Summary: The book, Positive Intelligence suggests how can we live a more fulfilling life, using positive intelligence.

Introduction of concepts:

Saboteurs: Saboteurs our inner enemies. Our ten Saboteurs are:

• Judge: It is the master Saboteur that everyone suffers from.
• Stickler: It is the need for perfection, order, and organization taken too far. It makes us and around anxious.
• Pleaser: It compels us to try to gain acceptance by pleasing others.
• Hyper-Achiever: Our self-respect depends on a constant need of high performance.
• Victim: Playing a role of a victim, to get others’ attention.
• Hyper-Rational: It involves being rational about everything.
• Hyper-Vigilant: It makes us being vigilant all the time to stay away from dangers.
• Restless: It makes us constantly search for the next excitement.
• Controller: It makes us feel either in control or out of control.
• Avoider: It makes us focus only of positive and pleasant in an extreme way.

PQ: PQ stands for Positive Intelligence Quotient. High PQ means your mind acts more as a friend and less as an enemy. PQ scores range from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest). For example, a 75 PQ score means your mind is serving you about 75% of the the time and sabotaging you about 25% of the time.

Sage: The sage represents the deeper and wiser part of you. All your distress is self-generated. The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity. Your Sage has access to your five great five Sage powers:

1. Empathize: Feel and show empathy, compassion, and forgiveness.
2. Explore: To deal with any problem, explore the ways with the curiosity.
3. Innovate: Think out of the box and think of new ways of addressing a problem/situation.
4. Navigate: To unblock/unstuck us from choices, we can decide based on internal compass. For that, we can rely on our values.
5. Activate: Active power moves us into pure action, with all mental and emotional energies on actions, and without distractions by the Saboteurs.

Implementation items:

Three strategies to improve PQ Brain:

1. Weaken your Saboteurs:
   1. Do a self-assessment of your Saboteurs. Check our ratings (1 lowest and 10 highest) on each of these Saboteurs. The next step is to work on minimizing the power of these Saboteurs.
   2. Observe and level your thoughts. For example,, “oh, I am restless again.”
2. Strengthen your Sage: Shift towards Sage perspective.
   1. Three gifts-approach: think of at least three ways a problem could turn into a gift and opportunity at some point in the future.
   2. Apply above mentioned five Sage powers to a problem you want to solve.
3. Strengthen your PQ muscles: The book suggests making habits to practice PQ brain muscles, to get 75 score points every day. The author suggests practicing mindfulness techniques about 15 minutes every day. To remember building PQ muscles, we can set reminders around our daily routine activities.

As I learn more, I will revise my notes about the book.

Reference: Positive Intelligence, by Shirzad Chamine