Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential AND HOW YOU CAN ACHIEVE YOURS

by Shirzad Chamine

Our minds are our own worst enemies; the mind harbors characters that actively sabotage our happiness and success. These Saboteurs can easily be identified and weakened. 2. The “muscles” of the brain that give us access to our greatest wisdom and insights have remained weak from years of not being exercised. These brain muscles can easily be built up to give us much greater access to our deeper wisdom and untapped mental powers. Exercises that focus on one or both of these dynamics can dramatically improve one’s PQ in a relatively short period of time. The result is dramatic improvement in performance and happiness, in both work and personal life.

Judge The Judge is the master Saboteur, the one everyone suffers from. 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. Its self-justifying lie is that without it, you or others would turn into lazy and unambitious beings who would not achieve much. Its voice is therefore often mistaken as a tough-love voice of reason rather than the destructive Saboteur it actually is.

Pleaser 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. It also encourages others to become overly dependent on you. Its lie is that you are pleasing others because it is a good thing to do, denying that you are really trying to win affection and acceptance indirectly.

Hyper-Vigilant The Hyper-Vigilant makes you feel intense and continuous anxiety about all the dangers surrounding you and what could go wrong. It is constantly vigilant and can never rest. It results in a great deal of ongoing stress that wears you and others down. Its lie is that the dangers around you are bigger than they actually are and that nonstop vigilance is the best way to tackle them.

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.

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.

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 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.

Most of us grow up experiencing love that is conditional on being good or performing, and we get into the habit of placing the same conditions on self-love. But conditional love is not real love. It’s more like receiving a carrot for good behavior.

The presence of those negative feelings indicates that the Judge has taken over and that you are judging rather than discerning. 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.

Your Sage has access to your five great powers: empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and decisive action.

a few brief seconds of feeling anger, disappointment, guilt, or shame are fine as immediate reactions to events. This is similar to feeling pain when you touch a hot stove. A moment of physical pain should alert you to remove your hand to avoid further damage. A few seconds of psychological pain should similarly alert you to shift your mind to the Sage mode so you can deal with the situation without further distress and damage from your Saboteurs. If you don’t shift your mind, it is like keeping your hand on the hot stove and continuing to feel the pain that was only initially useful.

The Sage perspective is about accepting what is, rather than denying, rejecting, or resenting what is. The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity. (I emphasize every to take away a loophole through which the Saboteurs could sneak in.)

When our Judge says something is bad, we need to take that statement with a grain of salt—if not outright dismissal. Our Judge convinces us that we know what is good and bad at any given moment, but the truth is that we actually don’t. Our Judge’s perspective is narrowly focused—it has severe tunnel vision. It reacts to the immediate effect of something, ignoring the many longer-term possibilities of its impact that could easily be the opposite.

Anxiety, disappointment, frustration, shame, blame, and guilt, the Judge’s favorite feelings, are never your best fuel for action. Those fuels might propel you forward, but with a huge amount of pollution and wasteful friction along the way.

Your Sage has the same snowballing, self-fulfilling effect, but in reverse. Your Sage moves you into action not out of feeling bad, but out of empathy, inspiration, the joy of exploration, a longing to create, a desire to contribute, and an urge to find meaning in the midst of even the greatest crises. From the Sage perspective, there is no such thing as a bad circumstance or outcome. Every outcome simply points to the first step toward the next positive outcome. The Sage moves you one positive step at a time, regardless of what life throws at you.

1. EMPATHIZE Empathizing is about feeling and showing appreciation, compassion, and forgiveness.

Empathy recharges our batteries and renews the vitality that is drained by the Judge’s violence toward ourselves. It bandages the wounds of the warrior before sending him out for another fight. It is most useful when the recipient of the empathy—whether you or someone else—is feeling some emotional pain and difficulty. Think of empathy as the power you should use when the emotional reserve is running low, when the person needs some recharging before moving on with problem-solving action.

The Judge warns you that if you empathize with yourself or others’ avoidable hardships, you are encouraging more of the behavior that caused the hardship. You’d better punish rather than empathize, it says. A key fallacy of this argument is the belief that empathizing with pain means condoning the action that brought the pain about. If your child plays in the part of the playground that you warned him not to play in and breaks his leg, you would first get a cast on his leg and empathize with his pain. After the pain subsided, you would have a conversation about lessons learned and how to avoid the same mistake in the future. The Judge, of course, would strongly disagree with this approach and demand chastisement from the start.

