If your ADHD shortcomings take center stage, it is usually the saboteurs operating it from the wings. They unleash all your anxiety, unhappiness, and self-doubts. When your saboteurs come together, your performance at work, your relationship with your loved ones, and your overall well-being get negatively impacted.
What are Saboteurs
Each time to try to get your life in control, you probably hear loud, damaging, and incessant inner voices that stop you from reaching your goals. These voices are what we call saboteurs. When saboteurs take control of your mind, there emerges an “automated pattern.” This pattern then governs how you feel, think, and respond to situations. Saboteurs fuel your anxiety, frustration, stress, self-doubt, unhappiness, and restlessness. As this pattern grows stronger, it begins to harm your well-being, performance, and relationship.
How they Sabotage Our Minds
According to Positive Intelligence, Saboteurs can be divided into two types – the “Master Saboteur (or The Judge)” and “accomplice saboteurs.”
Ever woken up in the middle of the night with extreme worry? Did the smallest shortcomings manage to trigger intense inner criticism? These are the situations that The Judge is usually responsible for. More often than not, The Judge teams with one or more of the accomplice saboteurs to turn your day (and life) upside down.
Some of the many Accomplice Saboteurs include:
The Avoider – one that makes you avoid challenging tasks.
The Controller – one that gives you intense impatience or anxiety when you cannot take control of people’s actions or situations.
The Victim – one that makes you put extreme focus on emotional and temperamental feelings to gain affection or attention.
The Restless – one that doesn’t let you stay content with your current task but makes you restlessly look forward to the next activity that “possibly” has greater excitement.
The Hyper-Vigilant – one that triggers extreme anxiety and vigilance about everything that “could” or “might” go wrong.
In the absence of the right guidance, saboteurs quickly turn into a mental quicksand that constantly pulls your life into chaos. But fortunately, there is a way to…
Stop the Saboteurs in their Tracks
The Mental Fitness Bootcamp takes a holistic approach towards setting your mind and ADHD life on the right path. It blends in three critical mental fitness tools – Systems, Mindsets, and Habits to help you identify Saboteurs and use the following tools to shift your mind to “Sage” (inner wisdom) perspective.
Systems are external support tools that assist you in your mental fitness journey. For example, using google calendar to remember an event, setting reminders for tasks you know you’d forget, redesigning your environment, etc.
Mindsets include both Saboteur (negative inner voices) mindset and Sage (inner wisdom) mindset.
Habits are formed when you combine both systems and mindsets. For example, your goal is to exercise every day, you can apply systems (your morning alarm) and mindsets (reinforcing the importance of exercising in your mind) to ensure exercise becomes a habit in the long run.
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