Positive Intelligence®️ (PQ) Coach Patrick Little reveals how we can most effectively make our lives more fulfilling, joyful, and free by the consistent training of just three mental muscles.
Getting off the mental hamster wheel
You are probably familiar with some of these situations: At work, nothing unfolds according to plan, projects are thrown off kilter, deadlines pile up, and colleagues disappear into the woodwork. Or at home, your partner and child(ren) drive you crazy because they show zero understanding for your needs. And sometimes, deep down inside, you are not really satisfied with yourself. In such moments we all want some peace of mind, so that we can go through the day relaxed, productive, and in harmony with those around us, fueled by love rather than fear. We recognize that the hamster wheel looks like a ladder only from the inside!
This is exactly where the concept of positive intelligence comes in: With increasing understanding of mental processes and through continuous daily practice (training), we can each shape and live more relaxed and self-determined professional and private lives.
PQ: Sound science, not wellness baloney
Positive Intelligence®️ is based on the combination of the latest findings from brain research, cognitive psychology, positive psychology, and performance research. Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence founder, executive coaching veteran and Stanford lecturer, tested the effectiveness of the concept with the help of more than 700,000 participants from over 30 countries and summarized the results in his New York Times bestseller “Positive Intelligence”.
It has been shown that our Individual Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ), i.e., the ratio between positive and negative emotions on a typical day, has a direct influence on how stress-resistant we are and how much, or how little, of our real potential we manifest in our professional activities, relationships, families, and private lives.
Thankfully, we can still significantly improve our PQ at any stage of life. We achieve this in three simple steps:
1. Identify and intercept our (mental) Saboteurs
2. Train our so-called Sage Powers in a targeted manner, and
3. Develop and maintain our ability to rapidly switch from Saboteur to Sage.
Step 1: Intercept your saboteurs
The goal is to draw upon our full positive potential and thereby create a life we love, enjoying excellent health, harmonious relationships, and the highest levels of performance, creativity, and purpose. The biggest obstacle we face is our mental saboteurs, i.e., those patterns of thought and behavior that have been deeply ingrained over the years and are now running on autopilot. Our thinking, our lives, our relationships, and our jobs are influenced by the saboteurs without us truly being aware of it.
In his scientific research, Shirzad Chamine has identified the following nine Saboteur types (who, together with a universal Master Saboteur – Judge – repeatedly take us hostage in thought and action): Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, and Victim. Each of us has a very personal combination, an individual team line-up or constellation of saboteurs, variously developed in terms of their respective strengths.
Solution orientation rather than symptom control
Let’s say all the important projects and tasks pile up on your desk at work, while your relaxed colleagues are off enjoying their lunch. It is highly probable that certain saboteurs are at work here. If everything somehow always ends up on your desk, this may not necessarily simply reflect an unfair distribution of labour; the cause may well lie within yourself. Perhaps your Controller is running amok, and you find it difficult to give up responsibility and trust in the performance of others. If this is true, you probably prefer to double or even triple-check everything again, which ultimately results in your overwhelming workload.
Maybe your Pleaser is also very prominent, and “saying no” is incredibly difficult for you, for fear of making yourself unpopular, or disappointing others. Or you have a pronounced Stickler, that is, good is never good enough for you. In your view, there is always a compulsion for improvement or revision. The root causes of our problems are not the circumstances, but rather our own imprinted – often unconscious – mental patterns.
When you work on identifying these negative saboteur patterns, you will get good at recognizing them as they become activated in any given situation. You can then practice at intercepting them so that you can return to your original strengths. This will not only help you in overload situations, but you will also learn to recognize how you can consciously shape your life, both personal and professional, differently for good. If you are curious about which of your saboteurs are particularly active, you can find out with the (free) PQ Saboteur Assessment Test here – Saboteur Review. As soon as you have identified which saboteurs are the most active and thus the greatest obstacles to reaching your full potential, you can start with the actual “training”.
