Positive Intelligence

The Positive Intelligence® Program

According to Shirzad Chamine, if you’re not physically fit, you’d feel physical stress as you climb a steep hill.  If you’re not mentally fit, you’d feel mental stress, such as anxiety, frustration, or unhappiness, as you handle work and relationship challenges. 80% of people score below the minimum level of mental fitness required for peak performance and happiness. The great news? With recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and technology, you can now improve your mental fitness significantly within six weeks of practice.  The results? Dramatically improved performance and productivity and a calm, clear, and happier mind. Within 6-8 weeks of mental fitness training you'd be able to see the results in MRI imaging:
  • Increased grey matter in the PQ Brain region, where your Sage lives
  • Decreased grey matter in the Survivor Brain region, where your Saboteurs live

What is PQ?

Book Cover PQ is a synthesis of recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, cognitive and positive psychology, and performance science. Research included:
  • hundreds of CEOs
  • sales, operations, and technology teams
  • Stanford students
  • elite athletes
  • 400,000 participants from 50 countries
This research was summarized in Shirzad Chamine's book Positive Intelligence, a New York Times bestseller, translated into 20 languages. The research reveals that:
  • Saboteurs and Sage live in entirely different regions of the brain.
  • You can cause a dramatic shift in brain activation to weaken Saboteurs and boost Sage.
  • 3 core muscles constitute mental fitness.

Three Core Muscles of Mental Fitness

Three core muscles constitute your mental fitness:
  1. Saboteurs Interceptor Muscle You Saboteurs generate all your negative emotions, including stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, avoidance, procrastination, insensitivity, or discontent. Mental fitness requires the ability to intercept and discredit the Saboteurs.
  2. Sage Muscle Your Sage is the one in you that handles challenges with a clear and calm mind and positive emotions. It also has access to your 5 primary powers. All you need to paint any canvas is 3 primary colors. Similarly, through factor analysis research we’ve discovered that there are only 5 primary powers: Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate.For peak performance, you learn to boost all 5 powers and know when to use which power.
  3. Self-Command Muscle You’re not in full command of your mind. If you were, you would choose to entirely silence the Saboteurs in your head. You would choose to not stress out over what you can’t control, push away self-doubts, recover from disappointments immediately, and spend little time in anger, regret, or blame.PQ Reps are innovative 10-second exercises which build up this crucial Self-Command muscle in the brain. You learn to run your brain, rather than allow your Saboteur-hijacked brain to run you.

The PQ Program

Designed like a mental fitness boot camp, the PQ Program gives you the insights, motivation, and structure to practice 15 minutes per day for 6 weeks. The program combines weekly video sessions with daily app-guided practices to boost your 3 core mental fitness muscles.
  • Weekly 1-hour Video Sessions In these highly engaging sessions, Shirzad guides you through experiential exercises that deepen and personalize your understanding of the mental fitness tools. You leave inspired and energized for the week's daily practices.
  • Four 1-hour Individual Coaching Sessions
  • Exclusive App Guiding Your Daily Practice Each day a different focus for daily practice is assigned through a personalized companion app available exclusively to program participants. This builds one small muscle at a time, laying down new neural pathways to form lasting positive habits of your mind. The cumulative impact by program's end is substantial.
  • Interactive PQ Gym Innovative 10-second PQ Reps build up your Self-Command muscle. You learn to be clear-headed and calm even in the midst of great challenges, able to command your mind to shift from Saboteur to Sage response.
  • Daily Progress Tracking The app tracks your daily progress against minimum targets associated with new neural pathway (muscle) formation. Personalized daily coaching tips from Shirzad continue to both encourage and challenge you to keep going.
  • Cohort Community with Shirzad Shirzad remains an active member of your cohort community, answering your questions, or providing online coaching. Participants report the online cohort community to be key to sustaining their enthusiasm for daily practice.

Six Weeks of Inspired Practice

You can view the program overview here.
The first week you learn innovative 10-second PQ Reps that boost your self-command. This enables you to run your brain rather than being run by your Saboteur-hijacked brain. Self-command is key to intercepting unhelpful mental habits and rewiring your brain to respond more effectively.
  • Try out and discover PQ Reps that are most effective for you.
  • Reach the minimum target for PQ Reps/day to achieve your rewiring goal within 6 weeks.
  • Use the app's breakthrough PQ Charge Meter to ensure optimal brain activation before important activities.
  • Declare an audacious aspiration--what you want to achieve through this program.
For this entire week, you'll intercept and weaken the most damaging Saboteur, the Judge. You discover how judging yourself, others, and circumstances is a key source of your stress and quite damaging to your performance. Most participants discover their Judge to be far more prevalent and damaging than they suspected. 
  • Expose your Judge's hidden lies, limiting beliefs, and negative patterns.
  • Reveal your Judge's impact on performance, relationships, and stress.
  • Practice intercepting your Judge before it hijacks you.
  • Rewire your negative neural pathways by redirecting the Judge response.
This week you intercept and weaken the top accomplice to your Judge Saboteur, identified through the Saboteur Assessment from the following: Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, Victim. 
  • Expose your accomplice Saboteur's hidden lies, limiting beliefs and negative patterns.
  • Reveal this Saboteur's impact on performance, relationships, and stress.
  • Discover how to quickly intercept this Saboteur before it hijacks you.
  • Rewire your negative neural pathways by redirecting this Saboteur's response.
After weakening your Saboteurs, it is now time to strengthen your Sage, the counterpart to your Saboteurs. Your Sage lives in an entirely different part of your brain, generates all your positive emotions, and achieves peak performance through a calm and clear mind. 
  • Practice the Sage Perspective that every outcome or circumstance can be turned into a gift and opportunity. 
  • Use the 3 Gifts Technique to find the opportunity in setbacks.
  • Replace draining self-judgment with energizing self-acceptance and empathy.
  • Boost speed of recovery from failures and setbacks.
The Sage region of the brain enables 5 primary powers. Analogous to the 3 primary colors, these 5 powers recombine to form all of the emotional intelligence competencies considered crucial to professional success. 
  • Augment your mental toolbox with 5 Sage powers.
  • Practice 3 techniques to activate each power.
  • Know when to use which power--right tool at the right time.
  • Boost emotional intelligence through combinations of the 5 primary powers.
In our final week, you use your Sage's Navigate and Activate powers to take clear-headed, laser-focused, decisive action.
  • Use your Sage's Navigate power to align your actions with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
  • Use your Sage's Activate power to act without fear or emotional distractions even in the midst of great crises.
  • Discover your Sage's deep wisdom, far surpassing your analytical intelligence.
  • Discover how your Sage generates your highest performance while enjoying every step--"in the zone."
In this final session, you discover how to continue using your PQ tools for a variety of work and life applications.
  • Learn how to further apply to peak performance in selling and persuading, conquering stress, managing conflict, and relationships mastery 
  • Discover how to use the PQ app to maintain your new mental muscles and Sage habits
  • Chart your path to keep progressing towards your audacious aspirations
  • Establish support and accountability agreements to sustain your momentum

Results

Improvements in these competencies lead to substantial results:
  • At MetLife, trained salespeople outsold the control group by 37%
  • Motorolla recorded improved productivity in 93% of trained employees
  • In a UK restaurant group, higher competency resulted in a 34% greater profit growth
  • At Sanofi-Aventis Pharmaceutical, the average salesperson with improved competency sold $55,200 more per month
  • At L’Oreal, strength in these competencies resulted in $91,370 increase per salesperson
  • At CIBC, strength in these competencies account for 32% of booked sales and 71% of pipeline sales