From Self-Sabotage to Self-Made Success:
5 Best Tips
Becoming hyper-focused from being scattered will help you to achieve your goal.
Today we will reveal the 5 best tips to overcome your inner saboteur.
You will learn:
- How does a Director Saboteur person make things difficult for their team on purpose or without realizing it?
- How saying “no” gives you the ability to set your boundaries?
- How to accept your feelings rather than deny them?
- The two very important neurotransmitters in our brains help control how we feel and act.
- Steps to becoming hyper-focused from being scattered
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Show Summary
We’ve all heard variations of these quotes…” Get out of your own way.” “You are your own worst critic.” “Save yourself from yourself.” But, when we truly sit down to think about it, are we really ready to admit to ourselves that we may not only contribute to our own issues and negative circumstances but sometimes cause them, too? Sit back and buckle up, because this blog is going to make you want to do some heavy self-reflection and soul work. I’m here to share with you and guide you through it all, friend.
One of my passion spots lies in helping healthcare business professionals just like you realize their full potential, both personally and when it comes to their business. Sometimes that requires taking a good, long, hard look at ourselves and taking action on the areas that need improvement. That’s why I was so excited when I recently had the honor and privilege of interviewing Dr. Philip Agrios for my podcast The Provider’s Edge. Dr. Agrios is a former chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner turned business breakthrough strategist, international speaker, and best-selling author who guides business people worldwide to move from self-sabotage to self-made success by uncovering an inverter that stopped their success.
Dr. Agrios’ Story
His story is one of learning, taking self-ownership, and undergoing transformation. He started out his medical career as a chiropractor and a functional medicine practitioner with a specialty focus on thyroid and autoimmune diseases. He practiced for 35 years. Throughout his time practicing, he had these recurring, nagging thoughts, “Why is my practice not going well? Why are my kids not listening and doing what I tell them to do? Why are my patients not doing what I ask them to do and what they know will help them?” These different thoughts had a common root, but he wouldn’t discover that until he went through several devastating life events.
In his late 30s, he went through financial ruin, a horrific divorce, and attempted suicide by one of his daughters, all while having Thoracic Outlet Syndrome that placed him on disability. This syndrome causes weakness and numbness in both his arms and carpal tunnel in both hands. Even getting out of bed had him feeling like he was walking on broken glass. Despite all of this, at the time, he still owned and operated a multidisciplinary clinic.
To be blunt, he lost it all. He was falsely accused by insurance companies that he was going to jail. He was about to lose his license and everything else. The accusations were all completely false, and eventually, he was cleared of any wrongdoing and his license was kept intact. However, the stress and trauma from the experience further exacerbated his Thoracic Outlet Syndrome and left him disabled.
To add insult to injury, during all of this, his father had brain cancer and passed away eventually, as did his mom around that time, too. Despite ALL of these catastrophic events, Dr. Agrios was still able to dig deep and explore the answer to those common, recurring questions of why his life and the relationships within it weren’t working out the way he expected them to. He looked inward and discovered the one common root all of those nagging questions had: a hidden self-sabotage trait.
No, not all of his circumstances or events in his life were caused by his own self-sabotaging. However, he realized that self-sabotaging definitely influenced certain events and prevented him from living and having the life he truly wanted.
He ran with this concept and coined it the Inborn Sabotage Trait. We are born with this concept, and it’s hard-wired in how we function as humans.
Now, this innate trait of self-sabotaging doesn’t undermine who you are, make you any less of a person, or make you a bad person. It’s just in our human nature, but it CAN be overcome. The Inborn Sabotage Trait stops you from achieving your true potential. It’s also all on a subconscious level. People don’t purposefully set out to self-sabotage themselves.
When it first dawned on Dr. Agrios that we all naturally self-sabotage to a certain degree, the revolutionary idea seemed too simple of an answer. Being the curious go-getter he is, he set out to do something to solidify the proof of the Inborn Sabotage Trait - he set out to disprove it.
After working with tons of people, he couldn't disprove it. Each person he worked with had some form of inborn trait that was causing them to self-sabotage and preventing them from achieving true success.
Throughout his years of work with people, he was able not only to identify patterns of the sabotage trait but also an amazing solution to it all.
The patterns he noticed across a plethora of people are able to be broken down into 3 main categories. Even if he tested each of the 7.5 billion people in the world, there would still only be categories of self-sabotaging.
The Three Saboteurs & How to Conquer Them
The categories are known as Saboteurs. They are the Director Saboteur, the Supplier Saboteur, and the Communicator Saboteur.
The saboteurs work like this: when you are getting ahead either in your personal or professional life, like knocking things off your to-do list, meeting with lots of prospective clients, and accomplishing the goals you set for yourself, somewhere along that path to success, there is a loll or time where it’s not going so great. You may experience self-doubt, hesitation, fear of failure, or imposter syndrome. That’s the time when a saboteur creeps in. It is only natural, and a saboteur is just a form of protection. We sabotage ourselves to protect ourselves. It can look like holding ourselves back from our potential by being impulsive and making poor decisions, staying in our comfort zone, not going after opportunities, etc. If you allow a saboteur to take control, it doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with you or that you’re weak. Everyone self-sabotages.