Step 2: You, not your saboteurs, run your mind
Thinking precedes action. About 80% of our thoughts, which lead to how we feel and behave, lie beyond the realm of our conscious perception. When we start to pay close attention to which of our saboteurs are at work, we can then immediately collect ourselves before subsequently activating a different region of the brain. That might sound more complex than it is. However, because it’s basically about consciously recognizing what is going on between our ears, collecting (grounding) ourselves as quickly as possible, and then switching over, only three mental muscles need to be trained.
Saboteur brain or PQ brain?
Our “PQ brain” is an interplay of middle prefrontal cortex, insula cortex and right hemisphere, i.e., networks that are responsible, among other things, for the sage characteristics (sage = the wise one) such as empathy, intuition, creativity, seeing the big picture, innovation, self-reflection/self-knowledge, concentration, and implementation skills.
In complete contrast, our “saboteur brain”, – which consists of brain stem and limbic system – is responsible, among other things, for our affect behavior, impulses, drives, control of emotions, and the associated release of hormones. When danger threatens, cortisol is released, and the alarm is sounded. This activates areas in the left hemisphere of the brain where data and analytical skills are located. Its role is to ensure survival. It is the part of the brain which is active when we behave “in the heat of the moment”.
When we are negatively aroused, our saboteur brain always kicks in first. A clever survival strategy of evolution that trains us to see danger in everything, and prepares us for attack, freeze, fainting or flight. Nowadays, however, we are rarely confronted with issues of survival, but rather about living the most meaningful, happy, healthy, and fulfilling life possible.
The Mind Command Muscle is the key neural component for the conscious switching from saboteur brain to PQ brain. The strength of this muscle determines our ability to direct our mind instead of being directed by it. The stronger this muscle is, the faster you can get yourself out of the negativity spiral of the saboteurs and into Sage mode, where you can solve stressful challenges more creatively and effectively in a conscious, focused manner.
Three brief exercises for your ‘Mind Command’ muscle
Like any other muscle, our Mind Command muscle requires regular training, in the form of so- called “PQ-Reps” (based on the repetitions – “reps” – which we do in the gym when engaging in physical fitness exercises). These are short, simple sensory exercises that we can use immediately in trigger situations, but also repeat and train several times throughout the day, as a preventive measure, so to speak. Those who train their Mind Command muscle for three minutes, five times each day, every day, will soon notice palpable changes. They learn to respond faster and more appropriately to negative patterns in challenging situations and can activate their positive intelligence in real time. These following exercises are exemplary:
1. The conscious rubbing of our fingertips: rubbing our fingertips together, we concentrate fully on each individual sensation, the shapes, and different structures that we perceive at our fingertips and the feelings generated by this exercise. Three minutes fully immersed in and concentrating fully on it, are enough in most cases to ground us in any trigger situation, so that we can then reverse the neural polarity, break the negativity spiral, and then respond constructively to the challenge from the energy of the Sage.
2. With your eyes closed, focus only on the sounds in the environment for three minutes: Listen carefully to the most distant sounds you can hear. Then shift your attention to the sounds that are very close. Finally, listen to the sound of your own breathing or your own heart beating.
3. Consciously activate the sense of touch for three minutes: Take precise note of the structure, the shape, the temperature of a certain object and observe how you feel this touch. It can be so simple that, for example, you use everyday objects for this exercise, such as the keyboard of the computer, the leaves of a houseplant, or the cup from which you are drinking your tea.
The PQ exercises contained in a wide variety in the PQ-App focus on conscious perception while engaging our senses; our hearing, our visual perception, our sense of taste, our breathing, and our tactile experience. With a little trial and error, we can all find our personal favorite exercises in any given situation.
Step 3: Activate your positive potential to the full
To activate and live our positive potential to the full we need to act with empathy for self and others, to approach difficult situations with wonder, curiosity, and openness; to open ourselves to new ways of doing things, to develop innovative solutions; to tune into and listen to our intuition and inner wisdom; and, last but not least, to move into sober, clear and unswerving action. Empathy, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate are our so-called Sage Powers. The Sage Perspective, from which we learn to operate, states that every situation contains gifts for the good of all concerned (collective and individual).
