Praise for POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Positive Intelligence has had a lasting and transformative impact on me and others in my
organization. It is a powerful framework for bringing out the best in everyone and
quieting the worst. When you increase someones PQ, they will not only perform much
better but also feel a whole lot more personal fulfillment, and less stress, along the way.
Positive Intelligence ranks in the top three most influential business books I have ever
read. If I could give only one book to the thousands of team members in my organization
to enhance their performance, it would be this book.
Lisa Stevens, Region President, Wells Fargo Bank
Positive Intelligence can change your life and transform your business. A real gamechanger.
James D. White, Chairman, President, and CEO, Jamba Juice
Ive worked closely with Shirzad and experienced him walking the PQ walk. What
gives this book its power is his authentic sharing of how PQ principles transformed him
as a leader and a human being.
Experienced leaders know that most change initiatives fizzle because of our mental
Saboteurs. Shirzad gives us the tools to conquer these Saboteurs and create positive
change that lasts. This is a must-read for any individual or team serious about unleashing
peak performance.
Dean Morton, former COO, Hewlett-Packard (HP)
Developing a personal leadership model is one of the most practical, energy-saving, and
stress-reducing things that anyone can do for themselves. Positive Intelligence makes that
job easier by focusing on mastering the two most critical voices in everyones heads:
Saboteur and Sage. The best news is that leaders at every level can use its approach to
get, and stay, on a more winning trajectory. This is such a usable, lively, and
compelling book.
Douglas R. Conant, former CEO, Campbell Soup Company, and New York
Times bestselling author
This is a very innovative and important application of original psychological thinking to

the business field. The PQ model provides a solid basis for bringing meaning and
significant change to ones life. The strategies for identifying and dealing with Saboteur
and Sage while harnessing untapped powers of the mind have proved highly effective in
the business setting, and might well be applied elsewhere. If you want to create major
positive change in yourself, your team, or loved ones, read this book.
Crittenden E. Brookes, MD, PhD, Stanford University, and Distinguished Life
Fellow, American Psychiatric Association
I have worked with Shirzad personally and seen him work with many other Presidents
and CEOs. His impact is often game-changing for a team and life-changing for the
individuals. When a coach raises a teams PQ, it can quickly shift every player from
good to extraordinary. The players skills are the same, but he has learned to command
those voices in his head to his advantage. That makes all the difference in performance.
Positive Intelligence is a must-have for anyone who leads or coaches a team.
Jed York, President and CEO, San Francisco 49ers
Shirzad delivers a simple, doable, groundbreaking set of exercises that can help you
develop your performance muscles, increase your PQ score, and gain access to
previously untapped mental resources. Working out was never so rewarding or so much
fun! So if youre ready to get even better, get this booktoday.
Marshall Goldsmith, New York Times bestselling author, Mojo and What Got
You Here Wont Get You There
Positive Intelligence is an insightful book that identifies those internal voices (Saboteurs)
that undermine self-confidence and prevent us from achieving our potential. In a clear
and practical way, Chamine describes the actions that quiet those voices to allow us to
listen to our internal Sage. This is an excellent book for anybody who seeks to increase
their personal satisfaction, interpersonal effectiveness, and performance.
David L. Bradford, PhD, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, Graduate School of Business,
Stanford University. Co-author of the bestselling books Power up and Influence
Without Authority
Working with Shirzad has had a profound impact on me. The tools and techniques to
raise PQ are simple, concrete and pragmatic, yet incredibly effective. They help me
remain focused on what truly matters and grounded amidst the swirl of daily life.
The PQ model is a brilliant breakthrough as it defines, measures, and improves your
awareness of your own performance and happiness. It also helps solve the mystery of

why so many smart people still fail to be successful. This book is a gift. Make sure you
share it.
Jim Lanzone, President, CBS Interactive (CBS Corporation)

Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the
individual reader. The discussion or mention of any ideas, procedures, activities, products and
suggestions in this book is not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician, therapist, or
other qualified professional and obtaining competent medical or professional advice and care as to any
condition, situation, activity, procedure or suggestion that might affect your health or well-being.
Each individual reader must assume responsibility for his or her own actions, safety and health. In
short, this book and its contents are provided as-is with no representation or warranty of any kind.
Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss, injury or damage
resulting from the readers use, application, implementation or imitation of any information or
suggestion in this book.
While the examples and case studies in this book are drawn from real client engagements, the
names and identifying details of persons mentioned have been changed or omitted to protect their
privacy.
Positive Intelligence and PQ are service marks of Shirzad Chamine.
Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press
Austin, TX
www.gbgpress.com
Copyright 2012 Shirzad Chamine
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the
copyright holder.
Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
For ordering information or special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Greenleaf Book
Group LLC at PO Box 91869, Austin, TX 78709, 512.891.6100.
Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group LLC
LCCN: 2011942525

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60832-291-6

Ebook Edition

To my daughter Teesa
To my son Kian
You have taught me more
than I could ever teach you.
On your worthy quest
for the great rivers elusive source,
may you find a lake so pure,
with waters so still,
that you can see, truly see,
this magnificent being, you.
On your winding way,
when life throws you down,
may you, with great delight,
search inside the painted dust
for clues, unfolding
the grand mystery of you.
And when you get lost,
in the stormy moonless night,
may you trust, deeply trust,
as sage, ageless guide,
the true
beautiful
you.

CONTENTS

Introduction
PART I: WHAT IS POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND PQSM?
Chapter 1: Positive Intelligence and PQ
Chapter 2: The Three Strategies to Improve PQ
PART II: FIRST STRATEGY: WEAKEN YOUR SABOTEURS
Chapter 3: Self-Assessment of the Ten Saboteurs
Chapter 4: Judge, the Master Saboteur
PART III: SECOND STRATEGY: STRENGTHEN YOUR SAGE
Chapter 5: The Sage Perspective
Chapter 6: The Five Sage Powers
PART IV: THIRD STRATEGY: BUILD YOUR PQ BRAIN MUSCLES
Chapter 7: PQ Brain Fitness Techniques
PART V: HOW TO MEASURE YOUR PROGRESS
Chapter 8: PQ Score and PQ Vortex
PART VI: APPLICATIONS
Chapter 9: Work and Life Applications
Chapter 10: Case Study: Leading Self and Team
Chapter 11: Case Study: Deepening Relationships Through Conflict
Chapter 12: Case Study: Selling, Motivating, and Persuading
Chapter 13: Conclusion: The Magnificent You!
Appendix: PQ Brain Fundamentals
Acknowledgments
Endnotes

INTRODUCTION

I was twelve when I read an illustrated book about Sisyphus, the king who was being punished after
falling from grace. For weeks I couldnt get the image out of my mind. This poor former king
painstakingly pushing a huge boulder up a steep hill over and over again, only to see his efforts
unravel right before making it to the top. What torture, I thought! I felt burdened and depressed just
thinking about it.
It took me years of observing myself and others to realize that in many aspects of our lives we dont
fare much better than Sisyphus. Many of our efforts at improving our success or happiness unravel
just as surely as the giant boulder rolling back to the bottom of the hill.
Think about it. Why are most New Years resolutions abandoned year after year? Why do most
dieters succumb to yo-yo dieting? Why does that nagging and anxious voice in our head keep
returning to torture us when we are trying to sleep? Why is our increased happiness so fleeting after
we achieve what we thought would bring lasting happiness? Why do new leadership skills acquired in
workshops soon give way to old habits? Why do expensive team-building retreats only result in
temporary blips in team cohesion and performance?
We are indeed being tortured and punished, just as Sisyphus was. But heres the catch! The torture
is self-inflicted. The reason so many of our attempts at improving our success or happiness fizzle is
that we sabotage ourselves. More precisely, our own minds sabotage us.
Your mind is your best friend. But it is also your worst enemy. Undetected Saboteurs in your
mind cause most of your setbacks without your full awareness. The consequences are huge. Only 20
percent of individuals and teams achieve their true potential. The rest of us waste a lot of our time and
vital energy playing Sisyphus.
With Positive Intelligence you can both measure and significantly improve the percentage of time
that your mind is serving you rather than sabotaging you. This will permanently shift the balance of
power inside your mind so you can achieve more of your vastly untapped potentialand help others
do the same.
Positive Intelligence is ultimately about action and results. Its tools and techniques are a synthesis
of the best practices in neuroscience, organizational science, positive psychology, and Co-Active
coaching. I have honed these tools over many years, first through my own experience as CEO of two
companies, and then through coaching hundreds of other CEOs, their senior executive teams, and,
sometimes, their families. These tools had to pack a strong punch in a short time in order to fit busy
and demanding liveswith some taking as little as 10 seconds to produce results.
I encourage you to have high expectations for what you can get out of this book. All of the stories in
this book, while simplified for greater brevity and clarity, are based on actual experiences of my
clients. If the experiences of those who have gone before you are any indication, the material in this
book can change your life and be a game-changer for your team or organization. Please dont settle for
anything less.

PART I
WHAT IS POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND PQ?

CHAPTER 1
POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND PQ

Frank, the CEO of a publicly traded company, entered the greatest despair of his illustrious
professional career when his companys stock lost two-thirds of its value during the recession of 2008.
He was so devastated by his own failure that he broke down crying when his ten-year-old daughter
asked why he looked so sad. He could not stop blaming himself for the companys downward spiral,
and he often woke up in the middle of the night with his mind racing for a way to get the company
back on track.
Franks senior management team was also experiencing high stress levels, feeling guilt, and
pointing fingers over what had gone wrong. They worried about the impact on themselves, on the
thousands of others working for them, and on their families. They had been working impossibly long
hours to turn things around, without much success. Thats when Frank reached out to me for help.
When I met Frank, I suggested that his best bet for a sustainable turnaround of his company was to
raise the Positive Intelligence levels of himself and his team. Using the principles of Positive
Intelligence, we devised a core question to reframe and redirect the teams perspective and redirect its
efforts: 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?
Franks senior leadership team was skeptical when he posed the question during one of their weekly
team meetings. But their skepticism subsided and their enthusiasm grew gradually as Frank opened
each subsequent weekly team meeting with that same question. By contemplating the question and
utilizing many tools of Positive Intelligence, they were able to shift their entire mind-set from
anxiety, disappointment, guilt, and blame to curiosity, creativity, excitement, and resolute action. I
predicted that within a year they would discover how they could turn their collective failure into a
great opportunity. It took them less than six months.
Over the next year and a half, the company consolidated and streamlined its product offerings. It
doubled down on its bet on the original value proposition of the company, which had been lost over
years of chasing tempting but unrelated growth opportunities. During this time, the companys stock
slowly recovered its value. Each month Frank and his team became more convinced that their new
company would be far more dominant and successful than it had been in its prime.
When I checked in with Frank recently, he reported that he valued his increased sense of peace and
happiness even more highly than his impressive professional and financial gains. This is a typical
reaction, as increased Positive Intelligence impacts both. What Frank found most fascinating was that
he began having more success once he finally stopped believing that his happiness depended on his
success.

WHAT ARE POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND PQ?

As Ive already suggested, your mind is your best friend, but it is also your worst enemy. Positive
Intelligence measures the relative strength of these two modes of your mind. High Positive
Intelligence means your mind acts as your friend far more than as your enemy. Low Positive
Intelligence is the reverse. Positive Intelligence is therefore an indication of the control you have over
your own mind and how well your mind acts in your best interest. It should be relatively easy to see
how your level of Positive Intelligence determines how much of your true potential you actually
achieve.
To illustrate, when your mind tells you that you should do your very best to prepare for tomorrows
important meeting, it is acting as your friend. When it wakes you up at 3:00 a.m. anxious about the
meeting and racing in a loop for the hundredth time about the many consequences of failing, it is
acting as your enemy; it is simply generating anxiety and suffering without any redeeming value. No
friend would do that.
PQ stands for Positive Intelligence Quotient. Your PQ is your Positive Intelligence score, expressed
as a percentage, ranging from 0 to 100. In effect, your PQ is the percentage of time your mind is
acting as your friend rather than as your enemy; or, in other words, it is the percentage of time your
mind is serving you versus sabotaging you. For example, a PQ of 75 means that your mind is serving
you about 75 percent of the time and is sabotaging you about 25 percent of the time. We dont count
the periods of time when your mind is in neutral territory.
In chapter 8, I will show you how PQ is measured for both individuals and teams. I will also share
compelling research indicating that the PQ score of 75 is a critical tipping point. Above it, you are
generally being uplifted by the internal dynamics of the mind, and below it you are constantly being
dragged down by those dynamics. Eighty percent of individuals and teams score below this critical PQ
tipping point. And that is why 80 percent of individuals and teams fall far short of achieving their true
potential for success and happiness. You can measure your own PQ, or your teams, by visiting
www.PositiveIntelligence.com.

RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Current breakthrough research in neuroscience, organizational science, and positive psychology
validates the principles of Positive Intelligence and the relationship between PQ and both performance
and happiness. As mentioned, PQ measures the percentage of time that your brain is working
positively (serving you) versus negatively (sabotaging you). Though different researchers have used
different methods to track positivity and calculate positive-to-negative ratios, the results have been
remarkably consistent. For consistency and simplicity, I have translated various researchers findings
into their PQ-equivalent interpretations:
An analysis of more than two hundred different scientific studies, which collectively tested
more than 275,000 people, concluded that higher PQ leads to higher salary and greater success
in the arenas of work, marriage, health, sociability, friendship, and creativity.1
Salespeople with higher PQ sell 37 percent more than their lower-PQ counterparts.2
Negotiators with higher PQ are more likely to gain concessions, close deals, and forge
important future business relationships as part of the contracts they negotiate.3
Higher-PQ workers take fewer sick days and are less likely to become burned out or quit.4
Doctors who have shifted to a higher PQ make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster.5
Students who have shifted to a higher PQ perform significantly better on math tests.6
Higher-PQ CEOs are more likely to lead happy teams who report their work climate to be
conducive to high performance.7
Project teams with higher-PQ managers perform 31 percent better on average when other
factors are held equal.8
Managers with higher PQ are more accurate and careful in making decisions, and they reduce
the effort needed to get their work done.9
A comparison of sixty teams showed that a teams PQ was the greatest predictor of its
achievement.10
In the U.S. Navy, the squadrons led by higher-PQ commanders received far more annual prizes
for efficiency and preparedness. Squadrons led by low-PQ commanders ranked lowest in
performance.11
Groundbreaking research in psychology and neuroscience upends the common assumption that we
need to work hard so we can succeed so we can then be happy. In reality, increasing your PQ results in
greater happiness and performance, leading to greater success. Success without happiness is possible
with low PQ. But the only path to greater success with lasting happiness is through high PQ.
Besides impacting both performance and happiness, higher PQ can also literally impact your health
and longevity:
Research has shown that higher PQ results in enhanced immune system functioning, lower
levels of stress-related hormones, lower blood pressure, less pain, fewer colds, better sleep,
and a smaller likelihood of having hypertension, diabetes, or strokes.12
Catholic nuns whose personal journals in their early twenties showed higher PQ lived nearly ten
years longer than the other nuns in their group. Higher PQ can literally help you live longer.13
We could spend an entire book splicing and dicing research data on this topic. As a matter of fact,

many excellent books already do. Several books by pioneering scientists Barbara Fredrickson, Martin
Seligman, Shawn Achor, and Tal Ben-Shahar provide insightful analysis of the rigorous academic
research in this field in recent years.14 In this book, Ill focus on giving you specific tools to actually
sharpen your Positive Intelligence and raise your PQ score in the midst of your busy work and life.

HOW POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE AND PQ WERE BORN

They say necessity is the mother of all invention, and that was definitely true in the birth of the
Positive Intelligence framework. I originally developed this framework in an attempt to achieve both
greater success and greater peace and happiness in my own life. All of the tools and techniques of
Positive Intelligence were things that I tried out on myself first, long before realizing that countless
others could benefit from them as well.
I had a tough childhood. I grew up in povertya sensitive kid in an abusive environment. Shortly
after I was born, my fathers fledging grocery store went belly up and my father went into hiding to
avoid his loan-shark creditors, who were hounding us every day. My family was so superstitious that
they decided I had brought bad luck to my fathers business. Since it was too late to get rid of me, they
decided to at least change my name. My family never again called me by my real name: Shirzad. That
event proved to be an apt omen for most of my childhood experiences. Not having many of my
physical or emotional needs met, I developed a protective cocoon of depression. Bitter resentment and
anger, at myself and at the world, followed me well into my adult years.
I had high ambitions, and as I got older I realized that I needed to figure out a way to stop feeling
miserable, angry, and anxious all the time so that I could focus on making something of myself.
Initially, my search took me to a study of the inner workings of the mind. A summa cum laude degree
in psychology and a year of PhD studies in neurobiology proved equally disappointing in providing
answers. I stopped asking deeper questions at that point. I decided instead to find happiness in
professional achievements, like so many others seemed to be doing.
I spent the next four years getting a masters degree in electrical engineering at an Ivy League
school and working as a systems engineer at a preeminent telecommunications research laboratory. I
studied and worked hard and earned top honors, which I thought would bring happiness. It didnt, so I
decided an MBA would accelerate my progress.
The life-changing turning point that led to my eventual development of the Positive Intelligence
framework came when I was sitting in a circle with eleven fellow students in a Stanford MBA class
called Interpersonal Dynamics.15 Our guideline for this group interaction was to be fully authentic and
reveal everything we were really feeling and thinking in the moment. At some point, one of my
classmates turned to me with some trepidation and said that he had often felt judged by me and was
bothered by that. I listened and thanked him politely for his helpful feedback, but in the back of my
mind I was thinking, Well, of course you feel judged by me, you idiot! You are the biggest loser in this
group. How else could I be thinking of you?
The group was about to move its attention away from me when another person turned to me and
said something very similar. Again, I nodded and thanked her politely, while thinking that she was of
course the second-biggest loser in the group. Then came a third and a fourth person, repeating the
same thing. By now, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable and a little angry. But I was still
discounting the feedback. After all, it was coming from a bunch of losers, I thought.
Then the person sitting immediately to my left, whom I admired greatly, got up in disgust and
moved to the opposite side of the circle. It turns out that he had seen through my insincerity in
acknowledging the feedback. He said he was so frustrated by my unwillingness to truly accept the
feedback about my judgments that he couldnt even bear to sit next to me anymore. He said that he too
had felt judged by me, albeit positively. He was upset because he felt I placed him on a pedestal and
could never see him for who he really was.
That passionate and honest expression of feelings finally broke through the protective shell of my
inner Judge. In an instant I recognized that all my life I had seen everything through the lens of this

Judge, categorized everything as good or bad, and placed everything in one box or the other. I
instantly realized that this was a protective mechanism I began using during my childhood to make
life seem more predictable and controllable. That day, sitting in a circle with eleven classmates, I
discovered the hugely destructive power of this Judge Saboteur that had been hiding in my head
and that I had never even known existed.
That discovery changed everything. It revived my search for the mechanisms of the mind that lead
to happiness or unhappiness, success or failure. What I eventually focused on were two related
dynamics:
1. Our minds are our own worst enemies; the mind harbors characters that actively sabotage our
happiness and success. These Saboteurs can easily be identified and weakened.
2. The muscles of the brain that give us access to our greatest wisdom and insights have
remained weak from years of not being exercised. These brain muscles can easily be built up to
give us much greater access to our deeper wisdom and untapped mental powers.
Exercises that focus on one or both of these dynamics can dramatically improve ones PQ in a
relatively short period of time. The result is dramatic improvement in performance and happiness, in
both work and personal life.

PQ IN ACTION
I have been the chairman and CEO of the Coaches Training Institute (CTI). We are the largest coachtraining organization in the world. We have trained thousands of coaches around the globe, leaders
and managers in most of the Fortune 500 companies, and faculty at both Stanford and Yale business
schools. I have personally coached hundreds of CEOs, often their executive teams, and sometimes
their partners or families.
Many of the CEOs and senior executives whom I have coached over the years have been type-A
personalities uninterested and/or uncomfortable with deep psychological exploration. Taking this into
consideration, the Positive Intelligence tools and techniques were designed to generate results without
needing to first develop in-depth psychological awareness. These techniques take a direct approach
that literally builds new neural pathways in your brain, pathways that increase your Positive
Intelligence. Greater insight automatically accompanies the building of these pathways, which equate
to building new brain muscles.
This book is organized into six parts. Part I, which you are halfway through, provides a general
overview of the PQ framework that continues in the next chapter. There are three different strategies
for increasing PQ, discussed in turn in parts II, III, and IV. In part V, you will learn how PQ is
measured for both individuals and teams so that you can keep track of your progress. Part VI discusses
applications of PQ to many work and life challenges, including three in-depth case studies. At the end
of each chapter, an Inquiry will prompt you to connect the dots between what you are reading and your
own work and life.
Your potential is determined by many factors, including your cognitive intelligence (IQ), your
emotional intelligence (EQ), and your skills, knowledge, experience, and social network. But it is your
Positive Intelligence (PQ) that determines what percentage of your vast potential you actually achieve.
By raising my PQ, I have been able to convert the considerable difficulties and challenges of my
own life into gifts and opportunities for greater success, happiness, and peace of mind. I wrote this
book with the belief that you can absolutely learn to do the same.

Inquiry

If you could significantly improve one important thing, personally or professionally, as a result
of reading this book, what would it be? Keep that goal in mind as you read this book.

CHAPTER 2
THE THREE STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE PQ

When I lecture at Stanford University on the subject of creating sustainable change, I invite the
participating executives to make a bet. I tell them about my hypothetical neighbor who has been
undertaking a series of initiatives to improve both success and happiness, for himself and others. He
made a New Years resolution to lose some weight and keep it off. He took his team on an expensive
team-building retreat to help them become more cohesive and effective. He went to a two-day
workshop to improve his own emotional intelligence and leadership competencies. He did all of this a
year ago, I tell the participants. Now they need to bet all of their money on whether they believe the
changes that my neighbor made were mostly sustained or fizzled away.
How would you bet your money? Remarkably, about 90 percent of the Stanford participants bet that
the changes primarily fizzled. I tell the others that they would have lost their shirts on their optimistic
bet: the odds that significant improvements in either performance or happiness are sustained are only
1 in 5.16
Research on happiness confirms that people generally fall back to what social scientists call their
baseline happiness levels shortly after events or accomplishments that significantly raise their
happiness. This includes winners of large lotteries.17
Many executives complain about the same phenomenon regarding their attempts to improve
individual or team performance through coaching, tough performance-evaluation feedback, conflict
resolution and intervention, skill-building workshops, and team-building retreats. People prove
resistant to change, even when they seem to think they want it.
Think about your own life. How lasting have your own increases in happiness been once you
attained the things that you were certain would make you happier? Think about the many books you
have read and the many trainings you have attended in hopes of increasing your own work
performance or happiness. What percentage of those improvements lasted? Chances are, your own
experience confirms that initial improvements typically fizzle or at least erode significantly. The
question is, why?
The key to the answer, as I previously suggested, is one word: sabotage. Unless you tackle and
weaken your own internal enemieswell call them the Saboteursthey will do their best to rob you
of any improvements you make. Ignoring your Saboteurs is analogous to planting a beautiful new
garden while leaving voracious snails free to roam. This is where Positive Intelligence can help.
Positive Intelligence takes you to the frontlines of the unceasing battle raging in your mind. On one
side of this battlefield are the invisible Saboteurs, who wreck any attempt at increasing either your
happiness or your performance. On the other side is your Sage, who has access to your wisdom,
insights, and often untapped mental powers. Your Saboteurs and your Sage are literally fueled by
different regions of your physical brain and are strengthened when you activate those regions. Thus
your internal war between your Saboteurs and your Sage is tied to a war for domination between the
different parts of your brain. The strength of your Saboteurs compared to the strength of your Sage in
turn determines your PQ level and how much of your true potential you actually achieve.

MEETING THE SABOTEURS

The Saboteurs are the internal enemies. They are a set of automatic and habitual mind patterns, each
with its own voice, beliefs, and assumptions that work against your best interest.
Saboteurs are a universal phenomenon. The question is not whether you have them, but which ones
you have, and how strong they are. They are universalspanning cultures, genders, and age groups
because they are connected to the functions of the brain that are focused on survival. We each develop
Saboteurs early in childhood in order to survive the perceived threats of life, both physical and
emotional. By the time we are adults, these Saboteurs are no longer needed, but they have become
invisible inhabitants of our minds. We often dont even know that they exist.
Any World War II history buff knows that the most powerful and devastating saboteurs were those
who had ingratiated themselves and been accepted into the inner circle of the opposing side as friends
and allies. The same holds true for your internal Saboteurs. The worst damage is caused by those who
have convinced you through their lies that they are working for you rather than against you. They have
been accepted and trusted into your inner circle and you no longer see them as intruders.
Here is a brief description of the ten Saboteurs, intended to give you a sense of how each one works.
For now, dont worry about trying to remember all of them or assessing which ones are your top
Saboteurs. Youll learn how to identify your top Saboteurs in later chapters.

Judge
The Judge is the master Saboteur, the one everyone suffers from. It compels you to constantly find
faults with yourself, others, and your conditions and circumstances. It generates much of your anxiety,
stress, anger, disappointment, shame, and guilt. Its self-justifying lie is that without it, you or others
would turn into lazy and unambitious beings who would not achieve much. Its voice is therefore often
mistaken as a tough-love voice of reason rather than the destructive Saboteur it actually is.

Stickler
The Stickler is the need for perfection, order, and organization taken too far. It makes you and others
around you anxious and uptight. It saps your own or others energy on extra measures of perfection
that are not necessary. It also causes you to live in constant frustration with yourself and others over
things not being perfect enough. Its lie is that perfectionism is always good and that you dont pay a
huge price for it.

Pleaser
The Pleaser compels you to try to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or
flattering others constantly. It causes you to lose sight of your own needs and become resentful of
others as a result. It also encourages others to become overly dependent on you. Its lie is that you are
pleasing others because it is a good thing to do, denying that you are really trying to win affection and
acceptance indirectly.

Hyper-Achiever
The Hyper-Achiever makes you dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect
and self-validation. It keeps you focused mainly on external success rather than on internal criteria for
happiness. It often leads to unsustainable workaholic tendencies and causes you to fall out of touch
with deeper emotional and relationship needs. Its lie is that your self-acceptance should be conditional
on performance and external validation.

Victim
The Victim wants you to feel emotional and temperamental as a way of gaining attention and
affection. It results in an extreme focus on internal feelings, particularly painful ones, and can often
result in a martyr streak. The consequences are that you waste your mental and emotional energy, and
others feel frustrated, helpless, or guilty that they can never make you happy for long. The Victims
lie is that assuming the victim or martyr persona is the best way to attract caring and attention for
yourself.

Hyper-Rational
The Hyper-Rational involves an intense and exclusive focus on the rational processing of everything,
including relationships. It causes you to be impatient with peoples emotions and regard emotions as
unworthy of much time or consideration. When under the influence of the Hyper-Rational, you can be
perceived as cold, distant, or intellectually arrogant. It limits your depth and flexibility in
relationships at work or in your personal life and intimidates less analytically minded people. Its lie is
that the rational mind is the most important and helpful form of intelligence that you possess.

Hyper-Vigilant
The Hyper-Vigilant makes you feel intense and continuous anxiety about all the dangers surrounding
you and what could go wrong. It is constantly vigilant and can never rest. It results in a great deal of
ongoing stress that wears you and others down. Its lie is that the dangers around you are bigger than
they actually are and that nonstop vigilance is the best way to tackle them.

Restless
The Restless is constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or through perpetual
busyness. It doesnt allow you to feel much peace or contentment with your current activity. It gives
you a never-ending stream of distractions that make you lose your focus on the things and
relationships that truly matter. Other people have a difficult time keeping up with the person ruled by
The Restless and often feel distanced from him or her. Its lie is that by being so busy you are living
life fully, but it ignores the fact that in pursuit of a full life you miss out on your life as it is
happening.

Controller
The Controller runs on an anxiety-based need to take charge, control situations, and bend peoples
actions to ones own will. It generates high anxiety and impatience when that is not possible. In the
Controllers worldview, you are either in control or out of control. While the Controller allows you to
get short-term results, in the long run it generates resentment in others and prevents them from
exercising and developing their own fullest capabilities. Its lie is that you need the Controller to
generate the best results from the people around you.

Avoider
The Avoider focuses on the positive and the pleasant in an extreme way. It avoids difficult and
unpleasant tasks and conflicts. It leads you to the habits of procrastination and conflict avoidance. It
results in damaging eruptions in festering conflicts that have been sidestepped and causes delays in
getting things done. Its lie is that you are being positive, not avoiding your problems.

THE SAGE
If your Saboteurs represent your internal enemies, your Sage represents the deeper and wiser part of
you. It is the part that can rise above the fray and resist getting carried away by the drama and tension
of the moment or falling victim to the lies of the Saboteurs. Its perspective on any challenge you are
facing is that it is either already a gift and opportunity or could be actively turned into one. It has
access to five great powers of your mind and taps into those powers to meet any challenge. These
powers lie in regions of your brain that are different from the regions that fuel your Saboteurs.
Your Sages five great powers are (1) to Explore with great curiosity and an open mind; (2) to
Empathize with yourself and others and bring compassion and understanding to any situation; (3) to
Innovate and create new perspectives and outside-the-box solutions; (4) to Navigate and choose a path
that best aligns with your deeper underlying values and mission; and (5) to Activate and take decisive
action without the distress, interference, or distractions of the Saboteurs.
In subsequent chapters I will show that you have a great reservoir of these powers within you, which
often goes untapped. I will also show you how absolutely every challenge in work and life can be met
with the Sage, its perspective, and its five powers. If you use your Sage to overcome these challenges,
you will experience Sage feelings of curiosity, compassion, creativity, joy, peace, and grounded
decisiveness even in the midst of great crises. You will see for yourself that your Saboteurs are never
necessary to meet any challenge, despite the lies they have been telling you to justify their own
existence.

THREE STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE YOUR PQ

As I mentioned before, there is a direct connection between the different regions and functions of the
brain and whether you are in Saboteur or Sage mode. The Saboteurs are primarily fueled by regions of
your brain that were initially focused on your physical or emotional survival. We will call these
regions your Survivor Brain. The Sage is based on entirely different regions of the brain, which well
call your PQ Brain. This Saboteur-Sage brain link results in three separate but related strategies to
increase your PQ: (1) weaken your Saboteurs; (2) strengthen your Sage; and (3) strengthen your PQ
Brain muscles.

Strategy 1: Weaken Your Saboteurs

Weakening your Saboteurs involves identifying which thought and emotion patterns come from your
Saboteurs and seeing clearly that they dont serve you. Typically, these Saboteurs justify themselves
and pretend they are your friendseven worse they pretend they are you. In chapters 3 and 4, we will
blow their covers and expose their tricks to reduce their credibility and power over you. To weaken
your Saboteurs, all you need to do is to observe and label Saboteur thoughts or feelings when they
show up. For example, you might say to yourself, Oh, the Judge is back again, saying Im going to
fail or Theres the Controller feeling anxious again.

Strategy 2: Strengthen Your Sage

Strengthening your Sage involves shifting to the Sage perspective and accessing the five powers it

uses to meet every challenge. You will see for yourself that you do have this Sage inside of you, and
that it always offers you far superior ways to handle your challenges than the options the Saboteurs
offer. In chapters 5 and 6, you will learn the Sage perspective and fun power games that will help
you access and boost the Sages five powers whenever you need them.

Strategy 3: Strengthen Your PQ Brain Muscles

Strengthening your PQ Brain muscles involves understanding the difference between your PQ Brain
and your Survivor Brain. You will see how your PQ Brain muscles have remained underdeveloped
over the years while your Survivor Brain muscles have been on steroids. In chapter 7, you will learn
very simple, fun techniques that will quickly build up the strength of your PQ Brain muscles.
Each of these three strategies can be pursued independently of one another and result in increasing
your PQ. Even better, they actually reinforce and build on one another. For example, you will learn to
strengthen your PQ Brain muscles through many simple activities, including odd ones such as
wiggling your toes attentively or rubbing your fingers together attentively for ten seconds. At first
glance, these exercises might appear unrelated to your Sage and Saboteurs. However, Ill show you
that they help activate your PQ Brain, which in turn gives you greater access to your Sage perspective
and powers.
In addition, stimulating your PQ Brain weakens your Survivor Brain, which fuels your Saboteurs.
And every time you choose the Sage perspective, or observe and label your Saboteur thoughts or
feelings, you automatically activate and strengthen your PQ Brain.
Each of these three strategiesweakening your Saboteurs, strengthening your Sage, and
strengthening your PQ Brain musclescan be carried out by using techniques that take ten seconds or
less. They are designed to fit your busy work schedule and personal life. Different people gravitate to
different strategies, and you will discover for yourself which one you find most gratifying and
compelling. Once youve implemented your primary strategy, the other two will automatically follow.

