Endure the Saboteurs 4
THE HINDRANCES [TO ANSWERING MY CALL] EXIST CONTINUOUSLY. THEY TAKE THE FORM OF PEOPLE, MOSTLY, WHO ARE SO NARROW IN THEIR EXPERIENCES, CREATIVITY, ENERGIES, AND POSITIVE THINKING THAT THEY SEE ONLY OBSTACLES IN LIFE. UNFORTUNATELY, THERE ARE LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO FIT THIS PROFILE. SUCH PEOPLE CAN DRAIN YOU OF YOUR OWN ENERGIES.
Steve Sheppard
CEO of Foldcraft
IF YOU ARE SERIOUS about answering your call, you will encounter, in the course of your lifetime, people who do not believe in you, who disagree with your purpose, and who resent the part of life that you embody and they do not. The call you spent time and energy discovering and work to answer authentically attracts resistance, encrusted ballast from those who live its opposite.
Answering a call will bring mentors into your life. It will also bring tormentors.
The tormentors are your saboteurs. Although they are to be avoided for as much of your lifetime as possible, they are rarely completely avoidable. For reasons often hard to fathom, in a few key chapters of your life, the saboteurs will play a major role—negating, casting doubt, and destroying your hopes.
If you survive them, you come out tougher and stronger and more attuned to your call than ever. This may be why you attracted them in the first place. If you don’t handle their challenge well, the damage can be permanent. And often to your own surprise, the most persistent saboteur in your life can be yourself.
58The questions to keep uppermost in mind when dealing with saboteurs are these:
- How do saboteurs do their work?
- How can you prepare yourself to see this negation for what it is?
- What can you learn and how can you benefit from encounters with the forces counter to your calling?
- What do you do during those times when the worst saboteur you engage is yourself?
HIGH PURPOSE ATTRACTS THE DEMONIC DESTROYERS
If we were sitting around a campfire several centuries ago, we would have heard stories of great knights pursuing noble goals of conquest and protection, and how they would fight to overcome the great and evil intentions of a witch casting a spell or a powerful demon bent on destruction. Or a version of Cinderella might have been told, with the beautiful girl escaping the evil control of her stepmother and cruel sisters.
In contemporary times, the content has changed dramatically but the structure of the stories remains the same. Two generations of children have explored the stories of Luke Skywalker fighting off Darth Vader and discovering his identity. Harry Potter struggles with the evil wizard who took his parents and put the lightning bolt scar on his forehead.
Another such story branded into our memories through a popular book and the myth-making power of Hollywood is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.1 The reasons for the story’s greatness are surely its unlikely, unforgettable hero, McMurphy, and its equally unforgettable villain, Nurse Ratched, whose very name implies her life mission of control, ratcheting whatever she can to the nearest surface so she can keep it from growing into something she can’t dominate.
59Many of us know the general idea of the Ken Kesey story and some may know the details from many readings of the book or multiple viewings of the movie with a bag of homemade popcorn on a quiet Friday night. But parts of the story bear retelling, especially to illustrate the notion of saboteurs and how they operate to limit people on their way to living out a calling with integrity.
The story is told from the viewpoint of a huge Indian man, the Chief, who pretends throughout to be deaf and dumb. Before McMurphy shows up at the asylum with all those branded psychotic, Nurse Ratched runs her little ward of wounded souls with a perfect mix of medications and group therapy that reminds the patients of how inadequate and ill they are. Her control over them is more important than any healing, and she has long ago decided that her job is to keep them from changing and thus stay in the ward. There, she can see them and they can’t cause any trouble.
Into this scene comes a boisterous, partying Irishman, McMurphy, unsocialized to the point of having run-ins with the law fairly commonly and not attached to careers and families like most. Kesey uses the asylum as a microcosm for the world, of course, suggesting that those who are too adjusted to the world have no real life of their own. They are broken in less obvious ways than inmates, surely, but they are still broken. McMurphy may be a meddlesome redheaded Irish rogue, but he would do no one harm. His main goal seems to be to have fun, laugh, and annoy those who can’t, which, of course, targets saboteur Ratched from the get-go.
