Positive Intelligence - Shirzad Chamine

• He began having more success once he finally stopped believing that his happiness depended on his success.
• Your mind is your best friend, but it is also your worst enemy. High Positive Intelligence means your mind acts as your friend far more than as your enemy. 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.
• Saboteurs are a universal phenomenon. The question is not whether you have them, but which ones you have, and how strong they are. 
• I told David it was okay if his mind reminded him of the importance of an upcoming meeting ONCE. Going over a mistake ONCE as an attempt to learn from it and not repeat it was helpful. But to be badgered mutiple times was not useful: His Judge was not the friend it pretended to be.
• Focus will significantly deplete the oxygen supplies of all Saboteurs. 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.
• The most effective strategy for weakening your Saboteuer is simply oberserve and label your Saboteur thoughts or feelings every time you notice them. It might be helpful to create more personalized descriptions and names for them.
• 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 doesn't think I am capable."
• 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 torured by their own Judges. This is rarely obvious to those around them. Externally, we all show our happy and fully confident fronts. 
• 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. I embarked on a very different kind of game with my son. "So why is it, Kia? Why do I love you so much?" "Daddy, its because I am me." 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.
• 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, 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.
• The fact is that the other person hadn't neccessarily 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.
• To be precise, all your distress in the forms of anxiety, disappointment, stress, anger, shame, guilt - all the unpleasent stuff that makes up your suffering - is generated by your own Saboteurs.
• The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity. 
• WHO KNOWS IF ITS GOOD OR BAD?
• Our Judge convinces us that we know what is good and bad at any given moment, but the truth is that we actually don't!!!!!
• I ask people to come up with at least three scenarios where their supposedly bad situation could turn in to a gift and opportunity.
• Any amount of time and energy spent on anger, blame, regret, or worry is completely wasted.
• Your other option is to just let it go and put it behind you without any residue of unhappiness, regret, or distress.
• I often find People feeling stuck since they can't 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 unkown 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 eventuially 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 true of individuals as it is of teams and organizations.
• 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. ... Moves you into pure action. Laser-focused on action.... as all your mental and emotional energy would be focused on getting the action right.... By pushing aside all the mind-chatter coming from Saboteurs. ... Concentrate on pure action. ... Every single Saboteur gets in the way of taking pure action.
• Replace in a discussion all "No...buts..." with "Yes...ands..."
• Building PQ brain muscles
• Shift as much of your Attention as you can to your body and any of your five senses for at least ten seconds
• commanding yourself to stop being lost in thought and instead become aware of your physical sensations
• at least one hundred times a day.
• 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
• When you take a shower, give yourself permission to stop your busy mind-chatter for one short minute
• When you exercise, zone in rather than zone out
• next time you sit down for a meal, take at least one minute to become fully present and mindful of eating
• 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 hearbeat? 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
• regardless of how busy you are, promise yourself that wou will give your busy mind a rest for one minute every time you go to the bathroom.
• Promise yourself that every time you catch and label a saboteur, you will get a pq rep in for ten seconds
• Over time, your mind chatter will lose much of its intensity and volume, but it will never fully go away
• 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.
• 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 paralegic Person with a PQ score of 80. You wouldn't 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. ... Happiness is indeed an inside game.
• Can you think of anyone who has such a strong vortex of positivity around them that your mood is immediately lifted when you're near them?
• 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
• The sage knows nothing about mental exhaustion

PARENTING

• 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 what will make them happy: their PQ
• Life will do it's 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.
• During dinner
• pause our kids and ask them to focus closely on the next few bites. sometime all of us do so as a family
• We also go around the dinner table and each share three things about the day we feel grateful for
• Teaching your kids about their own sage and saboteurs has lasting impact.
• Kids as young as ten years old are fully capable of understanding and using the concept.
• 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.
• 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.