How to Achieve Your Full Potential - and Be Happy Doing It!

An “Executive Summary” of Positive Intelligence

Positive Intelligence (PQ) is Emotional Intelligence (EQ) on steroids. Here’s what every leader, executive, and professional needs to know.

Maybe you’ve begun to hear rumblings about PQ. Perhaps some people in your sphere are talking about how their training in mental fitness is returning them significant dividends in their professional and personal lives. Or how their team is using PQ to work more effectively together.

This might leave you wondering…what is this mysterious “PQ”? What does it have to do with executive leadership? How is it different from concepts like emotional intelligence (EQ) that have gone before? And most importantly, how might you explore and apply PQ?

A Quick PQ Primer

PQ is shorthand for Positive Intelligence and features in a New York Times bestselling book by the same title. Author, speaker, and Stanford University lecturer Shirzad Chamine posits that only 20 percent of people reach their full potential. He finds the barriers preventing the other 80 percent of people from being happier and performing better in the annals of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and performance science.

It turns out that most of us spend the majority of our time in “fight or flight” mode, tapping the parts of the brain devoted to survival. It’s a high-anxiety tightrope walk we don’t particularly enjoy.

PQ thinking, on the other hand, activates higher-order brain functions from which we derive calm, collected wisdom. When we build our Positive Intelligence, we expand our mental fitness to handle life’s challenges without so much effort, stress, and negativity.

Shirzad has been an executive coach to Fortune 500 leaders and Silicon Valley luminaries for decades. As a result, PQ is more than just a theory. It gains immediacy in direct application to real problems business leaders and teams face.

PQ is a powerful concept and a worthy addition to IQ (the original intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional intelligence, or empathic and interpersonal abilities). In fact, I’d argue it’s the most important of the triad. Or, as I describe it, PQ is EQ on steroids.

The Problem of Self-Sabotage

“You are your own worst enemy.” At heart, this is the PQ takeaway—that we engage in self-sabotage when we take our strengths to the extreme, and we end up undermining our own potential.

This may not sound like encouraging news, but PQ brings vital understanding to bear on the problem. When it comes to self-sabotage, PQ names names and shows us how calling out our key Saboteurs can steadily reduce their influence.

In the PQ world of your mind, the Judge is the Saboteur leader. We all have one of these hypercritical, fault-finding voices in our heads. The Judge continually offers up negative commentary about ourselves and those around us, sparking anger, guilt, and other difficult emotions.

Backing up the Judge are nine other Saboteurs. Although we may hear from any member of this chorus from time to time, we each have a dominant sidekick Saboteur serving as the Judge’s main Accomplice. Depending on your personality traits and history, especially in childhood, you may be dealing with:

·       The Pleaser, whose quest for acceptance and affection will cause you to put others’ needs and approval ahead of your own. (Enter resentment!)

·       The Stickler, the consummate perfectionist and order-seeker, who will waste your time and hold you back as you strive to dot every i, no matter how insignificant.

·       The Hyper-Achiever, who can never be satisfied by a job well done. HA is a Sisyphean task master, whipping you to achieve success and then allowing only moments of enjoyment before demanding you prove yourself again.

• The Hyper-Rational, a Mr. Spock-like Saboteur who values only logic and sidelines emotion.
• The Victim, who knows there is attention to be had by playing the martyr and will kill your relationships on the altar of self-sacrifice.
• The Hyper-Vigilant, who like Chicken Little is sure the sky is falling and wants you to be on guard at all times, no matter how exhausting.
• The Restless, who seeks constant excitement and activity as a distraction from larger issues, precluding peace and contentment.
• The Avoider, who works incessantly to escape conflict and procrastinate on difficult tasks, thereby hampering your progress toward meaningful goals.
• The Controller, who wants everything in life to bend to your will and becomes frustrated when plans fail or others insist on going a different way.

No one Saboteur is better or worse than any other. Each has the power to undermine your ability to achieve your potential and limit your happiness. Our Saboteurs lie to us, making us believe that we need them to be successful. Simply put, it isn’t true. They’re holding us back.

You may notice that some of the Saboteurs’ names include “Hyper.” That’s because Saboteurs take otherwise benign or advantageous characteristics to an extreme. There is nothing wrong with striving to achieve, applying rationality, or being vigilant in dangerous circumstances.

