EP 210: Shirzad Chamine | Building Mental Fitness with Positive Intelligence

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out.

Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Fleet Maul, and today I'm sharing a conversation with Shirzad Sharmin, author of the New York Times bestseller Positive Intelligence. We're going to explore five core superpowers of the positive brain, the 10 saboteurs that keep us in negative states, and the practical 10 second exercises to shift negative to positive brain states. So we're also going to talk about why insight alone isn't enough to change our lives, and how to rewire the brain. We're going to talk about shifting from your saboteurs to your inner sage on command and much, much more. Before we get started with the conversation though, I wanted to remind you that if you love these episodes, please subscribe on your favorite platform so you don't miss any. Also, I wanted to let you know that if you would like to download your copy of my free ebook Neurosomatic Mindfulness, you can do so at heartmind Code.

Podcast. You can also order my book Radical Responsibility how to move beyond blame, Live your highest purpose and become an unstoppable force for good by ordering it from your favorite bookseller, Barnes and Noble, Amazon Indie books and so forth. And then going to the book website radicalresponsibilitybook.com whereby uploading the order number or receipt you you can receive over $1,000 in free bonuses over $1,000 in valuable free bonuses, courses and challenges from Heart Mind Institute. Also, please join our Facebook group@facebook.com groups hmisummitcommunity and we'd also like you to consider becoming a member of HeartMind All Access membership and community where you will have access to all of our courses and all of our online summits past, present and future, which currently is over 1000 hours of incredible transformational teachings from the world's most renowned clinicians, neuroscientists, experts and positive neuroplasticity experts, expert trauma therapists, experts in psychic assisted psychotherapy, experts in meditation and mindfulness, and so much more. And you'll have access to all of that. Plus you'll enjoy curated journeys through all of this amazing teaching. You'll have activities, you'll have a community to be part of and become part of a global movement. All for a very modest annual subscription fee. So consider doing that at heartmind Co. Hmm, Heartmind Co. Hmm. You can learn all about it there. Also, don't forget to follow us on instagram@instagram.com heartmindinstitute and and on facebook@facebook.com heartmindinstitute and you can also just go to our basic website, learn all about all of our programs at heartmind.co.heartmind co. Okay, so we'll get started with this conversation with Shirzad Shamin.

And I'm very happy to be here today with Shirzad Shamin. Welcome, Shirzad.

Thank you for having me.

So I'm going to share a bit of your bio and to familiarize the audience with your background and your work and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Great.

All right, so Shirzad Shamin is the author of the New York Times bestseller Positive Intelligence and has been the CEO of the largest coach training organization in the world. Our preeminent C suite advisor, Shirzad has coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams. Shirzad's background includes a BA in Psychology, an Ms. In Electrical Engineering, and an MBA in from Stanford. He has lectured on positive intelligence at Stanford University and has trained faculty at Stanford and Yale business schools. So, Shahzad, we're here on day two of the summit focused on mental and emotional well being. And so I'm excited to dive into positive intelligence as it relates to mental fitness, mental health and well being, as well as emotional health and well being. Those are. You can't completely separate those two. And so I wanted to open up the conversation by just asking about the inspiration behind your work. How did you come to focus on positive intelligence?

Yeah, actually the honest answer to that is that I needed to dig myself out of the hole of being very successful as a human being, but also not very happy at all. So I had learned to be at the top of my career. I was always a straight A student, Stanford and all these other accolades that I was getting and being extremely successful in my work and business and feeling not very happy at all. As a matter of fact, I discovered that I was in clinical depression for pretty much the first 30 years of my life, which is a long period of time. And as I tried to dig my way out of that hole and trying to figure out how can I actually be happy and have peace and joy and not keep chasing the next achievement, I'm still feeling empty. I tried everything that there was there to try. I've read life changing books and I did workshops that were supposed to be life changing. And after each of these Life changing stuff I saw, I thought, I got it, I got it, I got it. And three months later, three weeks later, I was right back to the same old stuff. So the question of how do we sustainably shift ourselves from whatever our current experience is to a more positive, sustained level of being is what eventually led me to realize that insight, which you get from a workshop and from, from a book and stuff like that is a awesome, awesome thing. But it's 20% of what's needed, 80% of what's needed is actually muscle building, rewiring the brain, having new muscles in the brain to counter the old bad, you know, negative muscles in the brain. You don't fight muscle with insight, you need to fight muscle with muscle. And so I realized rewiring the brain in terms of neural pathways, generating positive new habits of the mind is where I had kept not investing in. And that no amount of the next workshop and the next book was going to get me to.

Building those lasting habits in my mind. It really came down to daily practices that rewired my brain and generated new positive habits. That's why I called my work eventually Mental Fitness, to really emphasize the fact that if you're serious about sustained change, yeah, you want to generate insight and awareness and understanding, but that's 20% of the game. Are you willing to do the daily work so that you rewire your brain and build neural pathways, quote, unquote, muscles of the positive part of your brain? And that's where the work is. That's where I finally achieved great success with myself and realized, wow, the world can use this stuff and all of this research and work, which eventually led to the work I do with so many thousands of coaches and athletes and CEOs and all that.

Well, fascinating. And it's always so gratifying to hear how people's, you know, huge contributions in the world, really important work, ends up evolving out of their own personal experience and their own personal need in that way. So. Absolutely. So could you tell us a little bit about what exactly is positive intelligence? Is that related to the field of positive psychology? Are they different? And.

How is positive intelligence different from idea, traditional IQ intelligence or ideas like emotional intelligence and so forth?