DAVIDS STORY
David is one of those rare entrepreneurs who can begin a company and hold onto the helm well after
its reaches the $1 billion mark. Soon after his company went public, David found himself under
unprecedented stress. After years of consistently explosive and profitable growth, his team seemed to
be on its way to its first year of loss. The result would be devastating on his companys fledgling
stock. David needed to turn the tide around, and he needed to do it fast. He asked me to work with his
team.
After a quick PQ assessment, I told David that the fastest and most efficient way to dramatically
improve performance was to improve his own PQ and that of his team. His PQ had come out as 48,
and his teams PQ was 52. This meant they were either wasting much of their mental and emotional
energy or using it to sabotage themselves. They could probably increase their performance
incrementally by fine-tuning their strategy and tactics and upgrading their skills. But removing their
own self-sabotage and tapping into their Sage powers would have much more dramatic and lasting
effects.
David was at first puzzled by my suggestions. He and his team prided themselves on their use of
positive thinking techniques and assumed that this practice meant they already had high PQs. After
all, the companys performance before going public had been good. The question was, why were they
suddenly floundering? I suggested that the positive thinking techniques couldnt match the power of
the underlying Saboteurs that were running interference. It seemed that the Saboteurs had been
supercharged since the company had gone public, which makes sense: stress feeds and fuels
Saboteurs. In addition, running a public company was different from running a private company. The
team members Saboteurs were making it more difficult for them to change some of the outmoded
ways they were used to running the business.
Our first job was to focus on David, since the leaders PQ impacts the teams PQ significantly. I
suggested that we start to increase his PQ by exposing and weakening his master Saboteur, the Judge.
Davids first reaction was that he didnt have a strong Judge, as he was not a very judgmental
person. I explained that the Judge is often well disguised, and that we often dont realize when we are
judging. Most feelings of stress, anxiety, frustration, disappointment, regret, and guilt are the direct
results of judging yourself, others, situations, or outcomes. The great stress and unease David was
experiencing told me that he must have a strong Judge in his head that was pretending to be his friend.
To show the power of his Judge, we examined the thoughts that had caused David to toss and turn
sleeplessly at 3:00 a.m. the morning before. He wrote down twenty thoughts. I asked him to categorize
each as neutral, useful, or harmful. David decided that three of the thoughts were useful: remember to
set up a meeting with a vendor, talk to HR about an employees compensation package, and ask his
assistant to book a trip to a conference. I agreed with David that these were useful thoughts. Still, I
asked him what would have happened had these reminder thoughts not occurred to him at 3:00 a.m.,
interrupting his rest. He agreed that they would have probably occurred to him later that day and that
nothing would have been lost.
David rated five thoughts as neutral. They included remembering his high school graduation day,
his first trip to Africa, and his first winter in New York. We agreed to categorize those as neutral and
random, even though a psychoanalyst wouldve had a field day with them.
Next we examined what David had accurately but hesitantly categorized as harmful thoughts, such
as the possibility that the board would fire him if the companys performance didnt pick up. This had
led to a cascade of thoughts about what would then happen to his reputation, whether he could keep his
big house and expensive luxury cars, etc. Other anxiety-provoking thoughts included concern over

potentially losing a big client that appeared unhappy and worrying that an upcoming presentation to
investors would not go well. A few thoughts were about regrets. Why hadnt he reacted more quickly
to a change in market dynamics? Why had he hired the wrong business development guy and wasted
nine months before letting him go?
David said the reason he was hesitant to firmly categorize these thoughts as harmful was that they
kept him on his toes, pressuring him to work hard to turn things around. I asked him whether this was
the first time he was having these thoughts. He admitted that they were actually recurrent thoughts and
that hed had them tens or hundreds of times.
I told David it was okay if his mind reminded him of the importance of an upcoming meeting once.
He could use the reminder to prepare for the meeting. But there was no redeeming value in his Judge
repeatedly insisting on making him anxious at 3:00 a.m., when there was nothing he could do but toss
and turn. I then explained that this was also true of his pondering past mistakes. Going over a mistake
once as an attempt to learn from it and not repeat it was helpful. But to be badgered multiple times
was not useful. The results were lack of energy, little rest, and constant anxiety, stress,
disappointment, guilt, and regret. It was sabotage, pure and simple.
It slowly began to dawn on David that his Judge was not the friend it pretended to be. Given the
Judges role as the master Saboteur, we agreed to focus on Davids Judge initially and not distract
ourselves with any other Saboteur.
Ordinarily, this strategy of focusing on weakening the Judge would have been enough work for the
upcoming week. But David wanted to progress as fast as he could, so we discussed adding the second
strategy of building his PQ Brain muscles. We created a simple plan to connect these two strategies
and turn his persistent Judge into his own PQ Brain fitness trainer. Every time the Judge showed up,
David would use it as a reminder to activate his PQ Brain muscles and make them stronger. This
would only take ten seconds and could be done while he was in a meeting, driving, or exercising. The
beauty of this plan was that the Judge would now be working toward its own destruction; as the PQ
Brain strengthens, the Saboteurs weaken.
For example, if David had the thought, Whats wrong with you, David? Why did you screw that up?
he would say to himself, Oh, there goes the Judge again, and then activate his PQ Brain for ten
seconds. We also discussed a variety of ways for him to activate his PQ Brain. His favorite methods
were to take his next three breaths a little more deeply, wiggle his toes attentively and notice each of
them, and feel each of his fingertips by rubbing them against one another.
David was skeptical that such simple exercises could have the dramatic effects I claimed they
would. I explained that the saying no pain, no gain was one of the many self-fulfilling lies of his
Judge and that something doesnt have to be difficult to be effective. In addition to their significant
positive impact, the exercises were also fun, relaxing, and energizing.
When I talked to David a week later, he was amazed by how prevalent his Judges voice had been.
Once David had started noticing his Judge, he discovered its nasty fingerprints everywhere. It was as
if his Judge were running a constant editorial commentary, whispering or shouting in his ears at all
times.
David said he was simultaneously encouraged and discouraged by the work. He was discouraged
that his internal enemy was so prevalent, powerful, and persistent. But he said there was an immediate
change when he switched from saying I dont think we can make it to my Judge says he doesnt
think we can make it. Once David exposed the Judge as an enemy and began noticing and labeling his
destructive thoughts, the Judge lost some of its credibility and power over David.
After a couple of weeks focusing on the Judge and strengthening the PQ Brain muscles, we turned
our attention to Davids accomplice Saboteur, the Controller.
The Saboteurs get stronger and more active with increased stress. Davids increased stress in recent

months, fueled in good part by his Judge, had further energized his Controller Saboteur. The more
things did not go his way, the more ironfisted his Controller became. This produced short-term results
that temporarily reduced his anxiety but kept him and his team from seeing and seizing opportunities
that would build a more sustained shift in their fortunes. In response to his Controller, Davids team
did as he wished but brought less of themselves to their work since they didnt have much room to
maneuver.
When I spoke to David about this, he acknowledged that perhaps his Controller did not allow his
team members to step into their own power and creativity. This was one reason he felt the full burden
of the company on his shoulders. But David was also afraid to let go of the Controller, who kept
saying things like, Im the one who has generated all the results for you. If I dont show up forcefully
like I do, nothing gets done. There will be chaos. People need me to tell them what to do. Theyll be
lost without it. People may not like me, but they know I produce results.
It was true that the Judge and Controller got things done for David and brought short-term
accomplishment, so we couldnt just let go of these Saboteurs without replacing them with the Sage.
The good news was that when David activated his PQ Brain, he automatically strengthened the Sages
voice and accessed its great powers. David didnt need the harassment of his Judge and Controller to
be a highly action-oriented, decisive, and effective individual.
David began to see the Judge and Controller all over the place. He said it was like buying a new red
sports car and suddenly seeing the same car everywhere. The good news was that he was finding it fun
to shift his attention to activating his PQ Brain for ten seconds when he saw his Judge or Controller
show up. As he strengthened his PQ Brain, his Sages wisdom broke through the Saboteur noises more
and more frequently. He kept discovering that there was a better, easier, more creative, and more
joyful way to deal with his challenges.
David learned to relax more, have more trust in himself and his team, and ease up on control to
enable his teams collective wisdom and power to emerge. Since his team members were working on
raising their own PQs, the wisdom and creative solutions that emerged from their collective Sages far
exceeded what any of them would have thought of alone in the past.
When David reported that he looked forward to his weekly team meetings and felt energized by
them, I knew that the teams PQ must have improved dramatically. An assessment showed that it had
gone from 52 to 78. Davids own PQ had increased from 48 to 75. There was one exception to this
progress, however. One of his team members seemed unwilling to shift the level of his positivity,
leaving a deepening chasm between him and the rest of the team. He eventually resigned.
It took David and his team a couple of quarters to stop the downward spiral and begin the
turnaround. The companys stock took a beating in the meantime, but it gradually recovered. I
recently ran into David at JFK Airport, jetlagged but beaming, returning from a European family
vacation. On the long flight back, he had started telling his eleven-year-old son about the Judge. His
son had listened thoughtfully and said, I will call mine PoopMaker, Daddy. He is always making a
mess of everything in my head. We both agreed that this was an apt description of the Judge.

Inquiry

What do you find energizing, hopeful, or exciting about Positive Intelligence? What are you
skeptical about? How would you know if your skepticism were generated by a Saboteur trying to
stay in power?

PART II
FIRST STRATEGY: WEAKEN YOUR SABOTEURS
In part II, you will learn the first of three strategies for increasing PQ: weakening your Saboteurs.
In chapter 3, you will learn more about the master Saboteur, the Judge, and the nine accomplice
Saboteurs. You will perform a self-assessment to determine which of the nine accomplice
Saboteurs is strongest in you and learn techniques to weaken that Saboteur.
In chapter 4, you will focus on understanding the Judge in greater detail so you can expose and
weaken it.

CHAPTER 3
SELF-ASSESSMENT OF THE TEN SABOTEURS

I have a picture of myself from when I was about two years old. It shows me with a bowed head and
stooped shoulders, in despair, peering through sad eyes that wondered what I was doing in this world
and how much longer I could bear it. I know now that I had already started isolating myself from my
fears and pains. This process, which eventually resulted in very strong Judge and Hyper-Rational
Saboteurs, allowed me to survive my childhood. That is the initial role of all Saboteurs: helping us
survive.

Since these Saboteurs formed the lens through which I saw and interacted with the world, it took me
almost thirty years to discover that they even existed. Once I did, I also realized that even though I no
longer needed them for survival as an adult, they continued to exert a great deal of negative influence
in my mind.
Forty years after that picture was taken, I helped bring a little boy into this world, who is precious
in every way. My wife and I pour everything we know into being great parents to Kian. Healthy, with a
loving extended family, getting a solid education, and growing up in beautiful San Francisco, he is a
lucky boy. Nevertheless, by the time he was ten, I saw the familiar formation of the Judge and, in his
case, the Avoider Saboteur. Saboteur formation is a normal process, and the first stage in our mental
development, when we develop survival strategies. The best parenting and upbringing cannot save us
from this mental drama.
The formation of the Saboteurs begins to make clear sense once you realize that the primary
objective of the first fifteen to twenty years of life is to survive long enough to pass on your genes. In
that sense, we arent much different from sea turtle hatchlings shuffling their way toward the safety of
the ocean as soon as they break out of their shells. For the human child, however, survival has a
component beyond physical survival. We also need to survive emotionally. The human brain is wired
to pay close attention to our environment in our early years and adjust accordingly so we can bear the
emotional strains we all encounter and make it into reproductive adulthood.
Even if you didnt have a difficult childhood, life still presented many challenges that your
Saboteurs were initially developed to handle. You might have had loving parents, but there was still
the scare of your mother getting sick and you not knowing whether she would ever come back from
the hospital. Or maybe you had a sibling whom your parents seemed to favor over you. And of course
there were kids at school who were taller, smarter, faster, or funnier than you, and the ones who didnt
seem to like you. There was the time you failed publically, or got rejected, or betrayed. There was the
time you felt terrified with the idea of death, or starvation, or one of the countless other dangers in this
chaotic world. There was the time you promised yourselfwhich you likely dont consciously

rememberthat you would protect yourself better so bad things wouldnt happen to you as often.
Your Saboteurs were the buddies who helped you keep that promise. Childhood is an emotional
minefield, regardless of how well you were parented. Saboteurs are a universal phenomenon. The fact
that you might not be consciously aware of them doesnt mean they dont exist. If you dont think you
have them, youre especially at risk: your Saboteurs are hiding well.

THE PROBLEM WITH SABOTEURS

We use many temporary mechanisms for physically surviving our childhood. These include using an
umbilical cord, drinking only milk before our digestive system matures, and growing baby teeth until
there is enough room for larger, more permanent ones. As we mature physically, we replace these
mechanisms with ones that better fit our adult years. Ideally, our mental survival strategies would
work similarlywe would abandon our childhood Saboteur strategies in favor of more mature ones
better suited to the less vulnerable adult years. The challenge is that once formed, the Saboteurs do not
voluntarily drop out and let go. They hang on in our heads and get entrenched.
Imagine what it would be like if as an adult you were still connected to your mother by an umbilical
cord, or still could only drink milk, or still had your baby teeth. Imagine if you put a cast on your
broken leg when you were five years old to protect it from further hurtand then never took it off. As
bizarre as that might sound, it is not too far from what actually happens to us mentally and
emotionally with our Saboteurs. The Saboteurs were the initial casts that protected us, but not
removing them in adulthood limits our mental and emotional freedom.

JUDGE, THE MASTER SABOTEUR

The Judge is the universal Saboteur, the one we all have: a predisposition to exaggerating the negative
and assuming the worst is actually good for survival. If youre in the jungle and see the leaves in a
nearby tree begin to shake, you would be better off assuming you are in grave danger, even though this
assumption would be based on very little information. This must be a tiger on its way to eat me alive,
and Id better run or hide, youd likely say to yourself. It is true that ninety-nine out of a hundred
times, the Judges exaggerated negative bias would have proven wrong for one of our distant
ancestors, but the one time it was right would have saved his or her life. Those without the negativeleaning Judge, those who waited to gather more complete and unbiased information before taking
action, didnt survive long enough to pass on their genes.
Each persons Judge develops its own particular characteristics in response to that individuals
specific needs for survival. We have a powerful psychological need for a mental construct that makes
sense of our experience of life, and the Judge helps us fit all the pieces together. The Judges
interpretation is always full of flaws and negative biases, but in early life it is still helpful in sorting
out the world around us to create a coherent mental construct of our experience.
In my case, as a child I felt I was not getting much caring and attention. My mind could make sense
of this in one of two ways. I could have interpreted the situation accurately and admitted that I was
being raised by flawed parents who didnt know how to give me the attention I needed and deserved.
But this would have forced a terrifying realization and made my emotional survival more difficult. I
depended on my parents for my life. Seeing them as flawed would have been as terrifying as a diver
deep undersea realizing that his air supply mechanism was flawed and about to fail. Instead, the Judge
came to the rescue. The Judges solution was that I was deeply flawed and unworthy of my perfect
parents time: Why should they show any more affection for someone so undeserving?
In addition to forming my sense of low self-worth, my Judge also had to help me survive by
beginning to judge others around me as deeply flawedit would have felt terrifying to be a defective
being in a world where everyone else was so great. Thus these two survival mechanisms of the Judge
judging myself and judging otherswere firmly established at a very early age.
I was of course not consciously aware of much of this. Saboteurs are rarely consciously formed. It
wasnt until my powerful experience at the Stanford MBA class many years later that I realized this
invisible mechanism was deeply entrenched in the way I interpreted and reacted to everything in my
life.
Figure 2 summarizes the characteristics of the Judge. At the bottom of the table, rate the strength of
this Saboteur in yourself. If you rate it very low, please keep in mind that it might be because yours is
hiding particularly well, as mine had done.

THE NINE ACCOMPLICE SABOTEURS

The Judge uses at least one accomplice Saboteur to ensure your early physical and emotional survival.
In my case, my Judges accomplice was the Hyper-Rational Saboteur. Im a sensitive person, and I
started life feeling deeply. But most of what I was feeling deeply was either painful or scary. So, it
made perfect sense for me to begin to shut out all feelings. I escaped, instead, to a purely rational and
analytical world where I could play with and have a sense of control over ideas and logic. Even more
importantly, this rational focus began to provide my greatest source of attention and acknowledgment,
from teachers heaping praise on their prize student. Unknowingly, I was developing my HyperRational Saboteur, which allowed me to get some caring and respect. Again, it took me about thirty
years to discover that I had actively numbed my own feelings and in the process deprived myself of
any ability to develop deep relationships or enjoy the true emotional joys of life.
While the Judge is the master Saboteur in everyone, the accomplice Saboteur it teams up with is
different from individual to individual. For example, among my four siblings I developed the HyperRational Saboteur, one brother developed the Victim, one developed the Controller, one developed the
Avoider, and one developed the Stickler. Wed all experienced similar difficulties throughout
childhood, but our survival strategies ended up differing widely.
Nature and nurture both play a part in determining which accomplice Saboteur we develop. Any
parent with more than one child was probably amazed to discover how different the kids dispositions
were, right out of the womb. As a father of a strong introvert son and a boldly extrovert daughter, I can
attest to the differences being obvious in the first few months of life, even though my wife and I made
great efforts to raise both children in the same way.
Our unique personalities end up influencing which accomplice Saboteurs we develop. Two
dimensions of our personality in particular play a partour motivations and our personal styles of
handling challenges. We will now explore these two dimensions to see how they impact which
Saboteur is developed.

Motivation
There are three primary motivations that underpin our emotional survival needs. Each person leans
toward one of these three motivations:
1. Independence: A need for boundaries with others and maintaining independence from them.
2. Acceptance: A need to maintain a positive image in the eyes of others, to be accepted by them
and gain their affection.
3. Security: A need to control lifes anxieties and push away or minimize them.
All of us are driven by each of these motivations to some extent. The question is, which one is your
primary motivation? Since much of Saboteur-formation is subconscious, you cant necessarily rely on
your rational mind to answer that question. Dont worry about figuring out the answer right now.

Style
You exhibit one of three different styles in order to satisfy your primary need for independence,

acceptance, or security:
1. Assert: This is the most active and commanding of the three styles. You take action that
demands the fulfillment of your primary need for independence, acceptance, or security.
2. Earn: You work hard to earn the fulfillment of your need for independence, acceptance, or
security. This contrasts with the more demanding nature of the Assert style.
3. Avoid: You withdraw yourself or your attention from activities, thoughts, feelings, or other
people in order to fulfill your need for independence, acceptance, or security.
Again, dont worry at this point about figuring out which of these three styles is your dominant one.

IDENTIFYING YOUR TOP ACCOMPLICE SABOTEUR

The intersection between your primary motivation and your primary style determines your most likely
accomplice Saboteur. However, nurture and outside circumstance also play a role. Trauma or extreme
distress, especially during our early years, can change the Saboteur-development process, as can the
Saboteurs our parents exhibit. Some children mimic their parents and grow similar Saboteurs, and
some develop Saboteurs that are complementary to their parents. For example, the child of a parent
with a Controller Saboteur might develop the Pleaser to maintain peace.
The following table shows how the nine accomplice Saboteurs relate to motivation and style. An indepth exploration of how each Saboteur exhibits its corresponding motivation and style is beyond the
scope of this book and can be found on www.PositiveIntelligence.com.

Our initial aim in exploring our Saboteurs is not to develop a deep psychological understanding of
their roots. Our focus is more on the current manifestation of their thoughts and feelings in ourselves,
and how they sabotage us today. We rely on what we can consciously observe in ourselves. This will
automatically result in discoveries about our Saboteurs deeper and even subconscious roots in due
course. (For a discussion of the subconscious connection, see Appendix A.)
A description of each of the nine Saboteurs typical thoughts, feelings, characteristics, justification
lies, and impact on ones self and others follows. The descriptions are by no means exhaustive; they
are intended to provide you with the overall flavor of each Saboteur. You will find that your own
experience conforms to some but not all the characteristics of any given Saboteur. As you read, focus
on getting an overall impression of each Saboteurs tendencies and personality rather than getting
bogged down in the specific details. Once you have a feel for each one, determine which is most likely
your Judges top accomplice.
You are likely to occasionally exhibit the characteristics of several of these nine Saboteurs. Dont
let that discourage or confuse you. All you need to do is focus on your Judge and the top accomplice
Saboteur. This focus will significantly activate and build up your PQ Brain muscles, depleting the
oxygen supplies of all Saboteurs. In addition, since your Judge is your master Saboteur and tends to
trigger the others, its weakening impacts all of them. Once you reduce the power of the Judge and key
accomplice Saboteur in your head, the others will come crumbling down automatically.

As you review the following profiles, it might be helpful to bring to mind people you know who
seem to have very strong versions of certain Saboteurs; this will help you remember the Saboteurs
better. You might also take some preliminary guesses about which Saboteurs seem to be at play in
your boss, your colleagues, your spouse, or your children.
The best way to do this Saboteur assessment is fast. Your first impression is likely more accurate
than what you come to after too much analysis. See if you can spend ten minutes, meaning about one
minute per Saboteur, to review and rate the strength of each Saboteur in yourself. Once you do a
preliminary pass on all nine, come back to your top few and compare them in order to determine your
top accomplice Saboteur. Some people report that their top accomplice Saboteur is different at work
and at home. If that holds true for you, its fine to make that distinction and identify a different
Saboteur for each environment.
Alternatively, you can assess your Saboteurs online at www.PositiveIntelligence.com.

EXPOSING THE LIE

The most common skeptical remark I hear from high-achieving executives is, I have achieved so
much of my success through listening to my Judge or being a Controller, a Stickler, etc. Thats what it
takes to generate results. Why would I give that up?
A Saboteur does its greatest damage if it convinces you that its your friend and you accept it into
your trusted inner circle. Each Saboteur has some very reasonable-sounding justifications for its
actionsit tells you how it is your friend and why it is good for youbut these justifications are
nothing but well-masked lies. For example, the Judge, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, and Stickler would
convince you that without them you would turn into a lazy, unambitious, or complacent couch potato.
It is not a lie that they have indeed pushed you and others to succeed and accomplish. The lie is that
your greatest success would come through them. Lets expose that lie.
Say you have just made a costly mistake on something important. Your Judge beats you up over it
and causes you to feel guilty, angry, or remorseful. Its distressing messages keep hounding you and
keep you up at night, worried about what happened and the consequences. It scares you into working
really hard to make sure the mistake doesnt happen again. Next time around, you will have real
anxiety about not screwing up. You might do better, but you will have paid a high emotional toll along
the way. Moreover, your high distress actually makes you more likely to make other mistakes while
anxiously focusing on not repeating your original error.
The Sage offers a very different approach. First, it will empathize with you and reassure you that,
even though you made a mistake, you are still a wonderful person. It tells you to have compassion for
yourselfwe are all fallible human beings. It tells you that everything, even your mistakes, can be
turned into gifts and opportunities by the way you react to them. Now, because you are feeling better
and not beaten up, you are less defensive and more likely to take a good look at your mistake and
explore what really happened and where you went wrong. The Sage might then have you come up with
creative solutions for how you could do better next time and prevent even bigger mistakes. With the
Sage perspective, you are more likely to be creative because your PQ Brain regions are activated.
These regions are far more creative than the Survivor Brain, where the Judge lives. At the end of this
process of empathizing with yourself, exploring what happened, and coming up with creative
solutions, you will be more energized to take decisive action and do better the next time. You wont
have wasted an ounce of vitality and energy beating yourself up and suffering through the negative
drama.
Both your Saboteurs and your Sage may lead you to success, but they do so by taking very different
paths. The Saboteurs push you into action and success through anger, regret, fear, guilt, anxiety,
shame, obligation, etc. But the Sage pulls you into action through compassion, curiosity, creativity,
the joy of self-expression, a desire to contribute and create meaning, and the excitement of action.
Would you rather be pushed or pulled? Only the Sage lets you achieve success without sacrificing
happiness and peace of mind.
I cant emphasize the importance of this point enough: you cant confront an enemy that you arent
sure is your enemy. If a voice in your head is still saying that you need your Judge, Controller,
Stickler, Hyper-Achiever, or any other Saboteur to succeed or be happy in life, you are still buying
into their lies. The Sage is far more discerning, aware, agile, vigilant, creative, decisive, and actionoriented than any Saboteur. As you continue reading this book, put this to a test. Take any work or life
challenge and see that it can be met most effectively by your Sages great powers. Dont fall for the
Saboteurs seductive lies; they arent your friends and you dont need them. The Sage always offers a
better way.

WEAKENING YOUR SABOTEURS

The key point about weakening your Saboteurs is that you shouldnt fight them, at least not in the
typical way we think of fighting. If you were to get upset and angry when you saw your Victim,
Pleaser, or Restless, guess what you would be doing? You would be judging your Saboteur, and in
doing so you would be activating and strengthening the ringleader of them all, the Judge.
The most effective strategy for weakening your Saboteurs is to simply observe and label your
Saboteur thoughts or feelings every time you notice them. The author Eckhart Tolle uses an apt
metaphor to describe this phenomenon. He says the egoic mind, which is his collective term for all
the Saboteurs, is like a giant snowman that melts away under the light of conscious awareness.18 The
bulk of the work in weakening your Saboteurs involves exposing them to the hot light of awareness by
simply observing and labeling them when they show up.
To better observe and label your Saboteurs, it might be helpful to create more personalized
descriptions and names for them. For example, my name for my Judge is the Executioner and my
name for my Hyper-Rational is Robot. Others have called their Judge Darth Vader, their Stickler
Anal Joe, their Controller Drill Sergeant, their Hyper-Achiever Workaholic, and their Victim
Martyr. You get the picture.
Lets say you determine that your key accomplice Saboteur is the Controller and you give it the
name Drill Sergeant. Now if you are in the middle of a meeting and you get a visit from your old
friend the Controller, you observe and label your Saboteur thoughts by saying, The Drill Sergeant is
insisting it will only work her way. Or you can observe and label the resulting emotions: The Drill
Sergeant is feeling anxious and angry that this meeting isnt going her way. You do all this in the
back of your mind. It takes hardly any time or effort. Its very quick, like stamping a passport.
You might wonder how this simple act of observing and labeling could possibly have a big impact
on you. It does, and heres why: By their very nature, Saboteurs do far greater damage when they do
their work while hiding under the radar, pretending they are your friend or that they are you.
Observing and labeling them blows their cover and discredits their voice. Notice the difference
between saying I dont think I am capable and the Judge doesnt think I am capable. The
snowman will melt under the light of your awareness.
In chapter 7, you will learn the additional technique of using each sighting of your Saboteurs as a
reminder to activate your PQ Brain for ten seconds. This will accelerate the demise of your Saboteurs
by quieting the part of the brain that gives rise to them.

Inquiry

A Saboteur initially served a purposeto protect you physically or help you survive emotionally.
How did your Judge and your top accomplice Saboteur help you in your youth?

CHAPTER 4
JUDGE, THE MASTER SABOTEUR

In all my years of coaching, I have never worked with anyone who was not substantially sabotaged by
a persistent Judge character, even though many were initially unaware of that fact. Your Judge
Saboteur is your private enemy number one. It impacts your well-being, success, and happiness far
more than any public enemy ever could.
The Judge accomplishes its staggering destructive sabotage by having us feel negative and unhappy
through constant faultfinding with (1) ourselves, (2) others, and (3) our circumstances. It does so
under pretense of being rational and reasonable and trying to be helpful. The Judge knows how to hide
well and might in fact have become so invisible that were unaware of its existence. This is why
discovering my brutal Judge for the first time that day in my MBA group was such a powerful
revelation; he was obvious to others but completely hidden from me.
This chapter is about enabling you to become aware of the enormous damage inflicted by your
Judge and the insidious and often well-disguised techniques it uses to sabotage you. You will learn to
become more aware of what your Judge looks and feels liketo develop its mug shot, so to speak.
Knowing when your Judge is surfacing will enable you to identify and label it in its act of sabotage.
Doing so is key to reducing its power and increasing your PQ.

1. JUDGING SELF
The first way the Judge sabotages us is by making us judge ourselves. As with most peoples Judges,
mine had started taking hold in my mind in early childhood. By the time I was an adult it was so much
a part of my thinking that I never questioned its voice as anything but my own. I took what it said
about me seriously. And what it said about me was not pretty. Despite years of having ranked at the
top of most of my classes, having attained multiple degrees from prestigious universities, and having
held significant positions at world-class organizations, I still lived with a voice in my head that
constantly found me falling short of an imaginary ideal. This judgment ranged from the sublime to the
ridiculous, from faulting and shaming myself for not having changed the world, to wondering how I
could ever get another date given my receding hairline. Everywhere I turned, this voice was there to
tell me I wasnt quite what I needed to be.
While my powerful encounter in my MBA class had woken me up to my judgments toward others,
my Judge was still well hidden in the damage it was doing to myself. My first real glimpses into how
universal and destructive the Judge is to the self came in my first year in business school. Having been
first in my class almost all my life, I was suddenly surrounded by 320 others who had similar
achievements. The euphoria of having been accepted to a top-ranked business school quickly gave way
to believing I was the sole mistake of the admissions office. Everywhere I looked I was much more
impressed with the achievements and abilities of others than with my own. I was keenly aware of my
many shortcomings. This of course led me to put extra energy into constructing a faade of
togetherness and confidence.
Over the months, I slowly began to detect signs of similar insecurities in many of my classmates.
By the beginning of my second year, these observations had allowed me to relax my self-judgments a
little. I began to wonder about the big price I had paid in unnecessary pain and suffering in my first
year. As I looked at the panic and insecurity so widespread in the faces of the incoming first-year
class, it became clear to me that this phenomenon was repeating itself all over again. I decided to take
a chance and share some of my own feelings of self-judgment and insecurity, with the hope of
shedding some perspective on how widespread this phenomenon is. I wrote a five-page, single-spaced
letter about how to achieve a better perspective, made 320 copies of it, and put one in the inbox of
every first-year student over an October weekend.
I spent a restless Sunday night wondering what the reaction was going to be the next morning. Since
I had put my name on the letter, if my premise was wrong, I would have just outed myself as the
single most insecure person in the whole business school and lost much credibility in this tight-knit
community that was so important to my future. As it turned out, the reaction far exceeded even my
most optimistic hopes. The letter struck a chord with so many people that my inbox was inundated
with thank-you letters from people relieved that their suffering and self-judgments were unjustified,
and not unique to them.
Whats more, a year later the new second-year class replicated what I had done and put copies of
my letter in the mailboxes of all the incoming first-year students. When I attended my twenty-year
reunion, I was told by a faculty member that in the prior twenty years my letter had become a
tradition, gifted from each second-year class to the incoming first-year class caught in the grips of
self-doubt and self-judgment. This was my first real glimpse into the fact that the Judges destructive
power over us is a relatively universal phenomenon, and that most people suffer it alone.
This understanding deepened over years of leading retreats and coaching others. I once led a twoday leadership development retreat for about one hundred CEOs and presidents. At one point in the
retreat I gave everyone a three-by-five card and asked them to write down, anonymously, an important

thing about themselves that they had never shared with others in fear of losing credibility, acceptance,
or respect. After shuffling the cards, I started reading them out loud. They were replete with
confessions of feeling inadequate, undeserving, and guilty over letting others down as a leader, parent,
or spouse; fear of being lucky rather than competent; fear of being fundamentally flawed; and fear of
everything coming tumbling down one day. After I read all the cards, there was a stunned silence.
Many said they felt a huge weight off their shoulders because for the first time in their lives they had
realized that their inner torment was commonly shared.
Most successful, high-achieving people are privately tortured by their own Judges. This is rarely
obvious to those around them. Externally, we all show our happy and fully confident fronts.
This realization had a profound effect on me. For the first time in my life, I felt fully normalI
realized that the Judge and the insecurities it generates are universal, an ailment common to everyone.
When I interact with people now, I no longer wonder if they have a nasty internal Judge, but instead,
how it is hiding and doing its damage in that individual.
Our ways of dealing with our Judge-induced insecurities are different, as I have found in my
coaching practice. This is because different peoples Judges trigger different accomplice Saboteurs.
Larry, the head of a manufacturing facility in the Midwest, buried himself in work so he could run
away from hearing and being tormented by these voices. He ran, terrified of not being busy. Mary, the
head of a marketing services organization, turned her insecurities inside out and showed up with
arrogance, an aura of superiority, and a pretense of invulnerability, which is ultimately all about
hiding insecurity. Peter, the head of a highly successful telecom company, had a habit of dwelling in
self-judgments and torturing himself privately while showing a confident public face. This double-life
resulted in a great deal of stress that included insomnia and increasingly frequent physical
breakdowns. Catherine, the VP of operations of a global software company, tried to bury her selfdoubts deep in a locked compartment, terrified she would one day be exposed to herself and others as
the flawed being that she was; she met any hint of criticism with a violent reaction. Our methods of
dealing with the Judge are different and may not be as clear-cut as these examples. The Judge is still
there, however, doings its devastating damage.

Why Do I Love Thee?

The Judges most damaging lie is that we are not worthy of love or respect by just being who we are.
Instead, it forces us to constantly perform for them; this forms the construct of conditional love.
Most of us grow up experiencing love that is conditional on being good or performing, and we get into
the habit of placing the same conditions on self-love. But conditional love is not real love. Its more
like receiving a carrot for good behavior.
Given the ubiquity of the Judges conditional love game, I have embarked on a very different kind
of game with my son to prevent a strong version of his Judge from taking hold. I start tickling him and
tell him that I will only stop if he keeps giving me the right answers, which he has learned to give over
the years. Heres how the game goes, as I tickle him and stop only to hear his answers through his
laughter:
Me: Kian, do you know why I love you so much?
Kian: No, Daddy, I dont know.
Me: Is it because you are so handsome? (Trust me, he is very handsome!)
Kian: No, Daddy, it isnt because Im handsome.
Me: Is it because you are so smart?
Kian: No, Daddy, it isnt because I am smart.

Me: Is it because you do so well on your homework and get good grades?
Kian: No, Daddy, it isnt
I keep going down the list that includes his kindness and generosity, his talent in sports, his
sensitivity and thoughtfulness, and so on. At some point, I feign great frustration:
Me: So why is it, Kian? Why do I love you so much?
By now Kian has learned to say (and he says it with firmness and certainty): Daddy, its because I
am me.
Occasionally I ask Kian to remind me what this answer means. He says it means that my love for
him is not conditional on anything he does. It is for his essence, for the being looking back at me when
I first held him the day he was born. He knows that in his essence he is worthy of love, always. He is
to never worry that he might lose it, regardless of his successes or failures and the ups and downs of
life.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
The Judge, of course, has an aneurism hearing all this. It will give you dire warnings like, This is a
recipe for your child becoming lazy or irresponsible; if his actions have no consequence on how you
feel about him, why should he try to achieve anything? Does that sound familiar? Is your love for
yourself unconditional? At the end of a bad day, in which youve made terrible mistakes with negative
consequences, how much self-love do you feel?
Does your Judge warn you that you would turn into a lazy, unambitious, unaccountable, complacent,
or selfish being without it kicking your butt constantly? This is a key rationale the Judge uses to stay
in power. This view is a fundamentally cynical one asserting that you, and human beings in general,
will only do the right thing under pressure, or out of fear of guilt, shame, or negative consequences.
This cynical view ignores the enormous untapped Sage powers within you and the fundamental nature
of your essence.
This is another case of the push versus pull difference between the Sage and Saboteurs. While the
Judge might push you into action through threats, fear, shame, or guilt, the Sage pulls you into action
through anticipation of the joy of exploration and discovery; through the compelling and deeply seated
human urge to find meaning in life and to matter; through the joy of creativity and possibility; through
the longing of the human heart to connect, care, and be cared for; through appreciation of the mystery
of life; and through a desire for clearheaded action toward desired outcomes.
Both the Judges view and the Sages view are self-fulfilling prophecies. Each of us is a mixed bag,
both divine and wretched. Whether you are in Sage or Saboteur mode determines which version of you
gets manifested. Which version would you choose for yourself? For people in your company and
team? For your spouse and children? Unless you develop mastery over your Judge, the ringleader of
your Saboteurs, it gets to choose for you.

2. JUDGING OTHERS
The second way the Judge sabotages us is by judging others. The Judge plays a central role in team,
professional, and personal conflicts.
This phenomenon is easiest to illustrate using a personal relationship example, which can then be
applied to work settings. I will use the case of John, an executive I coached, and his wife, Melody. In
the early stages of their relationship, the romance phase, they had danced in the euphoric energies of
their Sages while the Saboteurs were forced onto the sidelines. Many of the Sage qualities were
evident. They were deeply curious about each other, open to experimenting with new ways of being,
caring about what the other was feeling and experiencing, and trusting of the mystery and wisdom of
the circumstances that had brought them together. It was a glorious situation of the Sage in John
seeing the Sage in Melody, and vice versa. As is common, the Sage energy in one had reinforced and
encouraged the Sage energy in the other. In a virtuous reinforcing cycle, they were each bringing the
best out of the other by bringing the best out of themselves. Everything was great. What was there not
to love?
But as we know, Saboteurs dont like staying on the sidelines for too long. At some point, John
began judging and being irritated by Melodys fear-based controlling behavior (her Controller). He
reacted at first with mild and then increasingly stronger irritation. This helped to trigger his other big
Saboteur (the Victim) in the form of frequent bouts of self-pity for what he had to live with. Reacting
to Johns Victim, Melodys Judge emerged full-force, wondering whether she could respect the new
John. This led to her favorite strategy to avoid difficult feelings: indulging in food and restless
busyness (the Restless Saboteur).
By this point, the Judges on both sides were firmly established as the ringleaders, reacting to the
Saboteurs in the other and denying their own culpability in triggering those Saboteurs. The exhausting,
self-reinforcing negative cycle of the Saboteurs had begun. Each party was bringing the worst out in
the other. They each began to wonder what had attracted them to the other in the first place. It was
impossible to love the others Saboteurs, and each wondered if the other had changed.
The fact is that the other person hadnt necessarily changed. John was always a mixed bag (of
Saboteurs and Sage), and he will always remain a mixed bag, even as he learns to better restrain his
Saboteurs over time. The same was true of Melody. The same is true of me, you, and every human
being alive. The Judge causes trouble when it has you focus narrowly on the Saboteurs of the other.
This focus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as your Judge triggers and reinforces the other persons
Saboteurs, which in turn become evidence for your Judge that it was right to begin with. Your Judge of
course will never take any responsibility for its own role in triggering and reinforcing your
counterparts Saboteurs. In reality, we are co-responsible for which version of the other person comes
out in interactions with us.
Of course, relationships go through ups and downs, good times and bad times. As a rule of thumb, if
you find yourself in an exhausting, knock-down, drag-out fight with your colleague, partner, spouse,
or child, chances are very high that the Judge in you is busy judging the other, and vice versa. And yes,
that is especially true in cases where you are 100 percent sure you are right and the whole thing is the
other persons fault.
While the harmful role of the Judge is glaringly obvious within our personal relationships, it is
equally central to tensions and conflicts in work-related settings. I rarely coach a team that is not
constantly sabotaged by judgments team members make about one another. In some teams this is done
in a blatantly open and confrontational way. In others, it is done in a more subversive and indirect
way. In either case, unless the team members explicitly learn greater mastery over their own Judges,

the collection of Judges in the room can cause significant and ongoing friction that costs a great deal
in lower trust, wasted energy, heightened stress, and reduced productivity. What is the price you
would put on the damage that judging another person is causing for you, within your personal
relationships or at work?

