Copy of Unblocking Leadership: How to Fire Your Inner Saboteur and Rewire for Peak Performance (TPL Insights #295)

By Rob Andrews

Every leader, no matter how seasoned, eventually hits a wall. Some crash into it spectacularly. Others stall quietly, staring at the same spreadsheet that once fired them up. When it happens, most of us look outward. We blame the org chart, the budget, the bureaucracy, or that one guy in accounting who seems to exist solely to say “no.”

But if you strip away the noise, the real problem is not out there. It is in here.

Harvard leadership coach Muriel Wilkins (2025) calls them “hidden blockers.” I call them leadership parasites. These are the limiting beliefs that hide under the hood of our minds, quietly whispering lies like “I can’t make a mistake,” “I know I’m right,” or “I have to do everything myself.” They sabotage confidence, throttle creativity, and keep otherwise brilliant leaders playing small.

Wilkins’ research found seven of these nasty culprits, from perfectionism to impostor syndrome. Each one convinces high-achievers that their worth depends on control, certainty, or constant validation. It is like driving a Ferrari with the parking brake on and wondering why you are not winning races.

The Blueprint Behind the Blockers

What Wilkins calls “hidden blockers,” I recognize as broken internal programming. In Total Performance Leadership (TPL), we have seen the same patterns show up in organizations and individuals for three decades. People do not act in accordance with the truth. They act in accordance with what they believe to be true (Andrews, 2022).

That distinction is everything.

If your self-talk says, “I’m a micromanager because my standards are high,” your subconscious dutifully builds an operating system around that belief. It recruits confirmation. It edits reality. It reinforces your self-image until you behave exactly like the picture in your head.

As the principals at The BluePrint Toolset put it, “We do not get what we want. We get what we picture.” That is both the most terrifying and liberating idea in leadership psychology. Your subconscious mind does not care whether a belief is true or false. It just follows the script. So if you picture yourself as a courageous, composed, and collaborative leader, your creative subconscious will get to work making that image reality. But if you picture yourself as the anxious firefighter who has to save everyone, you will live that out too.

In other words, if your inner movie is a disaster film, grab the popcorn.

How Leaders Accidentally Program Themselves to Fail

Every adult alive today is living in the movie they wrote with their own self-talk. Words trigger images. Images trigger emotions. Emotions trigger behaviors. Behaviors reinforce the story.

That is why Wilkins’ framework starts with awareness. Her three steps, uncover, unpack, and unblock, are about catching your brain in the act of lying to you (Wilkins, 2025).

The first step, uncovering, means recognizing the belief that drives the dysfunction. “I need to be involved” turns you into a control freak. “I need it done now” makes you a factory for burnout. “I know I’m right” kills innovation.

The second step, unpacking, is about tracing where that belief came from. Maybe it served you once. “I can’t make a mistake” might have kept you from getting fired early in your career, but it is poison at scale. The problem is that the brain does not have a “retire outdated beliefs” function. You have to consciously rewrite the code.

The third step, unblocking, is reframing. Instead of “I can’t make a mistake,” try “My focus is excellence, not perfection.” Instead of “I need it done now,” try “I need to focus on what truly matters.”

It sounds simple. It is not. But the science backs it up. Neuroplasticity tells us that we can literally rewire thought patterns through repetition, imagery, and emotion (Andrews, 2022). What you vividly imagine, your brain records as reality. This is why affirmations work when they are authentic and specific. “I am decisive and calm under pressure” beats “I am awesome” by a mile.

How the TPL Mindset Unlocks Human Potential

In our Total Performance Leadership study, we analyzed hundreds of organizations and leaders who consistently outperform their peers. They all share one superpower. It is not a strategy. It is not resources. It is a mindset.

Every one of them has leaders who consciously curate their internal dialogue. They practice what I call “affirmational hygiene.” They choose their self-talk the same way they choose their food, carefully and intentionally. They know that mental nutrition determines organizational health.

TPL teaches that self-image is the automatic pilot of performance. You cannot consistently act in a way that conflicts with your self-image. If you see yourself as a bold, values-driven leader, you behave accordingly. If you see yourself as a victim of circumstance, you live that movie too. The subconscious always returns you to your default picture of yourself, no matter how much conscious effort you expend trying to behave differently (Andrews, 2022).