Yeah. Positive intelligence is actually a synthesis of the latest breakthroughs in positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, performance science and neuroscience. And what it focuses on is that we are constantly sabotaging ourselves every single day. We are sabotaging our wellness, our effectiveness, and our relationships. How we sabotage ourselves is when we go to the negative mind.

And our ability to shift to the positive mind has us stop sabotaging ourselves and start thriving. And so the positive intelligence is about how much ability have you built in yourself to intercept yourself in the negative mind and activate and shift to the positive mind. The beauty of it is that unlike cognitive intelligence, where you don't quite know how to grow your iq, with positive intelligence, we call that pq, Positive intelligence quotient. You can massively improve your positive intelligence because it literally is about rewiring your brain so that you can intercept yourself in the negative, activate the positive, and shift to the positive. And. And related to that, a very important thing that we talk about. And how do we know that you're sabotaging yourself? We basically say that, you know, negative emotions are incredibly helpful, but for just a second initially, and use a metaphor of, you know, we ask the question, is pain helpful to you? And the answer, hopefully, is, yeah, pain is helpful for me. Why? Because if I put my hand on the hot stove, and if I don't feel pain, then I'm going to keep my hand on the hot stove. It's going to burn me to the bone. Right? So really helpful to feel pain. But the question is, how long is it helpful for you to feel your hand on the hot stove before you get the message and remove your hand? And hopefully the answer is, you know, split second pain is helpful to give me an alert, and then if I am wise and smart, I take action on it. So the same exact thing with negative emotion is stress. Stress is the number one negative emotion. The most prevalent negative emotion is stress. Stress, anxiety, shame, guilt, disappointment, regret. Are these helpful? The answer is absolutely. They are critical. They are critical to give you an alert that something needs your attention. But for just that first second, the alert is delivered to you. But then if you continue being stressed, if you continue being obsessed and upset and disappointed and shamed and guilty and all that stuff, then you're keeping your hand on the hot stove and you're staying in a negative emotion. That makes it hard for you to figure out how to deal with this challenge, how to actually properly interact with this challenge so that you produce the best results, best relationship, best performance.

Therefore, when you are in negative emotion for more than a second, we say by definition, you are sabotaging yourself, because staying in a negative emotion makes it hard for you to figure out how to best interact with the challenge in front of you. You feel worse, you do worse, you damage relationships, you damage performance. Therefore, then we say that your saboteurs, the ones that sabotage you in your head are the ones that are causing you to stay in negative emotion for longer than the useful second in meeting the challenges of your life. And therefore we can look everybody in the eye and say you do some amount of self sabotage every day. How do we know that? Because you spend a negative emotion for more than a second in meeting the challenges of your life. What would it be like if you spend a lot less time there and you learn how to shift to the positive on command? It's about developing that self command, self mastery over your own mind.

Wow. So I'm glad you made that distinction because certainly so called negative emotions are part of our life and there's information in them and even, maybe even wisdom in them on some level. And so you're making, you're clearly not talking about what some people reference today as toxic positivity or the idea of bypassing, but you're just saying we're going to be happier and healthier if we spend more time in the realm of our positive emotions. And I know from the neuroscience research.

And this is kind of a simplification, but I believe it's in either the right or left front temporal lobe, prefrontal lobe, the. There's a guy. We have these natural breaks on our negative emotions. Like, you know, they're supposed to only last so long, but those breaks can get weak and then we find ourselves staying upset too long. And so from a neuroscientific perspective, part of rewiring the brain, retraining the brain, is strengthening those brakes so we can turn off those negative emotions at the appropriate time and make a shift back to a more positive, positive state that.

Exactly. The alert, the stress that initially has me pay attention to, wow, something needs my attention here. That part, that's. That neurochemical element of that alert is processed by your body in about a second and a half. That's the useful period. And you've processed in about a second and a half beyond that. Then it is your thoughts that are coming in and say, oh my God, what about this? What about that? What happens over here? And then you have gone into a no longer useful generation of ideas that keep generating anxiety, shame, guilt, whatever that. Then take your eye off of what it is that you can be doing. That would be helpful. And I'm really glad you brought up the toxic positivity thing because the problem with toxic positivity is that it may generate a message that says shame on you if you're not able to shift to the positive. What the heck is wrong with you? Don't you realize negative is not up for you helpful. What's wrong with you? Why don't you shift? And what we talk about here is that. And so I am honest in my own practice of this. And what I say is, if my house burns down, I can't shift to the positive about how do I turn this into a gift or positive in the world. I can't shift to that in one second. I need more than one second to recover from that, to shift from being upset, to shift to what do I do about this that turns into a positive? The one second is aspirational. And then depending on how much mental muscle power I have built, it may take me longer. And as it is taking me longer, I am really careful not to shame myself and guilt myself of what's wrong with you. It should be positive. Even after all these years of practice, what I do say is I occasionally still get hijacked by my saboteurs who have me be really upset, be disappointed, be ashamed, be guilty, all of that stuff. And so I am very aware of the fact that as human beings, it is absolutely impossible for us not to get hijacked by these saboteurs, these agents of self sabotage, these agents of negativity. And when that happens, the last thing I want to do is be upset at myself. Because being upset at myself is actually one of these judgment saboteurs that deepens the negative process. So when I find myself in this imperfect part of myself where I am still in the negative mode, even as I'm trying to attempt to shift, what I bring to myself is compassion, not judgment. The compassion of, you know, what I'm hijacked right now. This has been really tough. I've tried to recover to positive. I haven't been able to discuss. This has been particularly tough. I'm going to keep trying until the shift happens. And until then I will have deep oodles of compassion for myself, for being the one who is in this situation who hasn't quite been able to shift yet. Because I'm an imperfect human being, I get these hijackings. I am working on it.

