[00:01] Welcome to the Focus B show, where Katie Stoddart, high performance coach, interviews experts around the world in performance and mindfulness. Now, here's your host. Katie.

[00:34] Welcome to a brand new episode of the Focus B show. Very excited today to talk about a topic that I think is absolutely essential when it comes to peak performance, which is to understand our personality and more precisely, what aspects of our personality are contributing to earth, having great levels of performance, or on the other hand, actually diminishing our daily performance. I'm talking here about the different sabotage that we all have. This is a concept that was created by Shiazad Shameen that you can find on positive intelligence. I will leave a link in the show notes, and there are nine different sabotage. I will go through each one, and if you identify with one more specifically, I will also give some tips and tricks on how you can actually use the strengths of this sabotage and what you can do to prevent it from sabotaging your own progress and success. Let's get going first. Sabota is the stickler. Stickler is another word for perfectionist. You'll probably identify with the stickler if you have a tendency to constantly review, to tweak everything, to spend extra hours just to ensure it looks pristine perfect, and that you never fully feel satisfied with the result that you have. A lot of the time you're probably aware that you have this tendency and you know that you should drop it and continue with another project, but you feel almost incapable of letting go. The best route for progress when it comes to this specific sabotage is to embrace this mindset of done over perfect instead of spending all this extra time, these extra hours, identifying, when is this a good moment to stop? When you feel that the main message, the 99% of it, is done, and all the extra bits and pieces you're doing are just to satisfy this stickler. Sabota. As an exercise, you can try and notice when you feel you're doing this because it genuinely needs to be done, and when it's just to satisfy this inner perfectionism. And the more you practice this, the easier it'll become for you to see the balance between a great job, an excellent job, and one where you've overdone it because you want to save yourself time and energy and not dedicate it all to super perfectionism. So this is the first debater, the stickler. The second one is pleaser. You will probably also be aware if you are a people pleaser type of person, and this is when you are dedicating all of your time and energy, not to perfectionism, but to other people. It's probably easy for you to do tasks for others, yet you struggle to honor your commitments. If we're looking at the four personality types by Gretchen Rubin, you're most likely an obliger. Once more easy for you to meet expectations of others and struggle to meet inner expectations when it comes to working with your pleaser. Sabota the main aspect is having boundaries, having clear boundaries as to what is your inner space that you protect. This can be your time, this can be certain actions and what you want to dedicate to others and noticing if you're doing a specific activity just to satisfy the other person or because you genuinely want to do it. There is a difference. And the more you learn to listen to your inner world, the easier this will be. This is why working on your pleaser sabhata comes with working on being more assertive about your own needs. So here it's really about learning to listen more to yourself and not constantly doing everything for others. It's great to be kind and generous, but not to the extent that it comes to the detriment of your own inner world. So that was the second sabotage, the pleaser. The third one is hyper vigilant. Hyper vigilant sabotage comes with a lot of doubt and fear, both self doubt and fear towards the external world. It can be a very unpleasant feeling to constantly have the impression that the outside world is a threat and to be very vigilant once more, just like with perfectionism or with the pleaser, it's about finding that balance. Yes, it is a great strength to having caution and being precautious, but it's not necessarily a strength if you overdo it because it creates a lot of anxiety. Here it might be even worth working with a therapist or a hypnotherapist or a coach or someone who can help you to identify when is it genuine caution and when is it over paranoia or worry or anxiety. So this was the third sabotage. Hyper vigilant. Number four is avoider. Avoiders are master procrastinators. It's very difficult for them to tackle hard tasks and somehow they always manage to avoid it. You could be, for example, an avoider pleaser where you avoid difficult conversations because you always want to please another person. Of course we can have, and we all have each of these saboteurs but to different extents, I find that avoidant pleaser can sometimes be correlated. For avoiders, it's working on that procrastination and it's working on tackling the first step, the beginning, and gaining that momentum. Perhaps as an avoider, you are an end to start planner, which means that you see the whole journey ahead and the end goal and you feel that even beginning is very difficult and it's really about breaking it down. First step, maybe finding an accountability partner and tackling those tasks that you are avoiding. The next sabotage fifth saboteur is restless, and this is one I particularly used to struggle with. You will know if you are a restless person, it is difficult for you to stand still, to be calm, to not be in action. You always want to be either doing something or seeing someone or both. You maybe have a tendency to multitask, being restless comes from having too much energy. What we want to find here is a way to canalize this energy and be able to be at peace and rest and slow down. It's fantastic to be proactive, but not to the detriment of using all your energy. We all need some rest. So here, for restless people, it's important to learn to take breaks. Maybe you have to force yourself and that's okay. And by breaks I don't mean doing something else on the computer or being on your phone and go for a walk, having a bit of fresh air, breathing and notice your pace, notice how fast you talk, how fast you do actions. I used to be an insanely fast speaker. I don't think