The Saboteur

Tap the ones you want to practice. They stay marked on this phone.

1. 1The saboteur is an inner voice that formed early to keep you safe. It isn't a character flaw. It's a survival mechanism that never got the memo that you grew up, and because it's so old, it feels like the truth.
2. 2It still has something worth hearing. The problem isn't that it shows up. It's that it doesn't leave. A useful warning visits, says its piece, and goes. The saboteur moves in.
3. 3The Judge is the master saboteur, and everyone has one. It doesn't feel like criticism. It feels like clarity, high standards, accountability. It points three ways: at you, at others, and at circumstances.
4. 4The Judge needs the past to replay and the future to fear. You can't be fully present and fully in judgment at the same time. The Judge lives everywhere except now.
5. 5Saboteurs get built in a thousand small moments where a child learns that a want or a feeling is wrong. Separate the desire from the worth: the want is real, and the boundary is a separate thing.
6. 6With youth, you hold one of the pens. No single sentence breaks a kid, but over a season your responses form a pattern, and that pattern becomes their inner voice. Name the struggle, honor it, and keep going.
7. 7At the elite and college level, comparison is structural. Hidden, it lets the saboteur invent stories in the dark. Name where a player stands, let them feel it, then ask: what do you control? What do you want to do about it?
8. 8At the pro level, don't fix the saboteur. Understand it. The star and the role player, the veteran and the rookie, run different voices. Your job isn't to tell athletes to change. It's to create the conditions where they want to.
9. 9Love the saboteur instead of fighting it. Acceptance tolerates it. Love treats it as a messenger: it comes in, tells you something, and leaves.
10. 10Start with yourself. The saboteur lives in your body, not just your head, so understanding it is the beginning, not the end. Name it with some lightness ("there's the Judge again") and choose something different. The Judge and its nine accomplices come from Shirzad Chamine's Positive Intelligence.