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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

That’s where we are now in our exploration of the Saboteur. Please don’t hit me.

So what have we covered so far? The ego and the nervous system are both opposed to change that takes them too far out of their comfort zone. It doesn’t matter if it is change you are desiring and even working to create, all your efforts can be undermined, counterbalanced, and undone if they feel sufficiently threatened.

We get caught in a paradox. Most of the things we are wanting, seeking, and working to create are things we don’t have and are therefore unfamiliar to us. Unfortunately “the unknown” (regardless of how good we’ve decided it will be, or how much we want it) tends to send us deep into the stress zone, activating the Saboteur.

This brings us to the good news:

The Saboteur doesn’t show up for no reason. It doesn’t get bored, it doesn’t torture you for its own amusement. It responds to the specter of radical change and catastrophic unfamiliarity, which the ego perceives as a threat to its survival.

But if we look at the situation from another angle it can be described quite differently:

The Saboteur has been activated by the presence of “possibility.”

In other words the prospect of expanding your business, or losing all that weight, or getting out of debt seemed too real. It wants you to believe you do not have the choices it feels threatened by; you’re never going to have the time to write that book, you’re never going to get organized enough to restructure your business, you’re never going to be able to focus long enough on one thing to see this new idea through.

But the truth is that the Saboteur emerged in the first place because something started to feel very possible. You started talking about it, thinking of actually doing it, maybe even taking steps.

We don’t sabotage our dreams; we sabotage our potential realities.

It wants you to believe it can’t be done and you are not capable anyway. The goal is for you to feel bad about yourself and overwhelmed by the situation. What I’m suggesting is that when you notice yourself getting in your own way, you say instead, “Apparently my dream is dangerously possible. I must be on to something!”

Unfortunately this is easier said than done because the Saboteur knows you extremely well, it has access to all your information, because it is you. It knows which beliefs about yourself to activate to attack your self-esteem, it knows what barriers to present you with to kill your energy or overload you, and it knows the perspective to take on the situation and the way the world works in order to make progress seem impossible.

However, even this can be a great gift if you look at it differently. When you are willing and able to stay conscious and observe the Saboteur at work then it will teach you exactly how and why it operates. Basically, you can follow your fear and decode its playbook.

Do you recognize an opportunity impersonating one of your blocks or breakdowns?

Saboteur: [sab-uh-tur'] The part of you that tries to protect you from change by removing choice.

Now let’s look at the contribution of another partner in crime, the ego.

By ego I mean, who you see yourself as right now. Everything from height, age, weight, gender, to likes, dislikes, talents, failings, popularity, job status, political and spiritual affiliations, etc. It wants to know exactly who it is and spend a lot of energy reinforcing its definition of itself.

Believe it or not, in most cases it would prefer to hold a negative version of itself versus an uncertain one. Like your nervous system, your ego wants to feel in control and frequently seeks to avoid the destabilization of change.

Accordingly, two of its greatest fears are death and the unknown. Death to the ego occurs when it fundamentally can no longer think of itself the way it used to. Part of the reason breakups and divorce are so difficult is that the ego got attached to defining itself relative to the ex-partner. The devastation we feel is largely the struggle to accept that we are no longer going to have the life we had pictured; we can no longer be seen as part of a couple.

This ego death experience often follows losing a job, kids growing up and moving away, or even a receding hairline. But it can also apply to change we see as positive.

Have you noticed the plot of almost every “E! True Hollywood Story” or “Behind The Music” is the same? A nobody turns into somebody, it’s fun for a while until it all falls apart, but then they figure it out and now it’s all okay.

In fact most stories about everything follow this pattern. We are constantly reminding ourselves that transitions are hard but if we hang in there our egos will reform into a better, more relevant version of who we are in the present.

This makes plenty of sense when we are transitioning away from something we saw as good, but we fail to see the stress it causes our ego to become a rock star, make a quantum leap in our business, or radically deepen the intimacy in our marriage. The fact that a new ego will be reborn into a new and better situation can be of little comfort to the ego that must dissolve for this to happen. There are very few eager martyrs.

Think of it this way: there are support groups for lottery winners. Apparently it’s not as easy as it looks, but we would all take that chance.

Many lottery winners blow all their money and have their lives ruined. In fact most people who end up millionaires lose and remake their money several times before they learn how to keep it.

We don’t take into account that most of our friends are in our income bracket; when we make a huge leap in earnings, our whole social circle can change. Suddenly relatives we didn’t know we had come out of the woodwork when they find out we are rich.

