This is the right program for you if you are a) committed to improving your performance and effectiveness dramatically while reducing stress, b) looking for a science-based and trusted system to make it stick, and c) willing to put in the initial effort to rewire years of mental habits that don’t serve you.

An analysis of more than two hundred different scientific studies, which collectively tested more than 275,000 people, concluded that higher PQ leads to higher incomes and greater success in all arenas of work and life.

• Salespeople with higher PQ sell 37% more.
• Negotiators with higher PQ are more likely to close deals. 
• Higher PQ workers take less sick days and are less likely to burn out. 
• Doctors with higher PQ diagnose 19% faster.
• Students with higher PQ score better on math tests.
• Teams led by higher PQ managers perform 31% better.

What sold me on the Positive Intelligence framework is that it is based on the best practices in neuroscience, performance science, positive psychology, and cognitive psychology. And it has been extensively tested and validated in research conducted with over 500,000 participants from 50 countries including hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams, Stanford students, and world–class athletes.

You’d never learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it.

You’ll be asked to read the first eight chapters of the book while participating in the program.

The book provides the research foundation and introduces the tools.

The video sessions guide you through experiential exercises that help you personalize the tools to your own personality and needs.

And the app coaches you to practice one tool at a time in the context of your own daily work and life challenges.

The mistake most people make is thinking that they can improve their mindset with a “quick fix” by reading a book.

Our bad thought habits live in our minds in the form of mental muscles that automatically generate our old responses. You can’t fight muscle with insight. You need to fight muscle with muscle.

You cannot build up muscle strength for the new way to counter the old way simply by reading about Positive Intelligence. That would be like thinking you can train for a marathon by reading a book about running.

Lasting positive change doesn’t come from knowledge or insight alone. Which is why 90% of the people who attend workshops have reverted back to their old habits within 6 months of attending the workshop.

True transformation requires 20% insight generation, 80% muscle building. You need to repeat the new habit or thought pattern for an extended period of time to build the neural pathways or mental muscles that form the new habits.

It’s really hard to do this on your own. You are way more likely to establish and maintain a new habit when you are held accountable by someone else.

A majority of people who initially commit to doing daily practice to build their PQ muscles and weaken their Saboteurs fizzle out in their attempts. Sooner or later, their Saboteurs trick them into stopping the practice or doing it only sporadically.

Your Saboteurs will use every weapon in their arsenal to convince you to stop, so they can retain their power.

The first day you forget to do the practice, they beat you up to make you feel guilty, prolonging your slump.

The first time you use the PQ techniques and don’t feel immediate relief, they tell you these techniques will never work.

The first day you are burdened with too many tasks, they tell you that you are too busy for PQ, while tending to far less important tasks.

Some Saboteurs might even trick you into making this practice stressful or burdensome, taking the practice so “seriously” that you feel anxiety over doing it right, counting just the right number of PQ reps, etc. They try to make the practice hard, so you quit.

Look at your behavior. If you are not getting the results you want, your mind is working against you, not for you.

Another way to know is to take the Positive Intelligence Assessment. It is one of the Assessments that I have you take when you start the Academy. You can take it now to measure your Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ) which measures the strength of your positive mental muscles versus the negative.

CLICK HERE to take the FREE assessment.

We are predisposed to negativity because of how we are hardwired. Our ancestors were always on high alert (in other words, they were always assuming the worst) because the rustle in the bushes might just be the wind or it might be a saber-toothed tiger preparing to pounce on them. Because they were always on high alert, they survived to pass their genes down to us.

Even though we no longer have to worry about saber-toothed tigers in the bushes, we still have a bias towards noticing, exaggerating, and reacting to the negative because it is an instinctive survival strategy. It reduces our chances of being surprised and harmed by unanticipated dangers to our physical and emotional survival. The part of our brains that is activated (in other words, doing our thinking for us) is the part that is responsible for the fight/flight stress response and generates negative feelings.

Positive and negative thoughts and emotions are generated in different parts of the brain.

Negative thoughts and emotions are fueled by the brainstem, limbic system, and parts of the left brain, the parts of our brain that were initially focused on our physical and emotional survival. You’ve probably heard that part of the brain referred to as the Survivor Brain. The Survivor Brain is where the stress response (the flight/flight/freeze response) originates from. It motivates us through negative emotions such as fear, stress, anxiety, anger, guilt, shame, and insecurity.

Positive thoughts and emotions are fueled by the middle prefrontal cortex, empathy circuitry, and parts of the right brain. In Positive Intelligence, we call these areas of the brain the PQ Brain or Sage Brain. These parts of the brain motivate us through positive emotions such as empathy, curiosity, creativity, passion, and purpose.

Most of us have an overdeveloped and overactive Survivor Brain that keeps us trapped in a vicious cycle of automatic and habitual negative thought patterns, judgment, anxiety, emotional reactivity, low self-esteem, relationship conflict, and unhappiness.

The daily Positive Intelligence training activities strengthen the Sage Brain and weaken the Survivor Brain. You can actually see it in fMRI scans. The gray matter in the Sage brain has grown.

Saboteurs are the negative thought habits and patterns that live deep in your unconscious and derail your performance and happiness. They are a set of automatic and habitual mind patterns, each with its own voice, beliefs, and assumptions that work against your best interest.

We develop saboteurs early in life in order to survive the perceived threats of life, both physical and emotional. By the time we are adults, the saboteurs are no longer needed, but they have become invisible inhabitants of our minds. We often don’t even know they exist.

Our Saboteurs cause all our stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, regret, shame, guilt, and unhappiness.

Saboteurs do their greatest damage because they convince you that they are your friends and that you need them to be productive and successful. Each Saboteur has some very reasonable-sounding justifications for its actions—it tells you how it is your friend and why it is good for you—but these justifications are nothing but well-masked lies..

You’ll be committing to watching a one-hour video once per week and doing a combined total of 15 minutes per day of practice guided by the Positive Intelligence app exclusively designed for this program.

This might sound like a lot of time. In fact, cumulatively, it constitutes less than 2% of your awake time for the duration of the program. Please consider that your Saboteurs are costing you far more than 2% of your time, effort, energy, and productivity. Consider how much more than 2% of time and productivity this 7-week investment will save for years to come.

If you have a question that’s not answered here, email me at [email protected].