Their battle begins innocently enough. He starts breathing life and spirit into the inmates by laughing and playing and stretching all of the ward’s rules. A wild fishing expedition and a ragtag basketball game with his inmate nonathletes are two of the more memorable scenes as McMurphy helps those on the ward enjoy their senses and their bodies again.
Nurse Ratched sees McMurphy for the danger that he is to her system, and so the battle between the saboteur–control freak and the one with the irrepressible human spirit escalates slowly and dramatically to its bitter, triumphant conclusion.
60In one scene, McMurphy’s will to live and move the immovable is symbolized by his attempt to tear a sink from its stand, literally to rip the plumbing apart with the strength of his muscles multiplied by an indomitable will. After straining with every fiber of his body, the veins nearly bursting through his skin with effort, the sink remains unmoved. But we see, under his party personality, just how fierce the will to live, to go beyond and rip apart everyday constraints, burns at the core of his being.
The battle between McMurphy and Ratched eventually centers around one of the inmates, a stuttering Billie Bibbit, and his struggle to free himself of his sickness and self-doubt. Under McMurphy’s influence, the man starts to discover his own mind and questions Nurse Ratched’s authority and control. On the fateful night of a big party in the ward, orchestrated by the redhead and attended by some of his party-loving girlfriends, Bibbit rediscovers his manhood. His potency becomes a sign of his return to autonomy and health. His lifelong stammer actually disappears and he can express himself, make up his mind, and have his own opinions as he discovers his own voice.
The morning after the messy party that no one cleaned up, Nurse Ratched comes upon the scene when she enters the ward. This is the last straw—she knows that if her little world is to be maintained she must pull out all the stops. And she is up to the task with a grand moment of sabotage creativity. In her tight-lipped, starchy-nurse-uniform manner, she psychologically castrates the newly potent Bibbit, employing just the right amount of self-disgust-inducing shame—”I’ll of course need to tell your mother about this, Billie.”
Bibbit is aghast at the thought, and his newly won freedom of mind is too weak to handle this artful attack. He crumbles back into self-doubt and stuttering, and secretly goes to his room where he commits suicide.
When McMurphy absorbs Billie Bibbit’s death, he knows the game he is playing with the nurse and her rules is over. He has entered a life-and-death struggle. He attacks Nurse Ratched with his hands on her throat, because her death grip on the inmates has snuffed out a life that mattered to them all. If he had had a few more seconds he might have avenged Bibbit’s death, but the guards stop him before he does permanent damage.
He is taken away. The end of the story contains the sad triumph of his will.
61McMurphy is seen as dangerous and so, as Nurse Ratched would hope, he is lobotomized; by disconnecting the part of the brain that houses his will, he can no longer cause any trouble. He is now a walking, talking vegetable, with no frontal lobes to make up his own mind about anything.
But the Chief develops a plan. From his pose as mute and deaf, he has silently observed every episode in the grand battle between the human spirit trying to find expression and the saboteur who must squelch everything about the spirit she cannot control. McMurphy’s spirit has rekindled his own. The invitation that McMurphy had offered to all the inmates—to throw off the nurse and the medications and the labels and all the institutionalized crud that prevented them from being whole—was initially accepted by Bibbit. Now, when McMurphy is brought back to the ward and put into his bed to sleep, with deep purple scars on his temples, the Chief executes his plan.
He holds a pillow over the Irishman’s face to suffocate the body of McMurphy; his soul was already gone. Then he lumbers to the sink that McMurphy had tried to rip apart, leans over it, gets the same grip that McMurphy had a few weeks earlier, and promptly yanks it from its stand. He staggers across the ward supporting its huge mass, and crashes the sink through a screened window. Then he crawls through the window and escapes into the night, never again to let himself be separated from his life force. The spirit that was in McMurphy lives on in the least damaged of the inmates, the Indian who was closest to his roots in nature and whose will has been reactivated.
