Alexandra NielDivorce Recovery Coach, ANiel International, LLC. · I help women who held it all together through divorce finally build a life that’s actually theirs | Thrive After Divorce

Silence the Inner Saboteurs | Name It to Neutralize It

27 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker references the Positive Intelligence framework, which posits that each person harbors up to ten internal "saboteurs"—negative mental voices such as the Judge, Avoider, People‑Pleaser, Perfectionist, Hyper‑Vigilant, Victim, and others. These saboteurs generate fear‑based reactions that block authentic self‑expression. The speaker proposes a practical method for weakening their influence: explicitly naming each saboteur when it surfaces and commanding it to "shut up," thereby signaling that its opinion is irrelevant. By labeling the inner critic, individuals can diminish its power, reduce fear, and allow themselves to show up more fully for themselves.

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It's interesting because if you've ever read the book Positive Intelligence, his whole premise is that we all have 10 saboteurs that live within us at different degrees. And we all have a judge, and then everybody else, or everybody has, you know, an avoider, a people pleaser, a perfectionist, a hypervigilant, a victim, and all kinds of other things. But one of the ways that you can start to dismantle those things is by giving that entity a name and basically telling it to shut up when it comes up, because its opinion is not relevant here, right? Because it's— it gets in the way of us kind of showing up for ourselves because it's that voice of fear.