3. JUDGING CIRCUMSTANCES
The third and final way the Judge sabotages us is by judging the circumstances and events in our lives
and finding them lacking. This leads to one of the Judges biggest and most destructive lies: You will
be happy when
Many of the CEOs I coach who are in their mid-forties or early fifties show signs of a midlife crisis
of some sort. Ironically, the deepest crises are experienced by those who have attained many of the
goals they had set out to achieve. These goals often have to do with financial achievements and
reaching the pinnacle of ones profession. The crisis comes from finally achieving these long-soughtafter goals and realizing that the promised happiness that was supposed to accompany them is
nowhere to be found. At the heart of the midlife crisis is the question, Can anything really bring me
that elusive peace and happiness Ive been chasing all these years? The chase has, of course, been
orchestrated by the Judge and its big lie: You will be happy when
When you examine this lie more closely, you will see that there are actually two lies embedded
within it. The first lie is that you cant be happy with your current circumstances. Much of our
unhappiness stems from this lie alone. This lie places a when condition on your eventual happiness;
it could be when you make your first million, when you get promoted, when you get to run your own
company, when you raise the kids and see them off to college, when you achieve retirement security,
etc.
The second lie is that the when is a moving target rather than a promise to be kept. When you do
make the first million, the Judge will allow you a two-minute or two-day celebration before it has
convinced you that you cant be really happy until you also have a second vacation home like your
best buddy from college. After all, youre just as smart as she was, and its only fair that you have one
too, right? The when gets renegotiated the moment it is about to be reached. Millions of people die
every year still waiting to reach the last when. This ever-moving target is a mirage and a key
technique the Judge uses to ensure your everlasting unhappiness.
The fascinating thing is that each when is selected based not on objective criteria but on relative
comparisons that are completely arbitrary. I was a firsthand witness to the absurdity of this
phenomenon while living in San Francisco in the late nineties, at the epicenter of the dot-com craze. I
watched highly educated and very successful people lose perspective completely and allow their
Judges to renegotiate their when targets to absurd levels.
Peter, an entrepreneur who had long ago declared $10 million to be the target for his happy
retirement, rejected a $125 million offer for his company. His rationale? His college buddy had sold
his for $330 million and was now traveling with his own personal jet. After running some numbers,
Peter had decided that the lifestyle he could now envisionincluding a personal jet and vacation
homes on multiple continentsrequired a target higher than $125 million, and he couldnt be happy
with that offer. As it turned out, within a year he witnessed the complete collapse of his companys
valuation and eventual bankruptcy. His when was then renegotiated by his Judge. He could now be
happy when he came out of debt, got to $10 million in net worth, and regained some respectability in
his field. I ran into Peter recently at a conference and found out that he was still chasing his
renegotiated $10 million when. So many years later, the sighs and regrets of the Judge still seeped
into his words as he spoke about his life. He was completely oblivious to the fact that even now he was
earning an amount of money and living a lifestyle that placed him among the top one percent of
people in the world. Peters Judge was still in charge, chasing the new when.
I encountered many such examples: Jackson, a forty-five-year-old man who had previously been
fine with a target retirement age of sixty, but who felt like a failure because he still had to work while

his neighbor, whod hit it big during the dot-com boom, had retired at forty-two; Allison, a marketing
VP who had previously been fine with a steady rise on the corporate ladder in a company that treated
her well, but who suddenly felt like a failure for not having jumped ship like one of her junior
associates who struck it rich in a start-up; Tim, the CEO of one of the most reputable publically run
brick-and-mortar companies, who had gone overnight from feeling on top of the world to feeling like
a worthless dinosaur. It is stunning the tricks the Judge plays in renegotiating the when.
As we will discuss in chapter 5, the when for peace and happiness is actually now, regardless of
the circumstances of your work or personal life. Any other when is the lie of the Judge. The Sage
helps you feel peace and joy regardless of whats going on in any area of your life, while the Saboteurs
make you feel unfulfilled regardless of the circumstances. The Sage is right: Its not about the
circumstances. Its not about the when. Its about who is whispering or screaming in your ear while
interpreting the circumstances for you.
Think about each when youve declared for yourself in the past and actually reached. How long
did your happiness last before you (your Judge) renegotiated a new one? What when are you chasing
right now as a condition of your own happiness and peace? Would you be willing to reconsider and
give up that when, believing instead that you can have great peace and happiness in your work and
life right now?

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JUDGING AND DISCERNING

I often hear people say that without their Judge they wouldnt be able to defend themselves from
mistakes, wouldnt give people tough corrective feedback, wouldnt fire people who need to be fired,
wouldnt say no when they need to, wouldnt take corrective action in time, and so on. Such claims
confuse discernment with judging.
If someone has turned in his projects late five times in a row, the voice of discernment in you
should simply state that fact and say that it is therefore likely, unless something shifts, that the person
will be late turning in his next project. This is discernment; youre paying attention to the state of
things as they are. Once youve made an observation like this, you can activate your Sage to figure out
what to do with that discernment. You could sit down with that person to explore the underlying
causes of his behavior and see if you can help. You could work on contingency plans so that the
lateness wont impact you adversely. You could choose to fire the employee if all previous attempts at
changing this pattern have failed and hes showing no openness to change. The Sage can help you do
any of this without feeling angry, blameful, scornful, disappointed, or betrayed.
The presence of those negative feelings indicates that the Judge has taken over and that you are
judging rather than discerning. Pay attention to the emotions involved. If you are calmly noticing what
isnt working or what has gone wrong in order to figure out how to move forward, you are discerning.
If you are feeling upset, disappointed, anxious, or resentful, you are judging. Indeed, that is how the
Judge causes much of your distress in any situation. Your distress is not caused by what happened; its
caused by your Judges reaction to it.

WEAKENING YOUR JUDGE

So what is one to do with an internal enemy who is so devious, pervasive, and damaging, and who
shrewdly camouflages these characteristics? As with any other Saboteur, your key job is to observe
and label your Judges thoughts and feelings every time you observe them.
Given that the Judges damage is done on three entirely different frontsjudging yourself, the
people around you, and your external circumstancesyou might want to remind yourself of its typical
patterns in each of these areas. You might also want to come up with your own personal name for your
Judge based on its personality. As I mentioned earlier, I call mine the Executioner given his brutal
take-no-prisoners stance. Others have called theirs Destroyer, Insatiable, Brutal, SOB,
Know-It-All, Sourpuss. The name you give it should reflect its true nature. If you cant come up
with any name that works better for you, go ahead and stick with Judge.
The act of observing and labeling your Judge alone will have a significant impact in your life.
Notice the difference between saying I cant make it and My Judge says I cant make it. Or You
made me look bad intentionally and My Judge says you made me look bad intentionally. Or This
is a terrible situation and My Judge says this is terrible situation. Do you notice the big difference
between the impact of these two kinds of statements? The Judge loses much of its credibility and
power over you as you isolate it as an unwelcome intruder. In the past it was treated as royalty, as a
moral compass, as the center of intelligence, discernment, ambition, or drivebut not anymore.
Observe the Judge and simply call it on what it does.
This is the beginning of the end of your biggest impediment to greater success and happiness. You
will be amazed by what you find out once you begin watching the Judge.

Inquiry

What would change, at work or in your personal life, if your Judges voice were significantly
weakened?

PART III
SECOND STRATEGY: STRENGTHEN YOUR SAGE
I n part III, you will learn the second of three strategies for increasing PQ: strengthening your
Sage.
In chapter 5, you will learn the power and wisdom of the Sage perspective and contrast it with the
far more common Judge perspective.
I n chapter 6, you will learn about the five powers of the Sage and how they can meet any
challenge in your life. For each power, you will learn a power game that boosts that power and
gives you greater access to it when needed.

CHAPTER 5
THE SAGE PERSPECTIVE

I am a relatively predictable and consistent coach. When someone comes to me in mental or

emotional distress, I hear the person out and show compassion for his or her suffering. But before we
get too far into the discussion, I state the following key principle of Positive Intelligence: All your
distress is self-generated. To be more precise, all your distress in the forms of anxiety,
disappointment, stress, anger, shame, guiltall the unpleasant stuff that makes up your sufferingis
generated by your own Saboteurs.
I emphasize all because I have found that under the influence of their Saboteurs, people want to
bargain and negotiate. They claim that while they might agree that most of their distress is selfgenerated, their current distress is different and justified based on the severity of the situation. How
could I possibly not be upset over the loss of my biggest client? How could I possibly not be upset at
myself for screwing up on this project? How could I not feel constant disappointment and frustration
over the incompetence of my teammate? How could I not feel stressed over the possibility of losing
my job and my house in this terrible economy? How could I not be furious at my teenagers obstinate
behavior? The answer, always, is the same. Activate your Sage to deal with the situation and you will
feel quite different.
Your Sage has access to your five great powers: empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and
decisive action. With these powers, your Sage can meet all the challenges that you face in a way that
will not only generate the best results but also lead to the highest level of personal satisfaction, peace
of mind, and happiness along the way.
Well explore each of the Sages five powers in more detail in the next chapter. In this chapter,
well focus on the Sage perspective, which helps to amplify its five powers. We will see how the Sage
perspective, unlike the Judge perspective that causes you so much distress, leads to peace of mind and
focused action even in the middle of the greatest crises.
There are two small caveats to saying all distress is Saboteur-generated. The first is in the instance
of grieving as a way of honoring the loss of something or someone, which is a healthy process.
Second, as I will discuss in chapter 8, a few brief seconds of feeling anger, disappointment, guilt, or
shame are fine as immediate reactions to events. This is similar to feeling pain when you touch a hot
stove. A moment of physical pain should alert you to remove your hand to avoid further damage. A
few seconds of psychological pain should similarly alert you to shift your mind to the Sage mode so
you can deal with the situation without further distress and damage from your Saboteurs. If you dont
shift your mind, it is like keeping your hand on the hot stove and continuing to feel the pain that was
only initially useful.

SAGE PERSPECTIVE VS. JUDGE PERSPECTIVE

The Sage perspective is about accepting what is, rather than denying, rejecting, or resenting what is.
The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity. (I emphasize
every to take away a loophole through which the Saboteurs could sneak in.) This may sound like a
radical perspective. It is the exact opposite of many of the assumptions of the Judge, which most of us
have believed wholeheartedly for years or decades. The Judges perspective is that many outcomes
and circumstances are badcertainly not giftsand are therefore legitimate reasons to feel distress.
A Chinese parable illustrates a key difference between the Judge and the Sage perspectives:

The Stallion Story

And old farmer lives on his farm with his teenage son. He also has a beautiful stallion that he lovingly
cares for.
The farmer enters his stallion into the annual country fair competition. His stallion wins first prize.
The farmers neighbors gather to congratulate him on this great win. He calmly says, Who knows
what is good and what is bad? Puzzled by this reaction, the neighbors go away.
The next week, some thieves who heard about the stallions increased value steal the horse. When
the neighbors come to commiserate with the farmer, they find him again very calm and gathered. He
says, Who knows what is good and what is bad?
Several days later, the spirited stallion escapes from the thieves and finds his way back to the farm,
bringing with him a few wild mares he has befriended along the way. To his neighbors excited rounds
of congratulations, the old farmer once again says, Who knows what is good and what is bad?
A few weeks later, the farmers son is thrown off one of these new mares as he is trying to break it
in, and his leg is fractured. As the neighbors gather to commiserate with the old farmer, he once again
reminds them, Who knows what is good and what is bad?
The following week, the imperial army marches through the village, conscripting all eligible young
men for the war that has just broken out. The old farmers son is spared due to his fractured leg. The
neighbors no longer bother to come to the old farmer to congratulate him. By now they know what his
response will be: Who knows what is good and what is bad?
When our Judge says something is bad, we need to take that statement with a grain of saltif not
outright dismissal. Our Judge convinces us that we know what is good and bad at any given moment,
but the truth is that we actually dont.
Our Judges perspective is narrowly focusedit has severe tunnel vision. It reacts to the immediate
effect of something, ignoring the many longer-term possibilities of its impact that could easily be the
opposite. Life of course doesnt stop at the immediate effect. Even our stallion story doesnt end
where we left it. Who knows what happened next in that story? It might be that the son, saved from
military draft due to his fortuitous injury, caught the plague epidemic sweeping through the village a
month later and died. Or, he might have stayed behind, met the woman of his dreams and married,
producing a child. His child might have turned out to be a great scientist curing many ills. Or his child
might have turned out to be mentally troubled and burned down the village. When the farmer refused
to lose any sleep over his prized stallion being stolen, he was seeing life through the perspective of his
Sage rather than through the tunnel vision of his Judge.

IS THE SAGE ACTIVE OR PASSIVE?

The stallion story presents an incomplete view of the Sage perspective and can be misleading if taken
literally. The farmer just believes and waits passively for a bad thing to turn into a good thing. That
can be viewed as fatalistic and impractical, like sitting on the couch and watching TV and believing
everything will magically work out on its own. The Sage, however, is anything but passive. Its
perspective is that everything is a gift and opportunity, but it doesnt believe that as a matter of
passive and blind faith. The Sage uses its five great powers to turn that perspective into reality and
actively create a gift out of a bad situation. If action is required, the Sage is quite decisive and takes
the necessary steps. It moves into action, however, without any of the distress, interference, or
distractions of the Judge or the other Saboteurs.
Many spiritual traditions advocate for something similar to the Sage perspective as a matter of
spiritual faith; these traditions teach that everything in life happens for a reason and is part of the
greater mystery of life. However, as someone who has coached many agnostics and atheists, I would
not expect you to buy into the Sage perspective as a matter of spiritual faith. The Sage perspective is
the most pragmatic strategy to pursue, regardless of faith. This is because the Sage perspective and the
Judge perspective are both self-fulfilling prophecies.
Anxiety, disappointment, frustration, shame, blame, and guilt, the Judges favorite feelings, are
never your best fuel for action. Those fuels might propel you forward, but with a huge amount of
pollution and wasteful friction along the way. The moment you allow yourself to feel the distress of
the Judge, you have validated his perspective; you are wasting precious moments of your life in
distress. In addition, as we will discuss in chapter 7, when your brain shifts to distress mode, tunnel
vision sets in. Your distressed brain focuses on problems rather than opportunities. The Judge and the
Saboteurs that the distressed brain activates spiral in on themselves and snowball once they get
started, thus making sure the bad situation will indeed be a bad situation.
Your Sage has the same snowballing, self-fulfilling effect, but in reverse. Your Sage moves you
into action not out of feeling bad, but out of empathy, inspiration, the joy of exploration, a longing to
create, a desire to contribute, and an urge to find meaning in the midst of even the greatest crises.
From the Sage perspective, there is no such thing as a bad circumstance or outcome. Every outcome
simply points to the first step toward the next positive outcome. The Sage moves you one positive step
at a time, regardless of what life throws at you.

HOW I DISCOVERED MY SAGE

In my early thirties, still relatively fresh out of business school, I came up with the idea for some
career development and performance management software. Using my still relatively fresh softwareengineering skills, I coded an interactive prototype and then went boldly calling on CEOs of
established Fortune 500 companies to enlist them as investors and board members. To my great
delight, I secured significant personal investments from CEOs of several Fortune 500 companies.
Hewlett-Packard later became the first company to purchase the software for all its employees. Others
followed.
As the stress of delivering on the huge expectations built up, my Saboteurs got increasingly
energized and started running the show. My colleagues at my companythe very people who had
been inspired by my vision to join mewere now shocked to see an increasingly untrusting CEO who
was in Judge mode much of the time and would not delegate. I was violating and destroying the very
vision that had attracted them to the company, but they couldnt get through to me after repeated
attempts.
On the most painful day of my professional life, I returned from lunch to a shocking scene that
instantly made my heart sink. The chairman of the board, the most trusted and supportive senior
director, the president, and the most senior VP of my company were all sitting around the boardroom
table, waiting for me. Unable to get through to me, the president and VP had gone over my head to the
chairman of the board and senior director. It was like a professional intervention, if there is such a
thing.
I was confronted with irrefutable evidence of my failings as a leader. I had attracted everyone to the
company with a vision of enlightened leadership, yet I had become a micromanager, distrusting and
controlling everyone who reported to me. I had turned into a tyrant, a character I didnt even know I
was capable of being. I was endangering the companys very survival.
I found the experience so painful, so humiliating, and such a betrayal (in the eyes of my Saboteurs)
that I was literally in a daze for almost a week. My Judge was front and center in the beginning: How
could the people I had trusted do this to me? Didnt they see that I was working my heart out and
doing all of this for the good of the company? Surely they must have done it for self-serving reasons. I
must have been wrong when I had trusted them as people of integrity. And on and on.
Ordinarily, I would have either lashed out or walked away, actions that would have been
orchestrated by my Judge. This time, neither was an option. Many of the investors and clients had
come in because of me. I owed it to them to stay and see this thing through. I was stuck and had to
work with the people I felt had betrayed me.
This painful situation turned out to be the most valuable gift of my professional life. The pain and
stress became so unbearable that at some point I was forced to shift to the Sage perspective, even
though at the time I knew nothing of the Sage versus Saboteur construct. I simply had to turn this
painful situation into something I could begin to feel good about. I had to turn it into a gift. There
were two ways I could think of doing this: First, I could rebuild the frayed relationships to a place
where they would be even stronger than before the intervention. Second, I could turn the situation into
a great growth opportunity for myself as a leader.
I began to actively look at what was good, not bad, about the people I had so fiercely judged. I
began to listen more deeply to what they were trying to tell me all along. I got to witness them over
and over again fighting with impeccable integrity for what was rightfor our collective vision, not
just for themselves. I came to fully trust that what they had done in that boardroom was an act of great
courage and caring, not only for our collective vision but also for me. I eventually rebuilt mutual trust,

caring, and respect with all the parties involved. If anything, these relationships became stronger than
they had ever been. To this day, I remain close friends with the chairman, director, president, and VP
who confronted me on that fateful afternoon in the boardroom, and Im grateful to them all.
To turn the situation into a growth opportunity, I had to confront many of the false assumptions Id
made about myself and others. I had to come face-to-face again with my nasty Judge and began to
discover its accomplice: an intellectually aloof and arrogant Hyper-Rational. At the time, I still didnt
have names for these characters in my head, but I came to see their devastating damage clearly. I was
also beginning to discover the power of the Sage in myself.
I cannot even begin to count the many huge gifts that came out of my most humiliating professional
experience. I wouldnt trade those lessons for all my formal education in psychology or business.
Neither my subsequent successes as a CEO and coach nor this book would have been possible without
that experience.

THE THREE-GIFTS TECHNIQUE

I developed the Three-Gifts technique to help people shift to the Sage perspective. The most
challenging thing I do when I coach people who are in the middle of intense work or personal
challenges is to shake them out of the certainty of their Judge perspective so they can at least consider
the Sage.
If you had been sitting across the table from me on that fateful afternoon in the boardroom and told
me to trust the Sage perspective and accept the confrontation as a gift and opportunity, I would have
thrown you right out. To be more precise, my Judge would have thrown you right out. On that day, my
Sage was nowhere to be seen, and this is true of most of us as we encounter a crisis. The question is,
how can you access the wisdom of your Sages perspective when the stress and difficulty of your
situation has supercharged your Saboteurs?
To get the ball rolling toward the answer to that question, I employ the Three-Gifts technique: I ask
people to come up with at least three scenarios where their supposedly bad situation could turn into a
gift and opportunity. The time frame doesnt matter. It could be within days, months, or years. People
are often skeptical of my requestthey are usually certain that the situation is completely bad.
However, I refuse to continue with our dialog until they have come up with at least three scenarios.
I once asked the head of sales of a company to come up with three scenarios for how the recent loss
of the companys biggest customer could turn out to be a great gift. After some initial hesitation and
skepticism, she suggested the following: (1) This could sober up the whole company to the fact that
we are losing our edge and trigger more urgent action on new product development, which could in the
long run get us many more clients; (2) This could make my sales team more open to upgrading its
skills; (3) This could free up our service staff to serve our existing customers better and result in even
more referral sales than what we lost with the recent customer. If she needed to, she could have come
up with ten more possibilities.
For the highly skeptical or resistant, I sometimes have to repeat an important reassurance: accepting
a bad outcome as a gift does not mean inviting more of it or doing nothing about it. For example, you
will do you best to not drop a glass. But once it slips from your hand and is broken, any amount of
time and energy spent on anger, blame, regret, or worry is completely wasted. If you decide to actively
turn the broken glass into a gift, you might closely examine how and why it slipped from your hand so
that you can prevent an even more expensive glass from being broken in the future. Or the gift might
be that the accident gives you a chance to practice becoming more assertive and resourceful as you
figure out a creative way to convince the vendor to replace it for free. Or, you could learn how to make
glass objects as a new hobby, eventually not only replacing the glass but also developing a lifelong
source of amusement. You get the picture.
You dont always have to actively turn a bad situation into a gift. Your other option is to just let it
go and put it behind you without any residue of unhappiness, regret, or distress. It is easier to do this
once you really come to believe the Sage perspective that, if you wanted to, you could invest the time
and energy to turn the situation into a gift. Once you trust that you have the choice, it is easier to
choose to just let it go.
Ironically, deciding to just let a negative situation go rather than actively turn it into a gift is a gift
in itself: youre strengthening the Sage muscle that allows you to let go of regret, guilt, or shame. This
in turn weakens your Judge and strengthens your Sage for the challenges youll face down the road.
This might sound like a circular argument, and it is. You choose to initiate either the snowballing,
self-reinforcing, and self-fulfilling perspective of the Sage, or the snowballing, self-reinforcing, and
self-fulfilling perspective of the Judge and the other Saboteurs. Which do you want to guide you

through life?

WHAT ABOUT REALLY BIG PROBLEMS?

When I present the Sage perspective in my leadership seminars, someone often asks, How could
everything that happens be a gift and opportunity? How could that possibly be the case with a major
illness or with the death of a loved one?
I point out research that shows that, on average, able-bodied adults who become quadriplegic
through an accident return to their pre-accident baseline happiness levels within a relatively short
period of time.19 But this is an average. What this average hides is that some people allow tragic
events to victimize them for life. They live and die bitter and resentful. On the opposite side, those
who choose the Sage perspective turn tragedies into life-affirming events that bring great meaning and
purpose to their lives. Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox are two prominent examples of people
who chose to turn their afflictions (spinal cord injury and Parkinsons disease, respectively) into a life
purpose of helping millions of others suffering from the same afflictions.
Any parents greatest dread, and perhaps lifes most devastating tragedy, is the loss of a child. In
1980, Candy Lightner encountered this great tragedy. On a sunny Saturday morning in California, her
thirteen-year-old daughter, Cari, posed for her softball team photos in her orange-and-white uniform.
She then started walking with a friend to a church carnival shed been looking forward to attending.
The carnival was within Caris sight when she was hit and killed by a drunk driver who had been
previously convicted three times of driving under the influence of alcohol.
Manyperhaps mostin Candy Lightners shoes would have lived the rest of their lives
victimized by this loss. She activated her Sage perspective instead. Four days after her daughters
death, Candy said, I promised myself on the day of Caris death that I would fight to make this
needless homicide count for something positive in the years ahead. She then founded Mothers
Against Drunk Driving (MADD). By so doing, she turned the tragedy of her daughters short life into
a program that would eventually save countless lives.20
Of course, it takes an incredibly strong Sage to do what Candy Lightner did. I would like to think
that my Sage is strong enough to rise to such an occasion, but I cannot be sure. And I hope I will never
have to find out. If I found my Sage muscle inadequate for such a challenge and found myself hijacked
by my Saboteurs for an extended period, I would remind myself that the only sane way to deal with
the tragedy is to keep building up the Sage muscle. With increased strength, the Sage muscle can
eventually regain control and work toward turning the tragedy into a positive force in the world.
Some peoples Saboteurs trick them into getting fixated on extreme cases of tragic loss in order to
discredit the Sage approach. If you find yourself unconvinced that even extreme tragedies can be
turned into positive opportunities, put that issue aside as an exception and instead concern yourself
with the 99 percent of lifes challenges that indisputably benefit from the Sages perspective.
We cant control or choose much of what happens in work and in life. We can, however, determine
the impact that these events have on us by choosing how we respond. Let your Sage do the choosing.

Inquiry

Pick one thing in your life, whether at work or at home, thats causing you particularly high
distress right now. Try the Three-Gifts technique on it: think of at least three ways the problem

could turn into a gift and opportunity at some point in the future.

CHAPTER 6
THE FIVE SAGE POWERS

The Sage and its five powers can meet every challenge, no matter how momentous or daunting. It
meets challenges in a way that results in the best outcome while at the same time generating positive
emotions and minimizing negativity and stress.
We all have the five powers of the Sage. Weve all demonstrated the ability to Empathize with
ourselves and others; Explore with deep curiosity; Innovate creative options; Navigate among our
options and choose the paths that best align with our deepest-held values and purpose; and, finally,
Activate our intention in order to generate results.
But the problem is that our typical use of these powers is often polluted by a great deal of
Saboteur interference, and they often lose much of their impact. In this chapter, I will show you how
to use these powers in a pure form. I will also show you fun power games to boost and gain deeper
access to these powers.
Not every challenge will require all five powers, or require them in any particular order. If the
house is on fire, you will probably want to just Activate your intention to run. If the solution is
obvious, you dont need to Innovate. If your options dont have long-lasting importance or
consequence, you dont need to consult your Sages power to Navigate. Once you activate your Sage,
you will know which power to use and when.

1. EMPATHIZE
Empathizing is about feeling and showing appreciation, compassion, and forgiveness. Empathy has
two targets: yourself and others. Both are important. Deeper empathy for yourself typically makes it
possible to have deeper empathy for others. For most people, having true empathy for oneself is the
hardest thing to do. Why? You guessed itthe Judges pervasive interference.

When Empathy Is Needed

Think about the Sages power to empathize as the antidote to the Judges badgering. After years of
judging myself and others, I came to believe that most of us are doing our darnedest to be the best
human being we know how to be. We are imperfect, all of us. We fall short of our ideals almost all the
time. As a result, we are badgered by our own and others Judges almost constantly. Lets cut
ourselves and one another some slack.
Empathy recharges our batteries and renews the vitality that is drained by the Judges violence
toward ourselves. It bandages the wounds of the warrior before sending him out for another fight. It is
most useful when the recipient of the empathywhether you or someone elseis feeling some
emotional pain and difficulty. Think of empathy as the power you should use when the emotional
reserve is running low, when the person needs some recharging before moving on with problemsolving action.
Given that you probably dont go a day without falling short of some ideal and being beaten up by
your own or others Judges for it, you probably dont want to go a day without bringing some empathy
to yourself.

What Gets in the Way

Many of us grow up with our Judge telling us that empathizing with ourselves is counterproductive.
You need to be tough on yourself , says the Judge. But denying yourself empathy is not a sign of
strength, as the Judge would have you believe. Its setting yourself up for constant beating.
The Judge warns you that if you empathize with yourself or others avoidable hardships, you are
encouraging more of the behavior that caused the hardship. Youd better punish rather than empathize ,
it says. A key fallacy of this argument is the belief that empathizing with pain means condoning the
action that brought the pain about. If your child plays in the part of the playground that you warned
him not to play in and breaks his leg, you would first get a cast on his leg and empathize with his pain.
After the pain subsided, you would have a conversation about lessons learned and how to avoid the
same mistake in the future. The Judge, of course, would strongly disagree with this approach and
demand chastisement from the start.

Power Game: Visualize the Child

Once you switch to your Sage perspective, you will automatically have access to all its five powers,
including Empathy. To boost this power even further, consider playing our first power game,
Visualize the Child, for just one minute in the back of your mind.

If you go to a playground and watch five-year-olds play, you will probably feel instant empathy and
caring for these total strangers. This is in part due to the fact that at this age a child still mainly
radiates with his or her Sage essence energy. The off-putting Saboteurs that make us less likable as
adults are not yet as visible.
You can use this fact to shift your brain to feel empathy and caring for yourself or others. Visualize
yourself as a child in a setting where your essence is shining through. Perhaps you are holding a
puppy, building a sandcastle, chasing a bunny, or snuggling with a loved one. Pick a vivid and detailed
image that instantly triggers feelings of caring and empathy. You might even want to find an actual
picture of yourself as a child in which your original personality is shining through. Put that picture on
your desk or on your phone or computer so that you see it frequently. This image will be a reminder
that your true essence is worthy of unconditional caring and empathy when you are feeling beaten
down by your own Judge, or others, or the troubles of life.
The same holds true for generating empathy for others. If you are feeling upset at someone due to
their Saboteurs, you have been hijacked by your own. To recover back your Sage, you could activate
any of your five Sage powers. If you choose to activate the Sages power to Empathize, visualize the
other person as a child in her true essence before she started getting weighted down by Saboteurs.
Visualize her eyes and facial expression, her manner of carrying herself, and what used to light her up
as a child. Visualize her hold her puppy, snuggle with her mom, or chase a butterfly. Trust that the
same essence is still inside her, underneath her Saboteurs. You can do this in the back of your mind
even while you are interacting with her in a meeting. It will instantly impact how much empathy you
feel.

2. EXPLORE
As children, we all knew how to explore in a pure way, experiencing great curiosity and fascination in
discovery. The Sage way of exploring has a similar purity, like a child walking along a shoreline and
turning over rocks to see whats underneath. The pure energy and emotion that the Sages Explore
mode generates is based in curiosity, openness, wonder, and fascination with what is being explored.
A strong Sage can activate this exploration mind-set even in the midst of a great crisis.

When Exploration Is Needed

Exploring is helpful when understanding a problem or situation more deeply could put you on a better
path forward. The Sages question is, what more can I discover? Most of us draw conclusions, devise
solutions, or take actions before weve adequately understood the situation through exploring it fully.

What Gets in the Way

How often do you experience pure Explore mode? How often do you find yourself in a place of deep
curiosity, openness, and wonder in the middle of a challenging situation or crisis? Chances are, not
very often, because of interference from Saboteurs.
You have probably felt frustrated when someone you are arguing with listens selectively and hears
only what fits his or her own argument. We all do this under Saboteur influence. We think we are
openly exploring and being curious, but our field of exploration is significantly narrowed by our
Saboteurs.
One thing that brings in the Saboteurs is that we dont allow the Explore mode to happen purely as a
stand-alone step. We are often too busy trying to anticipate the next step, or maneuvering to win an
argument, to let our Sage explore. The Judge has us look only for what proves the other wrong. The
Controller only picks up on evidence to insist on its own way. The Hyper-Vigilant only picks up on
signs of danger and ignores all indications of the contrary. The Avoider tries to ignore all signals that
something difficult must be confronted. You get the picture.
This comes at enormous cost to us. We torpedo our ability to truly discover all the important and
relevant information before we move on to a solution or action. We miss out on discovering the most
transformational and important stuff, things we didnt know we didnt know.
While the Explore mode is important for looking at new challenges, it is also critical for learning
from our past failures and mistakes. We often avoid exploring our mistakes and failures fully because
the Judges presence makes the act too painful or too contentious. The Sage, of course, would be able
to turn those mistakes into gifts and opportunities, in part through the powerful discoveries that are
made in Explore mode.

Power Game: Fascinated Anthropologist

When you play the role of Fascinated Anthropologist, you become a keen observer and discoverer of
what simply is, without trying to judge, change, or control the situation. Try being a Fascinated
Anthropologist in a difficult situation. A Fascinated Anthropologist does not selectively filter

information that fits his or her preexisting judgments or desired outcome. The only goal is to discover
things exactly as they are. For example, if you are in conflict with someone, could you even for three
minutes let go of your own grievances and demands, becoming fascinated instead with discovering
why the other person is feeling exactly how he or she feels?

3. INNOVATE
While the Explore power is about discovering what is, the Innovate power concerns inventing what
isnt. True innovation is about breaking out of the boxes, the assumptions, and the habits that hold us
back. Whats a whole new way to do this? is the operating question for Innovate.

When Innovation Is Needed

The power to innovate is needed when the old way of approaching a situation, or the more obvious
ways of dealing with it, does not suffice. A new outside-the-box approach is required.

What Gets in the Way

We are all stuck in all sorts of boxes all the time. The set of beliefs and assumptions that we operate
under form the walls of our boxes. Many of these limiting beliefs and assumptions, all produced by
our Saboteurs, are unexamined or even unknown. When we try to have a purely left-brained and
rational approach to innovation, we will only come up with various configurations of solutions that
still operate within those limits. Without the Sages power of innovation, we stay in our box, merely
changing our location within it.
You need your PQ Brain and the Sage to escape from those limitations and engage in true outsidethe-box innovation. To protect your Sages power to innovate from Saboteur interference, you need to
give your mind one simple instruction: Come up with as many ideas as possible. Period. No evaluation
of the ideas as you come up with them. Evaluation during innovation is the back door through which
the Saboteurs enter.
It is easier to illustrate this concept in a team environment and then apply it to the dynamics inside
your own head. Imagine you are at a meeting in which you and your colleagues are to come up with
innovative new ideas about a product. If Joan throws out an idea and John shows his disapproval by
raising his eyebrows, the Judge has crept in. Everyone will begin to be more careful about what they
throw out next, worried about being judged and looking foolish. The Sages energy will begin to give
way to the Judges energy, which is interested in self-preservation and not looking foolish. Innovation
suffers greatly. The same would happen if any of the accomplice Saboteurs disapproved of ideas
counter to their vested interests. The point is that no evaluation whatsoever should be allowed during
the Innovate mode.
The same holds true inside your own head. If your Judge or another Saboteur calls your own initial
ideas foolish or impractical, you will begin to shut down internally and will fail to innovate. Your own
internal mental promise should be to generate as many ideas as possible, in rapid-fire succession,
without any evaluation whatsoever. The aim of the Innovate mode is volume of ideas, not quality. This
will lead to higher quality ideas automatically as it energizes your PQ Brain, the engine of your
greatest ideas.
The good news is that all you need at the end of this process is one idea that passes the test.
Evaluation of your options may or may not need the Sage. This evaluation could be based on simple
objective criteria such as cost, effectiveness, impact, degree of difficulty, etc. But if the options you
are evaluating have any significant bearing on your values, purpose, or meaning, then you would tap
into your Sages power to Navigate to help you decide.

Power Game: Yes and

To play Yes and follow every new idea you have by saying Yes, what I love about that idea is
and With this approach, every idea is appreciated rather than judged before the next one is
generated in reaction to it. Keep going as fast as you can, in rapid succession. This game can be played
both inside your head and in a team setting.
For example, lets say you are brainstorming how to improve the guest experience in your hotel
chain. Bob starts by saying, Maybe we can play soothing music in the lobby. Janet continues: Yes,
what I love about that idea is that it relaxes the guests. And we could look into aromatherapy research
to see if any aromas are proven to be relaxing. Kathy jumps in: Yes, what I love about that idea is
that we would be consulting scientific research. And maybe we could also look into positive
psychology research to improve the training of our greeting staff.