Saboteur Ratched has done, and will do, more damage, but McMurphy’s victory, against huge odds, is for the collective human soul. His resistance to the end was his life force at work, and the Chief’s escape is our hope.
LEARNING THE SIGNS AND PATTERNS OF SABOTEURS
The lessons from this classic story about saboteurs and how they operate are important. You may not run into a Nurse Ratched very often in your life. But you may have a coach, a boss, a business partner, a relative—even a spouse—whose main interaction with you squelches your core and muzzles your most vibrant impulses, the ones attached most centrally to your calling.
62Businessman Patrick Kelly, CEO of Physician Sales and Service of Jacksonville, Florida, the billion-dollar company that changed the medical supplies delivery business, says that his saboteurs were “bankers and partners. When they didn’t see the vision they about killed the company’s growth and potential on several occasions.”
Philosopher-consultant Peter Koestenbaum relates that his saboteurs were “uncomprehending, disinterested, and invalidating philistine teachers, especially at the university level.”
Many of you could name more than one in your life, and all of us have seen saboteurs at work in the lives of others, if not our own.
Knowing when you have a saboteur in your life is the first step in successfully enduring one. Here are the signs of saboteurs at work:
THEY OFTEN LOOK RESPECTABLE AND HAVE AUTHORITY
Nurse Ratched had nursing credentials and years of experience. In some instances saboteurs even are esteemed for their gifts and their contributions.
THEY SPEAK OF POSITIVE MOTIVES TO COUCH THE DAMAGE THEY DO
The best saboteurs are so accomplished at this that they confuse those they are squelching by making it sound as if they are creating and protecting value.
THEY TWIST REALITY
Saboteurs make those who are healthy and life-affirming seem in need of correction and control. They are accomplished at mind games, labeling good things their opposite with such skill and conviction that they go unquestioned.
63THEY ARE MASTERS OF POWER AND CONTROL
By finding the most vulnerable spots in others they know how to employ their tools of shame, anger, or quiet manipulation with measured words. This appeal to weakness becomes the essence of their control over others. The reason why McMurphy was impossible for Nurse Ratched was because he was beyond her control. The power-hold saboteurs gain is the very thing that must be broken for a calling to be lived, just as a wrestler must wriggle his way out of being pinned with both shoulders to the canvas.
THEY CAUSE PAIN AND ENJOY WATCHING OTHERS REGRESS
As they busily pursue their own agendas, saboteurs see the pain they inflict on others as a necessary step toward ridding life of unwanted elements.
THEY OFTEN DO GOOD IN SOME AREAS OF THEIR LIVES
This provides a protective shield for their work of sabotage, confusing even those on the receiving end of the devastation, because the good in other areas is apparent.
THE WORST SABOTEUR IN YOUR LIFE IS YOU
Although it is handy to attribute the force of evil to others, the simple truth is that we often do battle with ourselves. We have all been guilty at times not only of squelching the life force that wants to be called in others but even of turning our own worst inclinations against ourselves. We will spend some time on this dark reality later in the chapter, but let’s first talk about the need to protect your calling from the saboteur forces embodied in others.
64AN EARLY LESSON IN SABOTAGE
I needed to fend off a saboteur in my early career life, and it taught me a valuable lesson.
I have spent most of my working life helping companies and the people in them perform at a higher level, closer to their full potential. In order to become a coach and a consultant, I had to earn my stripes and go through the toils of leading teams and people myself.
In my first-ever supervisory role, my boss’s boss had an opening interview with me upon my arrival. I was thirty, energetic, and green, and ready to take on the management role to which I aspired: head of human resources. The forty-something manager had called me into his office, and after I answered a few of his questions, he told me in his deep voice, with a rather toothy smile, that “as I see your background, what you have we don’t need, and what we need you don’t have.”