If you choose to activate the Sage’s power to Empathize, visualize the other person as a child in her true essence before she started getting weighted down by Saboteurs. Visualize her eyes and facial expression, her manner of carrying herself, and what used to light her up as a child. Visualize her hold her puppy, snuggle with her mom, or chase a butterfly. Trust that the same essence is still inside her, underneath her Saboteurs. You can do this in the back of your mind even while you are interacting with her in a meeting. It will instantly impact how much empathy you feel.

2. EXPLORE As children, we all knew how to explore in a pure way, experiencing great curiosity and fascination in discovery. The Sage way of exploring has a similar purity, like a child walking along a shoreline and turning over rocks to see what’s underneath. The pure energy and emotion that the Sage’s Explore mode generates is based in curiosity, openness, wonder, and fascination with what is being explored. A strong Sage can activate this exploration mind-set even in the midst of a great crisis.

One thing that brings in the Saboteurs is that we don’t allow the Explore mode to happen purely as a stand-alone step. We are often too busy trying to anticipate the next step, or maneuvering to win an argument, to let our Sage explore.

We often avoid exploring our mistakes and failures fully because the Judge’s presence makes the act too painful or too contentious. The Sage, of course, would be able to turn those mistakes into gifts and opportunities, in part through the powerful discoveries that are made in Explore mode.

Power Game: Fascinated Anthropologist When you play the role of Fascinated Anthropologist, you become a keen observer and discoverer of what simply is, without trying to judge, change, or control the situation. Try being a Fascinated Anthropologist in a difficult situation. A Fascinated Anthropologist does not selectively filter information that fits his or her preexisting judgments or desired outcome. The only goal is to discover things exactly as they are. For example, if you are in conflict with someone, could you even for three minutes let go of your own grievances and demands, becoming fascinated instead with discovering why the other person is feeling exactly how he or she feels?

INNOVATE While the Explore power is about discovering what is, the Innovate power concerns inventing what isn’t. True innovation is about breaking out of the boxes, the ...

When Innovation Is Needed The power to innovate is needed when the old way of approaching a situation, or the more obvious ways of dealing with it, does not suffice. A new outside-the-box approach is required.

When we try to have a purely left-brained and rational approach to innovation, we will only come up with various configurations of solutions that still operate within those limits.

interference, you need to give your mind one simple instruction: Come up with as many ideas as possible. Period. No evaluation of the ideas as you come up with them. Evaluation during innovation is the back door through which the Saboteurs enter.

The aim of the Innovate mode is volume of ideas, not quality. This will lead to higher quality ideas automatically as it energizes your PQ Brain, the engine of your greatest ideas. The good news is that all you need at the end of this process is one idea that passes the test. Evaluation of your options may or may not need the Sage. This evaluation could be based on simple objective criteria such as cost, effectiveness, impact, degree of difficulty, etc. But if the options you are evaluating have any significant bearing on your values, purpose, or meaning, then you would tap into your Sage’s power to Navigate to help you decide.

Power Game: “Yes … and …” To play “Yes … and …” follow every new idea you have by saying “Yes, what I love about that idea is … and …” With this approach, every idea is appreciated rather than judged before the next one is generated in reaction to it. Keep going as fast as you can, in rapid succession. This game can be played both inside your head and in a team setting.

4. NAVIGATE The Sage’s power to Navigate is about choosing between various paths and alternatives based on a consistent internal compass. The coordinates on this compass are your deeply-held values or what gives your life a sense of meaning and purpose. If you keep navigating with this compass, your cumulative choices will generate the fulfillment that comes from living life in alignment with your ideals and principles.

You should use your Sage’s power to Navigate only when multiple paths are available, some of which may be more aligned than others with your sense of values, purpose, or meaning.

The coordinates on a team’s compass are the group’s commonly shared values or whatever brings a deeper sense of meaning or purpose to that group.