4. NAVIGATE
The Sages power to Navigate is about choosing between various paths and alternatives based on a
consistent internal compass. The coordinates on this compass are your deeply-held values or what
gives your life a sense of meaning and purpose. If you keep navigating with this compass, your
cumulative choices will generate the fulfillment that comes from living life in alignment with your
ideals and principles.

When Navigation Is Needed

You should use your Sages power to Navigate only when multiple paths are available, some of which
may be more aligned than others with your sense of values, purpose, or meaning.
I often find people feeling stuck since they cant chart a complete path from where they are to
where they want to be in the long run. I tell them their situation is analogous to finding themselves at
the edge of some unknown territory without a map. To make it even more challenging, the whole area
is covered in dense fog. If your goal were to emerge at the north end of this territory, there would be
no way for you to chart a step-by-step path to get yourself there. You would need to rely on a compass.
If you hit an impossible hill or obstacle in the middle, then you would take the most north-leaning
path around it. In due time, if you kept checking the compass and making sure you took each step with
north in mind, you would emerge close to where you wanted to be.
Similarly, many people think that the answer to the meaning of life will one day emerge with
fanfare and fireworks. They feel stuck because they dont have full clarity about their purpose in life
or what would make their life happiest or most meaningful. I tell them to consult their Sages
Navigation compass for their little steps, knowing that these steps will eventually get them to a very
meaningful place. Without the compass, we could take many steps that on their own might appear
successful but in the end could have us running in circles. A midlife crisis is a good example of this
phenomenon.
This is as true of individuals as it is of teams and organizations. The coordinates on a teams
compass are the groups commonly shared values or whatever brings a deeper sense of meaning or
purpose to that group.

What Gets in the Way

Our most deeply held values and the things that bring meaning and purpose to our lives do not lie in
the rational mind, they live in our hearts. In my experience, the vast majority of individuals, teams,
and organizations that proudly exhibit their documented statement of values or purpose only have a
superficial conceptual relationship with those words, which only live in their heads. Consequently,
they mean little in action.
For the Sages Navigation power to have a meaningful impact, there needs to be a deeper, more
visceral connection with the coordinates of the compass. They need to arouse emotion and inspire.
The Sages Navigation function is also susceptible to pollution from Saboteurs, all of whom bring
in their own biases. For example, the Judge uses guilt and obligation as coordinates on the compass.
The Hyper-Vigilant tries to navigate us to the path that feels least risky. And the Avoider encourages
us to navigate a path that sidesteps conflict at all cost. These criteria for navigation, while pleasing to

the Saboteurs, do not result in the best course of action.

Power Game: Flash Forward

When faced with the fork in the road, imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back at the
choices you are now facing. From that vantage point, what do you wish you had chosen at this
juncture? The reason this exercise works is that at the end of our lives, many of the trivial Saboteurrelated concerns fall away and are revealed as false. The things that stand out are those that are real,
those that bring value, meaning, and purpose to our lives.
The team version of Flash Forward is to imagine how you wish you had conducted yourselves as a
group at this juncture at a point in the future when the team or organization no longer exists.

5. ACTIVATE
Some worry that the Sages attitude of accepting everything as a gift and opportunity will lead to
passiveness, laziness, and lack of ambition and action. The reality is exactly the opposite. The Sages
Activate power moves you into pure action, where all your mental and emotional energies are laserfocused on action and not distracted by the Saboteurs.

When Activation Is Needed

You need the Sages power to Activate when it is clear what course of action you want to take. This
power allows you to move into pure action, without the procrastination, distraction, or interference
that Saboteurs cause.
For example, if someone has done you wrong, you might go through the Sages Empathize mode
and decide to forgive him or her, freeing yourself from resentment and bitterness. At that point, you
might choose to let the whole thing go. Or, you might choose to forgive but still seek compensation. If
you decided to proceed with the action of seeking compensation, you would shift into your Sages
Activate mode. Your action would be pure and unencumbered with anger, the need for revenge,
disdain for the other person, bitterness, anxiety over outcome, or any of the other dramatic tendencies
of your Saboteurs. You would simply and cleanly think about the best strategy for getting your
compensation and proceed with the action necessary to make it happen. You would be more likely to
succeed, as all your mental and emotional energy would be focused on getting the action right.
When you watch a martial arts master in battle, such as one of the Jedi in Star Wars, you get a sense
of the pure action of the Sage. When a warrior with a strong Sage is attacked from all sides, he knows
that the only way he can survive is by completely quieting and centering his mind. This means
pushing aside all the mind-chatter coming from Saboteurs. Doing so allows the Sage to concentrate all
his mental power on the urgent task at hand. If for one split second he allows himself to get angry at
the enemy attacking him from the left, that momentary lapse of focus could mean getting killed by the
enemy attacking from the right.
The paradox here is that the most urgent action can be taken by the quietest of minds, those that are
free of the Saboteur interference and can concentrate on pure action. This is the opposite of the frantic
energy that most people bring to urgent situations.
You now have a different explanation for why athletes choke in the moments that matter the most
and what would be possible for them if they could learn to strengthen their Sage powers.

What Gets in the Way

Every single Saboteur gets in the way of taking pure action. The Judge wastes your energy by causing
fear, stress, anger, disappointment, guilt, or shame even while you are taking action. The Avoider and
the Restless both have you avoid dealing with a painful situation, albeit by using different tactics. The
Controller and Stickler cause your action to be rigid, limiting the helpful contribution of others. The
Hyper-Achiever wants you to take action that is solely focused on some achievement-oriented
objective that ignores more important priorities, such as relationships. The Hyper-Rational has you
miss critical emotional signals from yourself and others as you take action. The Victim convinces you
to remain inactive to ensure that you will become a victim and prove it right. The Pleaser has you

focus your action only on activities that please others and win you acceptance. The Hyper-Vigilant
wastes enormous amounts of your energy worrying about contingencies, creating anxiety that is not
warranted by the actual risks.

Power Game: Preempt the Saboteurs

In this game, you put yourself in the shoes of your top Saboteurs and try to anticipate how they might
try to sabotage your action. You anticipate the thoughts they would whisper or scream in your ears in
the middle of the action and what lies they would use to justify those thoughts. Once you anticipate
their sabotage, you will be able to intercept and let go of those thoughts easily when they arise in the
middle of your action. A key component of defeating any enemy is to predict and prepare for its move.
You have in effect preempted the Saboteurs by discrediting their attack proactively while in a centered
Sage mode.
Figure 13 summarizes the Sages five powers, when each is needed, and a power game that boosts
your access to that power. You can find more power games at www.PositiveIntelligence.com.

THE CASE OF MARY

Mary was the VP of product development for a midsize sporting goods company. She had been a fastrising star, due mainly to her analytical and strategic brilliance. While considered brilliant by
everyone, she was not particularly well liked by her troops and didnt tend to inspire them. The new
CEO of the company was much less tolerant of leaders who were strategically or technically brilliant
but not strong in leadership skills. Mary had been told that her days were numbered unless she
improved her relationships with her team members and others in the company.
When I first spoke with Mary, her Saboteurs were clearly in control. She was visibly upset about the
new CEO who was suddenly putting so much more emphasis on this touchy-feely nonsense, as she
called it. Leadership is not a popularity contest, she protested.
When I suggested the Sage perspective, that she should accept the whole situation as a gift rather
than a problem, she was clearly not impressed. To soften her Judges grip on her, I insisted she come
up with at least three scenarios in which this ultimatum could be turned into a gift and opportunity.
She shot back, sarcastically, that perhaps this would accelerate her departure and that shed hopefully
be going somewhere where shed be appreciated. I insisted on more possibilities and she eventually
came up with a few. This weakened her Judge a little, but not much. The Sage was still in the shadows.
After some more work on at least allowing room for the Sages perspective, Mary agreed to give
her five Sage powers a try in order to turn that perspective into a self-fulfilling reality.
1: Empathize
Mary found the invitation to empathize with herself to be at best an irrelevant distraction and at worst
counterproductive. She said she was proud that she had successfully dragged herself out of her
difficult family circumstances in large part because she had been tough on herself and not allowed
herself to wallow in self-pity. It took a while for her to agree that self-pity was very different from
self-compassion. As a competitive athlete, she likened self-compassion to bandaging an injury before
heading back onto the field.
Mary agreed to be kinder to herself in the following week and play the Visualize the Child power
game to boost her Sages power to Empathize. She agreed to look at a picture of herself at a younger
age every day to access greater empathy and appreciation for herself. This would be particularly
helpful when she found herself feeling emotionally beaten up by herself or others, which was often.
She also agreed to observe and label her Judge thoughts as often as she could.
Mary was in a sober mood the next week, saying she was stunned by the voracity, viciousness, and
persistence of her Judge. She had found a name for her judge: the Destroyer. She discovered why
she needed the constant antidote of her Sages Empathy for herself.
Accessing empathy for herself led Mary to also feel a little more empathetic and less judgmental of
those who might have complained about her leadership, although her reaction was still mixed.

2: Explore
To fully access her Sages power to Explore, Mary agreed to play the Fascinated Anthropologist game
during the upcoming week. She agreed to observe and rate the shifts of energy and emotions during
interactions between members of senior management.
Marys report the next week was impressive. True to her perseverance and drive, she had actually
logged sixteen interactions. She had noticed that in roughly a third of her interactions the energy and

emotions of the other person had shifted toward deflated or negative. The other two thirds appeared to
have been neutral. She contrasted this against her colleague Tom, whose interactions seemed to be
roughly half neutral and half resulting in higher energy or more positive feelings in the other people.
She said she was both fascinated by her discoveries and embarrassed by them. She had barely finished
that sentence when she observed that her Judge, the Destroyer, was probably the one who had caused
the embarrassment.

3: Innovate
With all that she had discovered, Mary was ready to come up with some solutions to the problem. I
suggested the Sages Innovation process, of course. To create a Saboteur-free environment for Marys
Sage to Innovate, Mary agreed to play the Yes and power game for a period of twenty
minutes. I acted as a scribe but didnt contribute any ideas.
It was slow going at first, as she was clearly still judging ideas before allowing any to come out of
her mouth. But by the last ten minutes, her Sage was clearly in charge, evident in the rapid speed with
which she was generating ideas without filtering and in how some of them were completely outside
the box. She generated seventy-five ideas, of which many were impractical, but some had real
promise.

4: Navigate
Mary dismissed all but five of the ideas due to impracticality or difficulty. I suggested her Sages
Navigation compass to help decide between the remaining options. She agreed to play the Flash
Forward power game to access her own internal compass. By looking back at her situation from the
perspective of the end of her life, she narrowed her options down to two.
One option was to replace all her No buts with Yes ands This idea had come from
her observations as a Fascinated Anthropologist; shed noticed how much more frequently than her
colleague Tom she used the words no and but in her interactions with others.
Marys other choice was the gutsiest idea she had generated. To make a clear and dramatic shift in
her public image and signal a clear intention to change, she was going to dress as Butt-Head, of Beavis
and Butt-Head, during the upcoming Halloween office party. She would then tell people about her
conscious choice to stop being But-Head moving forward. She said that before consulting her Sages
compass, she was leaning away from that option, considering it too risky. But after consulting the
compass in the Flash Forward game, she was clear that at the end of her life she would absolutely have
wanted herself to take the boldest path.

5: Activate
The next question for Mary was what would stand in her way of taking pure action on her two choices,
unencumbered by any Saboteur interference. To answer that, Mary played the Preempt the Saboteurs
power game. She came up with three ways that her Saboteurs would try to get in the way of her action:
(1) the Judge would call her weak or a loser for having to do this; (2) the Judge would get upset at
others for not cutting her more slack as a leader; (3) the Hyper-Achiever would want to keep a good
public face rather than admit to failures. Since Mary was in Sage mode, she could clearly see the harm

these Saboteur thoughts would do. This made it easier for her to intercept, label, and discredit those
thoughts as they happened once she took action.
As it turns out, the Halloween costume was a perfect launch for the new Mary, since it was so
uncharacteristic of her to make fun of her own shortcomings. It gave everyone an idea of how serious
she was about working on her issue, and of her humility in exploring and acknowledging her
imperfections. This helped others be patient with her over the next six months as she kept practicing
and improving her new Sage powers. As is sometimes the case with such work, progress took the form
of two steps forward and one step back at times of high stress, during which the Saboteurs regained
strength. The new CEO took notice of Marys progress and highlighted her work as a model for
courageous leadership and lifelong learning, which were values he wanted to promote. The Yes
and way became Marys trademark style and was adapted by others in the organization.
Mary called me the day after the Halloween party the next year. Her entire team had surprised her
by all coming in dressed as Butt-Heads. Somehow, she said, this was the most satisfying validation of
her success in developing her leadership skills.

Inquiry

What is one area of your work or life where you could use some fresh and creative new
perspective? Play the Yes and game by writing idea after idea nonstop for ten minutes
without any evaluation along the way.

PART IV
THIRD STRATEGY: BUILD YOUR PQ BRAIN MUSCLES
In part IV, you will learn the third of three strategies for increasing PQ: building your PQ Brain
muscles. You will learn the difference between your Survivor Brain and your PQ Brain in greater
depth. You will also learn fun, simple, and concrete techniques for building up your PQ Brain
muscles.

CHAPTER 7
PQ BRAIN FITNESS TECHNIQUES

Remember from our earlier discussion that your Saboteurs and Sage are controlled by two different
areas of your brain. The Saboteurs are fueled by the parts of your brain that were initially focused on
your physical and emotional survival, what we call your Survivor Brain. The Sage, on the other hand,
is fueled by the areas of the brain we call your PQ Brain.
Activating your PQ Brain increases the volume of the Sages voice in your head and decreases the
volume of the Saboteurs. That is why strengthening the muscles of your PQ Brain is the important
third strategy for increasing PQ. The techniques you will learn in this chapter were specifically
designed to fit your busy and demanding lifestyle.

THE SURVIVOR BRAIN

To understand the PQ Brain, it is helpful to first understand its counterpart, the Survivor Brain. The
Survivor Brain consists of the most primitive parts of the brain, the brain stem and the limbic system,
both of which are involved in initiating our response to danger. The left brain is the primary
hemisphere involved in the survival functions.
The hallmark of the Survivor Brain is the fight-or-flight response. A brilliant design of nature, this
response instantly shifts the brain and bodys priorities to survive immediate danger. Our eyes reduce
peripheral vision, focusing on the object of danger or path of escape. All nonessential brain and body
functions are diminished as blood is directed to the larger muscles of the heart and limbs, enabling a
quick escape.
In addition to narrowing the bodys focus, the fight-or-flight response also narrows the minds focus
to anticipating and escaping danger, to the detriment of other functions. In particular, it activates the
minds survivor agents, the Saboteurs. Activating the Saboteurs diminishes access to Sage powers,
which are more about thriving than surviving. When the brain is in survival mode, it is so focused on
seeing signs of danger and finding something or someone to blame that it misses signs of opportunity
and fails to appreciate what is right.
The Judge rules the Survivor Brain. Its very existence is due to the Survivor Brain: the Judges
extreme negative bias was helpful to the physical survival of our ancestors in a dangerous and
unpredictable world of predators, enemies, and natural disasters. As we have seen, the Judge triggers
and is in return further triggered by the accomplice Saboteurs. Thus the Survivor Brain fuels all the
Saboteurs, and in return those Saboteurs keep fueling the Survivor Brain. This is a vicious cycle that
feeds on itself until you learn to quiet your Survivor Brain and activate its antidote, the PQ Brain.
To illustrate, lets say you lose an important client. Your Judge declares this as a definitively bad
thing, and therefore a cause for distress. That in turn triggers his accomplice, which was originally
formed to help you survive and cope with the distress initiated by the Judge. So you might become
rigid and overly perfectionistic in your next client presentation (Stickler), or procrastinate on securing
another client presentation (Avoider), or get melancholy and feel sorry for yourself to get some
attention (Victim), or distract yourself with something fun to take your mind off of dealing with the
situation (Restless), and so on with each of the Saboteurs. These Saboteurs will eventually perpetuate
the problem and therefore feed the Judge distress energy, which started the whole thing.
The Sage approach, of course, would have been to embrace the whole event as a gift and
opportunity, starting a very different cycle, a virtuous one involving your PQ Brain rather than the
Survivor Brain.
Most people today live in relatively constant distress and anxiety. This is related to a low-grade but
perpetual fight-or-flight response masterminded by the Judge in reaction to the challenges of life, both
personal and professional. Though the fight-or-flight response originally evolved to get us out of
acute, short-term danger, most of us run the Survivor Brain continuously. The consequence of this
perpetual stress and anxiety is heightened blood pressure, increased cardiovascular disease, reduced
immune system function, reduced longevity, and reduced happiness and performance.

THE PQ BRAIN
The PQ Brain is the part of the brain that gives the Sage its perspective and its five powers. It consists
of three components: the middle prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the Empathy Circuitry, and the right brain.
The MPFC is a relatively small region of the brain that plays several critical PQ functions. These
include observing yourself, pausing before action, soothing fear, staying centered in the middle of
challenging situations, and gut wisdom. As you can see, the MPFC counteracts many of the effects of
the Survivor Brain and energizes the Sage.
Empathy Circuitry is my term for a few different areas of the brain that are together responsible
for experiencing empathy for yourself and others. It also helps your brain tune in to the emotions and
energy of others. (For more detail, see Appendix A.)
The right brain deals with the big picture, imagery, nonverbal language, and the detection of
invisible things such as energy and mood. It helps with our awareness of our physical sensations and
emotions. This contrasts with the left-brain focus on language, linear and logical thinking, and details.
The left brain is clearly important in handling the details of our day-to-day lives, whereas the right
brain enables us to thrive in a life rich with relationships, curiosity, discovery, joy, and meaning.
As children, the strengths of our Survivor Brain and our PQ Brain are far more balanced than they
are when we get older. As we grow up, our Survivor Brain is continually exercised, rewarded, and
strengthened, while the PQ Brain atrophies. In the vast majority of adults, the Survivor Brain muscles
are far stronger than those of the PQ Brain.
The great news is that the PQ Brain muscles respond very quickly to being exercised and can
develop great strength in a relatively short time.

A Life-Changing Realization
In Paradise Lost, John Milton writes, The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of
hell, a hell of heaven.21 This illustrates one of the most critical principles of PQ: The positive and
uplifting Sage feelings of peace, joy, and true happiness are simply impossible to feel when your
Survivor Brain is in charge, and this would be true even if you were in heaven. On the other hand, you
will automatically experience the Sages uplifting feelings and perspective when your PQ Brain is
fully energized, even if you are in hell (figuratively speaking, of course). In other words, how you feel
depends on which region of your brain is active, rather than on your situation or circumstance.
Happiness is an inside game, literally and neurochemically.22
Dr. Jill Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist and prominent brain researcher experienced this
truth personally in the most dramatic of ways. She suffered a severe stroke in 1996, which shut down
much of her Survivor Brain regions and left her PQ Brain regions mostly in charge. No longer
impacted by her previously dominant Survivor Brain, she experienced a complete cessation of her
anxious mind-chatter and found her mind stunningly quiet. With her PQ Brain now in charge, she
experienced a euphoric sense of peace, joy, and compassion. This was despite the fact that she was
witnessing her body become paralyzed and her stellar career heading to ruin.
The life-changing insight she gained was that life looked and felt fundamentally different
depending on what region of her brain was dominant. She eventually fully recovered all of her brain
functions, but she was now very clear on which part of her brain should dominate. Her moving account
is described in her book, My Stroke of Insight.23

The point here is not to try to get rid of half of your brain. As Jill Taylor found out, you need many
of the functions of your Survivor Brain to handle the day-to-day routines of life. The goal, rather, is to
move your Survivor Brain from the captains seat to the copilots seat, to have it demoted from
running you to being run by you. The new captain, your PQ Brain, which fuels your Sage, knows when
and how to command its copilot. To accomplish this, of course, you want to strengthen your PQ Brain
muscles, enabling your Sage to take charge more often.

BUILDING PQ BRAIN MUSCLES

To develop your biceps, you could lift a dumbbell repeatedly. The PQ Brain equivalent of lifting a
dumbbell is very simple: shift as much of your attention as you can to your body and any of your five
senses for at least ten seconds. This is a PQ rep, just like the reps you do at the gym.
These simple reps require and therefore activate and energize your PQ Brain muscles. For example,
commanding yourself to stop being lost in thought and instead become aware of your physical
sensations requires the MPFC and right-brain parts of the PQ Brain. Numerous studies have
definitively linked focused attention on present physical sensations with activation of PQ Brain
regions.24 These studies have also shown that such exercise permanently rewires the brain by forming
new neural pathways that remain active even when the person is no longer focusing on the exercise.
This is similar to how your muscles remain strong long after you leave the gym. (For more detail, see
Appendix A.)
Many experts recommend taking at least ten thousand steps every day in order to remain physically
healthy. (This equates to walking approximately five miles.) The PQ Brain equivalent is doing one
hundred PQ reps every day. In other words, shift as much of your attention as you can onto your body
and any of your five senses for at least ten seconds one hundred times a day. You dont need to worry
about keeping exact timeten seconds is the equivalent of about three breaths.
Every day is filled with opportunities to get in PQ reps. For example, chances are you have been
lost in your head for the majority of the time youve been reading this book, not really aware of your
body. So right now, as you continue to read, begin to feel the weight of your body on your seat for
about ten seconds (or three breaths). Or begin to feel the temperature, texture, and weight of the book
you are holding in your hand. Or begin to be aware of your next few breaths and how your chest and
stomach rise and fall. Or try to hear all the sounds around you while you continue reading. You just
got a few PQ reps in toward your daily goal of one hundred.
As you can see, it is not difficult to build the PQ Brain muscles. It just takes a little practice. Just as
you cant develop your biceps by reading about bodybuilding, you cant strengthen your PQ Brain
through thinking, reading, or discussing concepts. You need to do the reps. Here are other examples of
how you can turn your common activities into opportunities to do PQ reps:
Daily routines: You can turn many of your current daily routines into PQ muscle-builders. Next
time you brush your teeth, see if you can become laser-focused on one physical sensation of brushing
for a minimum of ten seconds. For example, really feel the vibrations of the brushs bristles against
your teeth and gums, smell the toothpaste, or feel the bubbles of toothpaste foam bursting in your
mouth. Focus on one of these sensations at a time and keep letting go of thoughts as they come to you.
Its easy to get a few reps in every time you brush your teeth.
When you take a shower, give yourself permission to stop your busy mind-chatter for one short
minute, focusing instead on one physical sensation. For example, pay close attention to the sensation
of the drops of water hitting your skin, or the sound of the water hitting the bottom of the shower, or
the nuanced feeling of lather against your skin. Focus on one sensation at a time. Closing your eyes
often helps, as it reduces visual distraction, unless it is your visual sense you want to focus on.
Physical exercise: You can also turn your current physical exercise routine into an opportunity to
do many PQ reps. When you exercise, zone in rather than zone out. Take a few minutes during your
routine to pay close attention to one of your five senses. For example, if you are on a gym machine,
close your eyes for a few minutes and listen closely to the machine, your breathing, and any other
sounds around you. Or really feel the various sensations in each muscle that the exercise engages. If a
muscle aches, put all of your attention on the nuanced sensations of that ache rather than trying to

escape the ache. If you run, focus for a few minutes on the visual details of your surroundings as you
run, paying close attention to the colors and textures. Then shift your focus for a few minutes to
listening and hear the songs of the birds, the sound of your feet hitting the ground, your own breathing,
and the sound of wind in your ears.
Eating: The pleasure of eating can be significantly enhanced while also exercising your PQ brain.
Next time you sit down for a meal, take at least one minute to become fully present and mindful of
eating. Take a bite and then close your eyes, if possible, and pay careful attention to the texture and
flavor of the food as you chew. You will notice that the pleasure of eating is enhanced when you are
also getting a few PQ reps in.
If done consistently, doing PQ reps while eating will be more powerful than any diet plan. You
wont eat as quickly and you will get a lot more pleasure and satisfaction from far less food. Most
weight problems are associated with eating absentmindedly as a way of satisfying a psychological
rather than a true physical hunger. Activating the PQ Brain and in turn quieting your Saboteurs
significantly diminishes that psychological hunger.
Listening to music: Next time you are listening to a piece of music, zone in rather than zone out.
See if you can spend at least a couple of minutes in full mindfulness of the music. For example, pick
one instrument and pay close attention to the sounds it makes. Be fully present to every nuance of
every note rather than drifting away as we often do when we listen to music. This will both enhance
your listening pleasure and develop your PQ Brain.
Playing sports: Next time you play a sport, make a point of paying close attention to the sensations
of your weight on your feet, the breeze on your face, your grip on the club or racket, or your foot
against the ball. Pay close attention to both watching the balls spin and feeling its impact. Actively
let go of thoughts as they arise and sink into a deeper and deeper body wisdom that is only possible
with PQ Brain activation. This is what happens when athletes report getting into the zone, where
their physical exertion becomes effortless and flows.
Why do athletes sometimes choke in difficult situations? Why does a basketball player miss the
easy two-pointer that would have won the game in the last second? The only difference between this
moment and the hundreds of times he made the shot in practices is the Judges distracting voice. What
would happen to his performance if that voice were quieted through PQ Brain activation, allowing him
to focus entirely on the basket and the ball? Try this and youll discover a significant impact on your
performance in the sports you play.
Being with loved ones: Next time you hug someone you love, can you be fully present for ten
seconds? Can you be so present that you actually feel their breathing or heartbeat? Can you feel
yourself in your body, feel your feet on the ground, and feel your breathing rather than being lost in
the chatter of your mind? When you speak to them, can you see the pupils, colors, and sparkle of their
eyes?
One minute of being fully present with a loved one has a deeper and more lasting impact on your
relationship than spending a whole day together while you have a scattered mind.

HOW TO REMEMBER TO REMEMBER

As you can see, getting one PQ rep toward the hundred is very easy. The hard part is remembering to
do it often enough to make it to a hundred. There are two easy structures you can use to help yourself
remember: (1) do it every time you go to the bathroom; (2) do it every time you observe and label
your Saboteurs.

1. Bathroom as Reminder
Since you are trying to establish a new routine, its helpful to connect this routine to an existing one.
Why not use the bathroom as a reminder? After all, its a routine you do on workdays and weekends,
at home and while away.
Regardless of how busy you are, promise yourself that you will give your busy mind a rest for one
minute every time you go to the bathroom. Hopefully, you can see how absurd it would be for your
Saboteurs to argue that you are simply too busy to give your mind a rest for one minute every hour or
so. If you make yourself this simple promise, you will easily be able to establish a routine to get one
hundred PQ reps a day.
To do your reps during that minute, you could feel the weight of your body on your feet as you
stand up from your chair to go to the bathroom. Feel the carpet or floor under your feet as you walk
toward the bathroom. Feel the texture and temperature of the bathroom door as you push against it.
Feel the temperature and texture of the sink faucet. Hear the water in the sink and feel the water and
lather on your skin. All the while, keep letting go of the many thoughts that try to distract you during
this minute.
If you were to remain fully aware of your physical sensations throughout this entire minute, you
would earn six counts toward the hundred. However, you would most likely find yourself drifting in
and out of focus, in which case you would give yourself fewer counts.

2. Saboteurs as Reminders
As your Sage knows, you can turn everything into a gift and opportunity, including your Saboteurs.
Since they insist on showing up frequently, you can turn them into your PQ fitness trainers. Promise
yourself that every time you catch and label a Saboteur, you will get a PQ rep in for ten seconds. This
will serve two purposes. You will turn a Saboteur visit into an opportunity to build your PQ Brain
muscle. And you will take some oxygen away from this Saboteur by shifting from Survivor to PQ
Brain. Its a double win for you. What poetic justice it is to channel your Saboteurs energy into its
own eventual demise!
The combination of these two reminder systems can easily get you to your hundred reps a day. For
example, perhaps in the hour between two bathroom visits, while you were sitting in your team
meeting, you caught yourself getting upset and anxious and labeled these feelings as your Judge or
Controller. You then used each opportunity to bring your attention to feeling your breathing, or feeling
the weight of your body on your seat for a few breaths, and got a rep. Lets say you counted three PQ
reps during that hour. And you gave yourself a count of four during your one-minute bathroom visit.
You have now added seven counts toward the hundred in the course of an hour. The bathroom
structure allows you to keep a running tally throughout the day and monitor your progress.

Please make sure you dont allow any of the Saboteurs to make the job of counting toward a
hundred a chore that causes you additional anxiety and stress. Your count doesnt have to be precise;
doing ninety-seven dumbbell reps instead of a hundred and three wont make a big difference. If you
forget the count, just take a guess. If you go through a day and forget to do any reps, dont allow the
Judge to come in and beat you up over it. Start fresh the next day.
Your Judge might also try to convince you that you are failing at this because you cant cease your
mind-chatter on command. Indeed, your mind-chatter will not cease just because you command it to
do so, but dont get discouraged. You will find yourself drifting in and out of focusing on your
physical sensations as you attempt your reps. This is perfectly normal. Over time, your-mind chatter
will lose much of its intensity and volume, but it will never fully go away.
This practice should be fun, interesting, and joyful. When it doesnt feel that way, youll know your
Saboteurs are trying to convince you to stop.

THE PQ GYM
Doing PQ reps throughout the day is analogous to lifting heavy objects throughout the day; both
practices utilize and gradually strengthen your muscles. However, as any athlete knows, you can
greatly accelerate the development of your muscles by going to the gym every day and lifting
increasingly heavy weights for a concentrated period of time.
The PQ equivalent of gym workouts is finding five to fifteen minutes a day to sit quietly and do the
PQ reps intensively. After years of working with high-strung type-A personalities, I have developed
guided, closed-eye processes that result in deep activation of the PQ Brain for even the most restless
and distracted. In addition to giving you a good PQ workout, these guided sessions are deeply relaxing
and charge up your physical and emotional batteries. There are a few different versions of these
guided processes with different lengths to accommodate your needs, and you can download the audio
files from www.PositiveIntelligence.com. In a typical fifteen-minute session, during which you might
drift away in your mind-chatter for about half the time, you could reach a count of forty-five
successful reps (900 seconds, divided by 10 seconds per rep, divided by 2). So if you find yourself
falling short of your goal of a hundred toward the end of a day, this PQ gym is a fast way to make up
the shortfall.

21 100
Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon, noticed that it took twenty-one days for patients to cease feeling
phantom sensations in amputated limbs. With further research, he concluded it takes twenty-one days
to create a new habit and postulated that it takes that long for new neural pathways to be built and old
ones to atrophy.25 This process is, of course, what we have been calling muscle-building for the brain.
What this means for you is that you must promise yourself that youll get a hundred PQ reps per
day for twenty-one consecutive days. By the time you get to the twenty-first day, this will have
become a joyful new habit, and you will wonder how you ever lived without it.
Figure 14 on the following page is a sample chart created by Nancy, a director of operations for a
Silicon Valley company, for one day of her practice. Few people are so methodical in keeping track of
their PQ reps, and you are not expected to create a similar written record of your practice. I share this
chart to give you a sense of what a typical days PQ rep practice might look like.
Your practice might look quite different from Nancys. You might choose to take count in writing
like Nancy, or you might choose to keep track in your head and approximate. You might get many
more of your counts by observing and labeling your Saboteurs and doing a rep after every instance. Or
you might choose to get half of your counts in by committing to a fifteen-minute PQ gym workout. Or
you might get many of your counts in by doing your physical exercise routine on the treadmill more
attentively, or spending fifteen minutes eating attentively. Many of these activities will bring great
relaxation and even joy while also building up your PQ Brain muscles.

SIZE OF MUSCLE VS. SIZE OF CHALLENGE

As your PQ Brain muscle gets stronger, you will be able to handle bigger problems in life without
getting hijacked by your Saboteurs. How big does a problem need to be to have you get hijacked by
your Judge and/or accomplice Saboteur? Do you sweat the small stuff, or only the big stuff? The
answer depends on the strength of your PQ Brain muscles, which also correlates with the strength of
your Sage.
To illustrate, lets say you have medium-strength PQ muscles. Lets say this means your PQ
muscles are strong enough to lift weights that are thirty pounds or lighter, metaphorically speaking.
In other words, you remain centered, peaceful, and in Sage mode as long as the challenges thrown at
you are thirty pounds or lighter. Lets say challenges such as hitting traffic congestion, getting
messages from an angry and difficult customer, or being rejected by a small prospective client all
weight thirty pounds or less. This means you would be able to quickly recover from an initial Saboteur
hijacking in response to these challenges, re-center yourself, and approach them with your Sage
perspective. You would recover from feeling upset very quickly by just doing a few PQ reps to
activate your PQ Brain.
Perhaps discovering that your expensive new car was destroyed by a hit-and-run driver is heavier
than thirty pounds. Perhaps being rejected by a very large and game-changing potential customer after
working on their account for six months is weightier. Perhaps being criticized publically by your boss
on a costly mistake is weightier than thirty pounds, too. Only you know what challenge is too heavy
for your current PQ muscles to handle.
You will know when a challenge is too heavy for your PQ muscles when you find yourself having a
hard time recovering from a Saboteur hijacking. During this time youll notice yourself feeling upset
or anxious or angry or disappointed or guilty or any of the other varieties of Saboteur feelings we have
discussed. Even a few PQ reps may not give you relief. You might temporarily focus on feeling the
physical sensation of your back against the chair, or your feet on the floor, or your breathing, only to
fall right back to your angry or anxious feelings.
If the weight thrown at you is far greater than the strength of your PQ muscles, you may be so
dominated by your Saboteurs that you arent even able to observe yourself in the middle of the
challenge at all. You may simply get swept up in the drama roller coaster, stuck in full reactive mode.
You wont even remember to label your Saboteurs or do any PQ reps.
Life will always throw weighty challenges at us. Lasting peace is ultimately about developing the
PQ Brain muscles to a point where they are strong enough to handle any situation. Once this level is
reached, we can stay in Sage mode as we confront any challenge; we can feel peace, curiosity, joy,
compassion, or any of the other Sage feelings rather than distress, disappointment, regret, anxiety, or
anger. With the Sages perspective and powers, we are confident that we can choose to either actively
turn any situation into a gift or simply accept it and let it be.