It wasn’t exactly my picture of an encouraging opening meeting with one of my key leaders. I don’t know what I said in response, but I got out of the meeting fast and thought about what to do.
I basically did three things. First, when he was around me for the next year, I worked twice as hard to show him why he was wrong. Second, I avoided him whenever I could. Luckily for me, often he was too focused on other issues to bother me. Third, I had an important ally; my immediate boss often ran some effective interference. On occasion, I would ask him to present positions on my behalf and my ideas would go through with much less hassle.
This saboteur’s opening comment about what I did and did not have was a shot across the bow that put me on alert. With some judgment and a close ally in my boss, I was able to escape damage to my career and myself. And I was fortunate not to have an advanced saboteur to deal with, only a half-baked one.
65A MASTER SABOTEUR
About a decade later a close friend of mine had to endure a saboteur. This one was more serious and focused than the one I had encountered, and I watched my friend—we’ll call him Rich—feel some real damage from the experience.
In the course of building his business and offering new services, Rich had come across an especially promising and novel set of empowering management practices that improved business performance while building the talents of the people inside the business. He and his team dedicated themselves to learn, codify, and offer these services to clients everywhere. The services aligned perfectly with the values of Rich and his team, values of empowerment and good business practice. Learning to deliver these services became part of Rich’s calling.
To learn and launch this new business Rich created a new ownership team and partnered with a company skilled in the use of the practices and well-known in the marketplace for its accomplishments. The charismatic and powerful leader of this company became Rich’s partner, and while things started well enough—as a lot of people with saboteurs for ex-spouses and business partners will tell you—the saboteur colors rose to the surface rather quickly.
First, Rich was warned about how to work with the CEO—we’ll call him Blair—by a few of his longtime colleagues. But Rich and his partners didn’t listen too well because they were still focusing on the positives. I can remember hearing some of the early glowing reports, and they brushed over Blair’s darker side.
Then Rich noticed that Blair had many admirers, but that most of his own people were afraid of him and wouldn’t disagree with him. A faint twinge of trepidation could commonly be felt in the room when he questioned others even mildly, and at meetings he would occasionally browbeat others even in front of guests.
66During one session, he queried a manager to make a point and left the subordinate manager speechless about his poor judgment. In an audible aside Blair said, “Can you picture how that guy taught us to filet those fish we catch, how to debone them with just a few strokes of the knife?” He let the question hang over the room as the metaphor for what he had just done to the manager, letting it soak into everyone’s imagination. Blair was the master of the filet, cutting his own managers if he decided they needed it.
After a company manager who reported to Blair had to endure a public questioning some months later, the next manager to have to report was physically ill at ease and rushed back to her seat, clearly hoping that by sitting down and disappearing she would avoid a public question. It was both somehow humorous—a few people laughed— and sad to see a competent, grown woman reduced to a childlike state, scurrying from potential punishment.
Blair ran his kingdom well, sometimes very unobtrusively—like Nurse Ratched—because the rules had been put into place and his minions enforced them. He could often be funny and joyful and insightful. And he often performed kind acts, genuinely helping many with his educating style. But he made sure his inner circle knew how much he sacrificed and how and when he had been heroic.
The technique he used most often on Rich and his partners, and especially on Rich as the chief liaison in the partnership, was what they called “letting him go until he self-destructs.” In this saboteur game, only the most formal contact was maintained while someone was given a job to do. Then, all feedback, support, and substantive contact would be withdrawn until the person was filled with self-doubt and couldn’t perform.
Rich saw Blair do the self-destruct dance with others before him and did not understand it fully at first. After about ten months into the deal, Blair cut Rich and his colleagues off from any serious contact. Blair’s team needed no coaching on how to proceed, being practiced in it, and they stepped in line to move from partnering to a kind of friendly shunning. In the meantime, Blair and his team made it known that they wanted other partners “to fill out their service options.” This in effect negated Rich’s partnership. But Blair had covered himself in the best saboteur style—he could simply say the partnership hadn’t worked because Rich and his colleagues self-destructed.
