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

by Shirzad Chamine

Once we switch into either survive or thrive mode, multiple regions of the brain are activated, and they spiral in on one another and snowball, causing the vortex effect. For example, the amygdala is involved in making us feel safe or in danger. Once the amygdala determines that there is credible danger, the brain shifts primarily into survive mode. This results in a cascade of neurochemical events, including the release of the stress hormone cortisol. Few people realize that when you go into fight-or-flight mode, the mind—not just the body—becomes narrowly focused. It begins to selectively look for the negative signs of danger while ignoring positive signs of opportunity. When in survive mode, thriving takes a back seat. Although many opportunities might arise for a shift to a positive thriving mode, the brain with this narrowed focus is incapable of registering and capitalizing on them; this is part of what keeps the negative vortex going. Negativity is therefore a self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling mechanism in the brain. Once you get into it, you feel the pull of its vortex wanting to keep you in.

The Team’s PQ Vortex A team whose PQ is below 75 is also stuck in a net-negative vortex. A key factor in the functioning of this vortex is the brain’s mirror neuron system. Our brain’s mirror neurons ensure that we act as tuning forks to one another, unconsciously and automatically mimicking the other brains around us. The most visible manifestation of this is that we yawn when another yawns, or cringe when we see another in physical pain. The less visible manifestation is that energy, mood, and even PQ levels can be contagious. For example, it’s more likely that your own Saboteurs will come out swinging if someone approaches you with his or her Judge in charge.

Let’s say Jane has a moderate PQ of 70 but John has a low PQ of 30. The question is, who would tune into whom during an interaction between the two? Would they meet in the middle and each exhibit a PQ of 50? Would Jane lift John up to 60, or would John drag Jane way down to very low PQ behavior? There are two factors that help determine the answer. One is the relative status and power of each individual. If Jane is John’s boss, he’s more likely to be pulled up by her rather than she is to be dragged down by him. Another factor is what I call the “radius of the vortex.” This is analogous to a person’s force of personality. Some people’s vortex, whether positive or negative, has a small radius and doesn’t affect others much. Others have a larger vortex radius. We all know people whose negative vortex can sink the energy of any room they walk into. On the other hand, we also know people whose positive vortex has such a large radius that they light up a city block wherever they go.

In a team composed of people with various PQ scores and PQ vortex radiuses, the team eventually settles at one collective team PQ, like a room full of grandfather clocks that eventually tick in synchrony. Our mirror neurons are responsible for this contagion effect. A great leader or team player knows how to shift the collective PQ of a team to above 75 so that each individual within the team is uplifted by it. Each individual within such a team is likely to exhibit higher PQ behavior than they would on their own. This is what it means when we say someone “brings out the best” in others. If Peter has a PQ of 60, he might exhibit fewer Saboteur tendencies and a stronger Sage when interacting within a high-PQ team. When he goes home, he’ll be back to a PQ of 60 in interactions with his family. I know people who are so uplifted by their team’s high-PQ dynamic that they find their work life far more fulfilling than their home life. They feel better about themselves and see a better version of themselves show up withi...

THE UPPER LIMIT OF PQ Marcial Losada’s mathematical modeling uncovered an upper limit to positivity equivalent to a PQ score of 92. My own interpretation of this finding is that a minimal level of negativity is inevitable, and is actually helpful. I want to emphasize minimal, so we don’t give the Saboteurs the excuse they need to get back into convincing us they are our friends. If we use the physical body analogy, we would say that while we should aim to avoid pain, it is critical that our body be capable of feeling pain. For example, if you touch a hot stove, you will feel pain temporarily. This pain is a critical signal to you that you need to move your hand. If you didn’t feel this pain, your hand might be badly burned before you realized you needed to move it. It is inevitable that you will feel anxiety, anger, shame, guilt, disappointment, and many other negative feelings at times. These feelings wake you up and tell you that you need to pay attention. The problem with the Saboteurs is that they want you to keep feeling that way. They want you to keep your hand on the stove, to keep feeling the anger, the guilt, the disappointment, the anxiety. Instead, we need to learn to shift to Sage mode soon after the pain gets our attention, shifting our feelings into positive territory. The necessity of this minimal amount of negative feeling is why I believe PQ has an upper limit.