THE PQ REPS AT WORK

Lets consider another example of the PQ reps at work. Say you are driving to work and you suddenly
think, I think I wills screw up this meeting and then Ill be in real trouble . Since you have studied the
characteristics of your Judge, you instantly recognize that as a Judge thought. You label it, thinking to
yourself, There goes the Judge. Catching your Judge reminds you to get a few reps in. So you now
shift your attention to feeling your physical sensations for the next few breaths. You feel the weight of
your body on your seat for several breaths. Thats two reps. Then you feel the texture and temperature
of the leather on the steering wheel for a few breaths. Thats another rep. You then choose to listen to
the air whistling through the window of your car and the sound of the cars engine and tires on the
road. You get a couple more reps in. For about ten seconds, you feel the slight up-and-down
movement of the car as it adjusts to the surface of the road. Another rep. Then you get distracted again
and drift away in thought, no longer getting any reps.
You arrive at work and the meeting indeed goes very badly. Throughout the meeting you are carried
away with the drama and fail even once to observe yourself and get any reps in. You get little access
to your Sage. You exit the meeting and are lost in the thoughts and feelings generated by the meeting.
You are mostly upset.
You get back to your office, feeling resentful of your boss and thinking he stuck it to you again.
You are feeling sorry for yourself. Suddenly you remember that all your upset feelings are selfgenerated through your Saboteurs. You remember that feeling resentful and pitying yourself are parts
of your Victim pattern. You label this and say to yourself, Oh, here is my Victim again . This helps you
to let go of those feelings temporarily and get some work done. You forget to use your Saboteur
sighting as a reminder to do any reps.
Then you feel the need to go to the bathroom, and you remember that you promised yourself youd
do a few reps during each bathroom visit. You notice the feel of the carpet under your feet as you walk
to the washroom. You notice the warmth of the water on your hands as you wash. You notice the
sound of the water. You notice the texture of the paper towel as you dry your hands. You remain aware
of your physical sensations for almost half a minute before you drift away to your racing thoughts. So
you decide to give yourself half the counts possible in a minutethree reps.
This shift of focus calms you down to some degree because it has activated your PQ Brain a little.
But this challenge is weightier than the strength of your PQ Brain muscles and your Sage, so your
calm is temporary and wears off quickly. You get hijacked again. By the time you go back to your
desk, you notice that you are feeling resentment and self-pity again. You label this as your Victim.
Catching your Saboteur reminds you to do a rep. For three breaths you feel your butt on your seat and
the weight of your hands on the desk. You give yourself another count toward one hundred.
Then you forget about the whole thing and get carried away by a phone call. Half an hour later, you
catch the Victim thoughts and feelings again, and you repeat the process. Since the Victim insists on
returning again and again, you use each return as a signal to redirect your attention to your physical
sensations and get a few counts in. You get quite a workout that day as you turn your persistent Victim
Saboteur into your personal PQ Brain fitness trainer.
After a few months of this practice, you find yourself anticipating the upcoming client presentation.
You hear the Judges voice saying that youll screw it up. You notice that with no conscious effort on
your part the voice is a lot less powerful than it used to be; it doesnt even faze you. Its volume has
dropped from a blaring 100 to a much more manageable 25.
At the meeting, your presentation goes okay, but the client throws a bad-news bombshell about a
big acquisition that might result in the loss of the client. As you hear and respond to the news, you

chuckle to yourself and think, Wow, look at you. Youre taking the bad news in such stride. A few
months ago you would have lost it! You chuckle again.
You begin noticing in other occasions that you automatically handle situations with a part of you
(the Sage) that stays above the fray and keeps everything centered. This automatically happens when
your PQ muscles reach a certain level of strength. All it takes is a little practice.

MY OWN PRACTICE
I have come a long way since gazing into that camera in sadness and resignation as a child. By my
mid-thirties, I had discovered the powerful Judge and Hyper-Rational Saboteurs, my old invisible
survival buddies, and recognized them as my biggest obstacles to greater success and happiness. By
following the practices I have outlined, I was able to turn both my Saboteurs into personal PQ fitness
trainers. Every time I noticed them surfacing, I was motivated to do a few reps to build up the muscles
to counter them. Today I still hear both their voices in my head. Their messages are still the same, but
I can barely hear them. Their whispers can no longer drown out the voice of my Sage.
Simultaneously, my Sages voice has increased substantially in volume and strength. Depending on
the intensity of the bad stuff happening in my work or personal life, I still occasionally get hijacked
by my Saboteurs. However, very few things get me down for more than a few minutes before I recover
and return to my Sage mode. I still exercise my PQ Brain muscles, since I am as committed to keeping
them strong as I am to remaining physically fit. These workouts are intensely enjoyable now and
something I look forward to. I would not dream of letting my PQ Brain muscles go flabby ever again.
Whatever you do, please dont allow your Saboteurs to convince you that you are too busy to
exercise your PQ Brain muscles. You can get in your entire hundred reps just by being more attentive
to what you are already doing throughout the day. Be suspicious of your Saboteurs telling you its too
much work and that a faster way to increased happiness and success is focusing on external factors,
circumstances, and achievements. Those will fizzle over time. There is no substitute for switching
power from your Saboteurs to your Sage and building your PQ muscle power. Without that change,
youre building many of your intricate castles on shifting sand.
I have never worked with anyone who has done a hundred PQ reps consistently for twenty-one
consecutive days and not experienced substantial and often life-changing improvements in their life.
For your sake, and the sake of your colleagues, your team, and your loved ones, I hope you will choose
to do the same.

Inquiry

Are you willing to promise yourself that youll do a hundred PQ reps every day? If so, what
might your Saboteurs try to tell you in the coming days to talk you out of it?

PART V
HOW TO MEASURE YOUR PROGRESS
In part V, you will learn how individual and team PQ scores are calculated to measure Positive
Intelligence. This will enable you to measure your progress as you use the three strategies for
increasing Positive Intelligence in yourself or your team.

CHAPTER 8
PQ SCORE AND PQ VORTEX

In this chapter, we will explore how PQ scores for both individuals and teams are calculated and
discuss what the PQ score means in practical applications. We will also explore the PQ tipping-point
score. Being above or below this PQ tipping point determines whether you or your team are constantly
feeling dragged down or uplifted by an invisible energetic vortex.
Metrics are an important part of creating and maintaining positive change. If you are exercising,
you get encouraged by seeing progress in miles run, calories burnt, or the weight of dumbbells lifted.
When dieting, you track your weight on the scale. During PQ practice, you track progress toward your
hundred PQ reps, and you measure you PQ score.
As described in chapter 1, your Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ) is your Positive Intelligence
score expressed as a percentage, ranging from 0 to 100. In effect, your PQ is the percentage of time
your mind is serving you rather than sabotaging you (acting as your friend versus your enemy).
For example, a PQ of 75 means that your mind is acting as your friend 75 percent of the time and as
your enemy about 25 percent of the time. We dont count the time that your mind is in neutral
territory. The question is, how do you measure whether your mind is being your best friend or your
worst enemy?
As previously discussed, a key premise of Positive Intelligence is that all your negative,
destructive, or wasteful feelings are generated by your Saboteurs, regardless of the circumstances.
Every ounce of your energy wasted on anxiety, stress, anger, frustration, self-doubt, impatience,
despair, regret, resentment, restlessness, guilt, or shame is a choice that was made by the Saboteurs in
your mind. But every challenge can be met by the Sage, its perspective, and its five powers. The
Sages perspective and powers generate only positive feelings.
It follows that the fastest way to detect whether your mind is acting as your friend (Sage) or enemy
(Saboteurs) is by noting the feelings you are experiencing. PQ is measured by calculating the
percentage of Sage-generated feelings versus Saboteur-generated feelings in the course of a typical
day. You can take the confidential two-minute PQ test by visiting www.PositiveIntelligence.com.
With the understanding that you have good days and bad days, your PQ score is calculated over a
typical period of time in your work and life. For example, your score during your Hawaiian vacation
by itself might not be an accurate read of your PQ. You might repeat the PQ test to get an accurate
score that is not biased by the variations caused by your atypical days.
You can determine a teams PQ with a similar method, except that the team members report the
feelings that they typically experience when interacting with other members of the team. The same
goes for PQ scores of entire organizations, relationships, and even marriages. The PQ score is a key
predictor of how much of the true potential of an individual, team, partnership, or marriage is actually
achieved.

IMPACT OF PQ ON HAPPINESS
If we define happiness by the percentage of time we experience lifes positive and desirable feelings,
your PQ score becomes your happiness score. By positive and desirable feelings, we mean all the
feelings generated in the Sage mode. In the Sages Empathize mode, these feelings would include
compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. In Explore mode, they would include curiosity, awe, and
wonder. In Innovate mode, you would feel the great joys of creativity. In Navigate mode, you would
feel grounded and centered in your deeper sense of values, meaning, and purpose. And in Activate
mode, you would feel the quiet power, resolve, and satisfaction of taking pure action without Saboteur
drama and interference.
You only need to know someones PQ score to know how happy they are. You could instantly say a
billionaire in full health with a PQ score of 50 is far less happy than a middle-class paraplegic person
with a PQ score of 80. You wouldnt need to know anything else about their life circumstances to
make this comparison.
This explains why researchers have shown that external events, such as winning a big lottery or
becoming a paraplegic through an accident, on average have little lasting impact on happiness. Within
a relatively short period of time, happiness usually reverts to what researchers call baseline
happiness levels that existed prior to these events.26 Other researchers, in a slight variation of this
theme, have found that external circumstances account for only 10 percent of variations in
happiness.27 Happiness is indeed an inside game.

IMPACT OF PQ ON ACHIEVEMENT
The relationship between performance and PQ is also straightforward. PQ determines how much of
your actual potential is achieved, as described in the following formula:
Achievement = Potential PQ
Your potential is determined by many factors, including your cognitive intelligence (IQ), emotional
intelligence (EQ), skills, knowledge, experience, network, and so forth.
This commonsense formula is not intended to generate precise scientific calculations and does not
incorporate the tipping point dynamic discussed later in this chapter. It is simply meant to illustrate
the general relationship between potential, achievement, and PQ. At higher PQ levels, most of your
energy gets channeled through the five powers of the Sage and is focused on creating the outcomes
you desire. At lower PQ levels, some amount of your energy is used to sabotage your efforts, or at the
very least is wasted on all the friction, drama, and distraction associated with the Saboteurs.
This formula confirms what we already know: most people have far more potential than they have
tapped. Only 20 percent of individuals and teams have PQ scores compatible with reaching most of
their true potential. The fastest and most efficient way to increase achievement and performance is to
increase PQ, not potential. This is because part of your potential, such as your IQ, is fixed, and the rest
of your potential is built over many years of acquiring skills, knowledge, experiences, and support
networks. Your potential is already high and significantly untapped. Investing in even more skills,
knowledge, or experience will add to your potential incrementally, but not dramatically in a short
period of time. On the other hand, PQ can be increased dramatically in just a few weeks or months.
To illustrate, imagine yourself on a beach. Youve entered into a contest to build as many sand
castles as possible in a few hours. Now imagine that every half hour a wave (a Saboteur) comes in and
destroys half of what you have built. If you want to improve your performance, you could invest your
time in attending a workshop that teaches you how to build sand castles even faster, increasing your
castle-building potential incrementally. This would of course result in better performance.
Alternatively, you could spend some of your time on building a sand wall to prevent the waves from
sabotaging your castles every half hour. (This would be equivalent to building up your PQ wall to
protect yourself from Saboteurs.) Guess which method would result in more dramatic improvements
in your final performance and outcome?

THE PQ TIPPING POINT: 75

I n chapter 1, I cited many research studies that showed the link between PQ and the happiness and
performance of individuals and teams. Now lets look at the evidence from some of the most
prominent researchers in the field that points to the existence of an important tipping point for PQ.
Please note that different researchers used different methods of measuring and tracking positivity
and negativity, although their results were highly consistent. In addition, these researchers have
typically reported their results as a ratio of positive/negative, such as 3:1. I have taken the liberty of
presenting those ratios as percentages in order to stay consistent with the PQ format. For example, I
have translated a positive/negative ratio of 3/1 into a PQ equivalent of 75 (3 positive to 1 negative
means positivity 75 percent of the time).
In one of the most thorough and impressive research projects in this field, Marcial Losada studied
sixty management teams, closely observing the interactions of the various team members. The teams
were placed into Low-Performance, Medium-Performance, and High-Performance categories based on
objective data that included profitability and customer satisfaction scores. While other dimensions
were also measured and compared, the positivity/negativity ratio proved to be the most dramatic
differentiator of the three performance categories (See figure 15).

What is most remarkable is the mathematical modeling that Losada contributed to this field of
research. His modeling showed that these human systems obey a nonlinear dynamic. This means that
at some tipping point, the system switches into either expanding or contracting cycles that spiral in on
themselves and create disproportionate impacts. At a PQ equivalent score of approximately 75 (74.4
to be exact), the system switches from a built-in, self-reinforcing loop that is biased toward
languishing into a loop biased toward flourishing.28
Equally impressive is the work of Barbara Fredrickson. After earning her PhD from Stanford, she
has emerged as a leading researcher in her field, winning the American Psychological Associations
inaugural Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. In collaboration with Losada, Fredrickson set out
to confirm that Losadas mathematically-derived tipping point, which was originally identified for
teams, also held true for individuals. Fredrickson studied individuals who were independently rated as
flourishing or languishing. Flourishing was determined by measuring thirty-three factors.
Fredricksons results, when averaged between the two populations she studied, translated to PQ
equivalent scores of 77 for flourishing individuals versus 69 for languishing individuals, validating
the tipping point of 75.29 Remarkably, Fredricksons assessment suggests that about 80 percent of
individuals score below this tipping point.
Perhaps the most publicized research on these positive/negative ratios is John Gottmans on
marriage, prominently highlighted in Malcolm Gladwells Blink.30 He can successfully predict, with

over 90 percent accuracy, whether a newlywed couple will be married or divorced four to six years
later. He identified an average PQ equivalent score of 82 for flourishing marriages and 41 for
marriages heading to dissolution. Gottmans results are consistent with the tipping point.
Robert Schwartz, a clinical psychologist, provided further validation. His own mathematical
modeling, successfully confirmed in working with patients, indicated the optimal mental state to be
slightly above the tipping point, and normal (average) states and pathological states to be
below.31
What is striking is that, despite using different ways of measuring the positive-to-negative ratios,
these researchers produced consistent findings. Barbara Fredrickson provides an excellent summary of
the research validating the tipping point phenomenon in her groundbreaking book Positivity: TopNotch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life.

THE PQ VORTEX
My own work with both individuals and teams has been consistent with the PQ tipping point of 75. I
like the metaphor of a vortex to describe the energetic phenomena on either side of this tipping point.
Below a PQ of 75, an individual or team is constantly being dragged down by the invisible forces of a
net-negative vortex. Above a PQ of 75, an individual or team is constantly being uplifted by a netpositive vortex. In an individual, these vortices are experienced inside the brain. In the case of a team,
the vortex is experienced in the interactions among the team members. Figure 16 is a graphic
representation of the vortices.

Have you known people who have such a vortex of negativity around them that you have to work

hard to resist being dragged down when youre with them? Have you ever belonged to a team whose
meetings make you feel dragged-down, anxious, self-conscious, suspicious, or defensive the moment
you enter the door? Can you remember any period of time when the negative force of the mind-chatter
inside your own head was so powerful that it exhausted you and you didnt know how to stop it?
Conversely, have you ever walked into a room where the energy was so positive and uplifting that
you immediately felt better, more hopeful, and more energized? Can you think of anyone who has
such a strong vortex of positivity around them that your mood is immediately lifted when youre near
them? Have you ever known a leader in whose presence you stand an inch taller and believe in
yourself more, regardless of whether he or she is even talking to you? Can you remember when your
mind was in such a flow that you embraced every challenge and obstacle as a fun game or
opportunity? All of these effects are the result of the invisible PQ vortex that each individual or team
exhibits at any given time. This vortex affects your energy level, mood, and perspective, often without
you realizing it.
When you are in the net-negative vortex, it will take constant energy investment to keep your head
above water and hold things together. In the net-positive vortex, you feel uplifted naturally, without
too much effort, as if youre flying with a tailwind. If youre caught up in a net-negative vortexif
you have a headwindyou might still get to your destination, but youd use much more fuel and take
longer. If your personal PQ or your teams PQ score is below 75, you are wasting a lot of your energy
just dealing with distressenergy that could otherwise be used to get things done.
Only 20 percent of us score above a PQ of 75, and thats why only 20 percent of individuals and
teams achieve their true potential.

WHAT CAUSES THE PQ VORTEX?

Why does the PQ vortex exist? Why does this nonlinear, discontinuous effect show up in so many
different researchers data? The answer differs depending on whether a PQ vortex is happening inside
an individuals head or inside a team. Lets look at the difference.

The Individuals PQ Vortex

The reason the PQ vortex occurs in an individuals brain is twofold. First, the way the human brain is
wired causes the negative or positive modalities of the brain to spiral in on themselves. Second, as
weve seen in previous chapters, both negative and positive brain modalities become self-fulfilling
prophecies in the external world. They generate results that reinforce the initial negative or positive
brain modality that produced them in the first place. This too reinforces the spiraling vortex.
The human brain is wired to perform two primary functions: survive and thrive. In survive mode,
your Survivor Brain takes control, primarily looking for the negative and dangers to your physical and
emotional survival. In thrive mode, the PQ Brain looks for opportunities to grow, discover, explore,
create, be in awe and appreciation, and reach its own full potential.
When PQ is 75 and above, the PQ brain is mostly in charge and the Survivor Brain is doing its job
in the background. Your Sage thought patterns loom large in thrive mode and your Saboteurs take a
back seat. When PQ is below 75, the situation is reversed.
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 mindnot just the bodybecomes 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 good news is that positivity is also self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling. Positive emotions bathe
our brains in serotonin and dopamine. These chemicals have multiple effects. They make us feel good.
They energize the learning centers of our brain, which help us in organizing, storing, and retrieving
new information. They facilitate making and keeping more neural synaptic connections, which in turn
help us think more quickly, be more adept at complex and big-picture problem solving, and generate
more outside-the-box creative possibilities. These are all Sage tendencies. Once in the positive vortex,
there is an uplifting pull to stay there.

The Teams 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 brains mirror neuron system. Our brains 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, its more likely that your own Saboteurs will come out swinging if
someone approaches you with his or her Judge in charge.
Lets 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 Johns boss, hes 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
persons force of personality. Some peoples vortex, whether positive or negative, has a small radius
and doesnt 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, hell be back to a PQ of
60 in interactions with his family. I know people who are so uplifted by their teams 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 within such a team than on their own.
If you are a member of a team, ask yourself this: Do you generally feel uplifted or dragged down
when you interact with your team? You can ask the same question about your marriage or your
relationship with your kids or parents.

WHY 75, NOT 50?

You might be asking yourself, Why isnt a PQ above 50 adequate to start a net-positive PQ vortex? At
a PQ of 50, there is one negative for every positive, while at a PQ of 75 there are three positives for
every negative. Why do we need three positives to counteract each negative? The reason is that the
brain is biased toward survival, and the Survivor Brain is wired to hang on to the negative and amplify
it while ignoring or discounting the positive. After all, dangers to our survival are negative things, not
positive ones. Unless you counteract each negative inside your own brain, on your team, or in your
relationships with three positives, you will be feeling the downward drag of a net-negative vortex.

THE UPPER LIMIT OF PQ

Marcial Losadas 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 dont 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 didnt 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.

THE PQ CHANNEL
If you are watching channel four on TV, the program being broadcast on channel five is invisible to
you, but its made visible once you tune into that channel. Similarly, the powerful energy and
information contained in the PQ vortex can become more visible to you once you learn to tune into the
channel through which energy, emotions, and tone are communicated. This is the PQ Channel.
The PQ Channel is very different from the more visible Data Channel through which we
communicate facts and details. We tend to be tuned into just the Data Channel, but any interaction
between two people simultaneously transmits information on both the Data and PQ Channels. As we
will see in later chapters, the information on the PQ Channel is often more important to leading,
building relationships, motivating, inspiring, and selling. Great leaders, parents, educators, mentors,
and salespeople know that.

To illustrate, Bob, your colleague, might be the kind of guy who always says Im fine on the Data
Channel anytime you ask him how he is. But through his energy and tone, shown on the PQ Channel,
he might be broadcasting a vortex of negativity, a cry for help, a longing for acknowledgement, or a
sense of resentment over an unresolved conflict with you. If you are not tuned into that channel, you
will be missing what is really happening in your relationship with Bob. The same might be true with
your whole team, your clients, your spouse, or your child. What people say is a small part of what they
are actually communicating in any interaction.
Learning to tune into the PQ Channel has a powerful impact on your effectiveness in interacting
with others. And, of course, it is your PQ Brain that knows how to best tune into the PQ Channel.

Inquiry

Pick an important relationship. If you counted the interactions in which positive or negative
energy is exchanged between you and the other person, would the ratio typically be at least three

positives to one negative?

PART VI
APPLICATIONS
In part VI, you will see the many applications of the three PQ strategies to enhancing both work
and personal life.
Chapter 9 shows the great diversity and range of these applications in brief.
Chapters 10 through 12 each include one detailed case study to give you a clear picture of how to
put what you are learning into practice. Chapter 10 follows a leader who turns his company
around by learning to first increase his own PQ and then his teams. Chapter 11 follows a couple
in the midst of great conflict as they learn to turn that conflict into an opportunity to strengthen
their relationship. This case study also includes a discussion of reducing conflict inside teams.
Chapter 12 follows a sales team applying PQ principles to selling. It also includes a discussion of
the application of PQ to motivating and persuading in general.

CHAPTER 9
WORK AND LIFE APPLICATIONS

Increasing your PQ has many applications. In this chapter, we will briefly look at application of PQ
techniques to team building, work-life balance, parenting, improving your game, solving complex
problems, finding meaning and purpose, working and living with difficult people, health and dieting,
managing stress, and developing other people.

TEAM BUILDING
A teams 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 cant help but be dragged down by the net-negative vortex
of a team that brings out their Saboteurs.
Most traditional team-building retreats and activities create short-lived euphoria and positivity
within a team that fizzles soon after the event. This is because these activities use artificial constructs
designed to force people to act in positive ways and temporarily push aside their Saboteurs. For
example, if you are high on the ropes in a ropes course with a team member whom you hold in
contempt, you have no choice but to temporarily put aside your contempt and collaborate with him to
meet the challenge at hand. This might be an uplifting moment of partnership that feels great. The
problem is that your Saboteurs are lurking behind the manufactured environment of the retreat. The
Saboteur was not permanently identified or weakened. Nor was your Sage strengthened. You dont lift
a heavy dumbbell a few times and think you have a muscular body for life. If your Judge was holding
your team member in contempt before the retreat, that contempt will likely come back in a different
form soon after the retreat.
In chapters 1 and 8 we discussed research showing a strong link between PQ and performance. The
sustainable way to build a high-PQ team requires a twofold focus: (1) help the team members increase
their individual PQs; (2) train the team to pay attention to the PQ Channel during team interactions.
To help people focus on the PQ Channel during team interactions, I sometimes ask people the
following question: If an alien who didnt 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.
For example, Kathy could have turned to Karl and asked, Karl, what led to that mistake in the
project? In a high-PQ team, when Kathy is asking this question, she is in PQ Brain and Sage mode.
She is Exploring and being deeply curious about what went wrong so she can learn from it, or so the
team can develop an innovative solution to avoid it in the future. The alien observer would have
picked up on the energy and emotions of curiosity and exploration in the PQ Channel, coming from
both Kathy and Karl.
In a low-PQ team, Kathy could have said the exact same words in the Data Channel. Karl, what led
to that mistake in the project? However, the Judge would have been in Kathys head saying those
words. In the PQ Channel, the visiting alien would have detected contempt or blame coming from
Kathy, and perhaps defensiveness coming from Karl. Kathys Judge would very likely have triggered
Karls Saboteurs automatically. Anyone paying attention to the PQ Channel would have noticed that
energy exchange and felt the net-negative vortex of the team.
We can improve only what we observe. The information exchange on the PQ Channel enables
people to begin to shift out of the net-negative vortex collectively rather than be constantly victimized
by its invisible force.
Observing the PQ Channel is easier if everyone on the team is practicing one or more of the three
PQ strategies to increase their own individual PQs. 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 didnt have Saboteurs and
refused to identify their own during a team retreat.
Imagine the great impact of team members identifying how they tend to shoot themselves and the
team in the foot. Imagine them doing this without shame, guilt, blame, or defensiveness. 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 teams 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 members 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 teams weekly discussion ensures that the teams increase in PQ is sustained long
enough to lift its PQ score into the net-positive vortex. Once that happens, the teams 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 quieted.
(Download self-guided audio files from www.PositiveIntelligence.com.)

WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Work-life balance is often interpreted in terms of how much time is spent on work versus family or
other personal pursuits. While creating a more balanced time allocation is always desirable, you can
instantly improve your work-life balance through being in your PQ Brain while participating in
whatever you are doing. The PQ approach to work-life balance focuses not just on the quantity of
time, but even more importantly, on the quality of time you spend on what is important to you.
When I interview the kids and spouses of the people I coach, they frequently complain that the
persons smartphone is the third wheel in their relationship and gets more true attention when they are
together than they do. Even though they are spending a lot of time together, the impact of that time on
the relationship is not very positive. One hour of time spent with your spouse or child while you are in
PQ Brain mode and fully present has a more positive impact on that relationship than an entire
weekend of being with them while youre afflicted by your Saboteurs and mind-chatter. Remember
that the signals on the PQ Channel are more important to a relationship than the signals on the Data
Channel. Many of us are in the habit of saying I love you to our loved ones on the Data Channel
while what were communicating on the PQ Channel is as loving and impactful as reading a list of
groceries.
Practice being in PQ Brain mode with the people who really matter to you for just five minutes and
see the great impact it makes on the relationship. If you hug them, feel their breathing and even
heartbeat as you hold them (one PQ rep, three breaths). If you are looking at them, really look at them.
Are their pupils constricted or dilated? How does the color shift around their pupils? Do their eyes
twinkle as you carry a conversation? If you say I love you, do you really feel the warmth of that love
in your heart as you say the words?
PQ can contribute to work-life balance in other ways. When your Sage is in control, you dont need
a two-week vacation to feel recharged. Unless you have been working in a coal mine smashing up
rocks, your exhaustion is not physical; its purely mental. And mental exhaustion is due to the
Saboteurs. The Sage knows nothing about mental exhaustion. You can relieve your mental exhaustion
instantly every time you shift to PQ Brain mode. You probably know this alreadyhave you ever
gotten a call from a long-missed loved one that instantly shifts you out of exhaustion?
In addition to increasing the quality of the time you spend outside work, increasing PQ results in
saving time at work so you can allocate more energy to outside activities. Frenzied multitasking, the
great addiction of the twenty-first century, is actually not as productive and efficient as single-tasking,
which is aided by the more calm and focused PQ Brain.
A group of Stanford scientists have recently shown that people who regularly multitask with several
streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job
to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.32 We kept looking for what
theyre better at, and we didnt find it, said Professor Eyal Ophir, the studys lead author. Theyre
suckers for irrelevancy, added Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers. 33
Professor Nass continues: Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And
one of the big discoveries is: you know what, youre really lousy at it. It turns out multitaskers are
terrible at every aspect of multitasking they get distracted constantly. Their memory is very
disorganized. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.34
The strange glamorization of multitasking isnt the only false Saboteur assumption that results in
wasting time at work. For example, if your Judge holds the no pain, no gain belief, you might ignore
easier solutions or not trust that they will work. Or your Hyper-Achiever may convince you that
working more always results in accomplishing more. But thats not true; 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. As
we have seen, the Survivor Brain is optimized for imminent danger, not steady productivity.

PARENTING
Most of us work too hard as parents, because we inadvertently micromanage our children. We work
tirelessly to get them to study and get good grades so they can get into good schools, excel in their
careers, find a good mate, etc. We think these achievements will make them happy. The problems is
that the vast majority of people I have coached who have met all of these milestones were not
necessarily all that happy and were instead living highly stressed lives while suffering from strong
Saboteurs. If happiness and peace of mind are what you ultimately want for your children, your most
important and lasting contribution would be to help them build the foundation that will make them
happy: their PQ.
As a father, my highest priority is making sure that my two children develop high PQsfar above
75before they turn eighteen and leave home. With a strong PQ Brain, they will be able to keep
tapping into the great wisdom of their own Sages after they leave home. Their paths will certainly
meander once they leave. They might find out after a few years that they chose the wrong major in
college. Or they might lose their way for a while and get bad grades or even drop out. They might have
their heart broken in their first relationship, or they might fail badly in their first job. Life will do its
thing and no amount of hyper-vigilant parenting on my part can protect them. With their Sages,
however, they will be able to turn all of these negative circumstances and their failings and mistakes
into gifts and opportunities. They will be able to keep growing, while also feeling happy and peaceful
along the way.
This doesnt mean, of course, that I neglect the other areas parents usually focus on, but I have
learned not to sweat them as much. They matter, but not as much as helping my kids master their own
minds and gain access to their own deeper wisdom.
How does this approach show up on a day-to-day basis? My wife and I take every opportunity we
can to remind our kids to get a few PQ reps toward 100. For example, during dinner we sometimes
pause our kids and ask them to get a few PQ reps in by focusing closely on the next few bites.
Sometimes all of us do so as a family, closing our eyes for a few reps for bigger impact. We also go
around the dinner table and each share three things about the day we feel grateful for. Gratitude, of
course, is a Sage feeling, and this exercise strengthens it.
When we play catch in the park, I occasionally pause and ask my son to close his eyes and get a few
reps by feeling all the sensations of the catchers glove on his hand, such as its texture and
temperature and weight. Or I ask him to feel the weight of his body on his feet. Or the breeze on his
face. Or the rising and falling of his chest or stomach with the next few breaths. When we resume
throwing and catching the ball, I ask him to do a rep by noticing the spin of the ball all the way until it
lands in his glove, and then to really feel the impact and sound of its hitting his glove. The first time
he did this he was amazed that he saw the small specks of dust that rose from his gloves as the ball hit.
He stopped fidgeting as much and moved into a more graceful physical form almost instantly.
Teaching your kids about their own Sage and Saboteurs has lasting impact. You might initially want
to limit it to a discussion of one overall Saboteur rather than explaining the Judge and its accomplice
Saboteurs. Kids as young as ten years old are fully capable of understanding and using the concept.
My clients son who had named his own Judge PoopMaker when his dad described the concept to
him was only eleven years old.
Once you teach your kid the basic framework of Sage versus Saboteur, you can then turn many of
her daily challenges into a coaching opportunity to reinforce the concept. Rather than dictating to her
that she should do A instead of B, you could ask her which voice in her head is voting for which
choice. Show your kid that there are always different voices and choices, and there are always

consequences for each. Allow her to follow the Saboteurs influences and incur their consequences, so
long as you always do a blameless analysis at the end and turn the situation into a learning
opportunity. This way, you get out of micromanaging your child and instead help her develop her allimportant PQ.

IMPROVING YOUR GAME

You can enhance your performance significantly in sports by developing your PQ Brain and
weakening your Saboteurs. I had a surprising firsthand experience of this. Growing up, I had never
touched a tennis racket. While at Stanford, I was inspired by the world-class reputation of the
universitys tennis program and faculty and decided to take classes. However, after two years of
practice I was still at a low-intermediate level in my game and decided to quit. I was frustrated by my
own slow progress.
Fifteen years later, on a summer vacation, a friend who was a relatively good tennis player kept
urging me to play with him. After multiple warnings that I hadnt touched a racket in fifteen years,
was not at his level, and would bore him to tears, I agreed to play. When we started the game, I was
amazed at my own performance. I was playing at a level far superior to what I had played fifteen years
earlier. My friend said he was impressed by the precision of my form and strokes. It dawned on me
that over the last fifteen years I had developed great strength in my PQ Brain and weakened my
Saboteurs. This meant that I could focus my full attention on the ball, the net, the racket, and muscle
memory of the occasional perfect stroke. There were no Saboteurs to worry me about my performance
or distract me with other thoughts or feelings. The resulting improvement in my game was stunning
and completely unexpected.
Next time you play your favorite sport, promise yourself to get as many PQ reps in as possible right
before and during the game. This might take the form of feeling the temperature, texture, or weight of
the club or racket for a few breaths, seeing the spin of the ball as it comes toward you, feeling the
breeze on your face, or just simply observing your breath as often as you can during the game. When
you hear Saboteur voices making you anxious about your performance, keep labeling them and letting
them go.
Athletes who experience being in the zone have tapped into their PQ powers. They report
suddenly experiencing deep calm and relaxation, a cessation of mind-chatter, and a laser focus on the
ball and the basket or whatever the game requires. The focus is so pure that they almost experience the
whole thing in slow motion and can even intuitively anticipate what will happen next. These are all PQ
Brain experiences. These athletes often dont know how they got there or how to replicate that
experience. By now you do.

SOLVING COMPLEX PROBLEMS

Have you ever had an experience where the fog lifts and the answer to a complex problem suddenly
pops into your mind? These are actually moments where your PQ Brain finally breaks through your
tangled-up rational mind and the noise of your mind-chatter to show you the way. Most people
experience these moments while taking a shower, working out, or hiking in nature. This is because
these activities, which are full of physical stimuli, focus your attention on your bodys sensations,
which activates your PQ Brain and quiets your Saboteurs. Now you know how to pursue moments of
clarity at your own command.
Computer scientists work with two kinds of computers: serial computers, which act more like our
left brain, and parallel computers, which act more like our right brain (part of the PQ Brain). Serial
and parallel methods are each suited to different kinds of problems. Some of the most complex and
profound questions can only be answered using the parallel process of our PQ Brain.
With a serial computer, one thing happens at a time and progress is sequential. For example, A is
fast and expensive; B is slow and cheap. Speed doesnt matter to me; money does matter to me.
Therefore, I should take B. This is a serial computing problem. It involves several discrete steps of
applying logic to data, and the answer is always the same. Most computers we use are serial
computers and are similar in function to our left brain.
A parallel computer processes a massively greater amount of data simultaneously in parallel tracks
and is capable of finding patterns and drawing conclusions that a serial process couldnt even touch.
Massive supercomputers operate in parallel, similar to our PQ Brain.
Many decisions we encounter are too complex to be reduced to the concrete and limited factors that
the left brains serial process can handle. Whom you should marry, whom you should hire, what vision
you should set for your team, what your calling is in life, what the next creative breakthrough could be
these are all complex problems that require your parallel PQ Brain for optimal answers.
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 wont 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.
If you have ever talked yourself into hiring someone against your own gut feeling because they
looked awesome on paper and met all the criteria, only to have that person fail within a short period of
time, you know why you should use your PQ Brain to make the final call in these types of decisions.
Many scientists and leaders talk about how their greatest discoveries and inventions were not
initially attained through hard rational thinking. Instead, their brilliant insight came to them in a flash
of inspiration, and then they did the hard work to gather the rational data and evidence that supported
it. Thomas Edison even turned this into a routine. He discovered that his greatest inventions occurred
to him in the moments right before falling sleep. So he would sit in a chair while holding a steel ball
in his hand until he dozed off. The moment he was about to fall asleep, his grip would relax and the
steel ball would fall to the floor, waking him. He would then jot down any worthwhile idea that had
popped into his head. This technique was successful because the PQ Brain is the more dominant brain
in the short juncture between waking and sleep.
There are of course easier and more practical ways to access your PQ Brains wisdom and creativity
than Edisons method. In my own case, whenever I am trying to resolve a complex issue or come up
with an important creative solution, I do a fifteen-minute PQ gym routine to fully activate my PQ

Brain. I then gently introduce the question to my mind, as straining the mind by thinking hard is the
Survivor Brains way of approaching problems. My batting average is one in three, meaning that I
typically need to do this at most three times before I have discovered my answers. Try it sometime
its actually a great deal of fun.

