More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 8 - October 24, 2017
“What do we need to do so that within three years we can say this current crisis was the best thing that could have happened to our company?”
What Frank found most fascinating was that he began having more success once he finally stopped believing that his happiness depended on his success.
Positive Intelligence is therefore an indication of the control you have over your own mind and how well your mind acts in your best interest.
it is the percentage of time your mind is serving you versus sabotaging you.
Above it, you are generally being uplifted by the internal dynamics of the mind, and below it you are constantly being dragged down by those dynamics.
It compels you to constantly find faults with yourself, others, and your conditions and circumstances. It generates much of your anxiety, stress, anger, disappointment, shame, and guilt.
The Stickler is the need for perfection, order, and organization taken too far. It makes you and others around you anxious and uptight. It saps your own or others’ energy on
extra measures of perfection that are not necessary.
The Pleaser compels you to try to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others constantly. It causes you to lose sight of your own needs and become resentful of others as a result.
The Restless is constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or through perpetual busyness. It doesn’t allow you to feel much peace or contentment with your current activity. It gives you a never-ending stream of distractions that make you lose your focus on the things and relationships that truly matter.
Sage represents the deeper and wiser part of you. It is the part that can rise above the fray and resist getting carried away by the drama and tension of the moment or falling victim to the lies of the Saboteurs.
Your Sage’s five great powers are (1) to Explore with great curiosity and an open mind; (2) to Empathize with yourself and others and bring compassion and understanding to any situation; (3) to Innovate and create new perspectives and outside-the-box solutions; (4) to Navigate and choose a path that best aligns with your deeper underlying values and mission; and (5) to Activate and take decisive action without the distress, interference, or distractions of the Saboteurs.
This Saboteur-Sage brain link results in three separate but related strategies to increase your PQ: (1) weaken your Saboteurs; (2) strengthen your Sage; and (3) strengthen your PQ Brain muscles.
To weaken your Saboteurs, all you need to do is to observe and label Saboteur thoughts or feelings when they show up. For example, you might say to yourself, “Oh, the Judge is back again, saying I’m going to fail” or “There’s the Controller feeling anxious again.”
You will see for yourself that you do have this Sage inside of you, and that it always offers you far superior ways to handle your challenges than the options the Saboteurs offer.
Judge, as he was not a very judgmental person. I explained that the Judge is often well disguised, and that we often don’t realize when we are judging. Most feelings of stress, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, regret, and guilt are the direct results of judging yourself, others, situations, or outcomes. The great stress and unease David was experiencing told me that he must have a strong Judge in his head that was pretending to be his friend.
if David had the thought, What’s wrong with you, David? Why did you screw that up? he would say to himself, Oh, there goes the Judge again, and then activate his PQ Brain for ten seconds.
His favorite methods were to take his next three breaths a little more deeply, wiggle his toes attentively and notice each of them, and feel each of his fingertips by rubbing them against one another.
from saying “I don’t think we can make it” to “my Judge says he doesn’t think we can make it.” Once David exposed the Judge as an enemy and began noticing and labeling his destructive thoughts, the Judge lost some of its credibility and power over David.
On the long flight back, he had started telling his eleven-year-old son about the Judge. His
son had listened thoughtfully and said, “I will call mine PoopMaker, Daddy. He is always making a mess of everything in my head.” We both agreed that this was an apt description of the Judge.
For the human child, however, survival has a component beyond physical survival. We also need to survive emotionally. The human brain is wired to pay close attention to our environment in our early years and adjust accordingly so we can bear the emotional strains we all encounter and make it into reproductive adulthood.
The fact that you might not be consciously aware of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If you don’t think you have them, you’re especially at risk: your Saboteurs are hiding well.
The Saboteurs were the initial casts that protected us, but not removing them in adulthood limits our mental and emotional freedom.
Two dimensions of our personality in particular play a part—our motivations and our personal styles of handling challenges.
Each person leans toward one of these three motivations: 1. Independence: A need for boundaries with others and maintaining independence from them. 2. Acceptance: A need to maintain a positive image in the eyes of others, to be accepted by them and gain their affection. 3. Security: A need to control life’s anxieties and push away or minimize them.
