How to Stop Self-Sabotage in Facing COVID-19.

As tough as this pandemic is, your mind is likely making it much tougher through self-sabotage.  This diminishes both your effectiveness and wellness. I’ll illustrate how with a crisis scenario: 

You wake up to the blaring sound of the smoke alarm.  Your house is on fire.  You have 3 minutes to save 3 kids, 3 house guests, and 2 pets spread throughout the 2-story building, attic, and basement, before it’s too late. 

Which mind would serve you best?

Mind 1:  you wake up panicked, and you stay panicked.  You frantically run around in every direction banging on doors, screaming to wake others, who similarly shift into panic.  Within 3 minutes of frantic action, most but not all get out safely.

Mind 2:  you wake up panicked but quickly shift to a calm, clear-headed, laser-focused mind.  In that state, you take a few seconds to survey the situation and be strategic.  Where is the source of the fire? Based on that location, who needs to be rescued first?  Who could be your best partner in helping to rescue the others? How could you wake her up to urgency not panic, so she could be similarly clear-headed in action? What would be the best escape route? 

Within 3 minutes, all are out of danger.

The most fundamental mistake we make in a crisis is to mistake frenzy with urgency, and believe that in order to protect ourselves and others, we need to remain anxious. 

But anxious hyper-vigilance is far less effective than calm, clear-headed, laser-focused vigilance.   

Based on our research with 500,000 people, we know that most people under stress shift into a self-sabotage mode.  In this mode, your thoughts and actions might generate some helpful results, but you waste a ton of mental and emotional energy that sabotages your effectiveness.  Even worse, you suffer unnecessarily. And you create a contagion effect, shifting others to self-sabotage mode.

There are 10 modes of self-sabotage—we call them “Saboteurs.”  They have names like Judge, Controller, Stickler, Avoider, or Victim.  You can find out yours through a 5-minuter Saboteur Assessment. 

We call Mind 1 Saboteur, and Mind 2 Sage--kind of like your inner Darth Vader versus your inner Jedi.  (my Stanford students called our work “Jedi mind training,”for that reason)

Saboteurs operate on negative emotions.  Negative emotions are helpful for just a second, similar to pain being helpful.  If you put your hands on a hot stove, it is important for you to feel the pain. But you’d want to quickly shift from feeling pain to taking action. 

The problem is that most people’s Saboteurs keep their hands on the hot stove, continuing to feel stress, anxiety, anger, disappointment, shame, or guilt.  The Saboteur brain is only good for the 1-second wake-up alert. It’s not your best brain to be creative, resourceful, empathic, or take calm, clear-headed action.

Once you shift from your Saboteur to your Sage brain, two things happen:

1. Survive: You’re able to handle the immediate dangers and risks with maximum effectiveness.

2. Thrive: You’re able to shift from survive to thrive mode:  “How could I convert this ‘bad’ thing into a gift and opportunity in the long run?”

Every crisis offers massive opportunities and gifts. But only if your Sage, rather than your Saboteurs, handle the crisis. 

In the case of the burned out house, your Saboteurs would keep you forever victimized, bitter about what happened, and why it happened to you.

Your Sage would actively wonder how to convert that misfortune into gifts.  Perhaps you finally decide to move to a new location you’d always wished you lived.  Perhaps you get a different house layout that results in more family living space interactions.  Perhaps you become super clear about the importance of family versus material possessions and simplify your life and career choices to emphasize family.  Perhaps you change your job to a more fulfilling one that directly helps others who are traumatized in accidents. 

The number of ways that your Sage could actively convert a crisis into lasting gifts and opportunities is endless.  Key is that your Sage, not your Saboteurs, take charge.

 The choice is yours.

To illustrate, here’s how I’m facing the Coronavirus crisis:

 First, survive:

I apply calm vigilance rather than hyper-vigilance.  I check the latest news approximately every six hours, asking myself if there is anything I should do based on the latest.  If yes, I do it, in a calm, clear-headed and laser-focused way for maximum effectiveness. If no, I keep the Coronavirus out of my mind, until my next check-in.

Second, thrive:

I’m actively generating the gifts and opportunities.  These include:

• showing my 19-year-old son, home from college, how to handle life’s crises, through my own modeling, not lecturing. 
• helping my 15-year-old daughter to redirect her attention from her own anxiety to comforting and coaching her high school friends. 
• agreeing with my wife to become even more vigilant as a couple about not letting disagreements on trivial matters impact the positive, loving energy in our home.
• training my world-wide CEO coaching clients on how to generate connection and trust in video meetings, significantly cutting my travel time even after the crisis passes. 
• conducting the most powerful team meeting I’ve ever run, with our remote technology team located in 4 corners of the world.  Using the common-ness of our Coronavirus experience as a way of feeling much closer to each other, bridging the separation caused by differences in geography, culture, or life experience.

The point is, in Sage mode I keep asking myself “what are the gifts I could create for myself or others, in response to this crisis.”  That question keeps generating answers. 

Now, to be fair, what I’m proposing is easier said than done.  The issue is that after years of Saboteur reactions under stress, that part of your brain has built up muscles (neural pathways).  You can’t fight muscle with the insight that you gain from an article. You need to fight muscle with muscle.

The good news is that there are very simple and specific neuroscience-based techniques to grow your Sage muscles and weaken your Saboteurs.  The result is a profound life changing impact on how you live your life, how well you perform, and how happy you are.

Let’s not let this crisis go to waste.  Let’s actively convert it into a life changing gift for you, your teams, and your loved ones. 

(To discover how you self-sabotage, take the free 5-minute Saboteur Assessment.  And please share the gift of this article. ??)