FINDING MEANING AND PURPOSE

We have established that your PQ Brain is wired to answer the more complex and profound types of
questions. And what could be more profound than questions of mission, purpose, and meaning? It is
your PQ Brain that can answer them.
There are two different approaches to bringing purpose and meaning to your work or personal life.
One is to change how you do things by making sure you are in your PQ Brain as you do them. The
second is to change what you do. We will explore both.
The students of a wise old teacher once asked the old man how life had changed since he became
enlightened. He contemplated calmly for a moment before speaking: Before enlightenment, I used to
chop wood and carry water. He paused as the students anticipation built. After enlightenment, I
chop wood and carry water.
The point here is that how you feel about this moment in time has far less to do with what you are
doing, and far more to do with how you are doing it. To be even more specific, it has to do with
whether you are in PQ Brain or Survivor Brain mode as you carry out any task.
This is further illustrated through a fascinating body of research conducted by psychologist Amy
Wrzesniewski and her colleagues. They found that people experience their work in one of three ways:
as a job, as a career, or as a calling. More importantly, they found that how people experience work is
more a matter of choice and perspective than of the job itself.
In research conducted on hospital cleaners, one group of employees experienced their work as just a
job and found it to be boring and meaningless. Another group experienced the same exact work as
meaningful and engaging. They approached their work in more creative ways. They interacted more
with nurses, patients, and their visitors. They took pride in making patients and hospital staff feel
better. They actively imbued their seemingly menial job with meaning.
Similarly, in a study of twenty-four administrative assistants with nearly identical jobs, close to a
third saw the work as just a job, another third saw it as a career, and another third as a calling.
What this means is that you can help yourself, and others, imbue the same exact work with far
greater meaning, without needing to change the work itself. You can change how you do your work by
activating the PQ Brain and the Sage.
The second way to give purpose to your job is to actually change what you do. This doesnt
necessarily mean changing jobs or rolesit could mean changing what you do within the scope of
your existing job or roles.
The Sages Navigate power is particularly relevant to helping you answer what you should do
differently in your current job or various roles. Play the Flash Forward power game as often as you
can to get guidance from your internal compass. For example, if you are a manager, ask yourself, How
would I wish I had performed this role at the end of my career, looking back? Asking such a question
might help you decide that developing your team members is far more important to your long-term
sense of fulfillment. This realization might lead you to do less micromanaging, or create a better
balance between just fighting the short-term fires and using them to grow your people in more lasting
ways.
In some circumstances, you might realize that neither changing how you do your current role nor
changing what you do within that role generates enough alignment with your internal compass. If
thats the case, you might want to consider a new job or even a new career. But in my experience, the
vast majority of people find satisfactory solutions without having to venture far from where they
already are.
If you are wondering which option to pursue, the answer is in your PQ Brain. Do a fifteen-minute

PQ gym workout to fully energize your PQ Brain and then gently ask yourself the deeper question.
Your Sage will give you your answer within a few attempts.

WORKING AND LIVING WITH DIFFICULT PEOPLE

By now we have a different language to talk about difficult people: they are people who have
particularly strong Saboteurs. How do you work and live more effectively with people like that?
Positive Intelligence offers four key strategies to do so:
1. 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 persons 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 persons presence. Intensify your effort to label and let go
of your Saboteurs, or do PQ reps, when you notice their Saboteurs coming.
2. Fuel their Sages. Remember also that the Sage in one person tends to energize the Sage in the
other. When in the difficult persons presence, intensify your effort to get centered in your
Sage. Adopting the Sage perspective means that you ask yourself how you can turn this
persons 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 ideagenerating 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 shouldnt 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. This helps in two ways: first, no one feels singled out,
and second, it raises the entire units PQ, meaning each person within that unit will have an
easier time maintaining a higher PQ. This is due to the invisible energetic power of the PQ
vortex.
4. Put boundaries around their Saboteurs. If the previous strategies are not possible, as a last
resort you can at least limit the damage of the difficult persons Saboteurs by setting some
boundaries around them. Allow their Saboteurs to have their way within a narrowly defined
boundary. You are in effect throwing a bone to the Saboteur to get its energy occupied and
spent in a smaller domain.
For example, you might give the Judge a narrow domain in which to feel superior; give the
Controller something small it can fully control within a larger project; allow the Stickler to do
a small project to full perfection and in its own exacting way; or negotiate with the HyperAchiever for clear boundaries for protected time with the family, outside of which it can be a
workaholic to its hearts delight. This is of course a strategy of last resort because it does not
diminish the underlying strength of the Saboteur.
With these four strategies, you can work and live more effectively with people who exhibit strong

Saboteurs. In addition, see if you can activate your Sages compassion toward these people. Imagine
how hard it must be for them to live with those Saboteurs. They werent born that way, and their Sages
are trying to get out from under the shadows of these Saboteurs. Those Sages could use your Sages
helping hand.

HEALTH AND DIETING

I cited research in chapter 1 showing that higher PQ tendencies result in lower levels of stress-related
hormones, enhanced immune system function, diminished inflammatory responses to stress, lower
blood pressure, less pain, fewer colds, better sleep, and reduced likelihood of diabetes and strokes. I
also mentioned that the research showed an increase in longevity of about ten years.
A healthy and moderate diet is clearly also associated with increased health. Experts agree that for a
vast majority of people, overeating has nothing to do with feeling hungry. The reasons we overeat are
mostly psychological, not physical. We are bored or anxious or restless or unhappy, so we reach for
the food. Eating temporarily soothes these feelings and brings a slight amount of distraction or
pleasure as an antidote.
The PQ Brain counters these dynamics in two ways. First, with your PQ Brain activated, you wont
feel bored or anxious or restless or unhappy. There will be no void to fill with food. Second, each bite
you eat attentively will bring you a great deal more pleasure than ten such bites in your Survivor Brain
mode, meaning that you need far less food to satisfy the same desire for pleasure.
When someone wants to lose weight, I dont coach them to go on any particular diet or eat any
particular kind of food. I go to the heart of the matter and ask them to commit to one thing: eating
attentively. They commit to getting at least ten PQ reps with every meal.
Peoples relationship with food is transformed when they begin to eat in this way. They instantly
report eating much more slowly and getting a lot more pleasure out of it, all while witnessing and
weakening the Saboteurs that cause their eating issues in the first place.

MANAGING STRESS
All stress is Saboteur generated. Under the Sages influence, you focus on doing what needs to get
done, but you dont 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 dont feel that your ultimate happiness and success depend on it.
While the strategies of weakening your Saboteurs and strengthening your Sage independently
reduce your stress and anxiety, you can also rely on the third strategy of strengthening your PQ Brain
muscles. The PQ Brain is incapable of feeling stress, just as the Survivor Brain is incapable of feeling
peace. If you strengthen and activate your PQ Brain, you will feel peace in the middle of the greatest
storms of life.
A CEO I once coached, who was into boating, likened his new experience of feeling calm during
crises to finding an anchor. He said it was as if he had spent all his life as a captain of a ship without
an anchor on rough seas, terrified of every cloud formation. With his PQ Brain strengthening, he said
he now had an anchor to throw: he could feel deep peace even in the middle of the greatest storms. I
am no longer constantly anxious about what the next storm might bring he said, articulating a
common sentiment of those who increase their PQ.

DEVELOPING OTHER PEOPLE

Billions of dollars are wasted on training and development each year. Within six months of most
expensive trainings, whether meant to strengthen leadership skills, emotional intelligence, selling
ability, or customer service, many participants can barely recount what they learned or point to what
has changed. Most of these trainings focus on higher-level competencies, while leaving the deeper
underlying Saboteurs intact. For example, in conflict-management workshops, people learn activelistening skills and work hard at listening to one another better. The problem is that if the nasty Judge
is left intact, it will soon override any benefit derived from active listening. Your new active-listening
skills might even become a tool used by the Judge to gather better evidence against the other person.
As one leader put it to me, If you enter this workshop a jerk, you will leave a jerk, except you are
more dangerous now because you will know better how to cover it up.
I n chapter 12, well see that a salesperson using positivity techniques while not truly feeling
positive (in other words, his Saboteurs are left intact) will be jeopardizing not only the sale but also
his own physical health. Positive thinking techniques backfire if they are learned without tackling the
underlying negativity of the Saboteurs.
If you want to develop other people in a significant and lasting way, your best bet is to start with PQ
training. Otherwise, you might be doing little more than planting a beautiful garden while leaving
ravenous snails free to roam.

OTHER APPLICATIONS
As you can imagine, we can take any significant challenge in work and personal life and apply the PQ
model to it. I hope you will choose to do so, and I hope you will share what you have learned with
others so a larger community can be built using our collective wisdom. Visit
www.PositiveIntelligence.com to share your learning and insights, and also to benefit from others
experiences.

Inquiry

What is one area in which you feel most inspired to use the PQ approach? What would success in
this area look and feel like?

CHAPTER 10
CASE STUDY: LEADING SELF AND TEAM

The beatings will continue until morale improves. This humorous saying, while seemingly farfetched, is not far from what often happens in practice.
I recently had a meeting with a very bright and sincere CEO who had been trying for months, with
mixed success, to shift his team into a higher-PQ mode. When we discussed his approach, a light bulb
immediately went off for him. He had kept urging for more positivity primarily through showing great
frustration with the ongoing negativity. He was focusing on punishing negativity and spending little
time celebrating or modeling positivity. He was inadvertently modeling and reinforcing the very
Saboteur energy that he was fighting.
This paradox is often evident not just in leaders but also in parents, educators, and spouses who are
desperately trying to shift their child, student, or spouse into more positive behavior. A leader, parent,
teacher, or spouse who wants to shift another person into higher-PQ behavior must first go there himor herself. The Sage in one is more likely to activate the Sage in the other, just as the Saboteurs in one
are more likely to activate the Saboteurs in the other.

FRANKS STORY
I n chapter 1, I shared an abbreviated version of Franks story to introduce you to the benefits of
Positive Intelligence. Since you have now learned the PQ framework and tools, I can now give you a
behind-the-scenes version of the story. This will help you coach both yourself and others through
applications of the model.
Remember that Frank was the CEO of a publically traded company. During the Great Recession of
2008, he called me to ask for an urgent meeting. When we met, I was surprised by how much he
seemed to have aged in the year since I had last seen him. After a very brief chitchat, he told me that
he had been so devastated by the recent losses in his companys stock that he had broken down in tears
in front of his ten-year-old daughter. She had actually comforted him and told him that everything
would be okay. He was embarrassed and felt guilty about this role reversal.
Due to his pride and confidence in his company, Frank had not diversified his wealth and had seen
his net worth, which was mostly tied up in his companys stock, plummet by about two-thirds within
six months. He was unable to sleep well and spent his nights with churning thoughts of fear, regret,
shame, and guilt for the companys downward spiral and the impact it would have on both his family
and his employees.
After empathizing with Frank and making sure he felt heard, I told him that despite the crisis, all
his current distress was a construct of his own mind and was due to his Saboteurs. On the napkin at our
coffee shop table, I sketched the perspective and five powers of the Sage for him and suggested that
they could help him turn his situation into a gift and opportunity.
To help Frank get over his skepticism, I proceeded to tell him the stallion story (page 70) to
illustrate the perspective of the Sage. I suggested that his situation was analogous to the farmers
stallion having just been stolen and the Judge saying it was bad, bad, bad, which was a lie. Frank was
unconvinced, which is typical when the Judge has been supercharged through a major crisis. He could
not see how he could possibly accept this terrible situation as a gift and an opportunity.
I insisted that we not continue our conversation until he had come up with at least three scenarios in
which his situation could be turned into a gift (the Three Gifts technique). He struggled and made a
halfhearted attempt. He came up with the possibility that he could be forced into early retirement and
end up taking better care of himself and spending more time with his wife and children. When I
insisted on more possibilities, he said that maybe the necessary layoffs would give him a chance to get
rid of C players in the company and form a stronger team. For his final example, he said maybe he
would eventually become a more relaxed person, since his worst nightmare had already come true. I
could see that Franks Judge had a strong hold on him and that at best I could only soften the edges
around his Judges certainty that this situation was bad.
I asked Frank how his executive team was doing, and he said that they were predictably under an
equal amount of strain and feeling discouraged by the turn of events. As I had predicted, Frank scored
a low PQ of 43, while his teams PQ came out at 54. Clearly, they had all been living in the grips of
their Saboteurs ever since the companys stock collapsed. They were being dragged down by the
powerful forces of individual and collective net-negative vortices.
Franks progress toward the hundred PQ reps a day was slow in the beginning. We had agreed that
he would email me at the end of every day and report his count. The first day he reported fourteen.
The next day it was five. Usually he practiced only during his morning routine, before he was swept up
in the net-negative vortex for the rest of the day. After the second day, I didnt hear from him for a
few days, during which time he had forgotten to practice at all.
On the sixth day he sent me a very enthusiastic email. He had decided to get a few counts in while

having lunch. He had closed his eyes to focus on a few bites of his turkey sandwich and was amazed
by the difference in his eating experience. He felt that for the first time he had really experienced the
texture and sponginess of the bread as he bit down on it, the crunch of the lettuce, the coolness and
juiciness of the tomato slice, the tangy sensation of the mustard hitting his tongue, the many sounds of
chewing, and the feel of the many muscles in his mouth getting involved. He was amazed that he had
always missed this symphony of tastes and sensations by shoving food into his mouth absentmindedly
and eating on autopilot. The experience had only taken one minute.
I congratulated him on his discovery and wrote, If there is so much pleasure, joy, and discovery in
a lowly turkey sandwich, imagine how much more is available to you in every other step of your day!
This little discovery made a believer out of Frank. His rep count quickly moved up into the twenties
and thirties, and he soon reached one hundred. I told him that he was now ready to take the Sage
framework into his executive team meetings.
When he introduced the Sage perspective of accepting everything as a gift and opportunity to his
team, Joe, his no-nonsense CFO, argued that accepting their terrible situation as a gift would lead to
denial, inaction, and further decline. He said mockingly, You cant run a company by singing Que
sera, sera! Whatever will be, will be.
Prepared for this skepticism, Frank was ready with a proposal that he and I had agreed to. 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. It weakened Joes skepticism enough so that they could proceed.
At this point, Kathy, the VP of marketing, chimed in and said that she was already feeling a little
more energized and optimistic by simply considering that maybe this whole thing wasnt just a
terrible fiasco and could be a gift in disguise. Others joined in with a mix of enthusiasm and
skepticism and agreed to give the Sage perspective a try.
In a subsequent meeting, the team agreed to individual self-assessments of their Saboteurs. Each
person described which Saboteurs they had and how they were getting in the way. This, of course, was
done a little halfheartedly, because their Judges resisted the whole process. However, the process still
had a powerful impact. Frank said everyone was both surprised and relieved when Joe volunteered that
his big Saboteur was the Controller, which was fired up due to the increased stress. They had all tried
to tell Joe over the years that he was too controlling, and now he had finally owned up to it.
The team agreed to do a hundred reps each day and include reports on their progress, successes, and
failures in their weekly meetings. In the meantime, I continued my one-on-one work with Frank to
help him raise his own PQ. The more progress Frank made in accessing his own Sage powers, the
more he was likely to help his team do the same.
Over time, we engaged each of the Sages five powers to help turn things around.

EMPATHIZE
Franks Judge had tortured him ever since his companys stock had plummeted. The criticisms varied,
but each came from his Judge: Whats wrong with you? You should have known better. Youre a
bad father, a bad husband, and a bad CEO. You arent as good as you thought you were; most of
your successes were probably due to luck. I suspected that everyone on his team was experiencing
similar assaults from their Judges.
When I suggested that Frank needed to activate the Sages Empathy to counteract the badgering of
the Judge, his Judge had the predictable objection. If Frank empathized with himself and others, he
would be encouraging mistakes similar to the ones theyd just made. We discussed that this was one
of the big lies of the Judge. Empathizing with his current pain did not mean condoning the mistakes
that contributed to it.
To access empathy for himself, I asked Frank to play Visualize the Child. His Judge was so
persistent that he couldnt access any empathy for himself by just visualizing. So I suggested using an
actual photograph. He found a picture of himself under a Christmas tree. He was lit up with joy,
kindness, wonder, and curiosity. The picture conveyed Franks true essence, which was hiding beneath
his tough corporate demeanor. I asked him to put a copy of that picture on his smartphone and look at
it every day. Frank reported that looking at the picture made it easier for him to feel empathy and
appreciation for himself during these tough times.
When Frank raised the importance of empathy with his team, most people understood his rationale,
but they didnt find it easy to comfort themselves either. They admitted to being hard on themselves,
thinking it was important for their ambition and high standards.
Frank said some of them felt a little awkward at first when he suggested the Visualize the Child
power game. But they gradually saw the connection between this seemingly irrelevant exercise and
how they could eventually pull themselves out of their current troubles.
Accessing empathy toward themselves, combined with the daily PQ reps, gradually strengthened
their Sages and weakened their Judges; soon, the team wasnt feeling quite so beaten up.

EXPLORE
Frank is a big fan of the book Good to Great.35 In this bestseller, author Jim Collins refers to a
practice of great companies that he calls blameless autopsy. Blameless autopsy is about openly
exploring what has taken place with the goal of learning from it. The approach must be blameless
because otherwise the scope of discovery is severely limited by the Judges presence and tendency to
look for blame. We often avoid thorough exploration of what happened because the Judges presence
makes the process too painful or too contentious.
To ensure a truly blameless autopsy, they needed to amplify their Sages power to Explore, so
they agreed to play the Fascinated Anthropologist power game. This helped keep their Judges at bay.
What emerged was a realization that as a result of several years of great success, the team had become
too sure of itself and had stopped being truly curious. They knew too much, and they had lost their
beginners mind, with is the basis of the Explore power. In particular, they had stopped listening to
the subtle signals their customers had been sending to them about the changing times. In their case,
success had bred too much confidence.
The team agreed that each of them, including Frank, would call up one customer they had lost and
request an in-depth conversation about what had happened. I asked Frank how excited he and the
others felt about having these conversations. He admitted that no one was looking forward to it. I
pointed out that the Sages Explore mode would actually be a very pleasant experience and that any
distress involved was being manufactured by the Saboteurs.

INNOVATE
Once the team had explored more of the dynamics underlying their customers needs, the market, and
their own mistakes in their recent past, they were ready to feed all this information and knowledge
into their Sages power to Innovate. Franks senior team had previously conducted multiple
brainstorming sessions to figure out ways to cope with their continually deteriorating condition. After
Frank described the mood and process of those meetings, it was clear that Saboteurs had hampered
their attempts. For one thing, the mood had been subdued, indicating that everyone was feeling their
Judges weight. It was also clear that the Judge and the Controller were teaming up to sabotage the
process. Many team members had verbally and nonverbally shown their disapproval of some of the
ideas that had been suggested or tried to control the discussion from going places they didnt want it
to go.
Innovation in particular is highly dependent on PQ Brain activation, so Frank started the next
meeting with a guided five-minute PQ Brain activation process. He played the audio file I had given
him so he could participate in this closed-eye exercise himself. (Download self-guided audio files
from www.PositiveIntelligence.com.)
Frank also created a few large NO JUDGE signs and posted them around the room before the
meeting. To further ensure that no Saboteurs disrupted their innovation, they agreed to follow the
Yes and structure for idea generation.
One of the outcomes of a Judge-free innovation process is the generation of a high volume of ideas.
Squarely in the Sages Innovate mode, Franks team generated almost two hundred ideas in less than
an hour. He said that he could literally feel the moment when people fully switched to this Sage mode.
Without the Judges filter, the ideas came with ease and speed. It was then time for them to Navigate
and choose a direction from all the possibilities.
The most common mistake made in this process is that individuals and teams try Innovate and
Navigate simultaneously, meaning they will keep evaluating each new idea as it comes up. This
creates a back door for the Judge to enter through. Fortunately, Franks team heeded my warning and
separated the two stages.

NAVIGATE
To discover the coordinates of his own Navigation compass, I had Frank play the Flash Forward power
game prior to his team meetings. I had him ponder the question, At the end of my life, how will I
wish I had conducted myself in this period, regardless of outcome? The answers came immediately
and helped him clarify the points on his compass for this issue. First, he was clear that he would wish
to have used this crisis as a way of bonding even more with his wife and kids rather than allowing it to
create tension and conflict. Second, he would have wished he had treated his loyal employees with
fairness and considered their best interests as well as his own. Third, he would have wanted to have
stuck firmly to his integrity rather than bend his principles in order to be expedient.
With Franks personal Navigation compass clear, he was ready to do the same with the teams.
Before using the Sages 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 Franks 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.
To discover the coordinates of its Navigation compass, the team asked, Years from now, how will
we wish we had conducted ourselves in this situation, regardless of outcome? Joe, the formerly
reserved and conservative CFO, was the first to share. The Navigation question, he excitedly said, had
instantly illuminated the choice for him. Years from now, regardless of outcome, he would wish they
had kept steady and doubled down on the original mission of the company rather than veer from it in a
desperate and opportunistic pursuit of returning to profitability at all cost.
Joes wish clearly pointed to one of the five finalist options. This option involved stripping down
the companys branding and product offering to its initial value proposition. Joe said he realized that
the other, more opportunistic ideas would mess with the very DNA of the company and that while
many things should change, the DNA shouldnt.
Others nodded in agreement: double down on the original promise. It was becoming clear that part
of what had gotten them into trouble to begin with was pursuit of growth opportunities that, while
individually profitable, were distractions from the original promise. The team had not consulted its
Sage in navigating the many forks in the road it had come upon in recent years, and it had lost its way.
Frank told me later that he had never seen his senior team agree so quickly on a critical item with so
little effort and conflict. The ease of it almost made him suspicious of the outcome. Could it be so
easy? he asked himself. I reminded him that the saying no pain, no gain was one of the many selffulfilling lies of the Judge. The Sage often leads to paths that are paradoxically both easier and more
productive. The PQ Brain actually feels good while producing great results.
The Navigate step had a calming and grounding effect on the team. Someone compared it to being
lost in a stormy sea on a black night and suddenly seeing a lighthouses powerful beam pointing the
way to safety. Being pulled by ones own compass (i.e., by ones deeper values and purpose) often has
this calming effect. The same is true for teams.

ACTIVATE
Frank and his team always prided themselves on being highly action-oriented. Through the PQ process
they discovered that they had put such a premium on taking action that many of their quick responses
had in retrospect been reactive and wastefulor even counterproductive in the long run.
When they conducted the blameless autopsy on their own actions, they agreed that they had
mistakenly reacted to urgency with frenzy in the past, unwittingly opening the door to a ton of
Saboteur interference and noise. We discussed that with PQ Brain activation, one feels calm, not
frenzied, in the middle of urgent crises and takes pure action with minimal Saboteur drama.
Franks team liked the analogy of how black-belt martial artists and Samurai warriors center and
calm their mind in the middle of the greatest fights so that they can focus all their energy on meeting
danger. They called this Samurai action and began asking one another whether they were taking
Samurai action or frenzied action.
At the end of a two-day retreat during which they had decided on the course of action, Frank asked
them to play the Preempt the Saboteurs power game. The team took a few minutes to consider which
Saboteurs were going to cause distraction, diversion, or delay as the team took Samurai action.
Frank took the lead in sharing his own response. He thought his Stickler would be the biggest
obstacle. His Sticklers perfectionistic tendencies kicked in even more strongly at times of high stress
as a way of bringing him some semblance of security and comfort. The current situation was ripe for
that tendency. Joe acknowledged that his Controller would likely be a key obstacle, as their new plan
would set into motion many changes that he could not fully control. Tom, head of operations, said that
his Avoider would be the greatest challenge: he found some of the required steps to involve
potentially unpleasant conversations with people, and his tendency would be to avoid those
conversations. At the end of this remarkably open discussion, they all offered suggestions and support
to one another to help keep the Saboteurs at bay as the team proceeded with Samurai action.
By now it was clear from their collective energy and positivity that they had shifted to the netpositive vortex. One reason I knew this was because Frank felt energized by his interactions with his
team rather than drained, as he had in the past. The next PQ measurements confirmed this. Franks PQ
had shot up to 79. Everyone on the team was above 70, with Kathy scoring an amazing 86. The teams
PQ had risen to 81, safely within the net-positive vortex. The team members were definitely bringing
out the best in one another and helping sustain each members increased PQ.
In a little less than six months, Frank and his team had streamlined their business operations back to
the core DNA of the company and doubled down on innovations that consolidated their lead in their
redefined market space. Within a year, their profit margin had recovered to within 80 percent of precrash levels, and their revenue was on a solid path to recovery. The companys stock had fully
recovered within eighteen months. The team was confident that the company now had an even more
defensible leadership position against its competitors in its redefined market space.
Frank recently told me that his greatest gratitude was actually not for the recovery of his company.
He was most grateful for having discovered the self-fulfilling nature of his Sage and for having
exposed the hidden powers of his Saboteurs. He said that with his Sages growing strength, he no
longer felt the desperate need for the company to succeed in order for him to be happy. His elevated
PQ had allowed him to see that his happiness was not dependent on the external circumstances of his
life. He found it paradoxical that his not needing to succeed so desperately was actually ensuring
greater success. I assured him that with his growing Sage powers, he would discover many more such
paradoxes.

Inquiry

Think of one person whose behavior you have been hoping to change. When you are interacting
with him or her, do you experience Sage or Saboteur feelings in yourself? If you are experiencing
Saboteurs, how are they sabotaging the change you are hoping to see in the other person?

CHAPTER 11
CASE STUDY: DEEPENING RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH CONFLICT

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 Sages 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 dont 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.
The Sage approach to conflict is identical for both personal and professional relationships and
teams. In this chapter, we will first see the Sage approach to conflict through a personal relationship
case studysomething we can all relate to easily. We will then explore how the same exact
techniques apply to harnessing the gift of conflict in professional relationships.

SABOTEUR INTERFERENCE IN RELATIONSHIPS

Before we get to our case study, lets look at how the Saboteurs interfere in relationships. Without a
strong Sage, the Saboteurs are often centrally involved in our approach to conflict. Here are some
examples of how Saboteurs can wield their negative forces to fuel conflict.
Judge: Your Judge causes you to make a whole lot of assumptions about the other persons
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 thats not your true intention.
Stickler: The Sticklers 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 isnt important. You might sugarcoat and soften your
message to the point where the other person doesnt 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 the other person too much during any conversation about the conflict. This only
causes you to feel resentful afterward.
Victim: A strong Victim Saboteur causes you to take things too personally. You might spend too
much time venting and dwelling on all the wrong that was done to you. Others might lose their
patience with you and opt to focus on what should be done looking forward.
Restless: Similar to the Avoider, the Restless causes you to avoid dealing with the pain and drama
of conflict. You might choose to shift your focus to more exciting and pleasant things and be hard to
pin down on issues of conflict.
Hyper-Vigilant: Your level of danger-awareness will likely be calibrated too extremely for most
when your Hyper-Vigilant is flexing its muscle. Forcing that same level of vigilance on others is
unfair and places an onerous burden on them.
Hyper-Rational: Conflict is rarely just about data and logic, which is what the Hyper-Rational
would like. The logical way is not necessarily always the answer, but the Hyper-Rationals
insistence that it is might cause you to be perceived by others as cold, distant, or intellectually
arrogant.
In the case study that follows, you will see the fingerprints of the Saboteurs in a conflict. You will
also see how each of the Sages five powers can completely shift the dynamic of a typical conflict.

PATRICK AND SUSAN

Patrick, the CEO of a global financial services company, initially sought my help with the rampant
conflict on his senior executive team. After I described the Sage approach to conflict, Patrick
confessed that he felt an even more urgent need to use the approach in his relationship with Susan, his
wife of twenty-one years. After I met with Susan separately, the three of us agreed to spend a retreat
day together to work on their relationship.
We got together in a beautiful hotel suite with a terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Despite the
lovely setting, you could cut the tension between them with a knife. Negative Saboteur energy
permeated the room. This didnt surprise me, as their relationship PQ score had turned out to be a very
low 30. They sat on opposite sides of the couch. Susan hugged a pillow as if in self-defense against the
attacks that she anticipated. Patrick sat with his arms crossed, looking impassive. They didnt look at
each other as they spoke, and they seemed to be communicating only through me.
I asked them to describe the current state of their relationship. Susan spoke first. She felt that
Patrick had been mostly absent as a husband to her and as a father to their seventeen-year-old son and
fourteen-year-old daughter. He always made work his main priority, so much so that he recently
cancelled a family vacation during the kids spring break at the last minute. At home, Patrick often
showed more interest in his smartphone than in his family. Susan felt she was practically a single
mother, having to deal with their teenagers attitudes alone. Her list of complaints was long.
As is often the case with intense conflict, Patrick didnt acknowledge a single concern of Susans.
He simply counterattacked. He thought Susan had it easy and that he carried the full burden of
providing for the family. He felt it should therefore be understood that work had to be his priority. He
had to cancel the vacation to attend an emergency board meeting. Over the last few years, every
conversation with Susan or the kids quickly became about their complaints and led to a fight. In his
opinion, it made perfect sense for him to prefer spending time with his smartphone rather than
engaging in another painful dialog after a tough workday. He felt constant pressure from his
professional and personal obligations and wondered when he would finally get some recognition for
all that he did. His list seemed as long as Susans, and his anger was just as palpable.
I let their back-and-forth dialog go on for a while. After it was clear that they were in a circular
argument, I asked them each what percentage of their concerns they felt had been acknowledged and
understood by the other person. They both said almost zero.
Herein is one of the key problems of conflict: We are so busy telling the other person what we want
them to hear that we usually listen very little. When we dont feel heard, we are likely to repeat
ourselves more loudly and from slightly different angles. Most people in conflict begin to sound like
broken records to each other, constantly repeating themselves because they dont feel heard. The
chicken-and-egg problem of conflict is that until we feel heard, we are not willing to listen. Thus the
vicious cycle continues.

FROM POSITION TO ASPIRATION

To show them why they felt so stuck, I drew a partially submerged iceberg on a piece of paper and
explained that it represented the three layers of information in a conflict. (See figure 18.) The visible
part of the iceberg, Position, represented the demands they made of each other. For example, Susans
position was that she wanted Patrick to skip his meeting and attend the family vacation. Patricks
position was that he wanted Susan to understand the necessity of his attendance at the emergency
board meeting.
The problem with these positions is that they almost always create automatic opposition; for every
position there is an opposite one. Conflict lives at the position level and is rarely resolved there. At
this level, one party or the other needs to give up its own position entirely, or the two need to meet
somewhere in between, which would result in each feeling they had compromised. This is not an
optimal way to resolve conflict on major issues.
Positions are typically held and defended by Saboteurs, who by their very nature are not interested
in resolution. Saboteurs are only interested in being right.
Peoples positions are often fed by underlying Assumptions. These often include many assumptions
about the other partys intentions. Even as an expert in this field, I have been humbled by how
difficult it is to correctly guess another persons 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 persons
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 anothers 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 youve 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 Sages 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 hed 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.
I asked Susan to talk for three minutes again about the vacation issue. After three minutes, I asked
Patrick to repeat what he had heard. He repeated back what he thought he had heard. I asked Susan
whether Patrick had heard correctly. Susan pointed out, accurately, that Patrick had left out several of
the points shed made. So I asked her to repeat those points until Patrick was able to fully report all of
them back.
I then asked Patrick to think for a second and ponder why he had missed almost half of Susans
points in the first go-round. To his credit, he admitted that he had been busy rebutting Susans early
points in his head and structuring his own responses, and as a result hed lost track of some of her later
points. I congratulated Patrick for this bit of honest and accurate introspection. Indeed, in the early
stages of this practice, the Saboteurs are still strong, and they interfere with our ability to truly listen
to the other person.
It was then Susans turn to listen. She did a little better than Patrick in reporting back what she had
heard. But I caught her throw in a few interpretations and rebuttals. This, too, is a common Saboteur
infiltration in the early stages of the process. Susan also admitted the difficulty of purely listening and
avoiding turning to rebuttal in her head.
After several rounds of speaking and listening, it was clear that the Saboteurs interference had been
minimized. I could actually feel the energy of the Sages Explore power in the room. The energetic
temperature in the room went up, and Patrick and Susans body language relaxed. They were now
turned to each other as they spoke and listened.
They were ready for some advanced Exploration, so I raised the bar. I asked Patrick to repeat not
only the data he had last heard from Susan but also the feelings that were implied or picked up in
between her words, in energy, tone, or body language. In effect, I was asking him to tune into the PQ
Channel rather than just the Data Channel. Doing so clearly required the PQ Brain, and by that point I
knew that both Patricks and Susans PQ Brains were activated enough to handle it.
After a pause, Patrick augmented his report by telling Susan, You seem to have felt deeply hurt
and rejected by what I did.
I allowed this powerful moment to sink in for a minute. Susan looked down and lessened her grip on
the pillow she had been clutching. I asked her how she was feeling. She said this was the first time in a
long time that she had felt truly heard and acknowledged by Patrick. I could see some air going right
out of her angry hot-air balloon. She sank into her seat a little and her shoulders relaxed.

The PQ Rule of Communication

At this point, I drew the Data and PQ Channels to help illustrate the PQ rule of communication:
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.
This statement lit an immediate lightbulb for both of them, and they both began nodding knowingly.
Patrick said he could finally see the blueprint of so many of their futile, circular arguments. Susan
would complain about something for a few minutes and Patrick would do his best to get into listening
mode and stay there. He would then immediately respond with a possible solution to the problem
Susan articulated. His new realization was that he had only been listening and responding to the Data
Channel.
Susan replied, And that left me feeling furious that he was not really listening to me or validating
my feelings. I didnt want solutions. I even found it insulting that he thought I needed his brilliant
mind to solve our problems unilaterally. He treated me like an employee coming to him with a
problem. More than anything I needed to feel heard. Until today I cant remember the last time I
really felt heard or seen or acknowledged in our arguments.
What was remarkable was the way Susan said all of this with calm clarity; there was no trace of the
bitter edge of the Judge that had infused some of her earliest statements. Her discerning Sage voice
was calling a spade a spade, and the blame-and-shame game of the Judge was nowhere to be seen. I
knew that Patricks Saboteur defensiveness would therefore not be triggered.
I asked Patrick to consider why he did what he did. He said he felt most comfortable with rational
problem solving and least comfortable staying on the level of what I was calling the PQ Channel of
emotion, aspirations, and deeper needs. The Data Channel and the rational mind were the tools he
knew best. He thought he was doing both himself and Susan a favor by offering quick solutions that
could end a messy and painful conflict.
I asked him if he could now better understand why even his most brilliant of solutions seemed to be
falling on deaf ears. He said he guessed that until Susan felt heard, she was not willing to hear what he
had to say. Susan said that perhaps that was true, but it was not a decision she had consciously made.
There was no quid pro quo. She wasnt withholding listening until she was heard. It seemed to have
happened automatically.
I reminded them again of the chicken-and-egg problem of communication: unless we feel heard, we
are not willing to listen to the other. I suggested that it would be an act of generosity for someone to
break this vicious cycle and be the first to really listen to the other even while believing that they
themselves were not being heard. Someone has to take the initiative to push aside the Judge and come
from the Sage, extending an inviting hand to help the others Sage emerge. Conflict is otherwise the
Judge in one person screaming at the Controller in the other person, or the Victim complaining to the
Avoider, etc. Saboteurs have no interest in resolution.
After several three-minute rounds of being listener and speaker, the Explore mode seemed to have
born significant fruits of discovery. As is often the case, Susan and Patrick both discovered that many
of their previous assumptions about the others needs and intentions had been false. They seemed to
understand a lot more about each others true underlying intentions and aspirations. The Explore phase
usually runs out of steam at some point, and it becomes clear that each party no longer has anything to
add and feels fully heard. It was clear we could move on.

