PDF Summary:Positive Intelligence, by Shirzad Chamine

Do you ever feel like your brain is out to get you? Or do you find yourself unable to connect with others for reasons you can’t understand? You might find that increasing your positive intelligence helps with these difficulties. In Positive Intelligence, best-selling author and lecturer Shirzad Chamine explains how you can train your brain to overcome the thoughts that are sabotaging your happiness and success so you can improve every aspect of your life.

In our guide, we’ll examine the ten ways your brain can sabotage you, as well as how to train your brain to overcome their influence. We’ll also explain how you can use attentional exercises to increase your level of positive intelligence. Finally, we’ll add scientific context for many of Chamine’s ideas, as well as alternative techniques for the tips he offers.

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All three of these Saboteurs are prone to emotional repression and avoidance, which studies show can have a negative impact on both physical and mental health.

Fearful Saboteurs

Some Saboteurs operate from a sense of fear of negativity and stress, which tends to sap their energy and causes them to fixate on their struggles and worries.

The Pleaser tries to gain the approval of others by helping or flattering them, and they put the needs of others ahead of their own needs. They’re typically not able to express their own needs clearly and try to meet them by expecting others to reciprocate their help—which then leads to feelings of resentment when they don’t receive such help. They fear being selfish or making others dislike them. Their fixation on helping others can cause them to burn out, and it can make others dependent on them.

The Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur feels constantly anxious about all the things that could go wrong and often overreacts when things do. They expect others to mess up, and they fear backlash when they themselves mess up. They often rely on rules and authority for a sense of security. Their constant vigilance can be exhausting for themselves and others, and the energy they could devote to achieving what they want in life is used up by their anxiety.

The Victim uses emotion and a sense of martyrdom to get attention from others. They respond to stress by sinking into negative emotions like depression and apathy. They feel misunderstood, burdened by misfortune, and dependent on their personal problems. While they crave connection, their emotional unpredictability and tendency to isolate push others away. Others feel guilty that they can’t seem to help the Victim.

Cognitive Distortions and Trauma Responses for Fearful Saboteurs

All 10 of the Saboteurs have characteristics similar to trauma responses, but these three in particular are often explicitly identified as trauma response behaviors. While Chamine acknowledges that the Saboteurs develop as defense mechanisms for threats in childhood, he doesn’t address the fact that such defense mechanisms may also be beneficial in adults who are experiencing trauma.

The Pleaser is characterized by people-pleasing behavior, which can be the result of low self-esteem, a fear of being seen as selfish, and a fear of negative consequences for saying no or failing to help others. However, people-pleasing is also a very common way to respond to trauma and is known as fawning. Fawning is one of the “Fs” of trauma responses, which also include fight, flight, and freeze, and it’s often a way to prevent genuine harm from an abuser or someone who’s presenting an active threat to you.

The Hyper-Vigilant Saboteur is fueled by catastrophizing, or the tendency to blow negative beliefs or predictions about the future out of proportion and always assume that the worst is going to happen. Catastrophizing can feel like a way to blunt the effects of a negative event by preparing yourself for the worst outcome, but the worst outcome is usually unlikely, and the stress of catastrophizing can be more harmful than the negative event itself. However, hypervigilance is also a trauma response, and, like fawning, it is sometimes used to minimize harm from abusers. Hypervigilance is particularly common in people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Victim is fueled by the mental filtering cognitive distortion, and it usually comes from the belief that people deserve whatever happens to them, a mentality that can be comforting because it can make us believe nothing bad will happen to us as long as we do everything right.

The Sage: How to Combat Your Saboteurs

The Sage is the part of you that can control and override the Saboteurs. It embodies the part of your brain that developed to help you thrive and not just survive. The Sage accepts who you are and what your life is like in the present and views every change in circumstances as a gift.