The problem comes in when we apply a habitual mode of thought and behavior in a chronic, even obsessive manner, in ways that are not only ineffective but often work at cross-purposes to our true goals and intentions. When that happens, we waste energy following the orders of our Saboteurs and fail to reach our full potential.

Survive or Thrive?

As mentioned earlier, the Saboteurs emerge from what some people call our Lizard Brain, the regions devoted to fight-or-flight survival.

But we humans are not limited to our ancient brains. We have the option of engaging higher order functions. And you probably know exactly what I’m talking about—you’ve felt the flow as an athlete (even if only during a morning jog), you’ve been in the zone when creating or innovating, or you’ve touched a level of peaceful insight through meditation.

These experiences and others bring forth what in PQ terms is known as the Sage. Consider the Sage the better side of our natures, the wise, unflappable voice in our heads we would prefer to guide our decisions and actions.

With a name like “the Sage,” you might think it takes years of solitude on a mountaintop to fully activate this part of your mind. Not so! Shirzad has developed a variety of PQ muscle-building exercises, many of which can be performed in just 10 seconds. Do them consistently and the increased grey matter in the “Sage” parts of the brain is visible on MRI within 8 weeks.

I don’t know about you, but I found this prospect inspiring when I first discovered PQ!

Individual, Partners, and Teams

So far, I’ve talked about PQ on an individual level—identifying your Judge’s key accomplice and activating your own Sage. But PQ also works interpersonally. As we each build our own PQ, we can interact more effectively, coming at relationships, organizations, and shared projects “from a better place.”

What’s more, PQ builds on PQ. Leaders with high Positive Intelligence tend to increase the PQ of those around them, bringing out their best. Partners, including spouses, can create positive PQ feedback loops where they reinforce each other and foster an environment in which they are both self-actualized.

Applying PQ to the needs of executives and leadership teams is where I devote my energy as a coach. And that brings us to…

…My PQ Practice

Full transparency here—if you’re interested in learning more about PQ, the website www.positiveintelligence.com has a wealth of resources. You can grab a copy of Positive Intelligence or take a free assessment to determine which Judge accomplice Saboteurs contribute most to your self-sabotage.

Reading the book and using the free online resources are a great start, but PQ can be tough to apply on your own. The Judge is a wily character and will try to defeat your efforts. Creating an environment for lasting change isn’t easy when the Judge is determined to throw you off track.

To effectively build PQ, most people need reminders, tools, and external accountability, at least at first. And an outside voice can help bring to light the many ways the Judge and the Accomplice are undermining progress. (Hint: They may tell you that you need their critical eye, attention to detail, or “motivation” to get off the couch—and many times, you’ll believe them! Remember how I told you the Saboteurs lie to you?)

That’s why Shirzad created a 6-week PQ program. It puts you on the path to developing the mental fitness required for peak performance and happiness. When embarking on the standard program, you would:

• Review a 1-hour course video each week with content not available elsewhere.
• Engage in about 15 minutes of PQ practice every day, using various PQ muscle-building exercises

As a Certified Positive Intelligence Coach myself, I am able to offer this program directly to clients. Given my focus on executive training, my fully-authorized, 6-week PQ training program has a twist:

• I’m empowering leadership groups, company departments, colleagues, or even friends who want to train in PQ to sign up together (ask me about group pricing).
• The group enjoys all the individual benefits of the standard PQ program, including the video content guided by Shirzad and the PQ exercises.
• Rather than go through it alone, I facilitate your experience and provide small-group coaching specifically tailored to your group’s needs and goals, and you receive the benefit of my trained expertise and coaching.

If you want to improve your professional and personal relationships, fix what might not be working on your team (stuck? not communicating well? competing instead of collaborating?) and achieve higher levels of success and happiness, PQ is the tool for you. And if you’re looking to collaborate and communicate more effectively as a group, what better way to start than with a team-focused PQ program!

If you’re curious, DM me, comment below, or message me at info@claudia-williams.com. We can talk all things PQ! I can share my own experience with the 6-week program and how it changed my personal life and how I approach my own work. In fact, that might be an upcoming article…stay tuned!