What is Positive Intelligence?
Positive Intelligence (PQ) is a mental fitness programme which enables you to build ‘mental muscles’ to help you in every aspect of life, including your work, wellbeing and relationships. The programme uses learning from neuroscience, positive psychology, cognitive psychology and performance science. More than 500,000 people have participated in some form of the training, so far.
The approach is based on the fact that all of us, as children, develop coping and survival strategies to help us handle the environments we live in (even if those environments are supportive and loving). We learn to respond automatically to certain triggers and situations. As an adult these responses are more likely to sabotage you than to help you, triggering negative assumptions about yourself, others and circumstances. Your ‘saboteurs’ may push you to succeed, but they don’t make you happy, because they motivate you through emotions like fear, stress, anger, guilt and insecurity, telling you lies that you’re hopeless, unlovable, out of your depth, cowardly. Your saboteurs drive you to survive, not to flourish.
By identifying and weakening the power of these ‘saboteur’ voices in your mind and by building up discerning ‘sage’ responses, you can build new neural pathways in your brain, giving you access to different habits and ways of thinking, so that saboteur responses don’t control your behaviour as they used to. This increased mental fitness is applicable in every part of life, which is why it can have an impact on relationships with family and colleagues, work-life balance and your level of contentment.
Curious?
Try the free saboteur assessment questionnaire (takes 5 minutes)
https://www.positiveintelligence.com/assessments/
Who’s it for?
‘I can’t recommend this course enough… After 6 weeks I’m already feeling more in control of my negative thoughts.’ LA, client Summer 2021
The PQ mental fitness programme is for you, if you want to increase your effectiveness and well-being.
For most people there is great benefit in learning and sharing this process with others. You can sign up with friends and other family members (suggested age 15+). Doing the PQ programme with people you already know is a powerful opportunity to build deeper relationships, giving you a common language and framework for tackling personal and shared challenges.
If you sign up as an individual, it may be possible to join with two or three other individual participants, to benefit from the shared learning.
‘It was very supportive and helpful to feel we were all going through similar things simultaneously.’ LR, client Summer 2021
What you’ll get from the programme
- A new level of self-awareness and an understanding of how to identify self-sabotage.
- An internal ‘operating system’ which you can apply in any situation, to reduce self-hijacking responses and respond with increased calm, wisdom and reflection.
- These new mental habits will help you to counter stress and manage conflict, as well as improving your problem-solving, decision-making, resilience and focus.
- Tools to improve relationships as you engage greater empathy and understanding for others and see how ‘saboteur’ behaviour triggers ‘saboteur’ reactions, whilst ‘sage’ behaviours trigger ‘sage’ responses.
How does it work?
Like physical fitness, mental fitness is an ongoing activity, which you can practise throughout life. There is great benefit in doing a focused introduction to mental fitness, to build the basic practices, strengthen the core muscles and weaken the saboteurs. It’s similar to doing Couch-to-5K or working with a personal trainer to get into good habits, when you start a new sport or exercise regime. Once you’ve established the new habits you can keep doing them by yourself.
The Positive Intelligence (PQ) course starts with a 6-week introduction to the process. This can be stand-alone or combined with additional weeks of daily practice and coaching sessions with me, using the Positive Intelligence approach. This may sound daunting but the time commitment is only about 2% of your time each week during the introductory phase, then 12-15 minutes a day after that, at times to suit you. The most important thing is your willingness to learn, practise and reflect.
You commit to:
- Downloading an app to your phone to access the content;
- Watching a one-hour video each weekend in the app (presented by Shirzad Chamine, who developed the Positive Intelligence programme) for 7 weekends;
- Doing daily app-guided practice Tuesday–Friday, for 12-15 minutes, spread across the day;
- Meeting individually or in a group on zoom for 45 mins-1 hour, once a week for 7 weeks (ideally Monday or Tuesday, at a time to be agreed);
- Reading or listening to the book, Positive Intelligence, provided in the app and as a pdf;
- For group participants, using a whatsapp group to share encouragement and learning;
- Any additional practice and coaching you have chosen to do alongside the core course.
After the course you can use the app to continue your mental fitness training for the entire year.
I will be available throughout the programme to offer support and answer questions and for one or more coaching sessions (recommended to consolidate your learning of the PQ principles).
‘As someone who is not a great lover of ‘prescribed’ on line programmes, I was pleasantly surprised at how well I engaged with the course. Many of the techniques discussed were new to me and I feel I have come away with some valuable tools and techniques to practise further and incorporate into my daily life.’ JB, client Summer 2021
Cost
Pricing depends on whether you are doing the core course by itself, or adding coaching and additional months of app content, but it is very affordable and I can offer discounted rates to family and friendship groups and to people on restricted incomes.
After the course
The 6-week core content remains available in your app for 12 months after the programme. You can also subscribe to the Positive Intelligence mental fitness gym membership, which gives you additional daily insights and practices through the app on a rolling monthly basis, for £20/month.