Most people aren’t used to handling money on that scale. Think of all the times you’ve heard of someone who had been wealthy going bankrupt and losing their mansion and all their cars. Didn’t you wonder how that was even possible?

There is a war going on between the part of them that wanted that life and the part of them that has become disoriented and destabilized by it. Guess which side the Saboteur works for?

Change demands we stretch our comfort zones, that we face the unfamiliar. Stretching too far takes us into the stress zone. Too much stress, real or perceived, conscious or unconscious, positive or negative, causes us to contract. From a contracted position we can only see through the lens of fear . Our priority switches from thriving to surviving.

So what happens when this response is running concurrently with your conscious position that you do want to risk and grow (enter the stress zone)? Like a computer program that has encountered contradictory commands, you crash. Your Saboteur finds a way to keep you from starting to write that book, making those important calls, or taking steps to get the support and assistance you require. You get to the end of another day, unable to cross it off your list.

And you wonder why, what’s going on?

I encourage you to ask yourself this: “How did my ego respond to this information?”

Next time, The Good News About Your Bad News.

At this point the Saboteur is loosely defined as “that inexplicable tendency I have to be my own worst enemy.” As you start to learn to recognize the Saboteur, your particular version, and how it manipulates you, it becomes possible to also understand why.

Which brings us to our second-stage definition:

Saboteur: [sab-uh-tur'] The part of you that tries to protect you from change by removing choice.

We exist on many levels simultaneously, and they don’t all agree with each other. In fact some are directly at war with each other. You want your business to be growing and thriving, and your relationships to be deepening and evolving, and your life to be challenging, expanding and exciting, right?

Of course you do!

But not all of you. There are some parts of you that see these as threatening and risky possibilities. These are the parts that forget to set your alarm, that hire the absolute wrong person, that over-commit and then implode with overwhelm.

Believe it or not, they do all this for your own good, your protection. And with absolutely no appreciation or recognition from you, you big ingrate! Let me introduce you to two of them:

The neurological level –

The body is programmed to create homeostasis. This means it seeks to normalize the unfamiliar – it will try to bring any dramatic shift back to the middle. It wants balance, predictability and manageability.

Imagine if I asked you to put your hand in water that was (unknown to you) either very hot or cold. Before your mind could register the experience, your reflexes would most likely intervene and yank your hand away. In most cases you wouldn’t even be able to tell if the water was too hot or too cold. The point is, it doesn’t matter.

Your nervous system judged the experience as “too much” and took over, compensating for the potentially disruptive change (extreme temperature) by recoiling from it.

Notice it doesn’t seek permission or wait for agreement from any other part of you. This means your neurology and your conscious mind can be headed in two contradictory directions at the same time.

Think of someone who is addicted to cocaine. Their conscious mind has judged the experience of intoxication to be “good” and worth repeating, and they will spend a lot of time, energy and money unsuccessfully chasing that first high.

Why won’t it ever be as good as the first time? Just like with the hot/cold water, the nervous system has determined that dramatic shift it experienced under the influence to be “too much,” and it begins adjusting to normalize the body’s response.

These competing agendas illustrate how two different levels within one person can be at war, pursuing opposite goals simultaneously.

Perhaps you can see how the Saboteur might be able to take advantage of this to thwart your plans. Do you notice these kinds of contradictions blocking change and progress in your life?

Tune in next time for part two, “The Ego’s Role in Self-sabotage.”

When I first mention it to people, they frequently self-identify unhesitatingly. “Oh, I definitely have that problem – I am my own worst enemy!” They are aware of a pattern of blocks, breakdowns and disruptions, and they are aware that they are playing a significant role in creating them, but that’s about it.

What I have seen is that there is tremendous benefit to be gained from understanding and working with this dynamic in our lives. It starts with becoming better acquainted with the “Saboteur.” I find it very useful to personify it, like the inner child – one of many personalities inside me that plays various roles in my life. One I can learn to recognize and incorporate.

There is almost always a lot of room for growth in this area because we are used to feeling alienated from and frustrated by the Saboteur. We are not eager to align with our ineffectiveness, negativity and bad choices.

We may not understand why or how the Saboteur operates in our lives, but we can at least start by identifying the results of its handiwork. Perhaps you recognize some of these typical examples?

• You get to the end of the day and wonder why the one thing you said was a priority didn’t get done, and you’re not sure where the time went.

The Saboteur is masterful at luring us into unconsciousness, where we are highly susceptible to distraction, avoidance and losing focus.

