible.

Next time we’ll look at what Mary can DO with this information to deal with the Saboteur and create a different day.

At this point I hope you have a pretty good sense of who the Saboteur is and why he (or she) does what he (or she) does. To benefit from the information he (or she) is trying to provide (obstacles and issues you would need to address in order to get to the next level), let’s now turn to how he (or she) operates.

The place to start is with this four-step process:

1) POSSIBILITY

This could look like an exciting new idea, a promising client prospect, or even the day with a whole lot of potentially productive, undedicated time. To our conscious mind this seems like good news, which makes it all the more confusing at the end of the day when it doesn’t work out like we hoped.

2 ) GO UNCONSCIOUS

Now this doesn’t mean actually passing out (although it sometimes appears as the powerful need for a nap). It’s closer to when you walk in a room with a sense of purpose but cannot remember why…

Or when you intended to drive somewhere but realize you are half way to a different destination you are used to driving to…

Or when you plan to behave differently around your family “this time,” but somehow the second you get near them something takes over and it goes pretty much the way it always does…

Unconsciousness happens without us really being aware of it, and it allows things to happen without us being aware of it.

Particularly -

3) HABIT

We drive to the usual place instead of the new place, and behave the way we are used to around our family because these are deeply ingrained habits. They are our auto pilot, default settings.

They are easy to do since they are well-rehearsed (even if they don’t get us what we say we want), and they are extremely familiar which is very effective for avoiding the unknown. This soothes our nervous system and stabilizes our threatened ego. And since everything occurred without our being aware, we are left with –

4) NO RESPONSIBILITY

It is intensely painful (and highly unusual) for us to look ourselves in the eye and say, “Today I felt afraid. I chose to stay small and played it safe.” Instead we opt to feel mystified and confused.

Sure, over time you might feel down on yourself, but not the “recognize a choice I can make in this moment to create change” kind. It’s usually more of the “I guess things aren’t going to work out for me like I’d hoped. Sure, I’ve lost some respect for myself, and I wish I would have done some things differently, but what difference would it really make anyway? This whole thing has just gone wrong somehow, I don’t know…” kind.

You get your unconscious, shadow agenda met without taking the blame. You get to stay stuck without any idea of how to make it different.

This can all happen in the blink of an eye, and often we don’t even notice or remember the “possibility” phase. Part of the reason it’s so effective is that it’s very hard to accept that you would do this to yourself.

Next time we will cover how to recognize this information and what to do with it.

Are you able to recognize any of this pattern in your situation? Tell us about it below in a comment.

Receiving the gifts the Saboteur has to offer begins with recognizing that its appearance indicates that whatever we are engaged with contains the energy of powerful possibility. Typically we experience it as the opposite.

A hallmark and standard strategy of the Saboteur is to disguise perceived threats (possibility of change) with their opposite. You could be standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but if you only face away from it, for all you know it doesn’t exist. It sounds stupidly simple, but it works. Also, remember: since it knows you extremely well, it will pick subjects and beliefs that you are highly susceptible to.

A second hallmark of the Saboteur: It uses strategies and content that will be persuasive to you. It uses what works.

• It will tell highly intelligent people they’re not smart enough.
• It will tell people with great enthusiasm and energy for their work that they lack passion.
• It will tell you things are going in the wrong direction or spinning out of control when they are actually going better than ever.

It will only use these, of course, if they are perspectives you are susceptible to. This is what allows us to decode its playbook.

To understand this we will have to explore the third definition of the Saboteur’s job, which I offered in the initial article on this subject, Say Hello to My Little Friend:

 To collect information about where your blocks and breakdowns are, so you clarify what needs to be addressed in order for you to go to the next level.

I like to think of it as your personal Tiger team. These are the people you hire to test your security systems by trying to defeat them. If you’re the Department of Defense, the only way to know if your firewall and encryption are keeping all that info Top Secret is to get someone to try to hack into it.

So when you wonder why you haven’t been able to take your business to the next level, the Saboteur shows up and says,

“Since you asked, I’m going to show you that first you would have to let go of that limiting belief that things only get done right when you do them yourself. This works nicely with your tendency to over commit and then get overwhelmed when there’s too much on your plate.

“You may have noticed that your habitual response to the feeling of overwhelm is to become anxious and unclear, which diminishes the quality of your work and causes you to get even less done. This allows more work to pile up and creates a vicious circle.”

If we could hear this with clarity and detachment, we would realize the extraordinary value of this feedback. Unfortunately, most of the time our response is to feel criticized, attacked and demoralized.

The Saboteur is essentially neutral, and its purpose is to serve our highest interest; but the ego tends to take the message personally and either polarize against it, turning him into an enemy, or manipulate the information against us for its own protection.

Up until this point I’ve been talking in terms of the Saboteur trying to take away choice and hiding opportunities by naming them their opposite. This new definition now shows us that the true culprit is our struggling, insecure, mistrusting ego bending valuable information to suit its own agenda and using the Saboteur as the fall guy.

Now that we have a better understanding of who the Saboteur really is and the benefit it’s trying to offer us (and it only took five blog posts!), we can begin to look at how the playbook can be decoded.

Does this change how you see your Saboteur?