Think about it this way. A leader who believes “I am terrible with people” will subconsciously generate tension and anxiety whenever they try to connect deeply with their team. That discomfort will lead to avoidance, which reinforces the belief. The only way out is to change the picture, not the behavior.

Why Organizations Get Stuck in Collective Blockers

Wilkins (2025) makes a crucial point. Leaders’ blockers do not just live in their heads. They leak into teams and cultures. “This is how we have always done it,” “Failure is not an option,” and “That is not our job” are just corporate versions of personal limiting beliefs.

At TPL, we call this the collective self-image. Companies act in accordance with how they see themselves. If a firm believes it is “a scrappy underdog,” it may resist scaling systems. If it sees itself as “engineering-led,” it might neglect culture. These are not mission statements. They are subconscious scripts.

When we work with executive teams, our diagnostics look for these embedded blockers. We assess not just what leaders say they believe but what their behaviors actually reveal. Often the data shows a split personality. Vision statements about agility paired with decision processes that move at the speed of tectonic plates.

Reprogramming an organization begins exactly the same way as reprogramming a person. You start with awareness, unpack the origin story, and reframe the belief. The beauty is that once leaders change their own self-talk, the culture follows. People act like the stories they believe about themselves.

Reframing for the Win

Once you have spotted your blockers, the key is to replace them with new mental scripts that align with your aspirations.

“I can’t make a mistake” becomes “My focus is excellence, not avoiding failure.” “I know I’m right” becomes “My role is to help others find the right answers.” “I can’t say no” becomes “I can say no to some things so I can say yes to what matters most.”

In neuroscience terms, this is called editing and resaving the mental file. The more vividly and emotionally you rehearse the new belief, the more quickly it becomes your subconscious reality. It is not magic. It is cognitive conditioning.

As Lou Tice, founder of The BluePrint Toolset, taught decades ago, human beings are teleological. We move toward images the way a heat-seeking missile moves toward its target. Imagination times vividness equals reality. That is not motivational fluff. It is how your nervous system actually works.

A Few Laughs Along the Way

Let’s be honest. Most of us have been guilty of saying “That’s just how I am” right before doing something dumb for the fifth time. I once had a CEO tell me, “Rob, I’m not a micromanager, I just like to stay close to the work.” Translation: he was in every meeting, reviewing every slide, and wondering why his team was disengaged. His hidden blocker was “I need to be involved.” Once he rewrote that to “I will weigh in on key matters but empower others to lead,” he became the calmest guy in the building.

The funny thing is, leaders often laugh hardest when they realize how ridiculous their blockers sound out loud. “I don’t belong here” is laughable when you are literally running a multimillion-dollar business. But the subconscious does not care about logic. It cares about repetition. Tell it something often enough, and it becomes your truth.

From Mindset to Movement

When leaders get unblocked, everything changes. Productivity rises. Creativity explodes. Cultures heal. You cannot fake that kind of transformation because it shows up in energy, posture, and tone.

At Allen Austin, we have built three decades of data around this phenomenon. Our Foresight process produces a 92 percent two-year placement retention rate and a 97 percent offer acceptance rate because we hire for belief alignment as much as skill alignment. We know that leaders who master their inner dialogue build organizations that do the same.

As Bob Anderson reminds us, “Organizational transformation cannot occur until there is a change in the consciousness of leadership.” That consciousness begins with the conversation between your ears.

So if you are feeling blocked, here is your call to action. Fire your inner saboteur. Reprogram your autopilot. And for heaven’s sake, stop listening to the guy in your head who keeps saying “I told you so.”

After all, the only thing standing between you and your full potential might just be the story you keep telling yourself.

Warmest,

Rob Andrews

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Celebrating 28 years of Executive Search, Leadership Advisory, and Interim Executive Excellence

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References

Andrews, R. (2022). TPL Insights #67, 68, & 69, How Mindset Enables Full Human Potential. Allen Austin.

Wilkins, M. M. (2025). Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential. Harvard Business Review Press.