EMPATHIZE
After years of conflict, people tend to be quite unwilling to let go of their Saboteur grievances and
empathize with one another. This requires a significant shift to the PQ Brain, even more than we had
achieved so far together. I guided Susan and Patrick through fifteen minutes of PQ Brain activation at
this point to accelerate their progress. They would now be more capable of tapping into the Sage
power of Empathy.
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 anothers vantage point. Empathy is
ultimately about feeling, not about thinking or analyzing.
We are often reluctant to empathize with someone elses 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
doesnt 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.
This distinction seemed to ease Susan and Patricks concerns about fully empathizing with each
other. Based on the discoveries they made during the Explore mode, I asked them to put themselves in
the others shoes and report what it must feel like from that vantage point. I suggested again that the
Sages Empathy was a great act of generosity toward the other, especially if one was the first to
initiate it.
Susan felt inspired by that. She volunteered to go first. She collected her thoughts and then calmly
started: Patrick, sitting in your shoes I can only imagine how tough it must have been for you to
make the decision to cancel on the vacation. In these shoes, I become aware of a few different
underlying needs that might have been in conflict. One need is to take care of your family financially.
I understand from our conversation today how heavily that always weighs on you. I am guessing
another business-related need might be the obligation you feel to your employees and board. And then
there are the kids and the vacation they had been talking about and planning for months. In these
shoes, I can imagine having felt sad and guilty in breaking the news to your family, especially to
Melody, who got so emotional. I can imagine having felt hurt and judged when everyone got angry at
you and said you were being selfish.
It was interesting for me to notice how these words flowed out of Susan seemingly without effort. It
was in sharp contrast to her more controlled, cautious, and labored speech when we had started. It was
clear to me that a different part of her brain, the PQ Brain, had moved into the drivers seat. With the
PQ Brain, we often experience a more effortless flow of thoughts, words, and actions.
Patrick seemed choked up. He was too proud to let himself go, so he fidgeted a little, bit his lips,
cleared his throat, and recomposed himself, looking down the whole time. I knew he was deeply
touched and in touch with his feelings, which wasnt common for him. I didnt want to ask him a
question that would take him right back to his comfort zone of rational analysis, so I allowed a couple
of minutes of silence so both of them could remain in their moving experience.
I then asked Patrick how he felt. He said he almost lost it when he heard Susan say that she
imagined he must have felt hurt and judged. He had never admitted to these feelings, either to himself
or to Susan. He had only expressed anger before. But when Susan described how she thought he had
felt, he instantly realized that she was exactly right, and his anger was just his habitual way of

showing his feelings of hurt and rejection. He felt touched that in Susans willingness to empathize
with him, he had been brought in touch with his own deeper feelings.
Patrick was describing the common phenomenon of one persons Sage activating the Sage in the
other. The PQ Brain in one person, including its Empathy Circuitry, amplifies the PQ Brain in the
other. Since Empathy Circuitry works in both directions, Patrick was now more empathic not just
toward Susan but also toward himself.
I then asked Patrick to report what it felt like to be in Susans shoes. Patrick was silent for a long
minute. He then started talking as if still deep in thought. He said that what he had just realized as he
put himself in Susans shoes was how difficult it must be for Susan to feel dependent on him for so
much. They had both met in a top-rated business school, and Susans marketing career out of business
school had been even more successful than Patricks. She had risen to group brand manager at a major
consumer goods company in record time and for a while was earning a higher salary than Patrick. And
then came their two children, over a three-year span. Susan had gone back to work a year after
Melodys birth, but she hadnt felt the same fire as before and didnt want to delegate raising her kids
to a nanny. She had decided to quit and stay home with the kids.
Susan had never brought up the subject with him, and Patrick sat there wondering how difficult it
must be for a woman of her level of intelligence and ambition to feel fully dependent on him
financially. He was taken aback by this realization. He elaborated more on it and then went silent, lost
in thought.
I didnt need to look at Susan to know that this must have struck a chord with her. I allowed another
minute of silence to let her process this generous offering of empathy from Patrick. She expressed
both surprise and gratitude that Patrick had stumbled onto this insight out of nowhere (which again is
a characteristic of the PQ Brain). She explained that she had been wrestling with questions of her
identity and worth in recent months, feeling some guilt about the choices she had made. She had been
wondering whether she had copped out from work challenges or really made a positive choice in
focusing on parenting. She wondered whether she had the energy and drive for a second career. She
called this her smoldering midlife crisis and suggested that she had felt resentful of Patrick, blaming
him in part for her situation. This was despite the fact that he had always supported whatever choice
Susan made. This, she now realized, was part of what fueled her anger with Patrick when he seemed to
be giving his career higher priority than the family. (This was an assumption she had made about
Patrick that had gotten cleared up during the exploration process.)
With this kind of empathic communication, it was now clear that the Sage was fully activated in
both of them through the Explore and Empathize steps. We were now ready to move to Innovation.

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.
Susan and Patrick had discovered much about each others aspirations. Patrick aspired to continue
to be a responsible CEO, which to him was about his role as provider. He wanted to find a way to
better balance that role with his roles as father and husband, so that Susan and the kids did not feel
shortchanged or lower in priority. For Susan, it was clear that she aspired to reclaim her self-respect as
a bright and effective leader. She didnt know yet whether this would entail returning to a part- or fulltime career.
By then the couple had the information they needed to move into creative problem solving using
their Sages power to Innovate. The Sages energy was firmly established in them, the Judge was
nowhere to be found, and the PQ Brain was fully active. They were clearly in the net-positive vortex,
and we could all feel the tug of its uplifting energy. I therefore did not feel the need to give them any
structure, such as the Yes and power game, to prevent Saboteur interference. I only gave them
a reminder that the Innovate phase would be most successful if they completely left out evaluation and
simply focused on coming up with as many ideas as possible without worrying about their practicality.

NAVIGATE
After about forty-five minutes, the Innovate phase had run out of steam. Without Saboteur
interference, a ton of ideas had been generated, and Susan and Patrick needed to make some choices.
To identify the appropriate coordinates to use on their Navigation compass, I suggested the Flash
Forward power game and posed the following question: At the end of ________, looking back, how do
I wish I had conducted myself, regardless of outcome? They needed to choose the appropriate thing to
place in the blank. At the end of the year, at the end of the companys life, at the end of the kids time
living at home, at the end of life?
Given the far-reaching nature of the aspirations they were considering, they both chose at the end
of life as the way to evaluate their options. This helped them narrow and prioritize their choices to a
manageable few.
For Patrick, one action was to carve out blocks of time on his calendar that would be designated as
family time. He was going to be proactive in alerting his staff and board of those time commitments
and declare his intention to hold boundaries around those times. He was to articulate the reasons why
he thought he would actually be a more effective leader as a result. To begin with, he was going to
make up for the missed vacation by planning a surprise two-week family vacation during the summer.
This was going to be their longest vacation together in years.
One of Susans actions was going to be reactivating her long-dormant connections with her onceclose network of business-school friends, many of whom were in leadership positions. This was to be
a key step in trying to answer whether reclaiming her self-respect as a bright and effective leader
would involve resuming a part- or full-time career.

ACTIVATE
We now needed to determine what it would take to move into the pure action of the Sage, unpolluted
by Saboteur interference and drama. I proposed the Preempt the Saboteurs power game and asked
Susan and Patrick to reflect on their Judges and accomplice Saboteurs, anticipating how they would
try to sabotage their actions. Prior to the retreat they had completed their Saboteur assessments, and
we now reviewed the results for a few minutes before proceeding.
Patrick predicted that his Controller would try to talk him out of his plan for greater balance and
make him feel anxious about delegating what he needed to delegate in order to free up time. I asked
him to anticipate what that voice would say in his head. He suggested things like Everything might
fall apart in your absence and do irreparable harm, What if people get lucky and everything goes
well in your absence? How would that reflect on you and the importance of your role? and What if
everyone else around you starts getting lazy and goofing off?
Since Patricks PQ Brain was now highly activated, I asked him to consider how the Sage would
counter these statements. He had a ready answer for each. For example, he said if things fell apart in
his absence, he could turn it into a gift in two ways. It would wake up and galvanize some people into
stepping up to fill the vacuum created by his absence. It would also reveal the people who werent
capable or interested in stepping upemployees who were perhaps no longer a good fit. Both would
contribute to building a stronger leadership team.
Susan suggested that her Judge and Avoider together would likely try to get in the way of action.
She said her Judge made her feel embarrassed to talk to her high-flying former classmates about her
choice to take a hiatus from her career. Her Avoider used this embarrassment as an excuse to put off
contacting them.
I asked her to anticipate what they would be whispering in her ears. She said they would say things
like Maybe you arent as smart as you thought you were, Maybe you were just too lazy and scared
to go back to work. The kids were just an excuse, and Your classmates will be so bored with you
now. You have so little in common now.
Susan, too, found ready Sage responses to these thoughts. They were now ready to move into pure
action.

KEEPING THE MOMENTUM

I had helped energize Susan and Patricks PQ Brains during our retreat, which had given them deeper
access to their Sages. The question was how to maintain that access beyond the retreat and keep the
momentum alive.
They both agreed to get a hundred PQ reps in every day. They also agreed to call a time-out on any
major conflict that seemed to be getting out of hand and switch to the Fascinated Anthropologist
listening structure we had practiced.
We had a follow-up call three months after our retreat. Susan and Patricks relationship PQ score
had risen to 77, so I knew their relationship was being uplifted by the net-positive vortex. Susan and
Patrick were now clear that our retreat had marked a turning point in their relationship. They had
learned to embrace rather than avoid the areas of conflict in their relationship as a way of
continuously deepening the relationship. They said they had both fallen back into bad old habits at
times. On a couple of occasions, theyd had nasty fights where they were too angry for a day to follow
the structure we had agreed to. On the whole, however, they had recovered a lot faster from these
setbacks and tried to turn even those fights into opportunities for ongoing learning. This indicated that
their Sage muscles were growing stronger through practice.
As icing on the cake, they reported that the Sage muscles they had developed to deal with their
relationship challenges were now paying off in other areas of their life. This had been evident in
Patricks annual 360 feedback from his company; he received accolades for being a more thoughtful
listener and leader. I had firsthand knowledge of this, of course, as we had been working together to
help his team learn how to harness the power of their team conflicts using the same techniques.

TEAM CONFLICT
The steps to harness the gift of conflict in professional settings are identical to what we have explored
so far, although the following additional considerations are helpful:
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 persons 80 percent fault to
discovering the 20 percent they are contributing. This shifts the focus of the conversation from
the Judges blame to the Sages 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 room and name them. People will be far more
willing to do so if they see that conflicts can be turned into gifts.
Its impossible for a relationshipwhether personal or professionalto reach its full potential
without embracing and harnessing the power of the conflicts that inevitably arise. Let the Sage show
the way.

Inquiry

What is the relationship you would most want to improve? How would it feel to be in that
persons shoes regarding this relationship? Be as thorough and generous as you can be in putting
yourself in his or her shoes.

CHAPTER 12
CASE STUDY: SELLING, MOTIVATING, PERSUADING

In one of my leadership seminars, I ask anyone in sales to raise his or her hand. Some hands go up, but
most dont. Then I ask again, How many of you are in sales? A few more hands go up. I ask a third
time and wait. At first theres confusion and hesitation. Eventually everyone catches on and raises
their hands. Thats when I say emphatically, We are all in sales.
Selling, persuading, and motivating are essentially the same at their core. If you are not a
salesperson by title, think of selling your capabilities the next time youre up for a promotion. Or
selling an idea to your boss on how things could be done differently in your department. Or
motivating a colleague to work on your project rather than another. Or persuading your spouse to
let you be yourself rather than constantly trying to change you. Or persuading your teenage daughter
to be more careful about her own physical safety after a night of partying. Each of these operates on
the same principles.
In this chapter we will use the case study of a sales team to illustrate the PQ approach to selling,
persuading, and motivating. For simplicity, we will focus on selling and clients, trusting that you
can extend the concepts to persuading or motivating. Before presenting the case study, we will explore
the three PQ principles of selling.

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.
Most of us are unaware or unwilling to admit that we buy based on emotion and intuition, not
purely on objective data and logic. This is something that successful salespeople and advertisers know
well. The PQ Channel leads us as we make buying decisions, while the Data Channel follows to justify
the choice and sustain the illusion of rationality and control. 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.
Take, for instance, a highly rational type who falls head over heels for a red Porsche when he takes
it on a test-drive. He then embarks on an exhaustive analysis of the cars build, performance, retail
resale value, efficiency, and environmental impact until he has gathered enough corroborating data to
pretend that his rational mind is deciding he should buy it. He doesnt admit that his decision was
made the moment he felt the adrenaline rush of the test-drive.
As a salesperson, leader, team member, parent, or spouse, if your attempts at persuasion are
primarily data-driven and analytical, you are missing out on your own greatest power in selling.
Persuasion and inspiration are functions of the PQ Brain.

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. For a human being, the status quo means continuing to be alive; saying yes to
something new and unknown could literally lead to death. The Survivor Brain is wired to prevent that.
Most products, services, and ideas that we want others to buy fall into the category of helping them
thrive. It then follows that what we are selling is more likely to be embraced by the PQ Brain.
The situation is reversed when the product, service, or idea is fear-based and centered on surviving
physical or emotional danger. If you want to sell unneeded security to a homeowner, it would help you
to stimulate the buyers Survivor mind by playing on his judgment and fear of all the creeps living
within a few miles. If youre a politician and want to sell the idea of an expensive and unnecessary
war, youd better ignite the Survivor mind and cast the country you want to attack as an imminent
threat. To sell something based on fear, you need the Judge and its accomplice Saboteur to be firmly
in control of your buyers mind. Hitler understood this well and whipped an entire nation into a Judge
frenzy. Political campaigns are peppered with similar tactics, albeit on smaller scales.
Hopefully, whatever it is you want to sell your client, team, spouse, or obstinate teenager will help
them thrive even more. In that case, you need to energize their PQ Brain to get an enthusiastic yes.

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 persons brain tunes into your brains 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 persons 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.
In a fascinating study, researchers discovered a compelling difference between the impact of fake
positivity (produced by the Survivor Brain) versus genuine positivity (produced by the PQ Brain).37
The researchers distinguished between the fake and genuine positivity by paying attention to the facial
muscles involved in a genuine smile and a forced smile. Both kinds of smiles activate the zygomaticus
major, the muscles that raise the corners of our lips. Genuine smiles also activate the orbicularis oculi,
the muscles circling the eyes. When contracted, these muscles lift our cheeks and create wrinkles
around our eyes. In the forced smiles of fake positivity, these muscles around the eyes are not
deployed.
In this study, the researchers discovered that 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 doesnt trigger the buyers PQ Brain and doesnt
improve your chances of getting a yesit actually exposes you to higher risk of dying from coronary
disease! Hows that for a job hazard?
I hope by now you are somewhat more skeptical of both the effectiveness and even physical safety
of the techniques taught in some sales and leadership development seminars. 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.

CASE STUDY
Jack, the VP of sales at a privately held software company, contacted me shortly after being hired for
a new job. As the previous head of sales at a leading enterprise software company, Jack was brought in
to produce a couple of years of aggressive revenue growth so the company could go public at high
valuation. There was a real sense of urgency to his mission. The company had seen a slowing of its
sales in the last two quarters due to new competition. They were worried that they might miss a
critical window of opportunity to go public if sales didnt pick up significantly.
Jack knew that his sales team was highly skilled in classical sales methods. Yet he had an intuitive
sense that most of his salespeople had far more potential than they knew how to unleash. He was
intrigued by a speech he had heard in which I had proposed that skills, knowledge, and experience
constitute potential and that PQ determines what percentage of that potential is actually achieved. He
wanted to know whether PQ could help.
Given the sales teams tight budget, aggressive timelines, and geographic diversity, we agreed to a
weekly webinar for a three-month period with his entire sales force of almost a hundred people.
Before the program started, everyone did an individual PQ assessment. Their scores averaged 59,
well below the critical 75 threshold. The fact that a large majority of them were stuck in the netnegative vortex pointed to significant opportunities for improvement. Given the urgency of their task
and the high motivation to improve, everyone agreed to work simultaneously on all three strategies for
increasing PQ: weakening their Saboteurs, strengthening their Sages, and strengthening their PQ Brain
muscles. Everyone did an assessment of their top accomplice Saboteurs and committed to doing a
hundred PQ reps per day.
In one of our first calls, I asked everyone to identify what was most draining and discouraging to
them. After a brief discussion, we agreed that it was the number of rejections they received. They had
bought into their Judges perspective that failure and rejection were bad things. It was time to move
them toward the Sage perspective.
I asked them to identify the gifts and opportunities in rejection. The responses were initially slow,
but before long they were coming in very quickly. They included, You need ninety-nine noes to get to
a yes, so one less to go, Theres learning in every rejection if youre willing to look into it, and
Maybe the client you lost frees up your time to get a bigger client.
Once theyd thrown out about ten more possibilities, I added another big one: Imagine, I said,
that you are on a battlefield on a pitch-black night, fighting an enemy you cannot see. Getting
rejected is like setting off a flare. It lets you see your enemy, your Saboteurs, clearly, and you can also
see the weapons theyve been using against you. You will now be able to fight a better fight against
your Saboteurs because you know what youre up against.
I explained that rejection goes to the very heart of the survival drive. As a tribal species, the early
humans physical survival depended on being accepted by the tribe. Outright rejection could literally
mean death by losing the shelter and protection of the tribe. Rejection hurts at the most primitive
levels of the Survivor Brain. It energizes your Judge and accomplice Saboteur to their core and
exposes their patterns for you to see clearly. This enables you to notice and label them, which is your
best strategy to weaken them.
In order to further expose their Saboteurs, everyone looked at his or her own way of handling
rejection. One sales rep said, I get mad. I get mad at the person who rejects me and I become very
judgmental of them for a while. After a while, I turn the table on myself and beat myself up so I will
do better next time. I guess it has gotten me good results, but its not pleasant. I use my anger to push
myself. We agreed that this was the familiar Judge pattern. The Judges voice was claiming that

unless you beat yourself up constantly over your shortcomings, you wouldnt become successful.
Another rep observed that her own reaction to rejection was to distract herself with fun or pleasant
activities to soothe the pain of rejectiona classic Restless pattern.
Another said his pattern was to obsessively refine his preparation to make sure he could avoid
future rejection, all the while knowing that he was overdoing it. We agreed that this sounded like the
Stickler pattern.
Another described her pattern of procrastination on making the next call, hoping to avoid the next
rejection. This sounded like the Avoider pattern.
The assignment for the group for the next two weeks was to turn every rejection and failure into an
opportunity to witness and label their own Saboteurs. When possible, they were to use each Saboteur
sighting as a signal to do a few PQ reps.

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.
One key difference between star salespeople and average ones is recovery time. Does it take you
seconds, minutes, hours, or days to recover from the pain and negativity of a failure? Just as
important, do you put yourself in front of new prospects while still in Saboteur mode from the last
rejection?
Our next assignment was for everyone to measure his or her own recovery time from rejection or
failure. We defined recovery time as the length of time it took to no longer feel a significant pang of
anger, disappointment, or regret when recalling the failure.
People reported a wide range of recovery times. Some admitted having spent days getting over big
losses. After some discussion, we agreed that recovery time depended on the severity of the failure,
the strength of the Sage and the PQ Brain, and what else happened in the ensuing hours and days.
Some said they had found that doing PQ reps after the bad news had significantly cut down their
recovery time.
Some people made sobering discoveries during this process. Janet, a sales rep from California, said
she hadnt been conscious of how much her interactions with other clients were affected while she was
in the recovery period from a previous client loss. She realized that remaining upset over one loss
made it much more likely to incur other losses.

EMPATHIZE
Until now we had focused on using the two strategies of weakening the Saboteurs and strengthening
the PQ Brain muscles. To accelerate their progress even more, we now incorporated the third strategy:
strengthening the Sage. We had already done a little work on adapting the Sage perspective on failure
and rejection. It was time to also activate the Sage powersin particular the power to Empathize.

Empathizing with Ourselves

Sales is one of the toughest jobs in the workplace. While we are all constantly engaged in selling,
persuading, and motivating of some kind, the inevitable failures of sales professionals are starkly
visible for everyone to see. The Judge and Saboteurs often have a field day beating us down over these
failures. The Sage, on the other hand, reminds us that we are worthy of self-acceptance anddare I
sound so clichdself-love, even at a time of failure. The Sages empathy for oneself is
unconditional.
I asked everyone on the team to think about how much self-acceptance and self-love they typically
felt at the end of a day in which they had made some avoidable and costly mistakes. Several people
said Zero! Most said Very little. One team member, who was influenced by the Restless Saboteur,
said he tried to push away his anger and disappointment by keeping busy. He admitted, however, that
the negative thoughts and feelings all came back in the form of frequently interrupted sleep; he would
often wake up with a racing mind.
Everyone agreed to play Visualize the Child to activate empathy for themselves as an antidote to
their Saboteur energies. Many chose to use actual childhood photographs. Within a few days of this
call, many people chose to email their childhood pictures to one another, resulting in a lot of fun
interactions.
They agreed that whenever they felt themselves emotionally beaten up by their own or others
Judges, they would visualize the picture and allow the energy of compassion and caring toward
themselves to fill them up. Some had instant success. Others took a few weeks before they were able
to access empathy for themselves.

Empathizing with the Buyer

In addition to empathizing with oneself, the Sage knows how to empathize with the buyer in an
authentic and heartfelt manner. Most of us are deeply moved when someone actually listens to and
empathizes with usit happens so rarely. When a person shows pure and true empathy, he or she is
operating from the PQ Brain. This means that we, too, are likely to shift to our PQ Brain, which is why
we feel moved by the experience. The Sages power to empathize is a key way to help shift ourselves
and the buyer into PQ Brain mode, which, as discussed, is more conducive to sales.
I invited everyone to honestly assess how much true empathy they felt in their hearts for their
prospective clients. In particular, I asked them to examine what they typically paid attention to during
client meetings and what kinds of voices they heard in their heads.
With a little self-exploration, most people agreed that much of their attention was still on
themselves and their own concerns during a sales call. They asked themselves questions like, Will I
be able to make this sale? How am I doing? Will I be able to reach my quota if I dont make this

sale? Does this guy like me? When he stops talking will I have the smartest thing to say?
Sounds familiar?
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. Its so much easier to come up with ideas
that address a clients 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 Sages 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.
The team agreed that feeling true empathy for another person was easier when they genuinely liked
that person. Some sales reps complained that their prospective clients were not necessarily all that
likeable and had strong Saboteur behaviors. To access their deeper Empathy toward the buyers, they
agreed to experiment with the power game of Visualize the Child, this time visualizing the child in the
buyer, at least a few times in the ensuing week. This would allow them to see and empathize with the
more likeable Sage essence of the difficult buyer.
After about six weeks of this practice, the average PQ score of team members rose from 59 to 69. It
was still below our threshold of 75, but it was a big improvement. We couldnt see any significant
improvement in sales, but that was to be expected given the sales cycles. People reported feeling more
energized and less stressed, which I knew would show up in their results sooner or later.

EXPLORE
When I discussed the Sages power to Explore with the team, we focused on the self first. I asked how
many of the sales reps conducted blameless autopsies on their own failures in selling and tried to learn
from them. Everyone thought they did. Closer examination, however, revealed another dynamic. In the
past, many of them considered failures and rejections too painful to deal with, so most autopsies were
done very quickly with relatively superficial learning. We discussed how much more thorough and
instructive the autopsies could be if they were approached with the Sages Explore power of curiosity
and fascination rather than with the Judges negativity. Everyone committed to a thorough Sage
exploration of what had worked and what hadnt after every major event. They agreed to watch for the
blame-and-shame game of the Judge during this process and label it if it showed up.
After a few rounds of the blameless autopsy on their recent failures, the sales reps discovered that
until now they had not done enough in-depth Exploration with their clients. They cited things such as
rushing to conclusions, bringing in old assumptions from other clients, listening selectively to the
client to prove their own existing hypothesis, and buying into the clients superficial understanding of
his or her own needs rather than delving deeper, among other things. These of course were due to
Saboteur interference.
We agreed that the sign of pure Exploration was truly not knowing what the next step would look
like. We discussed the Exploration power game of Fascinated Anthropologist. If an anthropologist
enters a village partially to explore and partially to sell what she has in her backpack, she wont be
much of an explorer. Her field of vision will narrow, focusing on who can get her the quick sell.
Again, here was the same paradox: in order to sell, you need to let go of needing to sell and
immerse yourself fully in the fascination of discovery. We concluded that if the sales reps werent
experiencing the joy and wonder of a Fascinated Anthropologist meeting a new tribe, then they
wouldnt be able to discover the deeper habits and needs of the prospective clients.
Their assignment for the following week was to play Fascinated Anthropologist with some clients
and tap into the joy and delight of the Sage in Explore mode.

INNOVATE
Having fully explored the clients needs and circumstances, the seller would ideally engage in a true
Sages Innovate mode. True innovation is ultimately about breaking out of the box that limits the way
we think about a problem and its solution. I pointed out that whatever box the seller is stuck in will
likely also trap the buyer, limiting the possibilities on both ends. To avoid this, the seller needs to go
into pure Innovate mode, and bring the buyer along too. The sellers PQ Brain then tunes into the
buyers PQ Brain.
I then asked, What is the enemy of true Innovation? What gets in the way? People were quick to
suggest the Judges premature evaluation of ideas. Paula, a bright and relatively new sales rep,
contributed a powerful insight that caused a long pause on the call. I worry that if I really go with
uncontrolled, creative idea-generation with the prospect, the best solution to their problems might not
include the product Im selling.
This was such an important insight that I asked Paula to repeat it. As she did, I heard sounds of
recognition from others. Paula had hit a deep chord, one at the heart of why we dont allow the Sages
pure Innovation to come alive in the sales process.
What are the consequences of putting up boundaries in idea-generation to make sure the ideas best
showcase our product? I asked.
Someone jumped in: Were more likely to stay in our boxes both as buyer and seller.
Which brain would you be coming from? I asked.
Survivor Brain, others murmured.
Which brain would that activate in your buyer? I asked. The answer was now obvious: the
Survivor Brain. The brain trained to say no to new possibilities.
We were looking at another instance of our paradox. You are much more likely to sell an idea or
product if you dont feel attached to selling the idea. Of course, not being attached doesnt mean not
being enthusiastic or committed. You could be highly enthusiastic and committed to selling a product.
But the moment you get emotionally attached to making the sale, you are no longer in true and pure
Empathy, Exploration, or Innovation mode with the client. Your anxiety-based emotional need has
shifted you right back to the Survivor Brain.
I told the group that early in my CEO-coaching career I had allowed myself to get attached to
retaining some key clients. At the time, I was working with two particularly difficult personalities
who were both very intimidating to their own senior teams and even board members. Lets call them
Tony and Karen. Their fierce tempers caused people to shy away from confronting them with feedback
about their shortcomings. I had allowed myself to be intimidated, too; I feared that if I directly
challenged them they might fire me. I rationalized away this self-serving choice by saying I could be
more helpful to them as a coach than if I werent there at all. Then one day I finally threw caution to
the wind with Tony and confronted him with some of the ways he was hurting his team and his
company. As I feared, he fired me on the spot. This made me even more cautious with Karen, and I
continued pushing her only as far as I felt was safe to avoid being fired by her too.
About three months later, Tony called me back and said he had done a lot of thinking and needed
me back in his life; I seemed to be the only one who dared tell him the full truth. Interestingly, Karen
stopped working with me around this time, having decided she no longer needed help from a coach.
My work with Tony continued for several more years and expanded into many layers of his company.
Ever since then, I decided I would never take on a new client if I didnt dare risk being fired by them.
I now asked the group these questions: Are you willing to get fired or rejected by letting go of all
your own needs to make a sale and focusing completely on the best solution for the client? Are you

willing to embrace true Innovation with your client even if it risks leading to a solution that might not
include your product or service? Are you willing to buy into the paradox that you will sell a lot more
if you let go of needing to make a sale?
Our brave Paula once again gave the honest answer: I can see the merit of this, but it would be a
little scary to practice. I asked her to get curious about which part of her brain and which voice in her
head was bringing up that fear.

NAVIGATE
The Sages power to Navigate is ultimately about aligning sales with deeper drivers: values, mission,
and purpose.
My company has trained, supervised, and certified thousands of coaches around the world. We
teach them something that can dramatically improve a coachs effectiveness almost overnight. It has
to do with making sure the clients vision has caught fire before doing anything else. If you gave
beginner or intermediate coaches an hour to coach someone on an issue, they might divide the hour
roughly into the following chunks:

When we supervise our coaches in training during the final certification program, we observe their
actual work in coaching a client. Supervisors always watch how hard the coach is working. A telltale
sign that something is wrong is that the coach is working too hard. The work should flow and feel
almost effortless. A coach working too hard often means that the clients vision has not caught fire.
The conversation has moved from vision to planning and obstacles too quickly, without the fuel that
an ignited vision would have provided. Lacking that fuel, the coach has to keep pushing for the both of
them.
Experienced coaches eventually arrive at a very different balance that is roughly divided as follows:

I asked the group why the second approach might work better, hinting that the answer related to the
PQ Brain. Tim, one of the companys star salespeople, answered instantly: Vision lives in the PQ
Brain. If you stay in the vision conversation long enough, you activate the PQ Brain in both yourself
and your client. That brain is more creative in figuring out a plan and overcoming obstacles. Another
person added, If you began planning while you were still operating with the Survivor Brain, you
would get bogged down because the obstacles would look bigger and more daunting.
They had summarized things perfectly. The big difference, indeed, is that once you and the buyer
are both in PQ Brain mode, you are allied with the clients Sage rather than fighting his or her
naysaying Saboteurs. You have to work too hard as a salesperson, coach, leader, spouse, or parent if
you havent helped the vision on the other side catch fire before focusing on plans, tactics, and
obstacles.
Many people make the mistake of reading the vision through the Data Channel rather than the PQ
Channel. A client or prospect might mention his vision in the first three minutes of the conversation.
But he uses words, data, and concepts that live in the Data Channel. They might not live in his heart in
that moment, and certainly not in the PQ Brain. It is the job of the coach, salesperson, or leader to
breathe life into the vision so that it catches fire and is felt deeply rather than remaining just a
thought.
I suggested to the group that the first step toward accomplishing this is activating their own PQ
Brains (the third PQ principle of selling). From there, they would need to help the client to feel, touch,
smell, and taste the vision being manifested using as much concreteness and involving as many of the
senses and emotions as possible.
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. We are celebrating the one-year anniversary of launching the new system
with a big bash attended by the CEO and the entire senior management team. The party is in a
beautiful banquet room in a resort in Hawaii, surrounded by lush trees. I attend with my wife and two
kids because I am being acknowledged with an award and I want them to share the special moment
with me. We show a video of testimonials from our store managers talking about how the new system
has changed their lives. A woman in the video chokes up as she talks about how time-saving and
automation has made it possible to attend her daughters ballet recitals, something she couldnt do in
the past. My own job has become more fulfilling because so many other departments in the company
are calling me to learn how to implement something similar, and I love to help.
And so on. Your prospective client might not actually create such a vision story, but you still would
want to engage her in the kind of dialog that builds the elements of such a story in her mind, and even
more importantly, in her heart. Inquiries that help clients form such narratives include: Lets imagine
that this vision has already been successfully manifested. What would feel different? What would
change in your own life, or someone elses? 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 fireit 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 Brains
attitude that everything is possible, and that even obstacles can be turned into opportunities.

Connecting the Dots to Values and Meaning

At this point in our work, I proposed that the sales reps do the work on themselves before trying it on
others. What about your vision of your own work? I asked. Has it caught fire? Have you connected
the dots between your work and your own deeper sense of values and mission in the world?
After a minute of pregnant silence, our daring Paula jumped in with an honest observation that
others often feel but few dare to express publically. If we sold lifesaving medicine, I could
understand this point. But lets be honest here. We are just selling a piece of software. Its not
necessarily the kind of thing I can connect to my deeper questions of legacy and meaning in life. I do
this work to make a living. I wouldnt do it if I didnt need to.
I thanked Paula for her courage in speaking the truth, as I knew the question on many minds was,
Does my work really matter? I then shared the research on hospital cleaners and administrative
assistants and how a third of them saw their work as just a job, another third as a career, and another
third as a calling. I suggested that the difference was due to whether the Saboteurs or the Sage was
leading the charge. If hospital cleaners and administrative assistants can actively imbue their jobs
with a sense of meaning and calling, you can too, I said, challenging the group.
I now asked why a sense of meaning should matter. They had no trouble responding: I would have
more fun at my job and feel less stressed. I would more likely be in my PQ Brain, get the PQ
principles of selling right, and be more successful. My greater enthusiasm would be contagious to
my prospects and get me better results. They really were getting it.
I asked them to 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?
After a few minutes of contemplation, some of them shared their discoveries. Bob, a middle-aged
rep from Arizona, had a particularly poignant response: Because of my background, I have a lot of
passion for helping underprivileged kids. I was wondering how selling a piece of enterprise software
could possibly connect to that. I came up with a few things. First, I will commit to contributing a
percentage of my commission over a certain amount to an organization that works with
underprivileged kids. So now when I am trying to make a sale, it can be in part for those kids. I was
also thinking of having some of those kids shadow me in parts of my work in hopes of inspiring them
into pursuing good careers. The third thing is that some of the potential clients Im talking to probably
come from underprivileged backgrounds. They are just adult versions of the people I especially care
about, and I can get excited about helping them out with our product.
It is amazing what happens to people once they connect the dots between their jobs and their deeper
sense of what makes life meaningful. I imagined Bob sitting a little taller in his seat and radiating
with a new vivacity after having connected the dots. If you havent connected what you do to what
brings meaning to your life, you are not tapping into your greatest reservoir of power and inspiration.
The Flash Forward power game or more subtle variations of it could also help you to connect your

buyer with her deeper sense of meaning, values, purpose, and vision. It is a key step in helping her
vision catch fire.

ACTIVATE
As the final step in selling, the Sage carries out any necessary action, without interference from the
Saboteurs. If the PQ Brain is energized in both the seller and the buyer, the Sages move to act is
automatic. The close happens organically and naturally.
We spent one of our final webinar sessions talking about which Saboteurs got in the way of the
Sages action in all areas of their jobs. After all, sales is a very process-intensive job, requiring
discipline in a whole array of activities, ranging from prospecting to research to follow-up. We played
the Preempt the Saboteurs power game to anticipate which Saboteurs might get in the way of action
and how. Each person compiled his or her own list and devised Sage responses in anticipation.
To keep the momentum alive beyond our webinar, they agreed to incorporate a PQ report item on
their weekly regional team meeting agenda. This would enable them to learn from one anothers
successes and failures. It would also be a continual reminder and an inspiration to keep up with the
practice beyond the initial phase, during which the developing muscles are still hard to see.

THE GIFT AT THE END

I did a follow-up call with this group a few months after the end of our webinars. I anticipated mostly
positive reports, as their average PQ had risen to 79 and they had produced signs of widespread
improvement in their sales process. As a result, they had revised their sales projection for the next
year, increasing it by 28 percent. They reported having been much more energized and effective in
their work individually and as a group. Jack summarized everyones sentiment by saying they felt on
fire.
Shortly after that follow-up conversation, I got a call from the CEO of the company saying that the
board had voted to sell the company to a public company rather than wait to go public themselves.
Their sales momentum had contributed to a high acquisition price.
About a year after the acquisition, I received an email from Paula, the most memorable and
outspoken member of the group, that made my day. She had taken to heart my suggestion that the PQ
selling principles applied to motivating and persuading of any kind. As a single mother of a troubled
sixteen-year-old son, her biggest challenge was persuading him to stop some of his increasingly selfdestructive behaviors. She hit some bumps in the road but eventually succeeded in persuading him to
do an assessment of his own Saboteurs. Every night at the dinner table since that day, they shared their
successes and failures in tackling their own Judges, as well as his Restless and her Stickler Saboteurs.
She wanted me to know about the profound impact this had had on him and on their relationship. We
never know when our improved skills in selling, persuading, and motivating will come in handy.

Inquiry

Think of an important area where you have you been overly reliant on a rational and data-driven
approach to persuasion. What is the unspoken emotional need in the other person that you have
not addressed?

CHAPTER 13
CONCLUSION: THE MAGNIFICENT YOU!