TEAM BUILDING A team’s PQ is not necessarily the average PQ of the individuals on the team. A great leader can build a high-PQ team made up of average PQ members. This means that the members of that team feel more positively while they are in the team than outside the team. Conversely, you can have a low-PQ team made up of higher-PQ individuals who just can’t help but be dragged down by the net-negative vortex of a team that brings out their Saboteurs.

To help people focus on the PQ Channel during team interactions, I sometimes ask people the following question: “If an alien who didn’t understand our language witnessed this interaction between Kathy and Karl, would he rate it as a positive energy exchange, a negative energy exchange, or neutral?” The alien would have an easier time focusing on the invisible energy of the PQ Channel, because he would not be distracted by processing the facts and details communicated on the Data Channel.

On your next team-building retreat, set aside some time for discussion of the PQ concepts and have each person identify his or her own Saboteurs. Some leaders worry before such retreats about one or two individuals who are particularly difficult, unaware, or reluctant to admit their own flaws. Since no one individual is being singled out for discussion of what is wrong with them, everyone participates in the PQ discussion fully. To this date, I have never encountered a single team member who claimed that he or she didn’t have Saboteurs and refused to identify their own during a team retreat.

The power of the PQ conversation is that it moves everyone to a place of curiosity about how they can improve themselves rather than focusing on how someone else should change. This helps a team shift from a collective Survivor Brain to a collective PQ Brain.

To sustain the momentum of the team’s increased PQ beyond the retreat, I ask teams to add a short PQ report to their weekly team meetings. Each member includes a few bullet points regarding PQ development successes and failures in the previous week. This could include instances where their Saboteurs got in the way, or when they successfully employed their Sage powers and saved the day. Both success and failure stories add to every member’s learning and commitment to stay with the PQ practice. Remember that just as physical fitness is a matter of daily practice, so is PQ fitness. A PQ report built into the team’s weekly discussion ensures that the team’s increase in PQ is sustained long enough to lift its PQ score into the net-positive vortex. Once that happens, the team’s high PQ will be self-sustaining.

As an additional boost to team PQ, many senior teams in industries as diverse as manufacturing, IT, and banking start their longer team meetings with some kind of PQ Brain activation exercise. This helps everyone hit the ground running, with the Sage in the driver seat and Saboteur voices q...

beyond a certain level of workload and stress, productivity plummets, meaning that working more actually results in producing less. This is partially because higher stress fuels your Saboteurs and energizes your Survivor Brain.

Your rational brain might make you smart, but your PQ Brain makes you wise. While your rational mind is only limited to information that you know and remember, the PQ Brain can access the much vaster library of anything you have ever experienced or learned, including things that you might not even be consciously aware of. When it pops up with an answer, it won’t be able to tell you how it arrived at the answer, since it used massive parallel processing and pattern matching. This is where the wisdom of your Sage lives. This is also where “gut feeling” and intuition come from.

WORKING AND LIVING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE

Stop fueling their Saboteurs. Remember that Saboteurs in one person tend to trigger Saboteurs in the other. It is therefore very likely that the other person’s Saboteurs have been triggering your own. Your Saboteurs in turn energize theirs even more, leading to a vicious cycle. You need to break this cycle by preventing yourself from being hijacked by your own Saboteurs when you are in the other person’s presence. Intensify your effort to label and let go of your Saboteurs, or do PQ reps, when you notice their Saboteurs coming.

Fuel their Sages. Remember also that the Sage in one person tends to energize the Sage in the other. When in the difficult person’s presence, intensify your effort to get centered in your Sage. Adopting the Sage perspective means that you ask yourself how you can turn this person’s difficult personality into a gift and opportunity, rather than get upset by it. You might also suggest a Sage power game to shift the dynamics of your interaction. For example, you might interrupt their naysaying by suggesting the “Yes … and …” approach during an idea-generating discussion. 3. Help them discover their Saboteurs. Most people would react defensively if you told them you thought they had the Judge, Victim, Avoider, or other Saboteur. They might, however, react more favorably if you shared the benefits of discovering your own Saboteurs with them and interested them in the power of similar discoveries for themselves. This book, or its companion website, could help them realize that Saboteurs are a universal phenomenon and that they shouldn’t feel embarrassed admitting to them. Even more powerful, you can see and acknowledge their Sage essence hidden underneath their Saboteurs. Let them know the possibilities you see for them if they can tap into their own Sage powers. When possible, share the PQ framework with people in a group rather than in a one-on-one setting. For example, everyone on a team, in a family, or in a classroom, could assess and discuss their own Saboteurs together...