(Shortform note: Since the term “sage” refers to someone with sound judgment

The Sage has five techniques it can use to propel your life forward in a positive way: empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and execution. Mastering and utilizing these skills will help you improve in all areas of your life, whether you’re participating in a team that’s trying to increase your company’s profits, confronting a conflict with your spouse, looking to add a deeper meaning and greater happiness to your life, or working on any other type of problem-solving or growth.

(Shortform note: In First Things First, Stephen Covey identifies four human “gifts” that resemble the Sage’s techniques that Chamine describes. These gifts can help you improve your relationships with others and, consequently, your life in general. The gifts are 1) self-awareness, which he describes as understanding how you affect others and vice versa, much like empathy, 2) morality, which is similar to your power of navigation, 3) willpower, which Chamine doesn’t address in his five powers, and 4) creativity, which could encompass both exploration and innovation. Covey doesn’t describe a gift equivalent to the Sage’s power of execution, as Covey’s descriptions are more conceptual compared to Chamine’s more actionable advice.)

Technique #1: Empathy

This technique allows your Sage to offer gratitude, acceptance, and kindness to you and others. It is most beneficial when you or another person is feeling pain or fatigue. Empathizing heals and rejuvenates you so you can carry on with the emotional work you’re doing. This skill combats the Judge’s insistence that you or others aren’t trying hard enough and that you need to be stricter and more punitive to see improvement. It also helps you see past other people’s Saboteurs and keep them from provoking your own.

(Shortform note: When you offer yourself and others empathy and compassion, you experience a physiological response that helps your body rest by lowering your stress response. This, in turn, helps you relax. Conversely, thinking critically about yourself or others increases your body’s stress response, causing an accelerated heart rate and sweating. While you might be tempted to be more empathetic as a way to lower your stress response, it’s important to avoid falling into the trap of toxic empathy, or the tendency to empathize with others so intensely that their needs and problems begin to take precedence over your own. This can lead you to feed the Pleaser Saboteur. Balancing empathy for others with empathy for yourself can help you avoid this trap.)

People are often reluctant to offer empathy because they fear it will encourage negative behavior. They worry that showing compassion after someone makes a mistake is like condoning that mistake. However, Chamine asserts that empathy helps heal the damage done by mistakes that would otherwise stand in the way of learning and growth.

Empathy Versus Sympathy

People often confuse empathy with sympathy, which can lead to a misuse of both skills. Empathy refers to feeling and understanding another person’s emotions, while sympathy refers more to feeling bad for someone. Some experts suggest that sympathizing with someone who’s behaving badly can mean you’re condoning their behavior because the pity you feel for them can cause you to want to spare them from the negative consequences of their behavior.

Empathy, on the other hand, provides emotional context to understand what someone’s feeling and what may be motivating their behavior. It’s possible—and even beneficial—to empathize with someone you strongly disagree with, and such empathy can open the door to communication that can help correct the other person’s negative behavior.

In order to employ your Sage’s empathy, Chamine recommends you visualize the recipient of your empathy as a child. For yourself, he suggests keeping a photo of yourself from childhood in a place that’s easily accessible so you can look at it when you’re feeling judgmental of yourself. For others, he recommends imagining what they were like before the Saboteurs of adulthood began to affect them. This will automatically prompt you to treat that person with more understanding and compassion.

(Shortform note: Other ways to practice empathy for others include going out of your way to meet new people and open yourself up to new perspectives, working on a project with them that combines your shared interests, and reading about people who are different from you (research suggests that reading fiction improves empathy and emotional intelligence). To get better at offering empathy to yourself, engage in self-care and activities that are comforting to you, write a letter to yourself describing what you’re feeling without placing blame on anyone, or talk to yourself like you would talk to a friend who’s struggling.)

Technique #2: Exploration

By exploring, you can tap into your natural curiosity to discover new ideas or solutions to problems. It’s most effective when you know you have a problem but you need to understand it better to solve it.

Many of us resist exploration because we’re focused on pushing ahead or on rebutting someone else’s argument, and we therefore don’t think about how we can re-examine what we’re seeing in the moment. If you already think you know what comes next, or if you’re just trying to win an argument, you’ll focus only on the information that supports your thinking rather than understanding every angle of a situation or listening neutrally to the other person’s point of view, and therefore you won’t explore alternative insights.

