Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor Frankl
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
C.G. Jung
Mindfulness meditation doesn’t change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart’s capacity to accept life as it is.
Sylvia Boorstein
Every time we ponder a thought, act on an impulse, or dwell on a desire, we are setting in motion a cause that will have a future effect. Mindfulness enables us to choose wisely.
Tamara Levitt
This essay is intended to provide an overview of the PQ Mental Fitness Programme which is a key element of my coaching toolbox and, indeed, my own recent development and growth.
PQ has been designed by Shirzad Chamine and his team in San Fransisco over the last decade. I joined their institute to train as a PQ Coach in January 2022 and have been training, coaching, and engaging in daily PQ practice since that time.
PQ clearly recognizes that any transformation process, to be successful, is made up of 20% insights and 80% practice. Most endeavours along these lines fail because of a deficiency in the area of practice. Look at all the corporate, personal, and organizational development seminars and how, after an initial period of enthusiasm, the energy tends to fizzle out within a matter of weeks or months, with everything returning to the base line from which the participants had hoped to grow.
Here there is a clear parallel with another well-known transformation process: the Twelve Step recovery process initially formulated by AA. Known as a `Programme of Action´, it is clear that insight alone will never suffice in the work of transformation. Action is imperative, one day at a time.
Both the insights and the daily practice exercises relating to PQ are to be found on the PQ App, an easy-to-use programme which runs on any computer or smartphone. The initial introduction module is made up of six weeks of tuition and practice. I augment this block with a week at each end, offering an eight-week workshop, followed by further regular coaching support, as desired.
Positive Intelligence is based on the combination of the latest findings from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, positive psychology, and performance research. CEO, Shirzad Chamine, executive coaching veteran and lecturer at Stanford University, has tested the effectiveness of the concept with the help of more than one million participants from over 30 countries. The results are summarized in his New York Times bestseller `Positive Intelligence´.
It has been shown that our Individual Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ), i.e., the ratio between positive and negative emotions on a typical day, has a direct influence on how stress-resistant we are and how much, or how little, of our real potential we manifest in our professional activities, relationships, families, and private lives.
If we have three positive thoughts for every negative one, we have a PQ of 75. Anything above 75 is considered beneficial in terms of sustaining growth as we move towards achieving our true full potential.
Thankfully, we can significantly improve our PQ at any stage of life. We achieve this in three simple steps:
1. Identify and intercept our (mental) Saboteurs
The PQ Model identifies the following nine Saboteur types (who, together with a universal Master Saboteur – Judge –) repeatedly take us hostage in thought, feelings, and actions: Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, and Victim. Each of us has a very personal combination, an individual team line-up or constellation of saboteurs, variously developed in terms of their respective strengths.
2. Enhance our so-called Sage Powers in a targeted manner
Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate are our so-called Sage Powers. The Sage Perspective, from which we learn to operate, states that every situation contains gifts for the good of all concerned.
3. Develop our ability to rapidly switch from Saboteur to Sage
We learn to identify and intercept a Saboteur hijacking, whereupon we engage in a short PQ Rep activity, which helps calm the mind and regulate our bodies. It also switches the focus of neural activity from the left brain to the right brain. We then ask ourselves which of the resources in the Sage realm would best be suited in dealing with the challenge we face, and proceed accordingly.
The recently revamped syllabus of the foundational PQ workshop is made up of weekly hour-long video tutorials, and roughly ten minutes of daily practice spread over three short sessions. My offering includes one weekly hour-long coaching session and a daily check in. The contents of the foundation workshop are described below on a week-by-week basis.
Week 1: We become aware of the problem of living in autopilot, with our mind generating hundreds of thoughts every hour, often below the radar of our consciousness. Most of them are harmful, fear-based Saboteur thoughts which drain our energy. We go through life as if driving with the handbrake on.
In this first week we learn about interrupting our autopilot mind and exercising Mind Command. We learn the power of PQ Reps, short sensate exercises which enable us to step off the endless conveyor belt of thinking so we can simply experience being in the present moment. Making use of our existing morning routines (waking, rising, bathroom routine, drinking tea, etc.), we start with 10 second sessions and work our way through to somewhat longer sequences.
Week 2: We learn about the three modes of the Universal Saboteur, the Judge: judging self, others, and circumstances. We become aware that the Judge is the one that often keeps our hand on the metaphorical hot stove, turning instantaneous pain into prolonged suffering.