You exhibit one of three different styles in order to satisfy your primary need for independence, acceptance, or security: 1. Assert: This is the most active and commanding of the three styles. You take action that demands the fulfillment of your primary need for independence, acceptance, or security. 2. Earn: You work hard to earn the fulfillment of your need for independence, acceptance, or security. This contrasts with the more “demanding” nature of the Assert style. 3. Avoid: You withdraw yourself or your attention from activities, thoughts, feelings, or other people in order to fulfill
...more
it will empathize with you and reassure you that, even though you made a mistake, you are still a wonderful person. It tells you to have compassion for yourself—we are all fallible human beings. It tells you that everything, even your mistakes, can be turned into gifts and opportunities by the way you react to them.
Both your Saboteurs and your Sage may lead you to success, but they do so by taking very different paths. The Saboteurs push you into action and success through anger, regret, fear, guilt, anxiety, shame, obligation, etc. But the
Sage pulls you into action through compassion, curiosity, creativity, the joy of self-expression, a desire to contribute and create meaning, and the excitement of action. Would you rather be pushed or pulled? Only the Sage lets you achieve success without sacrificing happiness and peace of mind.
The Sage is far more discerning, aware, agile, vigilant, creative, decisive, and action-oriented than any Saboteur.
The most effective strategy for weakening your Saboteurs is to simply observe and label your Saboteur thoughts or feelings every time you notice them.
He says the “egoic mind,” which is his collective term for all the Saboteurs, is like a giant snowman that melts away under the light of conscious awareness.
To better observe and label your Saboteurs, it might be helpful to create more personalized descriptions and names for them. For example, my name for my Judge is “the Executioner” and my name for my Hyper-Rational is “Robot.” Others have called their Judge “Darth Vader,” their Stickler “Anal Joe,” their Controller “Drill Sergeant,” their Hyper-Achiever “Workaholic,” and their Victim “Martyr.” You get the picture.
By their very nature, Saboteurs do far greater damage when they do their work while hiding under the radar, pretending they are your friend or that they are you. Observing and labeling them blows their cover and discredits their voice. Notice the difference between saying “I don’t think I am capable” and “the Judge doesn’t think I am capable.” The snowman will melt under the light of your awareness.
The Judge accomplishes its staggering destructive sabotage by having us feel negative and unhappy through constant faultfinding with (1) ourselves, (2) others, and (3) our circumstances. It does so under pretense of being rational and reasonable and trying to be helpful.
Everywhere I looked I was much more impressed with the achievements and abilities of others than with my own. I was keenly aware of my many shortcomings. This of course led me to put extra energy into constructing a façade of togetherness and confidence.
I was told by a faculty member that in the prior twenty years my letter had become a tradition, gifted from each second-year class to the incoming first-year class caught in the grips of self-doubt and self-judgment. This was my first real glimpse into the fact that the Judge’s destructive power over us is a relatively universal phenomenon, and that most people suffer it alone.
When I interact with people now, I no longer wonder if they have a nasty internal Judge, but instead, how it is hiding and doing its damage in that individual.
The Judge’s most damaging lie is that we are not worthy of love or respect by just being who we are.
The third and final way the Judge sabotages us is by judging the circumstances and events in our lives and finding them lacking.
At the heart of the midlife crisis is the question, Can anything really bring me that elusive peace and happiness I’ve been chasing all these years? The chase has, of course, been orchestrated by the Judge and its big lie: “You will be happy when …”
The first lie is that you can’t be happy with your current circumstances.
The second lie is that the “when” is a moving target rather than a promise to be kept.
the “when” for peace and happiness is actually now, regardless of the circumstances of your work or personal life.
Pay attention to the emotions involved. If you are calmly noticing what isn’t working or what has gone wrong in order to figure out how to move forward, you are discerning. If you are feeling upset, disappointed, anxious, or resentful, you are judging. Indeed, that is how the Judge causes much of your distress in any situation. Your distress is not caused by what happened; it’s caused by your Judge’s reaction to it.
Given that the Judge’s damage is done on three entirely different fronts—judging yourself, the people around you, and your external circumstances—you might want to remind yourself of its typical patterns in each of these areas.
come up with your own personal name for your Judge based on its personality.
The act of observing and labeling your Judge alone will have a significant impact in your life. Notice the difference between saying “I can’t make it” and “My Judge says I can’t make it.” Or “You made me look bad intentionally” and “My Judge says you made me look bad intentionally.” Or “This is a terrible situation” and “My Judge says this is terrible situation.” Do you notice the big difference between the impact of these two kinds of statements? The Judge loses much of its credibility and power over you as you isolate it as an unwelcome intruder.
