Positive Intelligence

Is your mind regularly on your side, lifting you up and helping you make the most of what you’ve got? Or is your mind regularly making you anxious, keeping you up at night, judging you, and wearing you down?

When your mind is on your side, you flourish.  When your mind works against you, you flounder. While there are a lot of factors to your success, Positive Intelligence might be your game changer.

Differentiated from the other known quotients, Positive Intelligence is an indication of how well your mind acts in your best interest. It means your mind acts as your friend far more than as your enemy.

Our mind has two modes: positive and negative. Shirzad Chamine, author of Positive Intelligence, calls the positive mode, the Sage, and the negative mode, the Saboteurs.

Your Inner Saboteurs

Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions when you handle life’s challenges. They exist in the brainstem, limbic system, and parts of the left brain. They produce much of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, shame, guilt, frustration, and mind chatter.

These negative emotions are only helpful for a second as they alert you to dangers or issues. However, staying in these emotions hurts your ability to see clearly and choose the most impactful response.

Your Inner Sage

Your Sage lives in an entirely different region of your brain, the middle prefrontal cortex, “empathy circuitry”, and parts of the right brain. It generates positive emotions while handling life’s challenges. These include empathy, compassion, gratitude, curiosity, joy of creativity, and calm, clear-headed laser-focused action.

This region is wired for creativity and big picture awareness of what is important and the best course of action. Activating this region results in release of endorphins that counter the negative impacts of stress-induced cortisol.

How to Achieve Positive Intelligence

Most attempts at positive change fail because we stop at insight and don’t build habits. Sustained change towards a more positive mind requires laying down neural pathways to form new habits through consistent daily practice.

You build a foundation of mental fitness by strengthening three critical mental muscles: (1) Identifying your Inner Saboteurs, (2) Developing your Inner Sage, and (3) Balancing your Positivity Quotient: the relative strength of your positive versus negative mental muscles.

Check out more resources at the Positive Intelligence website.