• You take an action or make a choice and look back later and wonder what you were thinking. Not only was it not productive, it created the opposite of what you said you wanted.

The Saboteur can make a stupid idea seemed temporarily smart or use a new, exciting, smart idea to distract you from following through in completing the current project.

• You can’t shake that voice that shows up at the worst time saying, “Who do you think you are? You’re not ready for this/not good enough/not able to do everything that needs to be done. You’re already hopelessly behind on this one project and there are five others you never finished and the house is a mess and the dog needs to be walked, and you haven’t done laundry in so long that you’re not going to have anything to wear tomorrow for that meeting you’re not prepared for.”

Hypnotizing ourselves with repetitious negative perceptions of the self and the situation becomes a well-honed habit. These anti-mantras then run on autopilot without our being fully aware of them or their pervasive and corrosive effects.

• You can’t get a handle on the part of you that keeps getting overwhelmed by an avalanche of ideas and possibilities. Or getting lost and stuck, confused about how to move forward. Or procrastinating and letting things pile up, till you feel hopelessly behind.

Creating situations and states (overwhelm, confusion, hopelessness) that drain our energy and make progress feel impossible is a Saboteur specialty.

The Saboteur leads us to conclude that we are lazy, untalented, unfocused and unworthy. In a sense it takes us over and convinces us that it is right: you can’t get where you want to go, you have no control of your situation and you may not really have anything of value to offer the world.

When defined in this way, it is relatively easy to see that we are engaged in self-sabotage. But it leaves us wondering why we would do this to ourselves – what’s the point? Fear of success? Fear of failure? Personality flaw? Low self esteem? To begin to answer this question we must revisit our definition of what the Saboteur is or, perhaps more accurately, what it does.

In our next episode I will get into more detail, but for now I would like to offer two new versions. The Saboteur’s job is:

1) To protect you from change by removing choice

2) 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 guess I’m surprised to hear Jesus is suddenly so easily threatened. Somehow till recently we had managed to live with the bizarre hybrid that Christmas has been for an awfully long time. The mishmash of pagan rituals, economic stimulus, and office parties together with the virgin birth (which, by the way, isn’t even remotely mythologically unique to Christianity) flew relatively successfully under the radar.

My neighbor’s yard has a manger scene combined with illuminated depictions of a Christmas tree (I don’t think they have those in Bethlehem. Shouldn’t it at least be a palm tree?), Santa (no connection to Jesus), and lots of penguins (aren’t they from the South Pole?). I’m not sure which is more remarkable – that we ever arrived at such a schizophrenic compromise, or that it never really gets questioned.

Why isn’t Santa Christmas’ public enemy number one? Here’s why I think it works.

Mythology doesn’t have to be accurate to be true. What’s more important is that the stories and rituals connect us to our tradition of understanding the world. They must express something essential and relevant yet timeless. If they resonate on a gut level, they need not make intellectual sense. Let’s face it, almost all mythology is absurd and impossible on its face, but some of it still stands the test of time. When that happens, it suggests to me that somehow it is pointing to a deeper truth.

So why does Santa coexist so easily with Christ? I believe it is because Santa is still the epitome of our collective understanding of and relationship to God.

He is a wise and magical, ageless older man with a white beard who lives at the top of the world (lookin’ down on creation). He sees you when you are sleeping and awake, keeps tabs on your behavior and rewards or punishes you accordingly. He’s capable of miracles that defy the laws of time and space and is assisted by many angelic helpers. We never actually seen him, but we like to think we see evidence of him and will manufacture it if necessary (dress up like him, leave presents in his name, eat the cookies that are left for him).

Perhaps most importantly he requires the leap of faith of believing in him, something which gets harder the further away from childhood we get. The more practical and less imaginative we become the more unreal Santa/God becomes. We really liked the idea of it though, so we try to keep it alive for children who are still capable of belief.

Unlike with Santa, most of us stay in our child relationship with God even as adults. We feel we ought to believe even when we don’t, while maintaining a sort of superstitious desire to appease and curry favor in order to receive gifts. Too often our personal mythology doesn’t mature. Without a way to connect that is relevant to adulthood, we become spiritually infantilized. No matter how evolved I might tell myself I am, when the going gets rough, how quickly do I resort to bargaining with God to take away my pain? What do I promise to do or not do in order to be rewarded?

Happy Kwanzaa!

What did it take for you to “grow up” spiritually? Where do you see room for growth? Tell us in a comment below.

P.S. David Frum covers similar territory in his post, The real Christmas ‘war’: Jesus versus Santa