Pain is a given of the human condition. As soon as it is brought into our field of consciousness, suffering is elective. Milliseconds are sufficient in the physical experience of touching the hot stove. This is true in the mental domain also. When it comes to thoughts and emotions, however, we tend to keep our hand pressed to the hot stove long after necessary or beneficial.
We learn to feel the impact of the Judge in our body and realize our Judge is wearing us down physically, even to the point of dis-ease. We experience our own power in being able to shift from destructive Judge feelings to life-affirming Sage feelings thanks to a brief engagement in PQ Rep practice.
We learn the Sage Step for each of our Saboteurs: a ten-second practice designed to help intercept the Saboteurs, energize the Sage Brain, or apply Sage Powers. Starting in Week 2 we learn new Sage Steps in each of the subsequent video modules and can experience how just 10 seconds of catching our Saboteurs immediately discredits and disempowers them.
We also learn about the importance of celebrating progress and how 10 seconds of joy is a great way to keep fuelling our growth and momentum.
Week 3: We learn about our specific top Accomplice Saboteurs (while the Judge is the strongest Saboteur in all of us, we each have a personal cast of characters of varying strength, depending on our personality and childhood experience). For example, mine are the Hyper Rational and the Controller. To find out the order of strength of you Saboteurs, simply take the following gratis saboteur assessment.
By this time, we will have discovered the big difference between hearing (in our inner dialogue): `I’m going to fail at this’ and `My Judge says that I’m going to fail at this´.
Week 4: Next we learn about the problems with conditional love and how profoundly different unconditional love is. We begin to cultivate compassion in a powerful exercise that makes use of a childhood photo and come to realize how important it is for us to practice compassion (Empathize) for self, others, and circumstances. We learn about our own beautiful, unchanging Essence Self, the Golden One underneath the self-imposed protective layers of the Saboteurs.
Week 5: We are now introduced to the Sage Perspective which states that every circumstance can be converted into gifts and opportunities. We learn the Explore Power of the Sage, which enables us to see the full picture in any given situation through establishing multiple perspectives.
We also get to know the Innovate Power of the Sage and practice generating ideas by finding what we like about an idea and then building on that. We learn that any idea is at least 10% useful and can inspire a great next idea.
Of utmost importance, we also learn that the Sage either accepts or converts any given situation, and that even choosing to convert always starts with accepting what is, for now, until we get a chance to convert.
The result of applying this approach is more peace of mind and a grateful heart. Accepting is a consciously active choice, actively letting go of the Judge voice over and over again, an action which, over time, builds powerful Sage muscles.
Finally, in Week 6 we learn that in the Activate Power of the Sage we increasingly experience ease and flow even when handling the greatest of life’s challenges.
As in building physical fitness, in the early days of achieving mental fitness, we begin to get an inkling of what is possible if we keep growing. We learn to repeatedly ask: `What action is needed now´ so we can remain on track in choosing Sage actions.
We will not be able to master these new challenges over night. Practice makes progress. We realize we’re just getting started but we now know what is possible and can work towards attaining it. When things are not working, we won’t get distracted and waste time blaming or trying to fix the `wrong cause´.
We will also begin to bounce back from setbacks much faster than in the past. This is our newly developed Resilience, a valuable by-product of Mental Fitness.
Then there is the marvellous Navigate Power of the Sage to which we are introduced in the final video module. This helps us align our thoughts and actions with our deeply held values, values which will have become clearer to us over the initial weeks of PQ practice.
Despite the protestations of our Judge, we begin to notice how these core elements of PQ, utilized together, have the potential to completely transform our experience of life. Attaining proficiency is only a matter of time. Eight weeks is just not long enough to achieve mastery. It is a good period to establish a foundational practice, however, upon which we can build for the rest of our life.
We will have noticed what has shifted thanks to this learning and, especially, practice. We can feel what is different about us after just eight short weeks. Imagine, if this is how much we have grown in just eight weeks, where we could get to if we continued for another six months or even years of daily focused practice. Improved Mental Fitness translates into improved health and well-being, increased performance, and better relationships all round.
`The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently´, says the contemporary spiritual teacher, Pema Chödrön.
PQ is a wonderful, easy-to-apply means by which we can develop new perspectives and funnel these into a practice which results in a new way of living.