To effectively use exploration to defeat your Saboteurs, Chamine recommends approaching a difficult situation from the perspective of an anthropologist fascinated with what they’re studying. In this way, you can put your emotions to the side and become someone whose sole purpose in that moment is to learn more without judging what you’re learning. This will counteract your Judge’s tendency to only pay attention to information that supports your side. It will also counteract other Saboteurs’ influences, like the Hyper-Rational tendency to dismiss others’ emotions or the Victim’s tendency to view others’ opinions as a personal attack.

Applying Empathy to Exploration

Other experts suggest that the exploration stage also requires you to use empathy as you’re taking in other perspectives. The authors of The Anatomy of Peace explain that to fully understand a conflict, you need to take on a cooperative mindset, which involves treating others with compassion and empathy and opening yourself up to change. They contrast this with a combative mindset, which is when you view others and differing perspectives as obstacles instead of as tools for collaboration. A combative mindset can lead you to view others as inferior, dismiss their opinions as unimportant, and mistreat them as people. This keeps you from exploring the real problem at hand.

In Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg explains that we’re rarely taught how to listen to others with empathy, so we tend to listen while preparing our own responses or figuring out how to “fix” the other person’s problems. As Chamine explains, we’re only listening to the information that supports our own ideas, causing us to miss important details and perspectives.

While they’re well-meaning, non-empathetic responses to others’ problems cause us to view the other person more as a project than a person. These responses include consoling the other person, giving them unsolicited advice, questioning what they’re saying, correcting them, or trying to turn their experience into a learning experience. Instead of these tactics, Rosenberg recommends frequently paraphrasing the other person’s words to make sure you’re understanding correctly.

Technique #3: Innovation

This technique allows you to create new, unexpected ideas and solutions to a conflict or problem without judgments or biases holding you back. It’s about generating as many new ideas as possible without evaluating them at all. Innovation works best when you’re in a situation where the old method of doing things is no longer effective and you need a new tactic.

(Shortform note: In Getting Things Done, David Allen explains that, in addition to avoiding judgment, you should refrain from trying to organize your or your team’s ideas as they come up, letting them arise organically and only worrying about organization after the brainstorming phase is over. Organizing takes mental energy that would be better used on creativity. He also recommends writing your ideas down rather than trying to keep track of them in your head so you can free up mental energy and space for even more innovation.)

Withholding judgment can be difficult because our Judge wants to evaluate each idea as it comes to us. In a group setting, passing judgment makes people feel more self-conscious about their ideas and keeps them from suggesting things that are unique or outside the box. The same applies to your personal idea-generating process. Evaluating ideas as they come to us allows our Saboteurs to hold us back from truly great ideas because they’ll often decide an idea is too impractical, too difficult, or otherwise not worth considering. We remain fixed in our previous assumptions and ways of doing things and can’t come up with novel solutions.

To use innovation to overcome your Saboteurs, Chamine recommends that you follow each new idea that you or someone else generates with a “Yes…and…” statement. After you or someone else expresses an idea, say “Yes, here’s what I love about this idea…” and then you share your next idea. This encourages you (and your team if applicable) to acknowledge and show appreciation for each idea before moving on to the next, and it blocks out the negative feedback that would accompany sentences starting with “No” or “But.”

How to Brainstorm Effectively

Judging ideas as they come can make us susceptible to cognitive biases such as the familiarity bias, which makes us view ideas more favorably if they’re similar to ideas we’re already familiar with. This closes us off to more innovative ideas that could greatly improve our current methods.

One reason brainstorming in groups isn’t always productive is that doing so often results in convergent thinking, which is when people’s ideas influence each other so that, when one idea is put forth, other ideas that follow are likely to be similar to that first idea. Brainstorming by yourself results in more divergent thinking, which leads to a wider variety of ideas.