In my experience, the vast majority of individuals, teams, and organizations that proudly exhibit their documented statement of values or purpose only have a superficial conceptual relationship with those words, which only live in their heads. Consequently, they mean little in action. For the Sage’s Navigation power to have a meaningful impact, there needs to be a deeper, more visceral connection with the coordinates of the compass. They need to arouse emotion and inspire.

Power Game: Flash Forward When faced with the fork in the road, imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back at the choices you are now facing. From that vantage point, what do you wish you had chosen at this juncture? The reason this exercise works is that at the end of our lives, many of the trivial Saboteur-related concerns fall away and are revealed as false. The things that stand out are those that are real, those that bring value, meaning, and purpose to our lives. The team version of Flash Forward is to imagine how you wish you had conducted yourselves as a group at this juncture at a point in the future when the team or organization no longer exists.

ACTIVATE

The Sage’s Activate power moves you into pure action, where all your mental and emotional energies are laser-focused on action and not distracted by the Saboteurs.

When you watch a martial arts master in battle, such as one of the Jedi in Star Wars, you get a sense of the pure action of the Sage. When a warrior with a strong Sage is attacked from all sides, he knows that the only way he can survive is by completely quieting and centering his mind. This means pushing aside all the mind-chatter coming from Saboteurs. Doing so allows the Sage to concentrate all his mental power on the urgent task at hand. If for one split second he allows himself to get angry at the enemy attacking him from the left, that momentary lapse of focus could mean getting killed by the enemy attacking from the right.

The paradox here is that the most urgent action can be taken by the quietest of minds, those that are free of the Saboteur interference and can concentrate on pure action. This is the opposite of the frantic energy that most people bring to urgent situations.

The Pleaser has you focus your action only on activities that please others and win you acceptance. The Hyper-Vigilant wastes enormous amounts of your energy worrying about contingencies, creating anxiety that is not warranted by the actual risks.

Power Game: Preempt the Saboteurs In this game, you put yourself in the shoes of your top Saboteurs and try to anticipate how they might try to sabotage your action. You anticipate the thoughts they would whisper or scream in your ears in the middle of the action and what lies they would use to justify those thoughts. Once you anticipate their sabotage, you will be able to intercept and let go of those thoughts easily when they arise in the middle of your action.

If the weight thrown at you is far greater than the strength of your PQ muscles, you may be so dominated by your Saboteurs that you aren’t even able to observe yourself in the middle of the challenge at all. You may simply get swept up in the drama roller coaster, stuck in full reactive mode. You won’t even remember to label your Saboteurs or do any PQ reps.

imagine yourself on a beach. You’ve entered into a contest to build as many sand castles as possible in a few hours. Now imagine that every half hour a wave (a Saboteur) comes in and destroys half of what you have built. If you want to improve your performance, you could invest your time in attending a workshop that teaches you how to build sand castles even faster, increasing your castle-building potential incrementally. This would of course result in better performance. Alternatively, you could spend some of your time on building a sand wall to prevent the waves from sabotaging your castles every half hour. (This would be equivalent to building up your PQ “wall” to protect yourself from Saboteurs.) Guess which method would result in more dramatic improvements in your final performance and outcome?

At a PQ equivalent score of approximately 75 (74.4 to be exact), the system switches from a built-in, self-reinforcing loop that is biased toward “languishing” into a loop biased toward “flourishing.”

Below a PQ of 75, an individual or team is constantly being dragged down by the invisible forces of a net-negative vortex. Above a PQ of 75, an individual or team is constantly being uplifted by a net-positive vortex. In an individual, these vortices are experienced inside the brain. In the case of a team, the vortex is experienced in the interactions among the team members. Figure 16 is a graphic representation of the vortices.

If your personal PQ or your team’s PQ score is below 75, you are wasting a lot of your energy just dealing with distress—energy that could otherwise be used to get things done. Only 20 percent of us score above a PQ of 75, and that’s why only 20 percent of individuals and teams achieve their true potential.

The Individual’s PQ Vortex The reason the PQ vortex occurs in an individual’s brain is twofold. First, the way the human brain is wired causes the negative or positive modalities of the brain to spiral in on themselves. Second, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, both negative and positive brain modalities become self-fulfilling prophecies in the external world. They generate results that reinforce the initial negative or positive brain modality that produced them in the first place. This too reinforces the spiraling vortex.