MANAGING STRESS All stress is Saboteur generated. Under the Sage’s influence, you focus on doing what needs to get done, but you don’t sweat the outcome. You know that whatever outcome you reach, you will be able to turn it into a gift and opportunity. This includes making a big mistake or failing. Imagine what happens to your stress if you go all out and passionately pursue the outcome you desire, while never getting attached to that outcome. This is a paradox, of course, that gives your Saboteurs an aneurism and that only your Sage understands. Your Sage knows that you are more likely to achieve your outcome if you don’t feel that your ultimate happiness and success depend on it.

For at least the next three months, he would start each of their Monday morning senior management meetings with the following question: “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?” This phrasing suggested an action-oriented self-fulfilling prophecy rather than a fatalistic and passive couch-potato approach.

Before using the Sage’s Navigation power, it is often useful to apply an objective filter to narrow down the choices to a manageable few. A two-dimensional matrix is often helpful for this stage. To construct the matrix, you would determine the top two most important objective criteria or metrics for making your choice. In Frank’s case, his team decided the criteria should be the cost of implementation and the projected impact. This helped narrow down the number of ideas to five that were high on impact and relatively low in cost of implementation. They consulted their Navigation compass to choose among these finalists.

There are essentially three main choices we have regarding conflict. We can avoid it and deny that it exists, which, of course, will cause it to fester over time and drive a wedge into the relationship. We can also confront it, with our Judge and other Saboteurs leading the fight. We may get our way or negotiate a grudging compromise, but it will probably be at the cost of the relationship. The third way, the Sage’s way, is to embrace the conflict as a gift and harness its power to strengthen the relationship. If a couple or team tells me that their relationship is a 10 because they don’t have conflict, I tell them they are at best a 6 or 7. You can get to 10 only through harnessing the gift of conflict.

SABOTEUR INTERFERENCE IN RELATIONSHIPS

Judge: Your Judge causes you to make a whole lot of assumptions about the other person’s intentions. These assumptions are often false and usually make the other person defensive. A powerful Judge also causes you to listen selectively, looking only for evidence to prove your own point right. Controller: The Controller tends to intimidate others in a conflict. A Controller can make you confrontational and give you an in-your-face style that makes others uncomfortable. The Controller can also make you shut down others and cause them to feel that you are inflexible and only committed to your own way, even if that’s not your true intention. Stickler: The Stickler’s certainty about the right way is often not shared by others. If your Stickler is in control, you might come across as self-righteous, rigid, or overly perfectionistic. Avoider: The Avoider directs your attention away from the conflict. You will either hope the conflict goes away or convince yourself that it isn’t important. You might sugarcoat and soften your message to the point where the other person doesn’t understand the severity of the problem until it has gotten out of hand. Hyper-Achiever: The Hyper-Achiever can make you too goal-focused, causing you to miss the relationship-building gift of the conflict. The other person might feel you are treating them only as a means of getting to your goal.36 Pleaser: The Pleaser prevents you from asking for what you really want or need and encourages you to accommodate t...

People’s positions are often fed by underlying Assumptions. These often include many assumptions about the other party’s intentions. Even as an expert in this field, I have been humbled by how difficult it is to correctly guess another person’s needs and intentions. I have learned that it is critical to check with them rather than assume. Assumptions regarding others’ intentions are often incorrect and provide much of the fuel for conflicts. Our Judges are much more certain about the other person’s true needs and intentions than our data and experience warrants.

The underlying Aspirations that feed our positions hold the key to harvesting the gift of conflict. While it is almost an automatic human response to oppose another’s rigid position, we react quite differently to aspirations, which are very difficult to argue with. Each of us is wired to champion others’ deeply felt aspirations. Consider, for example, how frequently you have automatically rooted for total strangers you’ve read about or watched in a movie who are passionately pursuing an aspiration. There is a whole lot of common ground between human beings at the aspiration level. The aspiration is spoken by the Sage in one person and appreciated by the Sage in the other.

