Diagnostic
Saboteurs Quiz
Use the Positive Intelligence Saboteur Assessment as a simple doorway into the negative stories and inner critics that hijack you under pressure.
This works best as a naming device, not a diagnosis. The point is not to become obsessed with a score; it is to get language for the patterns that most often take the wheel in hard moments.
The Source / credit link below goes straight to the official assessment.
What to expect
- Everyone has the Judge: the universal inner critic that attacks you, others, or your circumstances.
- Most founders also have two or three accomplice saboteurs that show up in their stress patterns.
- After you take the quiz, do not stop at the label. Ask when it shows up, what it says, and what it thinks it is protecting.
The 10 saboteurs
| Saboteur | How it often shows up in founders |
|---|---|
| Judge | The master critic: self-attack, blame, catastrophising, and constant focus on what is wrong. |
| Avoider | Keeps things pleasant, dodges hard conversations, and stays busy around the real issue. |
| Controller | Tightens grip, struggles to trust, and gets impatient when people do not move your way. |
| Hyper-Achiever | Ties self-worth to winning, status and visible success; the last achievement never feels like enough. |
| Hyper-Rational | Over-indexes on logic, analysis and detachment; relationships start to feel like messy data problems. |
| Hyper-Vigilant | Scans for threats, assumes something is about to go wrong, and finds it hard to stand down. |
| Pleaser | Rescues, accommodates and smooths things over to stay liked, then quietly resents the cost. |
| Restless | Chases novelty, busyness and the next hit of stimulation; struggles to stay with the boring important thing. |
| Stickler | Turns standards into perfectionism and order into rigidity; good work gets stuck waiting to be flawless. |
| Victim | Gets pulled into the pain of the story, hardship or martyrdom, and can start organising identity around it. |
What to do with the result
Name your top patterns
Circle the Judge and the two or three accomplices that feel most familiar. Fewer patterns, noticed well, beats a long list you never use.
Spot the trigger
For each one, ask what tends to wake it up: disagreement, ambiguity, criticism, a board meeting, a missed deadline, a cofounder wobble.
Choose one interruption
Do not promise total transformation. Pick one small move that breaks the pattern: a pause, a question, a compliment, a looser grip, a harder truth told sooner.
Source / credit
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