If you have taken one of our leadership courses or read some of my blogs then you will know that I encourage my clients to pay attention to their inner saboteur. Pay attention to it, so that you recognise it when it is getting in your way and pay attention to it so that you do not get fooled into actually listening to it!

Your inner saboteur

Have you ever taken time off work during the week and felt guilty? The feeling of guilt that you have is delivered to you courtesy of your saboteur. Have you ever been riddled by nerves before or during an important event? That is your saboteur. Are you putting off doing something that could really make a massive difference to how you live the rest of your life? Guess what? That is your saboteur holding you back!

Your saboteur displays itself in you normally in the form of some kind of negative feeling, emotion or maybe just a little voice, nagging at you. Some people even have an image in mind for their saboteur, a relative is a common one. One of my clients had a picture in mind of her mum shaking a finger in disapproval whenever she took a few minutes to sit down to relax. Now that is not going to help you chill out is it?

That feeling of scarcity

One of the ways that your saboteur likes to get involved with you is through the feeling of scarcity. How do you feel if you think about running out of time to do an important task? How do you feel if you think that they have stopped producing your favourite shampoo? How do you feel if you just can’t

get inspiration for your next project? How do you feel if you think that your life is passing you by and you haven’t achieved your dreams? How do you feel if you imagine that you are not going to get an income at the end of the month, if your skills are getting worse and not better, if ……..  Enough of that!

These thoughts are all mind constructs, aren’t they? Scarcity is a mindset, it is an addictive mindset that is produced by your saboteur. You programme your saboteur from an early age to warn you about scarcity. It thinks that it is doing the right thing by you to remind you of scarcity. After all, it is a good thing to make sure that you don’t run out of food, it is a good thing to make sure that you have lots of time in hand, it is a good thing to put petrol in your tank before you go on a journey.

The thing is that your brain is repetitive in its thinking and it looks for patterns from previous thoughts that it can link to present thoughts in order to warn you about possible future problems. If you accept that it is not a good thing to run out of petrol and you programme that thought into your brain, then your brain may see the same pattern emerging in current thoughts with nothing to do with petrol and so it sends you the warning sign, this is when your saboteur emerges. Every time there is a possibility of running out of something your saboteur emerges and cries out “Possible scarcity!” to you. What you normally get is feelings of panic, feelings of fear, feelings of anxiety.

Abundance Mindset

Given that all thoughts are mind constructs, we have a choice over what we think about. We have a choice over whether we live with a mindset of scarcity or abundance. Imagine that you have a deadline approaching and in your mind you have an abundance of time available to you in which to complete your tasks. How do you feel? If you are searching around for inspiration for your next project and you imagine, visualise an abundance of ideas flooding into your head, imagine a whole heap of ideas on the edge of a glass about to tip over into your glass..and..there they go. How do you feel? If you imagine that no matter how old you are you have a bag full of energy and a whole world of opportunity in front of you, how do you feel?

Pay attention to your saboteur, pay attention to your thoughts, what you create in your head will determine how you feel and will determine your results. Create a mindset of abundance. You are going to have around 90,000 thoughts today, so at any moment if the one that is currently running through your head is not what you want then change it because there are plenty more positive ones itching to burst through.