Well, that's absolutely wonderful because there's some of the mental toughness literature out there that kind of lacks the self compassion part. Right?

Exactly.

And it's. And obviously it's never helpful to shame ourselves, but to help folks, you know, with the logic of why it doesn't even make sense to save our shame ourselves. You know, it's understanding kind of what we're up against. We all have this legacy of the time when survival was really at stake for human beings. And so we have all this fear and survival based genetic predisposition and so forth and what scientists have called the negativity bias. And our brain naturally is more focused on danger because job one creates pieces of survival. Now we're not living out in the wild anymore. It's not that there aren't any dangers, but we, it's a very different situation, but our brain hasn't changed that much. So we really, and from what you're talking about is developing, which I think is really the difference. And so I don't, I don't mean to say this in a pejorative way, but the possibilities are really having a conscious life or not having a conscious life is the capacity to self regulate. And that is that ability to self regulate from states that are no longer really appropriate to what's going on, the states that are beneficial, that are, that are actually in our own enlightened self interest, that ability to self regulate our own, our own emotional processes, our cognitive processes and so forth. And it sounds like your message is we can train ourselves to get a.

Lot better with that and that it literally is about rewiring the brain. We see that with this kind of practices that we do within eight weeks in MRI imaging, people see increased gray matter in the positive regions of the brain and decreased gray matter, actual atrophy in the negative regions of the brain. It happens within eight weeks of daily practice. So our brain is massively capable of reviving itself. And the key thing that they are building to your point about self regulation, a fundamental thing we are building is the self observer, self commander, the one that watches over us and intercepts and says, you know what, this isn't serving right now. Let's literally shift brain activation to activate more of the positive region of your brain so you have access to a different part of you that can handle this better. That's the self observer, self commander, for lack of any better words. And it's a fundamental mental muscle that we built.

So you referenced a moment ago, Shahzad, that we may experience a negative emotion and it's appropriate and there's good information there for a second or two or however long, but.

But then our thoughts take over and we started creating all this additional suffering and reinforcing the negative mood and emotion and negative thinking and so forth. And so I know you've talked about how our mind can be our best friend, but our mind can also be our worst friend. And in a worse man that's getting into these patterns of self sabotage. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. And you alluded to this a few minutes ago, that these patterns that we have developed, the negative patterns which we call the saboteurs, the ones that sabotage you, they actually came into our life early on to help us survive. So what a saboteur does, these negative patterns really were very helpful for us in surviving this difficult thing called childhood. And even if you had the absolute best parenting and best upbringing, I guarantee you life from the eyes perspective of a child is quite vulnerable. It's full of dangers, full of dangers of abandonment and rejection and loss and all of that stuff. So in this threatening thing called life from a child's perspective, you develop go to habits to have you feel physically and emotionally safe. The number one go to habit for survival is the judge voice. And the judge voice.

The most common way of talking about is the inner critic. But the way we look at the judge saboteur, it actually has three different components. There's the one that keeps judging you, so it's the self judge. There's the one that keeps finding what's wrong with others, judging others. And even more powerfully and devastatingly, the one that keeps judging situations and circumstances and saying, there's something wrong with my this situation or circumstance in my life. I can't be happy. I will be happy when this changes and this changes and this changes. So we are constantly. So. So of the 10, we have 10 saboteurs based on our research, the one that's the universal saboteur that everybody has is the judge judging self, judging others, judging circumstances. And that's the master saboteur that gets the ball rolling in negativity. So at any given moment, the judge is finding, trying to look at what is wrong.

And as you said, this predisposition to the negative has a wonderful evolutionary survival mechanism. Because for our ancestors, when they were in the jungle and the tree started shaking, the ancestor that was always paranoid and looking at worst possibility and always said, no, the tree started shaking. I bet you it's a tiger coming out to eat me alive. And you ran 99 out of 100 times. That paranoia, that bias to negativity was wasteful. But that one time when there was actual tiger, you know, it saved your life. Imagine the distant ancestor who was very optimistic and positive, the tree starts shaking. And then she said, you know what? I have a good feeling about things. You know, it's a nice day. I have a good feeling. I bet it's a koala bear coming to give me a bear hug. How long do you think that ancestor lasted? The predisposition to anxiety and stress and negativity and looking at the worst thing, the judge was helpful for our survival, which is why everybody has a version of it. Then.

There are nine other saboteurs. We arrived at all of this based on factor analysis research. More than a million people involved in our assessment work. And so what we know is that there are nine other ways we go negative and sabotage ourselves. And those, those nine other ways have names like the controller, the restless stickler, victim pleaser, hyper rational, hyper achiever.