67There are more Blair stories, of course: how he used anger, how he’d absorb others’ contacts and make them his own, how he couldn’t accept feedback. When Rich gave him feedback on a few occasions, he would argue back, and instead of trying to learn from the feedback would try to fix things with some manipulation of the work process. He would usually delegate “the problem,” as he saw it, to someone else so he would not have to bother changing anything about himself. In his mind, he was a small part of the problem at most, and others had to get it together.
Rich saw Blair repeat the pattern with others who followed, beautiful variations on the same saboteur pattern as he’d find a flaw and play on it until the relationship ended.
Much of Rich’s insight into Blair came after some time had passed. During the interactions it was an often-confusing mix of polite and minimal interaction, and because of the self-destruct policy, lack of meaningful contact. The lack of feedback is very disconcerting, of course, because in a start-up with little positive market feedback to count on initially, the interaction with a partner is crucial. The shunning was crazy-making in the extreme, a great saboteur method for creating self-doubt.
THE DAMAGE SABOTEURS INFLICT
Blair’s full impact on Rich, as an early forty-something with a good string of successes, was broad and long-lived. Because of intense persistence on Rich’s part, the partnership went on for three years. Blair’s minions actually began to admire Rich because no one had lasted even half the time. He felt so committed to the value his team could provide clients that he endured financial difficulties and Blair’s abuses in order to continue to learn the skills and bring value to the marketplace. This work had truly become part of his calling.
But by his account, here is the damage the relationship with Blair caused him:
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- Raging self-doubt and negation. For months and parts of years the success and good work he had done were pushed far into the background. He wondered if he had really acquired skills and added value.
- Persistent overworking to prove a point. He took his tendency to overcommit to an extreme. He overinvested time and energy and money at the expense of life balance on many occasions.
- Questioning of values. He would wonder if the values he held were of any real substance in the world, or if he was just wasting his time.
- Occasional use of some of Blair’s tactics. He got so good at seeing what Blair was doing to others that on a few occasions he forgot himself and retaliated with some of the same hurtful tactics, once with Blair himself and once with one of his reports.
- Obsessive clinging to a few straws. The lack of feedback clouded his judgment, and instead of seeing things for what they were he desperately clung to a few shreds of positive feedback, far outweighing their true value.
The wounds healed with some visible scars left. But years after the damage began, if I get him to tell me the stories, Rich can still bring back certain memories that generate anger and pain. The breadth of the damage is matched by its enduring nature.
Use the saboteur to grow more deeply committed to your calling. Extract value from your saboteur encounters.
LESSONS TO LEARN
In a review of what he learned as a whole from this encounter with the saboteur, Rich drew several lessons, the universal kind that anyone facing a saboteur can relate to. In fact, if you can extract learning from enduring them, saboteurs serve many useful purposes.
69One of the key things saboteurs teach is exactly how you don’t want to be. After a serious encounter with one, most of us take a vow, a solemn vow: “If I ever get to a position like that, I will never, e-v-e-r, do to somebody else what he did to me!!”
Remembering your saboteur, keep in mind the lessons listed here that most apply to you.
TOUGHEN UP
The pain and stress of enduring a saboteur becomes easier if you use the experience to reaffirm your values and the calling you are attempting to give expression to. It is easy to have a calling when all goes well; it is far harder and of longer-term value to commit to it while you are being negated.
Getting thicker-skinned at some earlier stage will help you endure the other debunkers and negaters who are sure to come later.
WEAKEN YOUR WEAKNESS
The saboteur is effective in part because he can exploit a weakness. When you see, for example, that your tendency to let others’ opinions matter too much or to take everything a person says at face value are weaknesses that will continue to limit you, you owe it to your calling, if not to yourself, to lessen that tendency’s hold on you. You will have no better motivation than after the souring and lingering encounters with a saboteur to do something about yourself.