I have attempted in this book to show that increasing your Positive Intelligence is the most efficient
and sustainable way to increase both your effectiveness and your happiness, and that the same holds
true for any team you might belong to.
The good news is that you have already raised your PQ a little just by reading this book. For one
thing, your Saboteurs are probably not as strong and credible in your mind now as they were before.
You have weakened them by exposing their self-justifying lies and destructive patterns. They can no
longer hide or pretend they are your friends.
Another reason your PQ is already higher is that you are now aware of the power of the Sage. If all
you do is remember the stallion story next time you are upset about something, you will have a
stronger Sage to combat your Saboteurs.
Practice is the key to how much more your PQ will increase and how deep its impact will be. PQ
practice doesnt require spare time. As you observe and label Saboteurs, access your great Sage
powers, and do energizing PQ reps, you will meet your challenges in ways that are both more effective
and more fulfilling. Committing to the PQ practice doesnt add a burden to your life. It reduces the
burden that is already there.
As you embark on this practice, it is wise to take your internal enemies seriously. Those who
underestimate the strength of their Saboteurs do so at their own peril. Your Saboteurs are committed
to their own survivalremember, they are rooted in survival. They dont like to lose power over you.
They will keep trying to convince you that your survival and success depend on them. They will also
tell you that to gain greater success and happiness you just need to focus even harder on external
achievements. I hope you are no longer susceptible to these self-justifying lies of your Saboteurs.
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 dont feel discouraged if you keep hearing your
Saboteurs in your head. They will lose much of their volume and strength over time.
If you go to a gym and lift dumbbells for a few days, you might have nothing to show for it. But I
can guarantee you that if you did so twenty-one days in a row, you would absolutely have something
to show for it. You would feel different, and others would notice it in you too. As a matter of fact, I
make a bet with my coaching clients that if they do the PQ practice for twenty-one days in a row,
someone in their life who doesnt know about their new practice will notice and comment on
something being significantly different about them. I win that bet most of the time.

DISCOVERING THE MAGNIFICENT YOU

I recently had a session with an amazing photographer to take the picture for this books jacket.
Cynthia was an inspirationshe was completely tuned into the PQ Channel. I was late to the session
and had just gotten off a very bad news call and needed a few minutes to shake off the Judge and
switch to the Sage perspective. Cynthia was so tuned into me that she could tell instantly when my
mind drifted. In those moments, she knew that my essence would not shine through in my face and in
the photograph. So on a few occasions when my mind drifted, she instantly asked me to wiggle my
toes and rub my fingers attentively against one another. I did, and I was right back into the PQ Brain,
with my Sage essence shining though. She was asking me to do a few PQ reps!
Cynthia said that for the duration of every photo session, she always allows herself to fall in love
with the essential beauty of the person she is photographing. This allows the subjects essence to shine
through and be captured on camera.
It occurred to me that I have always done something very similar as a leader, as CEO of my
companies, and as a coach to others. I have allowed myself to fall in love with the magnificence of the
human being in front of me long enough to have that person rediscover his or her own magnificence.
My Sage draws out the other persons Sage. Whats not to love about the Sage and its essence in each
of us?
I hope this book will help you fall more deeply in love with yourselfto see the beauty of your own
essence, of the being you were the moment you were born. You dont 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.
I also hope that you will choose to pause more often and fall in love with the amazing people all
around you in work and at home. I hope you will be able to see past their off-putting Saboteurs. I hope
you will choose to have your Sage see their Sages long enough for them to rise and shine through.
That is what great leaders, great team players, great parents, great educators, and great life partners
do. They enable us to rediscover and see our own Sages through their eyes.
From my Sage to yours: I see you!

APPENDIX
PQ BRAIN FUNDAMENTALS

In chapter 7, you read a very brief description of the PQ Brain. Here, you can explore the functions of
the PQ Brain and Survivor Brain in a little more detail.
The recent advent of Functional MRI (fMRI), which measures how neural activity changes blood
flow, has allowed neuroscientists and psychologists to witness the real-time working of the brain for
the very first time. We are now able to pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in producing different
thoughts or feelings. This means we are also able to track the parts of the brain involved with the
activation of Saboteurs, or the parts needed for activation of the Sage.
As you have learned, the master Saboteur, the Judge, has its roots in the Survivor Brain, the part of
the brain tasked with helping us survive. The brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain, is
involved in basic motivation for physical survival and issues the fight-or-flight response to danger.
Above this primitive part of the brain sits the limbic system, which includes the amygdala, the
moderator of our emotional responses, including fear. The hypothalamus and pituitary gland secrete
hormones in reaction to the amygdala, including the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol circulates
throughout the body, focusing it on survival. During this survival focus, the left brain, with its
concentration on concrete data and detail, is the primary participant.
As we have seen, once the Judge comes alive, it in turn activates the accomplice Saboteurs. Thus
the Survivor Brain fuels the Saboteurs, and those Saboteurs in turn fuel the Survivor Brain. The
distress and stress most of us feel is a result of a perpetual low-grade version of this vicious cycle. We
need the PQ Brain to interrupt this cycle.
The PQ Brain focuses on thriving rather than survival. The PQ Brain gives rise to the Sage
perspective and the Sage powers. It consists of three components: (1) the middle prefrontal cortex
(MPFC); (2) the Empathy Circuitry; and (3) the right brain.

1. THE MPFC
The MPFC performs some key functions that are critical to high PQ, including the following:
Observe the self: It allows us to rise above the fray and actually witness our own mind and
thinking process.
Pause before acting: It provides a buffer zone of contemplation that makes the difference
between acting and reacting.
Soothe fear: It releases GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) to ease the experience of fear
produced by the Survivor Brain.
Empathize with self and others: It plays a key part in the Empathy Circuitry, which allows us
to have empathy for ourselves and others.
Stay centered: It brings us back to a sense of equanimity and feeling centered in the middle of
great difficulty. It calms us down by literally coordinating the nervous system controls over
bodily functions such as heart rate, respiration, and digestion.
Access gut wisdom: It accesses and processes information from neural networks that are
outside the skull and spread throughout the body, including the heart and the intestines. This is
why we call intuition gut feeling.

2. THE EMPATHY CIRCUITRY

Empathy Circuitry is my term for a few different areas of the brain that combine to enable the key
Sage power to Empathize. The Empathy Circuitry includes (a) the mirror neuron system; (b) the ACC;
and (c) the insula cortex of the MPFC.

A) Mirror Neuron System

The discovery of the mirror neuron system in the brain was one of the most exciting discoveries of
neuroscience in recent years. In a nutshell, our mirror neurons pick up on the physiological and
emotional state of others and automatically have us experience similar states, including changes in our
own heart rate, blood pressure, or respiration in response to others around us. This explains how we
get affected by the mood of a meeting we walk into and why we yawn when someone else yawns. It
results in an invisible contagion effect that plays a key role in leadership, selling and persuading,
conflict resolution, parenting, and many other aspects of Positive Intelligence.
Think of the mirror neuron system as the tuning fork of the brain. If you are vibrating at the
energy frequency of Saboteurs, you are more likely to automatically trigger the Saboteurs of the
person you are interacting with. If you are vibrating at the Sage frequency, you are more likely to help
shift the other person to Sage mode. This is understood almost intuitively by great salespeople and
leaders as a way of impacting others.
This contagion effect brought about by the brains mirror neurons has many implications. In a
recent study, researchers followed 4,739 individuals, their relationships with one another, and their
levels of happiness over twenty years.39 They found that when an individual becomes happy, a friend
living within a mile had a 25 percent increased chance of becoming happy. In the most surprising part
of the finding, even a friend of a friend (two degrees of separation) had a 10 percent increased chance
of happiness, and even that friends friend (three degrees of separation) had a 6 percent increased
chance. If your positivity can impact someone three degrees of separation away from you, imagine
how much you affect those immediately around you, especially if you are in a position of leadership
or influence with them.

B) Insular Cortex
Another part of this Empathy Circuitry is the insular cortex, which is basically a highway that
connects the signals from the mirror neuron system down to the limbic area and the brain stem,
enabling our body to react with empathy for another. It also carries the signal to the upper side of the
MPFC, allowing us to become consciously aware of our empathy.

C) The ACC
The ACC sits between the thinking cortex area and the feeling and sensing limbic region. It regulates
our focus of attention. Together, the mirror neuron system, the insular cortex, and the ACC constitute
our Empathy Circuitry.

As an example of how this works, at some point in my childhood my brain began to dampen the
Empathy Circuitry signals. This was because the signals that it was mirroring from around me were
not pleasant. Why pick up and soak up even more pain from around myself if I didnt have to? And
why tune into my own painful feelings? What good would come out of that?
The challenge is that the very same circuitry that allows us to become aware and empathic to our
own body and our own emotions also works in reverse and enables us to be empathic to others. Once
the highway is shut down in one direction, it is also shut down in the other direction. This doublepronged approach of disconnecting both from our right brain and our Empathy Circuitry is extremely
prevalent as a survival strategy. The cost is becoming numb to ourselves, to others, and to the
richness of lifes experiences.

3. THE RIGHT BRAIN

What most people think when looking at pictures of the brain is that the brain is more or less one
organ, with different sides. What they dont realize is that actually the left and right hemispheres of
the brain are completely separate from each other and connected by a very small corridor of neural
fibers called the corpus callosum. These two hemispheres are wired entirely differently and have very
different functions. We literally are of two minds.
The right brain is much discussed and much misunderstood. It deals with the big picture, imagery,
nonverbal language, and detecting invisible things such as energy and mood. It is more directly
connected to the information flow from the body to the brain stem to the limbic areas, which
constitute an awareness of our physical sensations and emotions. This is where the emotional and
social self is centered.
In contrast, the left brain is responsible for linear and logical thinking, spoken and written language,
and details. It is the part of the brain that allows us to completely detach from emotions and physical
sensations and potentially live in a disconnected world of logic and data. The left brain is a place
where things can be more orderly and controllable. It is where the rational mind rules and where one
could justify and rationalize fears and pains away.
The right brain is clearly much more suitable for the key functions of the Sage, such as
Empathizing, Exploring with a completely open mind, Innovating with a big-picture perspective of
possibilities, and Navigating with a deep connection to what really matters to us in life. The left
brains functions are clearly critical in surviving our day-to-day lives, whereas the right brains
functions enable us to thrive with a life that is rich with relationships and meaning.
As children, we are somewhat more right-brained in the first few years of our lives than leftbrained, and we also have more balance between the two. Unfortunately, our upbringing in the
Western world systematically encourages and strengthens the left brain and either ignores or punishes
the right brain functions. This gradually results in us becoming completely imbalanced and lopsided.
Our education system is almost entirely based on building left brain muscles of language and logic.
Placement and achievement tests such as the SAT are predominantly based on left-brain strengths.
This phenomenon is so prevalent that I tell participants in my leadership seminars that they are all
living life almost half-brained. Few people ever push back on this statement after we look at the
research evidence. While it is true that women and people of more creative orientation have slightly
better access to their right brains on average, they are still predominantly and lopsidedly left-brained.
What further exaggerates the left brain/right brain imbalance is Saboteur involvement. Using
myself as an example again, my right brain was the dominant part of my brain as a child, as it is in all
children. At some point, however, I must have decided that if I couldnt exert control over my difficult
life circumstances, I could exert control over the more orderly place of my logical mind. After all,
there was safety in facts, figures, lists, and details. This, of course, strengthened my left brain
muscles. In contrast, I must have decided to begin discounting and numbing my feelings, as those
feelings were not pleasant. This caused further atrophy of the right brain, which is more involved with
those feeling functions. I was therefore using the strategy of the Hyper-Rational Saboteur to ensure
my physical and emotional survival. The result was the increasing atrophy of my right brain and living
life almost half-brained, as most people do.

OLD DOGS AND NEW TRICKS

Until now we have discussed only the bad news that most of us have allowed the PQ Brain muscles to
atrophy for years. The really good news is that in this domain of building PQ Brain muscles, old dogs
do indeed learn new tricksvery quickly.
To see how, it is useful to think for a second about what a brain muscle actually consists of. The
brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons. On average, each neuron, if you can believe it, has
about five thousand synapses that allow it to connect with many other neurons, meaning the electrical
signal traveling through a neuron comes to a fork in the road at the end of the neuron with a lot of
possible directions to travel. Which direction the signal then travels depends in part on which neuron
has become associated in the past with the first neuron. Neurons are not hardwired with one
another. Their connection is instead associational and statistical. The more often two neurons fire
together, the more they become associated with one another. In other words, neurons that fire together
become virtually wired together over time. This is how the brain learns, remembers, and forms
conscious or subconscious habits and assumptions.
There are several mechanisms that the brain uses to establish these new pathways and muscles,
which together constitute what is termed neuroplasticity. New synaptic linkages are created when a
new behavior different from an old habit is performed. Myelin, the fatty protective sheath around the
neurons that are involved, increases in thickness, resulting in a one hundredfold increase in speed of
signal transmission through those neurons, meaning traffic is more likely to be routed through this
new highway. This results in the old highway gathering dust and gradually disappearing, which is
what happens when you quit a habit. Focused attention, such as the PQ reps you learned in chapter 7,
release neurotransmitters that aid in strengthening new synaptic connections and laying down new
pathways.
The great news about neuroplasticity is that researchers have recently discovered that the brain
continues to build new pathways and create new synapses and even entirely new neurons in response
to stimulation, even in people who are in their nineties. The amazing recovery of stroke patients
whose brains quickly rewire themselves to make up for loss of functions due to lost neurons is
testimony to this power. My own experience with myself and my clients is that the brain is indeed
highly responsive to the PQ muscle-building practices.

PQ AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

Many of the Saboteurs, including the Judge, the Controller, and the Hyper-Rational tend to lead us to
believe we know more than we actually know. They need to be reminded that so much of what is
stored in our brain and affects our emotions and decisions is actually not consciously known to us.
We have two kinds of memory. Explicit memory is what we normally think of as memory,
something that we can consciously point to and recall. However, the brain also stores implicit
memories, memories that we are not consciously aware of. The challenge is that implicit memories
impact how we think, interpret things, or react to things. They constitute an important part of the
wiring of our Saboteurs.
What makes the difference between whether a piece of experience is stored in our implicit or
explicit memory is whether the hippocampus, the explicit memory maker of the brain, was involved
with laying it down and filing it away. In many situations, including high-stress situations such as
trauma, the hippocampus goes offline. It also is offline very early in our childhood, which is why
some of the most powerful and important experiences of our lives that determine how we think and
react to things are hidden from us.
Researchers have now shown that our implicit memories result in emotions and impact our decision
making without our conscious awareness. We rationalize why we do what we do without being fully
aware of the memories, feelings, and assumptions that actually motivated our actions from our
implicit storage. Every Saboteur has a series of justifications to convince you that it is really your
friend, but these justifications are often fed by implicit beliefs that have never been consciously
examined. For example, your Judge might hold beliefs such as no pain, no gain, or too much
kindness spoils people based on early experiences and associations that are not consciously
remembered and therefore unexamined or unchallenged.
Many schools of psychology and therapy work hard at making the subconscious content conscious
so that it loses its power over you. This can be highly effective, especially with more traumatic
situations. The challenge, however, is that some of the deepest implicit memories that we have might
never be accessible, especially those from very early childhood.
The practice of Positive Intelligence bypasses the need for having to uncover the underlying reasons
behind the formation of the Saboteurs or those Saboteurs implicit and hidden beliefs. All we need is
to recognize their current thought and feeling patterns and label them when they show up. You can
fight an enemy without having to know what he had for breakfast or what kind of childhood he had.
The caveat, again, is in cases of significant trauma where deeper therapeutic work might be needed.
Interestingly, developing the PQ Brain muscles will automatically result in gaining deeper access to
the subconscious dynamics of your Saboteurs, even while not trying to do so. When the PQ Brain
muscles are activated, you will automatically have greater access to the deeper, insight-producing
parts of your brain compared to the more superficial left brain, which is what you would activate if
you thought really hard about what is going on with you. You will experience these insights without
really knowing how they bubbled up. You probably have already had such experiences, in nature or
when exercising, taking a shower, or just waking up, where suddenly the fog lifts and you see things
clearly. Those experiences are happening because these sensation-intensive occasions have quieted
your left brain and activated your PQ Brain regions. With PQ practice, you learn how to induce such
insight-producing experiences at will and more consistently.
The scope of this book does not allow for an in-depth discussion of neuroscience. I have made some
generalizations to highlight the essential differences between the Survivor and PQ Brains. At a more
micro level, the brain is not as neatly differentiated and there is some overlap between the two brains

in almost everything we do. If you are interested in a more detailed understanding of the brain, there
has been an explosion of new research and books in recent years. Two great examples are Mindsight:
The New Science of Personal Transformation by Dr. Dan Siegel (Random House 2010) and The Mind
and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon
Begley (Harper Perennial 2003).
I hope this book has inspired you to develop at least as much understanding about your brain as you
have about your body. After all, it is our brain that orchestrates our entire experience of our lives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I believe as leaders and coaches we must practice what we preach. The Positive Intelligence
framework and tools are deeply rooted in my own decades-long practice to better myself. My
acknowledgments and gratitude therefore extend to those who have guided me in that journey of
discovery and growth.
To my clients: Your courage in pushing beyond your limits has challenged me to keep doing the
same over these many years. Thank you for allowing me to tell your stories in this book.
To Stanford Professor David Bradford: Your course changed my life and showed me that higher
profitability and greater authenticity could go hand in hand. To go from being your student to being
your colleague and collaborator has been one of the most thrilling rides of my life.
To Stanford Graduate School of Business: What an honor to belong to an institution that never rests
in its position of leadership and knows how to constantly reinvent itself. Thank you for giving me a
platform to make a difference.
To Henry Kimsey-House: You are my model for purity and integrity of vision. I have learned from
you to hold steady against the constant temptations of convenient compromise. You are the gentlest
and wisest bigger-than-life person I know.
To Karen Kimsey-House: You have taught me about the heart of leadership. You have shown me
how to honor relationships above all, and how to fight for those relationships with courage and truth.
Thank you for fighting for ours; it is one of the relationships I cherish most in my life.
To the late Laura Whitworth: You were a fierce warrior for the Co-Active way. I miss your bold and
constant challenge of the status quo. I hope you are finally getting the rest you so deserved.
To CTI faculty and staff: Thank you for walking the walk of the Co-Active way. It is inspiring to
see the power of what happens when a large diverse community across the globe can hold one another
accountable to walking the talk.
To YPO and WPO: How could a networked organization of twenty thousand presidents and CEOs
feel so intimate and personal? On my way to figuring out that answer, I have learned so much about
leadership and trust. Thank you for providing such a perfect cure for my loneliness at the top.
To my YPO Forum mates: You know who you are and what you have meant to me. How could I
have written this book without your constant support and that all-important kick in the pants that
jolted me out of my comfort zone to finish the book?
To Crit Brookes: I was introduced to you after I told someone it would be great to have a Yoda
figure in my life. You embody that ageless wisdom that has illuminated my path.
To WhiteEagle: What an honor to have been your student, challenged to my core. The ancient
wisdom traditions that you taught me have played such an important part in shaping me. You helped
me become whole.
To Judy and Bob Waterman: What amazing role models you have been for how to be a couple, a
parent, a leader, a colleague, and a citizen of the world. Judy, meeting you changed the course of my
career by making MindSteps possible. Thank you for your vision and partnership.
To my MindSteps colleagues, investors, and board members: We came together to change the
world. Little did we know that we were going to change one anothers lives before anyone elses.
What a ride! What an honor to have served with you.
To the many authors who have inspired my work: To Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, Malcolm
Gladwell, Daniel Pink, and Patrick Lencioni for showing me how deeply insightful writing in our field

could be engaging, accessible, and life-changing; to Daniel Goleman for waking up the professional
world to the critical importance of emotional intelligence and paving the way for my work and many
others; to Don Riso and Russ Hudson for your insightful contributions to my understanding of
personality differences; and to Eckhart Tolle for distilling the wisdom of the ages in a way that I could
hear.
To pioneering researchers in positive psychology, organizational science, and neurosciencein
particular Barbara Fredrickson, Marcial Losada, Marty Seligman, and Dan Siegel: My work stands on
your shoulders. The rigor of your research has provided the missing link between an intuitive
understanding of the power of this work and a credible explanation of why it works. Your work has
changed many lives.
To Shawn Achor: I have only known you for a few months, and it already feels like a lifelong
friendship. As a fellow servant leader and seeker, you combine a brilliant mind with a pure heart. I am
inspired by you and blessed to have found you as a colleague and friend.
To my agent, Jim Levine: I knew about your exceptional reputation for intellectual rigor and true
partnership with your authors. I was still surprised that you became the first person who fully
understood my dream for this book, from every angle: vision, science, art, content, integrated
platform, and future possibilities. Until you, everyone had understood and appreciated a piece of the
elephant. You were the first to see the whole. There is such power to being fully seen and fully
partnered. Thank you for that gift.
To the great team at Greenleaf Book Group: To Clint Greenleafthank you for creating a
publishing model for the digital age that treats the author as a true partner and the book as a part of a
complex, integrated communication platform. To Bill Crawford, my first and most instrumental editor
you helped me wade through a ton of content, simplify it, and organize it coherently to achieve its
intended impact. Your contribution was incalculable and I will feel forever indebted to you. Thank
you also to my wonderful subsequent editors, Jay Hodges and Aaron Hierholzer. Thank you to Heather
Jones for your sharp eye for detail, and to Bryan Carroll for your firm yet thoughtful command of
schedule and process. To Sheila Parrthank you for your beautiful and elegant design that so reflects
who you are as a person. Thank you to David Hathaway, for your great insights about business book
distribution, and to Jenn McMurray, for managing the distribution. And to Justin Branchthank you
for stewarding the whole relationship with steady care. A great class act by everyone at GreenleafI
am so grateful.
To my great partners in getting the word out and introducing Positive Intelligence and PQ to the
wider world: David Hahn, Lori Ames, Andrew Palladino, and Alexandra Kirsch at MEDIA
CONNECT, Steve Bennett and Deb Beaudoin at AuthorBytes, and Carolyn Monaco. It is thrilling to
partner with the best in class. Thank you.
And last but not least, to Ladan Chamine: You are true gracea living work of art. Thank you for
your patience, support, and sacrifice throughout the endless hours of researching, writing, and
rewriting. We did this together.
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. My work is really a
cocreation and belongs to the interwoven fabric of the many who have contributed to it either directly
or indirectly. The impact of this work in the world is our collective impact. We are part of this
beautiful mystery of blossoming human potential. I believe passionately that the best days for us
humans in this universe are still ahead. We have barely touched our true potential. What a joy and an
honor to be part of the unfolding of this grandest of mysteries.

ENDNOTES

1 Sonya Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener, The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect:
Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (2005): 80355.
2 Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (New York:
Vintage, 2006). This is derived from Martin Seligmans pioneering work with MetLife
insurance sales agents. Seligman measured the salespeople on the dimension of optimistic or
pessimistic explanatory style, which is related to how they interpreted adversity. He showed
that the agents with more optimistic styles sold 37 percent more insurance than those with
pessimistic styles. In PQ, the pessimistic style is attributed to the Saboteurs and optimistic
style to the Sage, meaning the salespeople with the optimistic styles were exhibiting higher
PQ. Seligmans work is described in his groundbreaking book, Learned Optimism.
3 Shirli Kopelman, Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, and Leigh Thompson, The Three Faces of Eve:
Strategic Displays of Positive, Negative, and Neutral Emotions in Negotiations,
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 99 (2006): 81101.
4 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (2008). This is an assessment of US residents health and
well-being, whereby 1,000 U.S. adults are interviewed every day. Given the construct of the PQ
model, an unhappy employee is a low PQ employee, regardless of the circumstances.
5 Carlos A. Estrada, Alice M. Isen, and Mark J. Young, Positive Affect Facilitates Integration of
Information and Decreases Anchoring in Reasoning Among Physicians, Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes 72 (1997): 117135.
6 Tanis Bryan and James Bryan, Positive Mood and Math Performance, Journal of Learning
Disabilities 24, no. 8 (October 1991): 49094.
7 Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That
Fuel Success and Performance at Work (New York: Crown Business, 2010), 41. Achor points
to data about the impact of happy CEOs on their team. This translates directly to high-PQ
CEOs.
8 Achor, Happiness Advantage, 58. Achor discusses a study about encouraging managers versus
managers who are less positive and less open to praise. This translates to high versus low PQ
managers.
9 Barry M. Staw and Sigal G. Barsade. Affect and Managerial Performance: A Test of Sadderbut-Wiser vs. Happier-and-Smarter Hypotheses, Administrative Science Quarterly 38, no. 2
(1993): 30431.
Thomas Sy, Stphane Ct, and Richard Saavedra, The Contagious Leader: Impact of the
Leaders Mood on the Mood of Group Members, Group Affective Tone, and Group Processes,
Journal of Applied Psychology 90, no.2 (2005): 295305.
10 Michael A. Campion, Ellen M. Papper, and Gina J. Medsker, Relations Between Work Team
Characteristics and Effectiveness: A Replication and Extension, Personnel Psychology 49
(1996): 429452. In this study, researchers studied 357 employees, ninety-three managers,
and sixty teams. The greatest predictor of a teams relative achievement was how the
members felt about each other, which is also how team PQ scores are calculated.
11 Marcial Losada, (1999). The Complex Dynamics of High Performance Teams,
Mathematical and Computer Modeling 30, no. 910 (1999): 179192.
Marcial Losada, and Emily Heaphy, The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the

Performance of Business Teams: A Nonlinear Dynamics Model, American Behavioral

Scientist 47, no. 6 (2004): 740765. The high PQ characteristic discussed was being openly
encouraging versus low PQ characteristics of having controlling, aloof, or negative
demeanor.
12 Sarah D. Pressman and Sheldon Cohen, Does Positive Affect Influence Health?
Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (2005): 92571.
Michael F. Scheier, et al. Dispositional Optimism and Recovery from Coronary Artery
Bypass Surgery: The Beneficial Effects on Physical and Psychological Well-being, Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 57, no. 6 (1989): 10241040.
Glenn V. Ostir et al., The Association Between Emotional Well-being and the Incidence of
Stroke in Older Adults, Psychosomatic Medicine 63, no. 2 (2001): 21015.
Laura Smart Richman et al., Positive Emotion and Health: Going Beyond the Negative,
Health Psychology 24, no. 4 (2005): 42229.
Sheldon Cohen et al., Emotional Style and Susceptibility to the Common Cold,
Psychosomatic Medicine 65, no.4 (2003): 65257.
Andrew Steptoe et al., Positive Affect and Health-related Neuroendocrine, Cardiovascular,
and Inflammatory Responses, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102, no. 18
(2005): 650812.
13 Deborah D. Danner, David A. Snowdon, and Wallace V. Friesen, Positive Emotions in Early
Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 80, no. 5 (2001): 80413.
Judith Rodin and Ellen J. Langer, Long-term Effects of a Control-relevant Intervention
with the Institutionalized Aged, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, no. 12
(1977): 897902.
14 Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity: Top-notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will
Change Your Life (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009).
Achor, Happiness Advantage.
Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
(New York: Free Press, 2011). Tal Ben-Shahar, The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing
Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009).
15 This groundbreaking course was created by Professor David L. Bradford (with Jerry Porras),
who currently holds the title Eugene OKelly II Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Leadership at
the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This course has been one of the most popular
courses of the Stanford curriculum for the past four decades. Its life-changing impact was
not unique to me; it is often cited by the alumni as one of the most enduring and valuable
positive experiences of their MBA education. Professor Bradford is the author of several
books, including two coauthored with Allan CohenInfluence Without Authority and Power
Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership.
16 This is connected to the PQ Vortex dynamics, discussed in chapter 8. Only 20 percent of teams
and individuals score above the PQ tipping point whereby positive change is supported
rather than resisted.
17 Jonathan Haidt explains this phenomenon in some depth in his insightful book The Happiness
Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
18 Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Lifes Purpose (New York: Penguin, 2008).
19 Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage, 2007). Gilbert, a Harvard
professor of psychology, has done some fascinating work comparing the happiness of lottery
winners with quadriplegic victims of accidents.

20 Information obtained from the website of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD):
www.madd.org.
21 John Milton, Paradise Lost, 3rd rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004).
22 I am certain that I am not the first to coin happiness is an inside game, as a Google search
reveals. There are at least two books with the title Happiness Is an Inside Job, one by Sylvia
Boorstein and another by John Powell.
23 Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientists Personal Journey (New York:
Viking, 2008). You might also want to watch Dr. Taylors inspiring speech at the TED
conference. Find it by searching the TED website (www.ted.com) for her name.
24 Many research studies have validated these claims from different angles. The following
provide a small sampling as a starting point.
Sara W. Lazar et al., Functional Brain Mapping of the Relaxation Response and
Meditation, Neuroreport 11, no. 7 (2000): 15815.
Bruce R. Dunn et al., Concentration and Mindfulness Meditations: Unique Forms of
Consciousness? Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 24, no. 3 (1999): 147165.
Ulrich Kirk, Jonathan Downar, and P. Read Montague (2011). Interoception Drives
Increased Rational Decision-making in Meditators Playing the Ultimatum Game, Frontiers
in Decision Neuroscience 5:49 (April 2011): doi: 10.3389/fnins.2011.00049.
H. C. Lou, et al., A 15O-H2O PET Study of Meditation and the Resting State of Normal
Consciousness, Human Brain Mapping 7, no. 2 (1999): 98105.
J. R. Binder et al., Conceptual Processing During the Conscious Resting State: A Functional
MRI Study, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11, no. 1 (1999): 8093. Jason P. Mitchell,
et al., Distinct Neural Systems Subserve Person and Object Knowledge, Proceedings of
the National Academy of Science 99, no. 23 (2003): 15,2343.
Debra A. Gusnard and Marcus E. Raichle. Searching for a Baseline: Functional Imaging
and the Resting Human Brain, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, no. 10 (2001): 68594.
John Kounios et al., The Prepared Mind: Neural Activity Prior to Problem Presentation
Predicts Subsequent Solution by Sudden Insight, Psychological Science 17, no. 10 (October
2006): 88290.
James H. Austin, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and
Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
25 Maxwell Maltz, The New Psycho-Cybernetics (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001).
26 Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Lottery Winners and Accident
Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8
(August 1978): 91727.
27 Sonya Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade, Pursuing Happiness: The
Architecture of Sustainable Change, Review of General Psychology 9, no. 2 (2005): 111
131.
28 Losada, The Complex Dynamics of High Performance Teams, 179192.
Losada, The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams: A
Nonlinear Dynamics Model, 740765.
Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada, Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of
Human Flourishing, American Psychologist 60, no. 7 (2005): 67886. Fredrickson and
Losada reported the positive/negative score (positivity ratio) in one population to be 3.2 for
flourishing versus 2.3 for languishing individuals. In the second population, it was 3.4 for
flourishing and 2.1 for languishing.
30 Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown,

2005).
John M. Gottman and Robert W. Levenson, The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a
Couple Will Divorce Over a 14-Year Period, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62
(2000): 73745.
31 Robert M. Schwartz et al., Optimal and Normal Affect Balance in Psychotherapy of Major
Depression: Evaluation of the Balanced States of Mind Model, Behavioural and Cognitive
Psychotherapy 30 (2002): 439450. Schwartz is a clinical psychologist who categorized
people into the three groups: pathological, normal, and optimal. His mathematical modeling
anticipated their PQ equivalent scores to be 38, 72, and 81 respectively. This was
empirically confirmed in his research.
32 Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner, Cognitive Control in Media
Multitaskers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 37 (August 2009):
15,58315,587.
33 Adam Gorlick, Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price, Stanford Study Shows, Stanford
Report, Stanford University, August 24, 2009.
34 Interview: Clifford Nass, Frontline: Digital Nation, accessed January 10, 2012,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/nass.html#2.
35 Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Dont (New
York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
36 Arbinger Institute, Leadership and Self-deception: Getting out of the Box (San Francisco:
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010).
37 Robert Zajonc et al., Feeling and Facial Efference: Implications of the Vascular Theory of
Emotion, Psychological Review 96, no. 3 (July 1989): 395416.
38 I owe the inspiration of the vision story format to my friend George Johnson. He later
developed the idea for TEL.A.VISION (www.telavision.tv), a nonprofit online effort to give
voice to the youth through personal vision videos.
39 James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social
Network: Longitudinal Analysis Over 20 Years in the Framingham Heart Study, British
Medical Journal 337, no. a2338 (2008): 19.

Visit www.PositiveIntelligence.com
Get the resources you need to put Positive Intelligence to work starting today. Youll get
Assessments
Measure the PQ scores for yourself, your team,
and your key relationships.
Identify your top Saboteurs so you can weaken them.
Tools
Self-guided audiofiles to activate and strengthen your PQ Brain. A Leaders Guide for raising
team PQs in retreats or workshops. A Coachs Guide for developing others using PQ principles.
Best Practice Case Studies
Learn from the best practices of Positive Intelligence:
Strengthen leadership Build cohesive high-performance teams Manage conflict
Sell Motivate
Improve work/life balance Reduce stress
Workshops & Webinars
Deepen your understanding of Positive Intelligence and create a personalized plan to put its
power into action.
Keynotes and More
Engage Shirzad Chamine for team retreats or keynote speeches. Read the authors blog, and
more.
Visit www.PositiveIntelligence.com
POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE
WORKSHOPS AND WEBINARS

Learn to apply the power of Positive Intelligence to your own specific challenges. Workshops and
webinars are available both for individuals and teams. They can help you:
Create Vision. Form a compelling vision utilizing your PQ Brain without distortion from your
Saboteurs.
Get Individualized Coaching. Receive individual coaching to apply PQ techniques to achieving
your vision.
Weaken Your Saboteurs . Deepen your understanding of your top Saboteurs and personalize
your strategy for intercepting and weakening them.
Strengthen Your Sage. Practice the power games to access your Sages five great powers.
Strengthen Your PQ Brain . Personalize your plan to strengthen your PQ Brain. Find your most
energizing and practical path to getting 100 PQ reps per day.
Track Progress. Track your progress through both milestones and your PQ score.
Receive Daily Reinforcement. Establish a daily structure reinforced by your peers to maintain
the momentum of your PQ practices.
Build Action Plans. Devise an action plan with twenty-one-day, three-month, and long-term
goals.
Coach Others. Learn how to coach others on these techniques and how to work with difficult
personalities.
Apply to Teams . As a team, learn to apply the PQ tools and techniques for team cohesion,
mutual accountability, creative problem solving, conflict management, and coaching one another
toward your greatest success.
Visit www.PositiveIntelligence.com for more.
SHIRZAD CHAMINE AS KEYNOTE SPEAKER
This was quite simply one of the most powerful presentations that I have been an audience to in
quite some time. Shirzad has not only inspired me to make positive changes in my organization,
he has given me tools to change my life.
Senior Executive Participant in Stanford University Seminar

AS A KEYNOTE SPEAKER, Shirzad Chamine consistently scores near-perfect evaluations. He

inspires lasting positive change, both professionally and personally. He is a passionate and
engaging speaker who creates instant rapport with his audiences through his humor, humility, and
personal storytelling. Shirzad guarantees to:
Appeal to wide range of audiences. Shirzad has wowed audiences from Ivy League business
school faculties to CEO gatherings, global NGO events, leadership seminars, association
meetings, sales conventions, and teambuilding events.
Deliver powerful tools and techniques. Shirzads audiences experience the power of
breakthrough tools and techniques that can generate immediate results.
Engage both the head and the heart. Shirzad supports his moving and inspiring messages with a
solid, research-based analytical foundation.
Tailor the message . Shirzad adapts the versatile power of Positive Intelligence to the specific
needs of each audience.
For more on bringing Shirzad Chamine to your organization, visit
www.PositiveIntelligence.com.