Hyper vigilant. So there are nine of these and hopefully it resonates with you. Like, oh, my kid has this and my wife has this and my husband has this. These names hopefully ring a bell. Like, yeah, that's how in my relationship with my spouse, she goes negative and she goes to the stickler, controller, whatever. And typically these saboteurs are what generates our frustration with each other. Our conflicts with each other typically are a dance of my saboteurs being activated by yours. By the way, these characters are contagious. So when I go to my controller, then that, that contagion energy brings out your avoid or whatever your saboteur is. And before we know it, we are bringing out the worst in each other in our relationship. Because when, because of mirror neurons, when I go to this part of my brain that the saboteurs live, it activates the part of the same part of brain in you. And so I am bringing out the worst in you because I'm bringing out the worst in myself right now.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a really important distinction in terms of the quality of our relationships. And you know, I think our responsibility to ourselves and others in the, that to understand that negativity is contagious and positivity is contagious. And so, you know, taking responsibility to self regulate and our contribution to the world can be to spread a little more positivity and a little less negativity. Absolutely. So, you know, yeah, I love the names that you've given these saboteurs and I just love the term saboteurs because self sabotage is just something that, you know, we all deal with. And, and the names that you used are very evocative and understandable. And you know, you just mentioned another one, the victim. But I was also going to ask you about that already when you talked about the three types of the judge, right, the judging ourselves, judging others, and judging circumstances. Because it's very, I mean, people are victimized in life and children are victimized. And you know, we all face a lot of challenges, but we can get caught in this mindset where we, we think our destiny, our life is being determined by our circumstances and give away any sense of our self agency. And you know, it can be very logical to think, well I got all these obstacles and the reason I'm unhappy is because of this and that, and I can't get a job because of this and that. And there may be some logic to it, but the problem is if we really focus on that, we're giving away our own power because we can't control those things. The place where we have some, you know, is with self agency. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about. And this isn't, I don't mean any way to invalidate the people that are victimized in life may need a lot of support and validation, healing. But there is this victim mindset that we get into and it may be understandable, but the problem is in a process we just give our power away.

Yeah, it's a big, big part of what we do where first of all we talk about how all your saboteurs live in a region of your brain where the negative brain is. And then the counterpart to your saboteur, the part of your mind that serves you as opposed to sabotage you, we call that the sage. So inside your mind there is a battle going on constantly, every hour of every day between your inner saboteurs and inner sage. And we call, we believe the inner sage. Your sage is your true self. And, and these saboteurs are kind of take things you learn for survival, but that, that's not your true self, that's not what you're born with. And for fans of Star wars, it's like the war raging inside your head between your inner Darth Vaders and inner Jedi. So this work, some of my Stanford students used to call that Jedi mind training because we help you really strengthen the positive Jedi mind in yourself. And in order to shift to the sage.

The first thing that we do is we assume the sage perspective. And the sage perspective is that I can absolutely turn every situation or circumstance into a gift and opportunity. That every situation or circumstance can be converted into a gift and opportunity. There's a whole chapter on just this sage perspective in my book. And to bring it to life, I'll tell the story. It's a well known story from a Daoist Chinese tradition that I love that kind of brings the wisdom of this sage perspective that everything can Be a gift and opportunity. And it says it's a stallion. It's called the stallion story. It's the story of a sage old farmer who lives in a farm with his stallion that he prizes against all other possessions. And one day he enters his stallion into a nearby village competition. And his stallion wins first prize. And his neighbors bring their congratulations. We are so happy your stallion won first prize. And the farmer says, who knows what is good and what is bad?

That's a puzzling answer. The neighbors are puzzled. They go away. A week or so passes. The thieves in the area have discovered the stallion has won first prize. He's more precious, he's more expensive. So they actually come and steal the stallion. The neighbors bring their condolences and the farmer says, who knows what is good and what is bad?

Very puzzling answer. They, they are puzzled. They go away. A week or so passes. The stallion is a very free spirited stallion. He breaks away from his captors. He finds his way back to the farmer's farm. Along the way he befriends all these precious wild mares. So he enters the farmer's farm himself and all these precious wild mares. The neighbors bring their congratulations. And the farmer says, who knows what is good and what is bad. And by now the neighbors are thinking, this guy is getting old. These are weird answers. Something wrong with this guy. They go away. A week or so passes.

The farmer has a young adult son. His young adult son is taming, trying to tame one of these wild mares and he's thrown to the ground and he breaks his leg. The neighbors bring their condolences. And once again the farmer says, who knows what is good and what is bad.

And by this time in the story, the neighbors have gotten their they are convinced that this guy needs help. These are bizarre answers to events. They go away concerned. And now another week or so passes. By the way, this village is very eventful. Lots of things happen every week. So that's a fun place to live in a week. War has broken out in this region of the imperial arm world. In China, the imperial army goes to village to village to conscript all able bodied young adults to take them to war as soldiers. But they can't take the farmer's son because he has a broken leg.

And by this time in the story, the neighbors don't even bother to come bring their congratulations because they know what the farmer is going to say. The farmer is going to say, who knows what is good and what is bad.