Instead of a traditional, in-person brainstorming session, some experts recommend virtual brainstorming, in which members of a group brainstorm individually and then anonymously add their ideas to a shared collaboration tool like Google Docs. Once all the suggestions have been gathered, team members can comment (also anonymously) on each other’s ideas, and they can be refined from there. This method could be combined with Chamine’s “Yes… and…” technique so that each comment not only addresses the positive aspects of the idea in question but also suggests a new direction or a separate but related idea.

Technique #4: Navigation

The navigation technique helps you choose your next steps when there are many options available and you’re not sure which is best. You’ll use this technique to evaluate your different options and decide—based on your personal values or the values of your team—which option is best. These values become your navigation tool, and the more you use this tool, the stronger your values will become, and the more effectively you can use them to guide your actions.

To navigate effectively, you have to be in touch with your personal values, which can be difficult when your Saboteurs try to add false values. For example, the Hyper-rational Saboteur may try to push you toward paths that look better on a résumé but aren’t emotionally fulfilling. The Stickler may try to push you toward the path that leaves the least room for error even when those errors could be beneficial.

To take advantage of this technique, Chamine recommends that you imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back on this moment and ask yourself what you’ll wish you had done. This helps you shed your temporary concerns or superficial values and think about what truly matters to you. This way you can see what decisions work best in the moment, which will help you avoid regret in the future.

Finding Your Values

In Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins explains that understanding our values can be difficult because many of them developed without our conscious knowledge. Many came from social conditioning from parents, teachers, or peers, so a lot of your current values relate more to behaviors that you were rewarded for than principles that are personally important to you. This opens the door for your Saboteurs to influence your values by tying them to other people’s perceptions of you.

Robbins explains that there are two types of values: ends, or values that relate to a desired future outcome, and means, or values that relate to methods of achieving a desired outcome. He emphasizes that you should be aware of the differences between these two and avoid focusing exclusively on means because you’ll risk losing sight of what you ultimately want to achieve.

For example, if the end value you want to achieve is to be self-confident, you may decide to pursue this through the means of exercise, focusing on the value of physical health. However, if you become overly fixated on the belief that you need to change your physical appearance, you may actually damage your self-confidence. Chamine’s exercise of imagining your future self looking back on you in the present moment can help you align your ends values with your means values.

Technique #5: Execution

This technique allows you to take action without interference from the Saboteurs. It’s the tactic you should use once you’ve clearly identified the path you should take. It allows you to do what’s right calmly and without emotional attachment to the outcome.

All of the Saboteurs try to interfere with your execution skills. They use their hang-ups to cause you to waste your time and energy, limit your options, and lose track of what’s best for you.

To use your execution skills, Chamine recommends anticipating the ways your Saboteurs will try to interfere with your action in advance. For example, your Avoider might tell you the new sales technique you’ve developed is too confrontational, or your Stickler might tell you your household’s new chore wheel technique will fail because your roommates won’t do a good enough job cleaning. Once you’ve thought through the different lies your Saboteurs might tell you to keep you from taking action, it will be easier to confront and dismantle those lies when they come up later.

(Shortform note: In The Oz Principle, Roger Connors, Tom Smith, and Craig Hickman explain that taking action and executing a plan requires commitment and accountability, and they offer some tips for how to stay on track with your plan. They recommend that you keep track of your results, which will also help you measure your progress as you go. They also recommend that you stay vigilant and don’t let momentary successes keep you from moving forward with your plan—staying aware of your inner cheerleader and not letting it take too much control (which is the inverse of Chamine’s advice to be aware of your Saboteurs). Additionally, they suggest that you get comfortable with the feeling of risk, as this will help you bounce back and learn from failures and mistakes.)