EXPLORE To facilitate shifting to the Sage’s Explore mode, I proposed a strict structure that was a variation of the Fascinated Anthropologist power game. To keep the Saboteurs at bay, Susan and Patrick would take turns being speaker and listener. Susan, the first speaker, would be free to speak for about three minutes. At the end of the three minutes, Patrick had to state back exactly what Susan had said to ensure he’d heard her correctly. Patrick could only become speaker when Susan acknowledged that she had been heard fully. At that point, the roles were reversed, and Susan had to be listener to Patrick. Thus, the listener had no choice but to listen well, without Saboteur interference.

People do not feel truly heard until their communication on the PQ Channel is felt and acknowledged. Being heard and responded to on the Data Channel is not adequate.

unless we feel heard, we are not willing to listen to the other.

I suggested that showing Empathy for another is a generous act. It is about walking in the shoes of others, not only seeing but also feeling the world through another’s vantage point. Empathy is ultimately about feeling, not about thinking or analyzing.

We are often reluctant to empathize with someone else’s point of view because we worry that by doing so we are legitimizing and encouraging their position and downplaying our own. I needed to have Susan and Patrick decouple these two. Empathizing with someone who has just stubbed their toe doesn’t mean you are rewarding their carelessness or encouraging them to do it again. It simply means you are feeling their pain and letting them know it. Empathy should be decoupled from problem solving or deciding on a solution; it is a critical stand-alone Sage power that makes people more willing to bring other Sage powers into their interactions, such as Innovation, Navigation, and Activation.

INNOVATE When conflict is approached at the position level, the top of the iceberg, there are only two ways out. Either one person loses and the other wins, or both compromise and give up something important to them. Neither of these alternatives is appealing. The Sage approach is not about compromise. It is about going deeper in the pyramid to discover underlying needs and aspirations and then devising creative solutions that address those needs and aspirations in both individuals. It is about expanding the pie before dividing it.

PQ Brain Activation: If the energy and atmosphere of a team meeting feels negative and loaded with Saboteur energy, you will have an uphill battle trying to help each person shift individually. This is because the team is collectively caught in the net-negative vortex. In this situation, I recommend a five- to fifteen-minute PQ Brain activation exercise to help quiet the Saboteurs’ voices and give everyone greater access to their Sages’ wisdom before proceeding. (You can download self-guided audio files of this exercise from www.PositiveIntelligence.com.) • The 80-20 Rule of Conflict: It is a rare conflict in which anyone is 100 percent at fault. As a rule of thumb, I tell people in a conflict to remember that they are at least 20 percent at fault. Encourage people to shift from trying to prove the other person’s 80 percent fault to discovering the 20 percent they are contributing. This shifts the focus of the conversation from the Judge’s blame to the Sage’s exploration and curiosity. As a way of people exploring their own 20 percent contribution to team conflicts, have everyone on the team assess their own Saboteurs and share how those Saboteurs fuel conflicts. • Conflict as a Gift: Some teams, and many individuals within teams, have great aversion to openly admitting that there is a conflict in the first place. The conflict then becomes a big elephant in the room that everyone tries desperately to sidestep. Everyone should be encouraged to call out the elephants in ...

THE FIRST PQ PRINCIPLE OF SELLING The first PQ principle of selling is that the PQ Channel is more important to selling than the Data Channel.

As a seller, the information and analysis of the Data Channel needs to be good enough to get you in the door, but the actual sale happens due to the influence of the PQ Channel.

THE SECOND PQ PRINCIPLE OF SELLING The second PQ principle of selling is that the buyer is much more likely to say yes if her PQ Brain is activated. (The proviso here is that she is responding to something of real value.) It is helpful to remember that the PQ Brain is wired to thrive, to say yes to opportunities and new ideas, to explore, to empathize and connect, and to expand. The Survivor Brain is wired to say no and preserve the status quo.

THE THIRD PQ PRINCIPLE OF SELLING The third PQ principle of selling is that you need to shift yourself to the PQ Brain before you can get the buyer to shift to his or her PQ Brain. As we discussed earlier, because of the mirror neurons in the brain, human brains mimic whatever they pick up on the PQ Channel from the other person. Since this shift happens automatically and subconsciously, it is hard to fake your own positivity when trying to get others to be positive. The other person’s brain tunes into your brain’s real frequency rather than the one you are trying to project. If you are in true Sage mode, feeling true acceptance and peace, curiosity, creativity, joy, and empathy, your state of mind will help shift the other person’s mind. Pretending to be those things will send positive data on the Data Channel but negative information on the invisible PQ Channel. The mirror neurons in the other person mimic your invisible PQ Channel, not your Data Channel.

insincere positivity poses the same level of risk of coronary disease as the overt negativity of anger. This fact is sobering when you think about it. Fake positivity deployed as a persuasion technique doesn’t trigger the buyer’s PQ Brain and doesn’t improve your chances of getting a yes—it actually exposes you to higher risk of dying from coronary disease!