And so this is. This is. I was when the book was when my book was published in China. I was telling the story, translator was translating, and at some point she stopped translating. And I said, why are you not continuing to translate my story? She said, Mr. Shamin, everybody in China grow their grandmother tells them this story when they're growing up. They already know this story. You don't need to tell it. So that was very humbling for me. But basically the main thing here that we are suggesting is in this particular story, the farmer has a spiritual leap of faith. Like believes that a quote unquote bad thing will turn into something positive. You just wait for it. The way we teach the sage perspective is now about half of the CEOs I've been a CEO coach and about half of my CEO coach CEOs have a spiritual belief system. And usually they say, you know what? This sage perspective is actually taught in my spiritual tradition. It says everything happens for a reason. Don't question the wisdom of the universe, just received the gift. And I say, okay, awesome. So this sage perspective is a way for you to live your spiritual belief system. That's great. But the other half of the CEOs I coach, they are atheist or agnostics. And with them I say, you don't need to embrace the sage perspective as a spiritual leap of faith. Embrace the sage perspective because it is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is a self fulfilling prophecy. So is the saboteur perspective. For example, if I'm in the middle of a very big, big project and all of a sudden I discover mistakes and failures are happening and things are going wrong, if I bring my judge perspective that this is bad, bad, bad, then I'm gonna go start a meeting that's upset and pissed off and you know, we have screwed things up. This is terrible. We are in big trouble. We gotta fix this, we gotta fix this now. And with all that negativity through the saboteur contagion, I have shifted everybody around me to their own saboteur world. So I've shifted Janet to her controller, I've shifted Bob to his victim, I've shifted everybody to their saboteurs. And will we find a way to improve the situation? Yeah, but we waste a lot of mental emotional energy because we're in the wrong brain to figure out how to solve the problem as opposed to if I was in the sage perspective. That's it. Mistakes and failures have happened. You know what? We can and we shall convert this into gifts and opportunities. I would go to the same team and say, hey guys, we made a mess of things and let's figure out how we can turn this into a gift. The emotions are our curiosity, our hope. And you create a contagion of positive mindset with everybody. And that positive brain is the part that's can clearly see what's going on. It's the part that's wired for creativity, resourcefulness. So you may figure out the reason we got ourselves in trouble is our entire process was the suboptimal process. And we maybe reinvent a newer process that gets us to the finish line twice as fast as a result of this midpoint breakdown. Right? That's how the gift is generated. Not because of a spiritual leap of faith, but because it's a self fulfilling prophecy. So the question that I want everybody to ask is every day you come across a lot of things that your judge of circumstance, remember judge of circumstance, that's the one that's coming and saying this is bad, bad, bad. This failure, this mistake, this breakdown, this thing that didn't go my way. Bad, bad, bad. And if you stay in that perspective, it becomes self fulfilling. You waste a lot of mental, emotional energy. That's a fork in the road. Can you shift to the sage perspective that says this can be converted into gift and opportunity. I wonder how you will have a very different experience if over and over and over again you intercept the judge and say no, that's just a lie, that's a self fulfilling lie. Let's assume a different self fulfilling prophecy.

Wow, amazing. So practical and beneficial. And that the Dawah story you shared, the stallion story is such a great wisdom story. So I'd like to kind of shift into the how to, you know, so practices, tools, strategies for strengthening our positive intelligence. And I would imagine part of that is just strengthening that ability to make that shift. Just strengthening the ability to recognize when we're moving into a negative state and, and to make that shift the capacity for self regulation and so forth. And, and so I'd love for you to talk about ways we can train ourselves to improve that, to build those muscles to rewire the brain and so forth. And I'm also curious about in terms of these saboteurs, these patterns, you know, different psychological systems, you know, talk about it almost like parts, we have all these different parts in us, right? So you know, you have these saboteurs and you know one thing is that just constantly try to shift or. But also as you said, they all had an original purpose. They developed mostly in childhood to protect us from various situations. And so is, is part of the process because sometimes if we Demonize them or resist them or make it that we almost can give them more power. Someone as well as learning to make the shift, is there some sense of kind of making friends with and having a more accepting attitude that yeah, there's the saboteurs and, and that's fine, there's part of me, but I'm just not going to let it run my life today is there is, there is a part of the self compassion and part of the, in terms of your methodology of how we train, both training our capacity to make the shift, but how we relate to those patterns themselves.

Yeah, no, great. That's exactly right. What you resist persists. So if I get upset at this part of myself, I'm actually bringing judgment, negative energy to it which is going to intensify the presence of that. So we absolutely don't want to be resisting and fighting these. We want to intercept them differently. And so that brings us to, to the very simple three component practice that we do. There are three steps we want to keep.

Watching ourselves to see when the saboteur begins to happen. The way we know that is by looking at doing the saboteur assessment so that we develop early warning signals for when this saboteur is beginning to take over. So for example, my judge saboteur is very clear. When I start getting frustrated with myself or frustrated with you or really disappointed with the situation or circumstance, that's the beginning of my judge starting to hijack me. However, one of my other top saboteurs is the avoider. So now what's the starting point of my avoider role? I know that my avoider operates. I am trying to work on a project and hit a creative block and my avoider says, you know what, let's go check social media over here. I know that what I need to be doing is working on the project, but my order wants me to go avoid or I'm dealing with a conflict with somebody and it's too challenging for me to actually talk about the conflict. So I just avoid having that conversation. So it's really clear for me when my avoider is beginning to come in. I also have the pleaser saboteur. I know when that's beginning to come in. I need to do the saboteur assessment. By the way, it's available for free. So in five minutes you can figure out what saboteurs you have so that you develop a sense of what is your way of going negative. By the way, notice that the negative is quote unquote. Because my avoider goes and plays with Social media, instead of dealing with the stuff that I was working on that feels like I'm generating fun for myself. That's not a negative thing thing. But the negative thing, if I'm really paying attention to is this voice in the back of my my head that says, you know what, shame on you. You're just, you're avoiding what you know that you need to be working on. And it begins to generate anxiety. The so, so basically it's subtle. What? The negative energy is not always obvious. The pleaser has me say yes to somebody trying to please them. Where's the negativity in that? It feels like a very positive thing. The hyper rational is emotionally numb and responding to a situation where empathy would be the right thing. But if I'm in hyper rational, hyperlogical mode, my quote unquote negativity is emotional numbness. I am not showing the empathy and compassion that would be more productive in this relationship situation, which is the restless is, instead of focusing on what's important here I go reach out for the donut. That seems like it's a pleasurable thing, but where's the negative here? The negative is in the back of my mind. There is a lack of presence, there's a restlessness that gets me to want to give myself a dopamine hit. We expand this idea of negative emotion and have you realize you actually have a lot of negative reactions that are not the obvious negative reaction. You do that based on the saboteur that you have. Now I've done the first step, which is what is the early signs of my avoider, my controller, my stickler, my victim, my judge, whatever saboteur I have beginning to hijack me. Then what we say to ourselves is the moment you see yourself do that, then just label that moment.