The Director Saboteur presents himself as someone who is scattered and all over the place. They like to start a project, but most of the time can’t finish it, because they started something else that is more fun for them. Their energy and effort are scattered because their mind is scattered. Then it’s just this never-ending cycle. Chaos seems to be their friend.
The Supplier Saboteur shows up as someone who overly gives and overly shares. They overly supply. They give too much and focus on everybody else’s feelings besides their own. They have a very hard time saying no to people. They feel they don’t deserve what they give out and don’t value themselves very much, so they tend to give out way too much. Boundaries are an issue for the Supplier Saboteur.
The Communicator Saboteur manifests as a person who has a very difficult time expressing themselves. They aren’t able to express their thoughts well and are often closed off and disconnected from others. They definitely have thoughts and feelings but are too embarrassed to share or don’t want to feel stupid, so they choose not to share much at all. This saboteur tends to push people in our lives away and makes it difficult to connect with others and make friends/ have relationships of any kind.
Everyone is going to sabotage themselves over and over in life, it is inevitable. You are born with it. Who you are, your personality and your situation determine which saboteur is your dominant one.
An important thing to know is that you can’t get prevent self-sabotaging from happening because it’s how we protect ourselves on a subconscious level. The Saboteur is there to evolve. When there’s a lull in your life or you start to feel uncomfortable with where you are and know that it’s time for a change, that is when the sabotaging takes place. How you handle and redirect self-sabotaging is key to your success. The secret to redirecting it lies in learning how to use your specific type of Saboteur to your advantage.
In his work, Dr. Agrios also found the solution or “anti-dote”, as he calls it, to self-sabotaging. The solution is two-fold. The first part of it, as with any real personal change in our lives, we must realize first what we are doing. You must become self-aware that you are sabotaging yourself. Learning to identify the saboteur when it first creeps in is key. An immediate red mental flag should go up.
The second part of the answer to self-sabotaging is simply doing the opposite of what the saboteur says to do. We know this is easier said than done when first starting out, but it truly is the key to quitting self-sabotaging and opening the door up to your success.
How This Can Help Your Business
As healthcare business leaders, we are always looking for innovative ways to engage our team members - after all, they are what helps keep moving our business forward to success. The way you can infuse your new knowledge of three types of saboteurs into your business is by learning the type of saboteur of each of your staff members. It could even be a form of professional development, much like the Performance Indicator (PI) that is widely used across the United States.
Knowing the saboteur types of your employees and clients would allow you to support them in the way they best thrive. It would only enhance business performance and make your staff and clients feel even more valued and supported. You could handle conflict or concerns in a way that they would positively respond to.
An example of this in action is the companies that Dr. Agrios has worked with. At several companies, there were low-performing employees. They had the knowledge, the expertise, and the experience, but something was blocking those employees from peak performance. Each employee’s saboteur type was identified through Dr. Agrios’ assessment. Each employee was then trained on their specific type and how to overcome both in the professional space and personal space.
Within a few weeks, the low-performing employees were performing at a much higher level, as not only were they implementing the self-sabotage training they had received, but also their managers were utilizing their specific types to the business’s advantage.
How This Can Help You
Dr. Agrios has a course called Transcendence for individuals who are ready to put an end to self-sabotaging and do the work to change into a self-success. In five weeks or less, he guarantees you will stop self-sabotaging.
A few months ago, he had an individual complete the Transcendence program. This man had his own acupuncture practice, but wasn’t satisfied with the amount of new clients that were coming in. Within the five weeks of the program, learning his type of saboteur and how to use it to his advantage, he was able to DOUBLE his client numbers within that time.
He happened to be a Supplier Saboteur. He was always overly-giving to others in his life, including his patients. He dialed back on that in a healthy way and was able to still utilize his gift of giving, just in a way that didn’t sacrifice his own well-being so much. He reported to me that new patients seemed to start coming out of nowhere.
He was able to cut certain toxic people out of his life, that before the Transcendence program, he kept in his life, because he was such a people pleaser by nature. Cutting these people out made room for people to come into his life that were able to collaborate and form positive relationships with him.
By going through the Transcendence program, you’ll learn your Saboteur type, how to identify when it’s happening, how to apply the anti-dote method, and how to bring to life what you truly want through defeating your default tendency to self-sabotage.
End Results For Each Type of Saboteur
After the five-week Transcendence program, each kind of saboteur can expect to experience substantial growth according to what type they are.
Director Saboteurs learn how to become aware of when their mind is all over the place and how to hone back in their thoughts into a calm and focused state. When the saboteur arises again, which it always will, they are able to counteract it with self-awareness and calmness. Life becomes less chaotic.
The Supplier Saboteur learns to see the value they hold and how to receive from others instead of give, give, give, and getting burnt out. They find validation within themselves instead of from others and aim to enrich their own lives instead of bending their backs to please others. They begin to attract the right kind of people into their lives.
Results for the Communicator Saboteur include learning how to vulnerably open up to others when appropriate and being courageous enough to share their feelings and thoughts without fear of embarrassment or being judged. Their relationships with others improve drastically because their core communication issue improved.
No matter what type of saboteur you are or how much you may be self-sabotaging, there is hope and real potential for change and growth. The life you want is waiting on the other side of discovering your saboteur type and applying the anti-dote.
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