I'm particularly slow right now. It took years of practice to speak more slowly. This is very common with restless people learning to breathe and be patient. Restless and patience is often a key lesson. There that. This is the fifth sabotage restless. The 6th Sabota is controller. So here the master controllers, the people who like to have everything in their control and feel that it's all safe because they have control on it. It can be both control on people, it can be control on schedule, it can be on their home and having it all immaculate and perfect, it could even be linked to OCD once more, a bit of control is fine. Having things neat and tidy and organized, it's when it goes to that other extreme here, the main point to really take into account is to learn flexibility, to not be so tight on control that we're not able to adapt in a constantly changing environment, like with all Fabatas, the most important point is awareness. Notice when the controller kicks in. Notice when that voice says no, but that's not how the way I want it. I want it to be exactly this way. Notice when you have this voice and feeling and that's when the controller kicks in and learn to let go, to accept the circumstances and situation as they are, even if it isn't like you want it to be, and breathe and move on. The next habitat is victim. This is hugely important, especially in the world of coaching, where the very first lesson we learn is take full ownership and responsibility for your life. This means that when anything happens that you're not fully satisfied with, you can't blame other people, the weather, external circumstances. For example, if you have an important meeting and the train is late, you can't blame the train for being late. For you being late at the meeting, you could have left earlier, you could have found a different way, you could have called. I do understand that there are a lot of things that aren't in our control and that will impact our lives. I think we all learned this this year. The main point here is to understand that by blaming the outside world we're just maintaining the status quo. If you blame other people because your work isn't high quality, you're essentially saying that you're accepting this low standard and that you're not going to work harder on it because you think it's someone else's fault. The second you accept that everything that is happening and everything that you're doing is your full responsibility, suddenly your whole perception changes. The most important one I find is that being happy and happiness is our own responsibility. So instead of looking for perfect circumstances, we can start to look at being happy is my responsibility. What am I doing about this? So that was the victim sabotage. The next one is hyperachiever once more. This is one I particularly struggled with personally, and pretty much all of my clients are hyperachievers. This means that you only have high self esteem when you have high achievements. Or another way of putting it is your achievements and your self worth are directly correlated. The better you do, the better you feel about yourself and the lower your performance, the lower you feel about yourself. You can imagine why a lot of people would hire a high performance coach if they are hyperachievers because they want better results. What I've learned on this journey and process is that it's both possible to achieve fantastic results and not have your self worth and self esteem based solely on these results. This entails accepting where you're at and still striving and being driven excited about goals that you enjoy or that you want to work on. It's absolutely possible to do both. It's not as easy or hard as it sounds. It's a balance and a constant work. So this is a hyperachiever. Learning to accept that you're good enough as you are right now and everything else that you do is a bonus. And you don't need to achieve anything else more in your life to prove that you're worthy of love or worthy of life or whatever it is you do it because you enjoy it or you want to contribute to the work or it's exciting or whatever other reason, but not to feel good about yourself, because that comes at the cost. That when the results aren't there, you don't feel so good about yourself and then you need to work on that whole roller coaster journey. The last savita is hyper rational. And if you're a hyper rational person, you have a tendency to look at everything through logic analytic numbers. In terms of personality, you might be a five in the enneagram or there's a lot of different type of hyper rational people, very scientific, very logic oriented. This of course, is a strength just like all sabotage. In many ways, however, what often happens is that you're out of tune with your emotions and your intuition. So instead of listening in and seeing, okay, this feels right. Whether it's finding a flat or a new job or your marketing strategy or which coach to work with. Instead, you'll go through all the analytics and all the details to find the one that logically looks best. And this can mean that you're disappointed. This can mean that you end up working with a person who's actually not a good fit for you, or end up living in a flat you don't like that much just because on paper, it looked right. So for hyper rational people, it's really learning to listen more to their emotions. Sure, do the logic thing, but listen also deep down, how you're actually feeling about it. What's your gut feeling? This is a great point of learning for Hyper Rational. So these were the nine sabotage from the Positive Intelligence website. Very useful framework. The stickler, pleaser. Hyper vigilant, avoider restless controller, victim hyperachiever, and hyper rational. Those were the nine. Please feel free to drop me a message on any of my social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you name it. And tell me, how has this helped you? What was your key insight and how can you use it in your daily life to improve your performance? How have you been implementing this knowledge to help you? And feel free to do the test also that I'll put in the show notes that can help you. Thank you everyone for listening. Please leave a review on Apple podcast and I look forward to welcoming you in the future episode. Thank you so much. Bye.

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