As the saboteur moment. I have learned, I promise myself and I do this the moment I see myself go to the avoid, I go to the police, I go to the judge, I say, oh, there it's happening, there it's happening, here it's happening. So I label that moment as a saboteur moment. And I now know that that is not serving me. That then allows me to do the second of the three component thing we want to do, which is now let me activate a part of my brain where my sage and positivity lives and quiet the part of my brain where the saboteur lives.

The moment I intercept this and label it and I want to now do a 10 second technique that has me quiet the negative region and activate the positive region. So I can choose differently. The 10 second technique, we call it a PQ rep. PQ stands for positive intelligence quotient.

Positive intelligence, we abbreviate to pq. We call this a PQ rep. The reason we call it that is that think about if you want to build a bicep muscle, you will take a dumbbell and you do one dumbbell rep, two dumbbell rep, three dumbbell wraps. But if you want to build the positive region of your brain and this part of you that's the self commander, self observer, so that you have agency, you choose your experience, then the rep for that is these 10 second PQ reps. And there are many ways to do them. The most popular Amongst all the CEOs I've coached and all the people thousands of people have these tattoos to is actually the following. So we can practice it together. So if you can do this with me for 10 seconds. So please take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other. Gently rub two fingertips against each other with so much attention on that that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. So you're paying such exquisite attention to fingertips sliding on each other where you feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. For some people it comes really fast. For some people, it takes a little practice.

That was about 10 seconds. Now, if you had your head under FMRI machine, we would have noticed that even with just what you did, you ever so slightly quieted the region of your brain where your saboteurs live. And ever so slightly, you activate the region of your brain where your sage, your inner Jedi lives so that now you can begin to shift to sage and choose differently. What we just did is two things. We just paused. We paused. The automaticity of the mind doing this avatar thing, that's the biggest deal. We paused rather than go automatic the old way, and now we are choosing to go a different way. What starts that different way is this perspective that says, you know what, no matter what's upsetting me over here, it can be turned into a gift and opportunity. That optimism, that looking makes it a lot easier for me to say, how could this be a gift? What could be positive about this? How could it be generated into a positive. Now how you do that is with that positive brain which we talk about. It has five superpowers. Empathize, explore, innovate, navigate, and activate. This all came from factor analysis research. What are the core positive modalities you don't need? What are the core ways we self sabotage? And our factor analysis researchers are only 10 ways we self sabotage. That's what the saboteurs are. On the positive side, there are only five core superpowers of your positive superpowers of the brain. When you really activate the positive brain and they are empathized, which is just bringing deep love, compassion, empathy to yourself and others explore, which is about that true beginner's mind, deep curiosity.

To any situation, not, not pretending that you fully understand it. There's always another perspective. There's always another perspective. Innovate, which is obvious, you know, you think out the box, navigate which is that part of you that enables you to be in touch with meaning and purpose so that you always, you have an inner compass about what direction makes sense here, what will bring more meaning or purpose to my actions. And finally activate, which is being able to move into action in a fearless, calm, clear headed, laser focused way without all of the drama and the distractions of the saboteur. So when you go to action, you're in pure action. You're laser focused, locked in and mentally and energetically able to bring all of the power to what it is that you want to achieve. Those are the five superpowers of the sage. When you activate that region of your, of your brain, everybody has access to them if they really activate that part of the brain.

Wow.

Wow.

You know, a lot of participants in our summit are mindfulness practitioners and I think a lot of this will resonate with them and be familiar in terms of various kinds of mind training practices and mindfulness practices and so forth. And also all the research into mind training, the neuroscientific research, Richie Davidson's work and so forth to really understanding the constituents of well being and happiness and how we can actually train ourselves to have a brain that's more predisposed to well being and happiness and less predisposed to negativity and, and so forth. So this is really fascinating stuff and I love your language and approach. It's very, very practical and, and simple. And I really like this idea of the sage mindset. And I listened to you talk about, you gave that great story from, from the Taoist tradition. So it seems like the sage mind has these five superpowers to begin with and also has qualities of kind of an unbiased approach, more vaster mind, more equanimity, greater perspective and, and because of that is less likely to get locked into one of these saboteur patterns or negative patterns that has that broad, unbiased economist kind of perspective. And it's something that's really, would you agree that it's. It's not necessarily something we can create. We have to create. It's already there. It's just getting more access to it. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. And. Exactly. And, and, and again, it depends on my access to that part of me, depends on what part of my brain is activated. And the difference. Let's say I've made a mistake and, and broken something very precious and important that my judge will come in and say, you broke the stairs out. What's wrong with you? All of that stuff, that attitude. My sage will come in and say, very honorable, will tell the truth in equanimity, in discernment, and says, shirzad, you broke this thing. It costs this much and all of that stuff. So our sage is constantly seeing things as they are without the drama of the saboteurs. Now, as I see what I have done without the drama of the saboteur, the option is still available to me to say, okay, now that I clearly see what is happening in discernment, not in judgment, what do I choose to do about it? And I can still choose to say I'm going to convert this mistake and this thing that I just did into a gift for myself and for. For others if needed to. How do I do that? We go into creative brainstorming with our coaches where you throw us any problem or challenge and we'll absolutely figure out how to turn that into a gift that becomes just a practice. And by the way, you brought in another thing, Fleet, which is very important. You said, how do we make sure we don't get upset at these parts of ourselves because they actually live the purpose. So I can tell the story of my judge. Right? My judge to this day, my judges was so brutal in his anger and brutality towards me. I called him the executioner because his belief about me, that was part of why I was in clinical depression for 30 years. Is, Shirzad, you are unworthy of any love or attention. You are an absolute fraud. Any minute now, you're going to be exposed for this worthless human being that you are and all of that stuff, like the imposter syndrome, all that stuff. Now, here's the thing. My judge used to be a giant. I used to completely trust all of these lies and therefore I was just cowering all the time. But the interesting thing is my judge has not changed his tune at all. He is still whispers in my head, shirza, you're unworthy of any love, any happiness. You are a fraud. You're going to be exposed. All of that stuff he still tells me exactly the same. The difference is, he used to be a giant, and I used to cower below him before him, and now he's just a whisper in my head. But the whisper has not changed.

