How Doctors Are Dogged by Negative Voices

What if you could have all the success, with a lot more joy?

I spoke to a physician in his 40s, who prides himself on positivity. It’s part of his social media brand. A few minutes into the conversation, he recalls the voices he heard in residency many years ago. “‘Maybe you aren’t cut out for this. Maybe you should just work in a call center from 9 to 5,’” the physician recalls his attending — “a man of science” bullying him as though it were yesterday. This was his response when asked how to manage without getting enough sleep.

The physician quickly shakes his head. “That was a long time ago.”

Yet, there it was: the bullying voice of a medical superior telling him that his basic needs for sleep, relaxation, affection and family somehow made him weak, not cut out for the work.

The voices of those early teachers haunt many doctors to this day. These voices become our own.

These are Saboteurs, originally awakened in us to keep us safe, often by maintaining the status quo. Maybe you recognize some of these phrases that you mumble to yourself in times of struggle: “Buck up,” “You’re lazy,” “I have to get perfect scores or you’re a failure,” “Maybe if I wait, the problem will go away,” “I shouldn’t be tired,” “I should…” The list goes on and on.

We all haunted at times by our Saboteurs, a French word originally referring to the wooden shoes thrown into factory gears as an act of worker protest. The word was later integrated into the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s psychological theory as the Saboteur Archetype. Most recently, Shirzad Charmine, best-selling author and Stanford University lecturer has fleshed out 9 saboteurs (plus the Judge, which we all have) in his Positive Intelligence coaching program.

You might recognize any of these internal voices that keep your stuck and limited in your beliefs by their very names: Avoider, Hyper Achiever, Pleaser, Hyper Vigilant, Victim, Controller, Stickler, Hyper Rational and Restless.

We not only internalize these limiting voices, but protect them — even when they are working against us. When first getting familiar with our saboteurs, we might be quite attached to them. Aren’t those punishing, negative voices the reason we made it? How would I amount to anything without them? These beliefs are generated by the saboteurs themselves. “The saboteurs are liars,” says Charmine.

The greatest most powerful lie of the saboteurs is that you cannot succeed without them; that they are the very reason for your success. But what if you could have all the success but with joy and ease? These are practices that anyone can learn. Through awareness and practice, we can dim power of our saboteurs and amplify the voices of our true and highest selves.