ALWAYS REMEMBER THE SABOTEUR’S NEGATIVE IMPACT ON YOU
Never forget the self-doubt and negation, so that you never let yourself feel or think that again. One lesson from an encounter with a saboteur is the realization that you cooperated with the control he or she had over you. By remembering that lesson, you never let it happen again.
70WHEN YOU BREAK OUT OF THE SABOTEUR’S GRIP, GIVE YOURSELF SOME HEALING TIME
The damage done by a saboteur will take some time to repair. Don’t put yourself on too fast a track to get back to the healthier you. And don’t be surprised if you never totally get over it. The memory of the pain may always be there, under the surface.
FORGIVE
One of the more damaging long-term impacts of an encounter with a saboteur can be to leave you cynical, doubting others’ motives, and too ready to see the minor sabotaging flaws that reside in all of us. Muster up the intellectual judgment to forgive the saboteur, and with the gift of time and some regular doses of prayer, most likely your emotional forgiveness will follow. Forgiveness washes away the bitterness, leaves you free to move ahead with your calling, and keeps you just as vigilant against saboteurs of any stripe in your future.
GIVE OTHERS THE BENEFIT OF YOUR INSIGHT
Help others in the grip of a saboteur to see what they are letting themselves go through. A person who has endured a saboteur can teach others who can’t see them for what they are. Be an anchor for those who are stuck, inform them of the reality of a partner like Blair or a Nurse Ratched in their lives.
FIGHTING YOUR SABOTEUR SELF: THE ULTIMATE BATTLE
As grand as the stories of pitched battles between strong evils and courageous goods are, the grandest stories of all are of people conquering their own internal saboteur, the one that limits both others and themselves.
71It would be simpler if life were so clear and bounded that we could ascribe all evil to others and view our own intentions and actions as always noble, always fair. But with maturity we learn that when things go bad we often had a part to play in the mess. A divorce is not the fault of one, but of two. A dashed business partnership ending in legal haggling also involves two parties, not one.
Just as often, when you start the good fight against the saboteur who is limiting your life, you discover that the real enemy is you. The only reason the saboteur coach or boss or teacher is able to dampen your spirit is because you are dampening it yourself with your own belief system and mental patterns.
One of the saboteur’s skills, you’ll remember, is finding and exploiting a weakness. We have such weaknesses because we haven’t taken care of that part of ourselves yet. A feature of our mental or emotional model of the world and our place in it isn’t complete and whole.
Bob Thompson, the telephone company executive we met earlier, had big doubts about his decision to become an entrepreneur in the music business and give kids better musical choices, something he felt called to do. “I worried about what others would think, and I had really only known business success, so I had this tremendous momentum going. Most of all, my pessimism in moving ahead to new work showed up as realism.… That was my biggest challenge, knowing that the realistic side of me always served me well, but my pessimism disguised itself as realism in this instance.”
One of the tricks is to remember that your weaknesses are tied to your strengths:
- You are a natural helper, but you give of yourself too much.
- You are a fine achiever, but you can’t stand to lose.
- You take charge as a matter of course, but you limit others by having to keep control.
This juxtaposition of strength and weakness is the reason we avoid working on ourselves. We focus on the good part, “I am so caring” (taking the first of the three preceding examples) and find it handy to push into denial the flip side of this feature, “I overnurture others and get taken advantage of.”
72As long as we stay in denial and refuse to work on ourselves, we attract people into our lives to exploit this weakness. The saboteur in us colludes with the external saboteur in our lives and together they deliver oodles of pain to the psyche: “Oh, I loved so much. I even showed my love by giving her all my money and extra time.” And when she leaves, without appreciation for our overgiving, we hurt intensely, smashed by the experience. The smashing and the pain can make us cynical and protective, negating the part of us that responds to a call of human connection and caring.
This is how self-sabotage occurs. The essential you is working hard to express your real values and purpose, and the saboteur in you finds ways to create the illusion that caring can’t work.