So that brings up how do I work with him? If I get upset at him for not quitting on me and still calling me a fraud after all these years, guess what I'm doing? I'm judging my judge. I'm actually feeling him. So what do I do instead? He shows up, and I say, there you go again. You haven't called me an idiot for a whole hour. What's going on? Are you tired? Didn't you get enough sleep? I haven't heard from you. Where have you been? Okay, I'm a fraud. Okay, Got it. And I'm gonna move on to something else. So I bring humor, and I bring patience, but I also bring vigilance. He knows that I'm no longer going to get into a conversation with him to say, let me prove to you I'm not a fraud. I've achieved this. I've achieved this. No, no, no. I'm not gonna have a conversation with him because his lie has been exposed. So, in a way, I have converted my judge, who is a persistent saboteur, into my Jedi trainer. How? Because if he shows up 10 times this hour, 10 times, I get a chance 10 times to say, oh, there you go. Let me do one of these PQ reps. I'm going to notice my breath. I'm going to notice my balance, seat, whatever, which means I'm building my Jedi muscles, my sage muscles, which means this charge. I have reframed my saboteur into my Jedi trainer because he keeps giving me a reminder to do Jedi muscle building, which means I'm not upset at him. I accept him, and I have incorporated him into a gift. But I also will not keep giving. I don't give him a hug every time he shows up. I don't get dragged back into his conversation with me. That's settled. I have thanked him for how he helped me in my childhood. I've also told him he is no longer helpful in his lies about me. Those are not going to be accepted or entertained by me. We are done with that. So there's a way of incorporating the saboteurs that doesn't have negative energy with it, but also doesn't have them getting into bed with us every minute and drag us back into what they want us to do, which is. Let's have an argument discussion here. Because that's what they want us to do. We don't want to get dragged back into those conversations. They're just lies.

Wow, you're just expressing the kind of rubber meets the road of this work so well for all of us. And it's, you know, you know, developing capacities for self observation, self awareness and self knowledge and, and even that vigilance. But then mixing that with self compassion, self humor and all this, it's really, it's an art. It's a balance, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. It's so beautiful. I wonder if you could talk more about, you know, when you had me do that little kind of mindfulness exercise there. Yeah. I actually experienced a BR state shift. You know, I just felt this very positive shift by focusing like that. I know in neurobiological terms, anytime we talk about the brain brain, we're in danger of oversimplifying things. But at least in part, there's a shift from the overactive default mode network, which is that can get involved in a lot of that negativity. That's not the only thing that a global network does, but it can be. And to what's sometimes called the executive network task positive network. Just by doing that, we quiet that part and allow that shift. Right. So what are some of the other mind training or muscle building or mindfulness exercises that, that you promote in your work for people to develop those muscles, rewire the brain, you know, develop a greater capacity for what you're calling positive intelligence.

One of the ways that we.

We have people really look into the difference between their saboteur and sage is that the way of the sage is the way of ease and flow. You just see so much of Jedi stuff, right? The way of the sage is the way of ease and flow. If a practice is hard, you're not gonna do it. We don't want you to get into a practice that requires discipline. No pain. I mean, so many of the lies of the saboteurs we have accepted as, as gospel truth, but they're just lies. No pain, no gain is a self fulfilling lie. Because what that means is in order for me to significantly improve the quality of my life, I've got to work really hard at it. I gotta be so disciplined about it. And you can only be pushing yourself with discipline so many days and then you'll have a bad day and then you say shame and guilt and you're done with that practice. So a big part of what we do is say the way of the sages, the way of ease and flow. If it is not easy. It's not sage yet. So we insist on finding the easy way to practice. So let me give you an example of this building, this muscle of self command. So what we say is.

Imagine this positive part of your brain as a flywheel. That from the morning you want to begin to give it a shift by doing one PQ rep and then find as many opportunities as you can to do another push to that five wheel, another push to that five wheel, another push to that five wheel. Each time it's just 110 second practice. So that this part of your brain keeps getting activated. Reactivated. Reactivated. So that in the afternoon when that judge begins to show up, that self observer, self commander is instantly seeing it and say, ah, stop, saboteur is happening. Let me do one of these 10 second stuff. Let me shift. So how do we make it easy? I'll give you my own example. I wake up in the morning and the first thing that happens is I reach out for my phone to turn off the alarm. And as I am turning off the alarm, I say, okay, 10 seconds of really noticing the phone in my hand. Texture, temperature, touch. That's my first.

Activating the positive part of my brain. The next thing that's happening, my head is not always on the pillow. 10 seconds of noticing my head on the pillow. Then I'm stepping on the carpet to go to bathroom. 10 seconds of noticing my feet as I walk on the carpet in the bathroom. Warm water on my hand, 10 seconds of warm water on my hand. First sip of tea, the first 10 seconds of sipping my tea.