In summary, let’s look back to our initial examples. With the help of our raised level of positive intelligence and strengthened mental fitness, the scenarios could play out like this:
At work, deadlines threaten, and tasks begin to pile up on our desk again. Our nerves are getting frayed, and we are becoming more and more restless and irritable.
Through our PQ knowledge and training, we now quickly realize that it is our Controller that is making life difficult. Instead of micro-managing, we can respond and change course in time. Together with our colleagues, we find new, creative ways to share the responsibilities and to better monitor and communicate the progress of the work and any necessary countermeasures. Team spirit is thus strengthened, and stress reduced.
Our partner and the children are once again showing zero understanding for our needs, and we feel like we’re in a remake of the movie: “Groundhog Day”.
As paradoxical as this may sound, when others appear to upset us, empathy, above all, is required. If your normally understanding partner sometimes becomes an emotional block of ice in heated and emotional discussions, then it is probably his or her Hyper-Rational Saboteur who has gained the upper hand and fooled them into believing that everything can better be solved rationally. To you, however, this seems hurtful and cold, which upsets you even more. By immediately starting your PQ-Reps you can quickly switch to Sage, which activates your empathy, allowing you to recognize the saboteur patterns in others. You no longer take it personally and can thus return faster to your inner balance and strength. Now you both have a completely different starting point, can really listen to each other, and together explore even unconventional solutions.
Sometimes, deep down inside, you are not really satisfied with yourself.
Our Master Saboteur, the Judge, is just waiting to furnish our entire day with negative subtitles: “This could be better, we could have more of that… or less, we should have done this or not done that.” If we train our Sage muscle regularly, we become increasingly adept at seeing through the banality of the saboteur’s comments. And after a tough night, when we look sleepily in the mirror, we notice not only the dark rings under our eyes and our pale skin. We also clearly see, in our eyes, the ever-shining brightness of our true essence, that loving energy that we rediscovered – as part of the PQ exercises we did in the first weeks – when we worked with our childhood photo.
The great lie of our Judge is: “I’ll be happy when….”. Each of the Saboteurs has its own lie, which if believed, will secure their continued hold over us, despite the inevitable negative consequences, for us and those with whom we engage. Viewed through the lens of our positive intelligence, the higher frequencies of the Sage energy remind us that happiness is a choice we can make with each new breath we take.
If the PQ program has piqued your interest, and you haven’t done so yet, I once again recommend doing the (free) saboteur assessment and then reading the relevant information provided with the results. If you want to know more, just book a free introductory appointment with me on the SoberOasis website, and I will be happy to help you explore your situation further and to answer any questions you may have.
Mental fitness, like physical fitness, is a task for life. The first step towards PQ Mental Fitness consists of a PQ App-supported 8-Week Intensive Programme which I offer F2F or online. The level of fitness that can be established over that brief period will put you in an excellent position to clearly identify and address the challenges you face in making the necessary transformation to get one step closer to living the life you love.
Postscript: I would like to thank my Munich-based PQ colleague Yvonne Hendrych for her kind permission to quote from her original article in German as I prepared this article.
About Patrick Little (CPQC)
I am a Transformation Coach and Mental Fitness Trainer based in Cologne, Germany, working internationally online and/or face-to-face with clients in English and German. By combining what I have learned in forty years of professional leadership and executive management, my own on-going transformation experience in Twelve Step recovery since 2003, and the App-supported daily practice of PQ, I guide my clients, young and old, through the transformation process they face, personal and/or professional, taking them one step closer to their goal of living the lives they love – successful, healthy, free, and living their full potential.
After 2 years of intensive study and PQ practice, I received my certification as a PQ Coach (CPQC) in July 2023. In providing the services of SoberOasis, I am now living the life I love.
For more information see: pq-mental-fitness.com (opens in a new tab)