Going through the motions of empathizing with the customer, caring for the employee, or empathizing with your spouse is a far cry from activating the PQ Brain in yourself so that these emotions are authentically felt. Authentic selling and leadership take on a new light when you consider this perspective.

RECOVERY TIME The point of accepting rejection as a gift was neither to invite more rejection or failure nor to disregard the important consequences of failure. The goal was to shorten the recovery time, to recover quickly from the Saboteurs that are activated by failure, and shift to the Sage so we could generate better results next time.

True empathy for someone else means that you place all of your attention on them. You put yourself in their shoes and see the world through their eyes. It’s so much easier to come up with ideas that address a client’s needs if you can experience the problem from his or her vantage point. This constitutes the heart of successful selling.

Many of us attempt this in the form of the sales techniques of active listening, repeating what we hear, showing a concerned expression, inquiring more, and so on. The only trouble is that we usually do all of this from our Survivor Brain, with our own success in mind, rather than from our PQ Brain and the Sage’s authentic compassion for what the client experiences. The impact is that both the salesperson and the client continue relying on the Survivor Brain rather than shifting to the PQ Brain. The PQ Brain is capable of understanding and embracing paradox, and there is indeed a paradox here. In order to get the sale, you need to let go of needing to make the sale. In order to get the result that makes you happy, you have to let go of your concern for your own happiness during the sales process. You need to be completely focused on the other person, not as a sales technique, but truly in your heart.

whatever box the seller is stuck in will likely also trap the buyer, limiting the possibilities on both ends.

Visions catch fire most rapidly and powerfully when you help the other person connect the dots between the vision for the project and his or her own most deeply felt values. Values point the way to the place where our reservoir of fuel and fire resides. Align with those values, and you will tap into the deepest source of fire, passion, and energy within. One technique that works particularly well is to have a person speak about his or her vision in a story format in present tense, with the vision already having been achieved.38 For example: “It is now two years into the future.

Inquiries that help clients form such narratives include: “Let’s imagine that this vision has already been successfully manifested. What would feel different? What would change in your own life, or someone else’s? How would you feel about yourself, your role, your contribution, or your life? What would be different on a typical day? How would this vision impact how much time you get to spend with your daughter? How would that align with the kind of legacy you want to leave behind in this role? At the end of your life, looking back, what would still stand out as significant?”

These are the kinds of questions that help a vision catch fire. You need to find your own set of open-ended questions that fit your particular situation. You will know when the vision has caught fire—it will show up on the PQ Channel. When a client gets a taste of the possibility of the vision, her body language will shift. There will be more leaning forward, a sparkle in the eyes, a lifting of mood and energy. If you asked her at this point what the obstacles are, she would list them without any sense of anxiety or heaviness, with the PQ Brain’s attitude that everything is possible, and that even obstacles can be turned into opportunities.

think about all the elements of their jobs that could be imbued with meaning and aligned with their own deeper sense of purpose in life. As a tool, I suggested Flash Forward, the power game that aids us in Navigation. “At the end of your life, looking back, how do you wish you had played this game of selling? What would stand out as meaningful?”

Your Saboteurs will never fully go away. The fact is that I still hear the voices of my Judge and Hyper-Rational Saboteurs very frequently. What has changed is the volume and power of the voices in comparison to my strengthening Sage voice. Please don’t feel discouraged if you keep hearing your Saboteurs in your head. They will lose much of their volume and strength over time.

I hope this book will help you fall more deeply in love with yourself—to see the beauty of your own essence, of the being you were the moment you were born. You don’t need to prove anything to anyone, or perform for anyone, or get to the top of any mountain. Your essence is always there as your Sage, unchanged and waiting for you to see it, access its enormous powers, and allow it to shine.

My vision for Positive Intelligence is that it will change countless lives, both individually and through transforming how organizations and institutions view and grow people.