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We need to just really acknowledge the fact that we are all experiencing too much change for the typical human being to be able to handle. And the reason that we need to invest in mental fitness is that it massively increases our capacity to handle change in a way that’s not stressful — but joyful. Shirzad Chamine,
founder and CEO, Positive Intelligence
How We Self-Sabotage
Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions as you handle life’s challenges. They represent the automatic patterns in your mind for how to think, feel, and respond. Your Saboteurs cause all of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness. They sabotage your performance, wellbeing, and relationships.
Meet the Judge, Your Master Saboteur
The Judge is the universal Saboteur that afflicts everyone. It is the one that beats you up repeatedly over mistakes or shortcomings, warns you obsessively about future risks, wakes you up in the middle of the night worrying, gets you fixated on what is wrong with others or your life. Your Judge activates your other Saboteurs, causes much of your stress and unhappiness, and harms your relationships.
The Accomplice Saboteurs
The Judge works with one or more Accomplice Saboteurs to hijack your mind and cause most of your setbacks. Do any of these seem familiar to you?
- Avoider – Focusing on the positive and pleasant in an extreme way. Avoiding difficult and unpleasant tasks and conflicts.
- Controller – Anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will. High anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.
- Hyper-Achiever – Dependent on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation. Latest achievement quickly discounted, needing more.
- Hyper-Rational – Intense and exclusive focus on the rational processing of everything, including relationships. Can be perceived as uncaring, unfeeling, or intellectually arrogant.
- Hyper-Vigilant – Continuous intense anxiety about all the dangers and what could go wrong. Vigilance that can never rest.
- Pleaser – Indirectly tries to gain acceptance and affection by helping, pleasing, rescuing, or flattering others. Loses sight of own needs and becomes resentful as a result.
- Restless – Restless, constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or constant busyness. Rarely at peace or content with the current activity.
- Stickler – Perfectionism and a need for order and organization taken too far. Anxious trying to make too many things perfect.
- Victim – Emotional and temperamental as a way to gain attention and affection. An extreme focus on internal feelings, particularly painful ones. Martyr streak.
The Saboteur Assessment is your first step to conquering your Saboteurs.
Take the Saboteur Assessment
Shirzad Chamine has developed a framework known as the Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ), designed to support your mental fitness, enabling you to achieve peak performance and a resilient mindset.
Measure Your Mental Fitness
Your PQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient) measures the strength of your positive versus negative mental muscles. Take the PQ Score Assessment to discover how often your mind is serving you versus sabotaging you.
PQ Score Assessment
The Sage
Your mind has two sides — the Saboteurs and the Sage. The Sage, is the positive part of your mind that embraces learning, curiosity, and creativity. By shifting focus from the Saboteurs to the Sage, you can approach life with an open and curious mind and increase your resilience.
The Sage works through five main powers: Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. Each one helps you take on life’s challenges with clarity.
Empathize Feeling and showing appreciation, compassion, and forgiveness — for yourself and others — builds social awareness and cultivates a sense of service. With practice, empathy leads to healthier relationships, better conflict management, and more effective teamwork and collaboration. 
Explore As a child, you knew how to explore purely, experiencing great curiosity and fascination in discovery. By grounding yourself in that innate sense of curiosity, openness, and wonder, you become more open to new ideas, more deliberate in the face of crisis, and more likely to effect positive change.
Innovate While the Explore power is about discovering what is, the Innovate power concerns inventing what isn’t. True innovation is about breaking out of the boxes, the assumptions, and the habits that hold you back. A mindset of innovation sparks adaptability, self-management, and optimism — all key to workplace wellness.
Navigate Every employee has their internal compass — as does your organization. By creating a consistent compass, your organization invites employees to align with it, relax, and find purpose in their work.
Activate When all your mental and emotional energies are laser-focused on action and not distracted by the Saboteurs, you bring new levels of achievement and initiative to the team.
Your Positive Intelligence Guide
The Three Muscles of Mental Fitness
To conquer your Saboteurs, you need to exercise and build three mental muscles.
Saboteur Interceptor Muscle
If you’re in negative emotion for more than a second, you’re in Saboteur mode. Label your thoughts and emotions in that moment as Saboteur and let them go. To be able to do that, you need to have studied your Saboteurs and discredited their lies and limiting beliefs.
Self-Command Muscle
10-second PQ®️ Reps are ways to command your mind to quiet the region where your Saboteurs live, and activate the region where your Sage lives. So every time you intercept your Saboteurs, do PQ Reps in order to pause and choose a Sage response.
*A PQ rep is very simple. It involves shifting as much of your attention as you can to your body and any of your five senses for at least ten seconds. That counts as 1 PQ rep. These reps activate and grow your ‘self-command’ muscle which helps you self-regulate your thoughts and feelings.
Sage Muscle
Your Sage is the one in you that handles challenges with a clear and calm mind, and positive emotions. It uses the 5 primary powers of Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. Once you’ve activated your Sage brain through PQ Reps, you’ll have access to these powers.