Sabotaging Yourself on the Team
I have seen an ugly dynamic often develop on management teams with this shadow-collusion as its base. An overly verbal peer on the team, commonly with a slightly too-high opinion of herself, faces a huge amount of work with her team, made up primarily of less verbal, reserved personalities. As the tension of the work builds, she gets louder, makes more decisions, takes up most of the airtime at meetings, and her teammates get more frustrated, shut down, say less, and contribute little to what becomes “her show.” The cycle of poor dynamics gets reinforced by everyone not willing to work on their undeveloped part. She needs to learn some humility and listening skills, and the others need to speak up and not be afraid of conflict.
Instead, they focus on what is outside of them, the lousy team or the loudmouthed peer, because it is easier to do that than to confront their own inner saboteurs with whom they have comfortably lived for as long as they can remember.
This is a two-way, self-sabotaging street that makes it look like an outer saboteur is at work but is about inner saboteurs in equal measure.
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We unconsciously recruit many of our saboteurs.
Because we can’t do the necessary learning ourselves, we actively go out and find the saboteurs, without being aware of it. We can’t see our weakness or flaw for what it is and we are too afraid to admit it and name it for what it is. So, to move us off our lack of insight, we need more pain and frustration as a motivation. We look hard for the right saboteurs, custom fit to have all the right-wrong qualities and drive us berserk. Then, and often only then, when we are in enough pain to do something about it, do we muster up the will to move on and grow.
We need a foil, an enemy, an external embodiment of the part of us that is limiting our growth on the path. With a raging saboteur in our lives, tromping all over our neediest, limiting parts, we can no longer deny our self-limiting tendencies. With an external force causing the pain, we eventually recognize the work we have to do, the work we have been avoiding. The work and effort and will to fend off the saboteur creates the inner resolve and capability needed to pursue our calling.
We will spend more time on fighting the ego, one of whose gambits is to be an inner saboteur, in chapter 7. For now it is only important to recognize that the battle against an external enemy is a battle to claim a part of yourself.
In the end, the way you deal with saboteurs, either inner or outer, is to outlast them. Endure them. Persist and wear them out. Then assess the damage, heal yourself as best you can, and minimize the bitterness, a quality that can taint your response to your calling.
And do the best thing. Take the lessons you have learned and move on.
74After an encounter with a saboteur you will see many more possibilities to live your calling. You’ll be wiser, and most probably, a lot tougher.
Overcoming the Inevitable Negation of Your Call
Endure the saboteurs, because you will be tested and negated by those who don’t want you to live with a purpose and act on your particular calling.
Learn the methods that saboteurs use in their quest for control. Pay special attention to the weakness in your mental or emotional makeup that they play on so you can see how the principles they espouse—innocent and even noble-sounding for the most part, ones you can agree with—disguise the destructive nature of their work.
Extract value from your encounters with saboteurs. Move on with a greater-than-ever sense of purpose, with a capability to sniff out saboteurs in the early stages.
Forgive and move on the wiser for your encounter. Help others endure their saboteur episodes with the knowledge you’ve gained and the patterns you can predict.
Take a good long look at how you have been your own worst saboteur by denying there are parts of you that need strengthening. The saboteurs who make your life so difficult, unwittingly invited there by you, teach you what you need to work on.
75EXERCISE: REFLECTING ON SABOTEURS AND THEIR IMPACT
- How many saboteurs have you fought off in the past or are in the process of currently outlasting?
- What long-term damage have you suffered in the process?
Ongoing bitterness?
Damage to your confidence and self-esteem?
Doubts about your worth and purpose and direction?
Loss of ability to take risks?
Cynicism about the human condition?
Abandonment of something you love? - What can you do to control the damage and move on? See a therapist? Have some conversations with friends? Do some journaling? Hire a coach?
- What long-term gains and lessons have you learned that you are passing on to others?
- How do you sabotage yourself?
- What saboteurs did you attract into your life so you could heighten the pain level and start working on the undeveloped parts of yourself?