PQ: Positive Intelligence Quotient

Your overall ability to keep your Sage in charge and your Saboteurs at bay makes up your Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ). Chamine rates PQ based on percentages, with 100% meaning your Sage is always in control and your brain is always working for you, while 1% would mean your brain is always working against you. Even though a score of 51% would mean your brain is working for you the majority of the time, Chamine has found that a score below 75% still means that the overall impact of your Saboteurs outweighs the impact of the Sage, suggesting that the negative impact of your Saboteurs is three times stronger than the positive impact of your Sage. He says that only 20% of people have a PQ of 75% or more.

(Shortform note: The reason the Saboteurs’ influence so heavily outweighs the Sage’s may be the result of humans’ negativity bias. Like the Saboteurs, this bias benefits us when we need to identify real threats, but it becomes harmful when it leads us to ruminate on everyday stressors. Since it’s not possible to eliminate stressors in our lives, overcoming the effects of the negativity bias requires consciously focusing on and more thoroughly processing positive things so they have a greater impact on our minds than the negative.)

Understanding your Saboteurs is the first step to increasing your PQ, and consciously employing your Sage’s powers is the second step. Chamine offers some exercises to strengthen your PQ brain to make this process easier.

A PQ Exercise

Remember, your Saboteurs exist in your survival brain and your Sage exists in the more advanced part of the brain that helps you thrive. Therefore, Chamine recommends that you use an attentional exercise to shift your thinking from the survival brain to the advanced part of the brain. The more you do this exercise, the more easily you’ll be able to shift your brain into the Sage state because your brain will form and strengthen new neural pathways to facilitate this shift. This will make your Sage stronger, improving its ability to combat your Saboteurs and enabling you to improve your overall thinking and every aspect of your life. Chamine designed these exercises to fit into your schedule so you don’t have to set aside extra time to do them.

To do this exercise, you’ll shift your attention away from your brain and onto your physical senses for at least 10 seconds at a time. For example, you may focus your attention on what you see in front of you, on the ambient sounds around you, or on the sensations of your clothes on your body. Whatever sense you choose, allow the sensory experience to fully occupy you and shut out the noise in your brain. Doing this for ten seconds—or approximately three breaths—counts as one repetition of a PQ brain exercise. Chamine recommends doing 100 repetitions per day.

You can do this exercise when you’re doing any activity, whether it’s focusing deeply on the feeling and taste of your food as you eat it, tuning in to the feeling of your muscles straining while you exercise, or immersing your brain in the physical sensation of hugging a loved one. In fact, you may find that you already do such attentional work during activities like showering, which requires little thought and involves a lot of physical stimuli. This may explain why people find themselves having more sudden insights while showering.

In order to establish this exercise as a routine and make it easier to remember to do, Chamine recommends doing a few reps every time you go to the bathroom, since that’s something you do several times per day. He also recommends doing a few reps any time you notice one of your Saboteurs trying to derail you, which is also likely to happen several times per day. If you do this consistently for a few weeks, the exercise will become habit.

PQ: A Mindfulness Practice

The brain’s ability to change its structure in response to stimuli is called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity allows you to turn a behavior into a habit—and it’s also what allows you to learn how to shift into your Sage state more easily. The attentional exercise Chamine describes is a type of mindfulness, and research shows that practicing mindfulness can improve neuroplasticity. It can also improve mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

However, research suggests that conditions like depression can interfere with your brain’s neuroplasticity, making it harder to change. In cases where you’re trying to improve such conditions, it can be beneficial to pair your mindfulness practice with medication, as research suggests that certain antidepressants and other drugs can improve neuroplasticity.

Beyond increasing your PQ, other benefits of mindfulness include improved sleep, reduced blood pressure, improved memory, and better chronic pain management.

In addition to Chamine’s exercises, there are many ways to practice mindfulness. Some of these include spending more time focusing on your senses—like focusing on the taste of your food throughout your entire meal rather than just 10 seconds at a time. You can also use techniques such as body scan meditation, which involves paying close attention to each part of your body as you mentally scan it from top to bottom or bottom to top. You can also use kid-friendly activities like a sensory scavenger hunt—finding one thing in your environment that appeals to each sense—to teach children how to be mindful.