In the shower. 10 seconds of hearing the symphonic beauty of the shower, or 10 seconds of feeling water drops on my skin. The point is, I have all these routines in the morning. And no matter how busy my day is, I can do 10 seconds of noticing the warm water on my hand, which means this flywheel of my sage brain, opposite brain, keeps getting turning and turning and turning from the beginning of the morning, no matter how busy I am. And then that carries over into the day. So I have a lot of zoom calls. What's the ten second promise I've made to myself? So I always remember, do it in the beginning of every zoom call. I am gonna, in the first 10 seconds or so, I'm gonna notice the hair, some real visual detail in the hair of the person I'm talking to. So you better believe, Fleet, I have absolutely been fascinated by your beautiful hair and colors and shades and all that stuff. That's the way I, I tuned into you when you showed up, right? I did my 10 second there and then most, you know, joyously every time I take a sip of tea or coffee, or every time I take a bite of anything, absolute promise to myself I'll close my eyes and at least be fully present with food or drink for 10 seconds. And it's so essentially delightful that my dinner time, now, my wife knows, my kids know, I have permission to close my eyes for as much of it as possible because there's such incredible joy that you tap into when you are, you know, doing this. And we don't call it mindfulness or meditation because mindfulness and meditation unfortunately is interpreted so differently by so many people that we say we don't need to know what your belief system is about mindless meditation, what baggage you carry about it. If you have had success or failure, we just call these 10 second moments of you going to self command, self agency and activating positive brain. That's what it does.

So long as you keep activating that part of your brain, then you're much more alert to realizing, I'm about to go to saboteur mode, stop, do another one of these 10 seconds so that then you can choose differently.

Wow, it's so practical. I love the 10 second idea. And it's very much part of my own personal practice. I'm just constantly coming. You're really talking about coming back to presence, anything that can bring us into the moment and to our direct sensory experience. And, and you know, in the mindfulness movement, there are people that talk about micro practices. And, and I, and I, I bring these kind of practices to the world of law enforcement, corrections, first responders, probation and pull. And, and they find it really helpful when we can give them these little micro practices to do rather than say you have to go sit on a cushion for an hour or something. No, we're just giving these little micro practices. And you know, there's a cumulative effect when you do that throughout the day. And I'm sure your experience is we develop these into routines. So that morning routine you talked about from the time you get up, that gets patterned in our brain and almost becomes after time, hard not to do that, right? And so we find ourselves spending more time in presence, more time embodied, more time in the present moment, and that's building the muscles you're talking about.

And as a matter of fact, Fleet, when you said it becomes hard not to do that, I look back at my life and wonder how in the world.

Was I able to live my days without this kind of practice. Being a human on earth is so profoundly difficult if we are not able to intercept ourselves in sabotago the sage because there are so many invitations every single day, increasing number of invitations every single day to go to the dark side, to go to depression, to go to anxiety, to go to outrage. And if you don't know how to intercept that and shift, it's really hard being a human being. And we gotta be teaching this stuff to every kid. You know, this is mental fitness.

Absolutely.

Science and practice. This is the most important thing we forget to include in our education system. And my eventual vision is that that absolutely every single kid, at least in high school throughout the world learn the science and practice of mental fitness, agency over their own mind that they are accountable for the experience that they're having. Then what happens to that kid's ability to withstand bullying, to withstand bad teaching, to withstand even bad parenting? What kind of politicians would that kid then end up electing? A lot of the politicians being elected today would not be electable then because so many politicians today.

Fuel the saboteurs and are voted in through the saboteurs and just keep perpetuating the darkness. Right. The entire world will change, will heal itself, everything will change. If we can bring up one generation that has mental fitness, that has this practice. That's my vision for helping heal the planet.

Absolutely. I completely concur. Completely. And fortunately there is a movement, growing movement In K through 12 education, high school education of bringing in the integration of social soft and called social emotional learning and things like mindfulness, mental fitness training and it gives great hope for the future. I wish I'd been introduced these things when I was a little kid. I discovered it began to discover this stuff more in my 20s after a very chaotic childhood and early adulthood. You know, I'm very grateful it's such a part of my life now. Shirzad, thank you so much for everything you've shared today and thank you for your work. Where can people find out more about your work?

Yeah, easiest place is positiveintelligence.com and when you go to positiveintelligence.com first thing you want to do is find the Saboteur tab. Click on the Saboteur tab, you'll have a five minute online saboteur assessment. All your information will remain confidential to you and in five minutes you get a bar chart that shows you if your top saboteur is controller, avoid or victim. What and the top few saboteurs you can work on. Also we have a program tab where you can look at an app guided program that we offer where It's a six week program guided by an app. So every week you actually practice on one of these things. One week you focus on just these 10 second stuff. One week on the Judge Saboteur, one week on your top accomplice Saboteur and then a few weeks on the Sage Power. So also look at our program that we offer there. Those are great places to start. And the book is Positive Intelligence that also is available of course anywhere that you want, right?

Incredibly valued. So positive intelligence.com right. And people can find your book on Amazon or other places, I'm sure. Thank you so much for being part of this summit and making this incredibly valuable contribution.

Thank you. Felidian. It's always delightful to do the interview with somebody who is such a deep practitioner of this stuff. So I love the way I've kept incorporating what I do with with the other wisdom that you bring. So this has been a real pleasure. I really appreciate that.

Definitely a joyful connection for me. I really enjoy doing a conversation with you. Thank you so much. Be well.

Hello, it is Ryan and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacasino.com I looked over the person sitting next to me and you know what they were doing? They were also playing Chumba Casino. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumba Casino's home to hundreds of casino style games that you can play for free, free, anytime, anywhere. So sign up now@chumbacasino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. That's chumbacasino.com and live the Chumba Life.

Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply.