Positive Intelligence® Program
Improve your mental fitness & emotional agility in 8 weeks.
What is Mental Fitness?
Mental Fitness is your capacity to respond to life’s challenges with a positive rather than a negative mindset and your ability to shift quickly & deeply from one to the other.
How We Self Sabotage
You know those voices in your head that generate negative emotions because of how you handle life’s everyday challenges.
Oftentimes life intensifies the voices to a concert of untuned instruments in your head.
They represent automated patterns in your mind for how to think, feel, and respond. They cause all of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, restlessness, and unhappiness. They sabotage your well-being and relationships.
In Positive Intelligence®, they are referred to as Saboteurs
Learn the Fundamentals of Mental Fitness
A deep dive into Mental Fitness, explore Positive Intelligence (mental fitness) where you will discover practical simple tools to train your brain to lean into better behavior choices and enhanced decision-making, and how building the three core mental muscles can help you achieve your goals
Which brain are you
typically in?
Which brain would you like to live in?
Build Powerful Habits with PQ® Training
Most attempts at positive change fail because we stop at insight and don’t build habits.
Sustained change towards a more positive mind requires laying down neural pathways to form new habits through consistent daily practice. And that’s what our PQ® Program empowers you to do.
What Makes Positive Intelligence® Different?
Focus on Habit Formation
Most trainings result in short-lived improvements. For sustained results, we focus on building neural pathways that form lasting new habits. That’s why we call this “mental fitness”.
Treat Root Cause, not Symptoms
Our factor analysis research has revealed the foundational root-level enablers and disablers of optimal performance and well-being. We rewire the brain at the root cause level.
Develop all 3 Core Muscles
Mental fitness requires 3 core muscles. Saboteur Interceptor, Self-Command, and Sage. Meditation only focuses on Self-Command, which is why it is not sustained by most.
One Operating System, Many Applications
Through factor analysis, we’ve discovered the core operating system of the mind that can run a massive variety of work and life applications. One simple operating system, many applications.
A Platform for Ongoing Growth
Similar to physical fitness, mental fitness is not short-term training. After the initial six-weeks foundation, our app ensures continued growth through a variety of work and life applications.
Research-Based, Measurable Results
Our research has included more than a million participants from around the globe. Our tools have been field-tested with thousands of tough-minded participants, ensuring their efficacy.
Vanessa Cardenas, Trusted Advisor for Betrayal & Transformation
Vanessa Cardenas, Trusted Advisor for Betrayal & Transformation
During this course you will learn:
Tools, techniques, and practices to improve your performance, effectiveness, and happiness while reducing stress. This proven systematic approach results in developing new neural pathways to rewire years of mental habits that no longer serve you. This course will develop the three core muscles that constitute mental fitness: sage muscles, saboteur interceptor muscles, and self-command muscles.
Meet Your Three Core Mental Muscles
1. Sage Muscle
The Sage resides in the region of your brain responsible for handling challenges with clarity, calm confidence, and positive emotional response. This part of the brain engages your five primary powers: empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and activation to solve any life challenge optimally.
2. Saboteurs Interceptor Muscle
Saboteurs live in the region of your brain that generates emotions such as stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, avoidance, procrastination, insensitivity, or discontent. While negative emotions are helpful and necessary to provide information, staying in them for prolonged periods is unnecessary and undermines your potential.
By strengthening the saboteur interceptor muscle, you learn to skillfully identify and intercept the competing commitments that make you immune to change. Mental fitness requires the ability to intercept and release the grip of what keeps people stuck.
3. Self-Command Muscle
True transformation is 20% learning and insight and 80% practice and muscle building. Exercising positive quotient reps in 10-second increments (PQ reps) develops the crucial self-command muscle, enabling you to respond rather than react. As a result, this practice breaks the self-sabotage cycles and retrains your mind and thought patterns to work for, not against you.
Intercept your Saboteur
Your Saboteurs generate all your negative emotions, including stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, avoidance, procrastination, insensitivity, or discontent. You’ll learn to intercept and weaken your most damaging Saboteur Power. Most participants discover their Saboteur to be far more prevalent and damaging than they suspected. Build self-awareness of which of your internal saboteurs are triggered by stress
Strengthen your Sage Power
Your Sage is the one in you that handles challenges with a clear and calm mind and positive emotions. It also has access to your 5 primary powers. After weakening your Saboteurs, it is now time to strengthen your Sage, the counterpart to your Saboteurs. Your Sage Power lives in an entirely different part of your brain.
Improve your “self-command” brain muscle
You’re not in full command of your mind. If you were, you would choose to not stress out over what you can’t control, push away self-doubts, recover from disappointments immediately, and spend little time in anger, regret, or blame. Self-command is key to intercepting unhelpful mental habits and rewiring your brain to respond more effectively. Practice 'Reps' to rise above your stressful thoughts and emotions
Meet uncertainty and life's challenges with confidence, clarity & enthusiasm
with Positive Intelligence®
True transformation is 20% learning and insight and 80% practice and muscle building. Exercising positive quotient reps in 10-second increments (PQ reps) develops the crucial self-command muscle, enabling you to respond rather than react.
Lifelong Applications
Positive Intelligence® is an operating system with many applications.
In the first six weeks, you develop your 3 core mental muscles.
In subsequent weeks, modules in the app then enable you to use those muscles for a variety of work and life applications.
You continue to grow.
What Outcomes Can You Expect?
After this course you will have:
Emotional agility.
Greater awareness around the ways in which you get triggered and sabotage yourself, your relationships, and your effectiveness
Skills to reduce the stress response, and shift any stressful situation or setback into a gift and opportunity.
Ability to break the unconscious cycles undermining your own advancements.
A mastery of mindfulness-based techniques to relax and focus the mind to navigate choices and ambiguous situations more easily
Enhanced creativity and innovative thinking skills.
Ability to skillfully identify the competing commitments and sabotaging behaviors that make you resistant to change.
Skills to treat yourself (and others) with compassion and recover from setbacks more quickly.
Increased levels of happiness, performance, and productivity in all areas of your life.
Adaptive resilience skills to navigate uncertainty, manage stress, and increase the speed of recovery from failures and setbacks.
Renewed levels of genuine self-confidence, truly owning your talents and achievements.
What's Included in the Program?
Training videos and audios released weekly.
Weekly live Group Coaching sessions with me.
Group Orientation Coaching and Discovery Session.
Group Conclusion Coaching Session & Where do you go from here?
7x weekly 1-hour inspiring videos (every weekend)
Led by Positive Intelligence® founder, Shirzad Chamine, who guides you through experiential exercises that deepen and personalize your understanding of the mental fitness tools. You’ll gain awareness and practical tools to your week of practice.
Daily 15-min app-guided exercises
The Positive Intelligence® App, available exclusively to program participants, allows you to apply the learnings from the weekly training videos.
With a different focus every day, it’s designed to build one small mental muscle at a time, laying down new neural pathways to form lasting positive habits of your mind. The cumulative impact by the program's end is substantial.
Daily Progress Tracking
The app tracks your daily progress against minimum targets associated with new neural pathway (muscle) formation.
Personalized daily coaching tips from Shirzad Chamine continue to both encourage and challenge you to keep going.
Unlimited Use of the PQ Gym on the App
Build your self-command muscles using these innovative 10-second exercises (called PQ reps) so you can shift your mind more quickly and more deeply from self-sabotage to self-mastery.
Added Bonus
You’ll keep the app and all of its content for the whole year!
Added Bonus #2
You will receive digital access (audio & PDF versions) to chapters 1-8 of the Positive Intelligence book
at the beginning of the program
While with Positive Intelligence® you are free to take the self-taught program for $995, with my program, you also get…
Eight 1-hour online group coach-led sessions
Facilitated by Vanessa via Zoom to help unpack your weekly learnings, work towards your goals and amplify your results. You leave inspired and energized for the week's daily practices!
Four one on one sessions
Receive an additional weekly one-on-one 60-minute session for 4 weeks to explore any area that you'd like further assistance with.
Guidance & Support
I will be available in between each session to cheer you on, help keep you accountable and committed to the program, as well as answer any questions.
My promise to you!
Maybe you're skeptical that you can achieve lasting behavioral and emotional change.
I understand. You need to see and feel this program to believe it.
That's why I offer an iron-clad 30-day guarantee.
At any time during the first 30 days of the program, simply send me a one-sentence email with, “Full refund please!” and you'll receive it within 24 hours. No questions asked. (To date, no one has yet to take me up on that offer) Not applicable to White Glove Add-on
8 week course outline
WEEK ONE: Welcome and program introduction
Get clear on your goals and desired outcomes for the program and recognize what might derail your practice and how you will manage it. Meet your group and decide the working norms for the group.
WEEK TWO: Strengthen the Self Command muscle
Master implementing innovative 10-second exercises called PQ Reps that boost your self-command skills. Self-command is key to intercepting unhelpful mental habits and building new neural pathways to respond rather than react.
WEEK THREE: Intercept the Judge Saboteur
Learn how to intercept and weaken the most damaging saboteur, the judge. Discover how self-judgment and judging others and circumstances is a key source of stress and self-limiting performance.
WEEK FOUR: Intercept accomplice Saboteurs
Take the saboteur assessment and learn to intercept and weaken the top accomplice to your judge saboteurs: avoider, controller, hyper-achiever, hyper-rational, hyper-vigilant, pleaser, restless, stickler, victim. Expose your accomplice saboteur's hidden lies, limiting beliefs, and negative patterns.
WEEK FIVE: Shift from Saboteur to Sage mindset
Strengthen your sage, the counterpart to your saboteurs. Your sage lives in an entirely different region of your brain generate all your positive emotions and achieve peak performance through a calm and clear mind.
WEEK SIX: Strengthen the Sage
Cultivate the five sage powers (empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and activation) that form the emotional intelligence competencies crucial to success. Learn how to shift your mindset to see any situation as an opportunity.
WEEK SEVEN: Practice the Sage powers
Use your sage’s navigation and activation powers to take clear-headed, laser-focused, decisive action aligned with meaning and purpose. Discover how your sage generates your highest performance while enjoying every step of the process.
WEEK EIGHT: Whole life application
Learn to continue using your PQ tools for a variety of work and life applications to solidify peak performance, effective communication, stress management, conflict mitigation, and relationship building.
Research Foundation - The Technical Scientific Based Details
Research Foundation - The Technical Scientific Based Details
Breakthrough Research
The breakthrough contribution of Positive Intelligence® research is through factor analysis to discover the core factors that impact both performance and well-being. This research revealed that there are only 10 negative response factors (10 Saboteurs) and only 5 positive response factors (5 Sage powers).
Discovering these root-level factors of performance and well-being dramatically simplifies personal and professional development. Intercepting one’s Saboteur and activating one’s Sage automatically results in a wide array of impacts including stress management, relationship improvement, performance, selling and persuasion, creativity, leadership, resilience, and happiness. This is because we are rewiring the brain at the root level rather than treating symptoms.
This program combines the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience, cognitive & positive psychology, and performance science. The research included 500,000 participants (CEOs, sales, operation & technology teams. elites athletes, and Standford students) from 50 countries. The research was summarized in Shirzad Chamine’s book Positive Intelligence, a New York Times best-seller translated into 20 languages.
FAQs
Is this the right program for me?
This is the right program for you if you are:
•willing to transition as smoothly as possible,
•ready to break free from self-imposed limitations that you are stuck in,
•willing to put in the initial effort to rewire years of mental habits that don't serve you,
•committed to improving your happiness, performance, and effectiveness dramatically while reducing stress,
•looking for a science-based and trusted system to make it stick and last.
I don’t have time, I have too much on my plate right now. Wrong time to start?
On the contrary! On vacation or in less busy/challenging times, you won’t see or learn to handle stress, urgencies, and challenges in your life. Now is the perfect time to train your mental muscles.
How is this different from meditation, mindfulness, or other personal development practices?
Meditation and mindfulness are specialized forms of doing PQ Reps. PQ Reps are innovative 10-sec exercises that are simple, accessible, can be done anywhere, anytime, with eyes open, and which you bring into any moment of your day.
How is this different from reading the Positive Intelligence® book?
Would you be able to learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it? Probably not.
You will be asked to read the first 8 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 group coaching sessions help you unpack your weekly learnings to amplify your results.
Aren't negative emotions sometimes helpful?
Some people believe that negative emotions are helpful. For example, they think stress gives them their performance edge, or beating themselves or others up is helpful for continual improvement.
Feeling pain for a split second when your hand touches a hot stove is indeed useful, delivering an important alert. But your Saboteurs keep your hand on the hot stove, continuing to feel negative emotions that harm both performance and happiness.
In this program, we learn to use negative emotions as a helpful alert, and then quickly shift to the positive region of the brain that has the calm, clarity, objectivity, and creativity to handle the challenge most effectively.
How much time and effort are required?
You would be committing to:
•watching a weekly 1-hour video with the Positive Intelligence app exclusively designed for this program
•doing a combined total of 15 minutes of daily practice guided by the Positive Intelligence® app
•attending an online weekly 60-min coach-led call on your own or with a maximum of 6 participants (via Zoom)
This might sound like a lot of time. In fact, cumulatively, it constitutes about 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 seven-week investment will save for years to come.
Who will lead the Positive Intelligence® Mental Fitness group program?
Vanessa Cardenas will personally facilitate each of the weekly group coaching sessions to help unpack your weekly learnings to amplify your results. She will also be available in between each session to cheer you on, help keep you accountable and committed to the program, as well as answer any questions. She is a Trusted Advisor, Certified Life Coach, Mental Fitness Trainer, and Certified 6 Phase Meditation Instructor with an 18-year C-Suite career, with experience in Healthcare Management, Operations, Business Development, and General Management within two different family-owned organizations. Her background includes a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Psychology, in addition to certification with Evercoach recognized by the International Coaching Federation coaching and training in Mental Fitness with Positive Intelligence.
Shirzad Chamine (Stanford lecturer and founder of Positive Intelligence®) will conduct each of the weekly video sessions. He will also participate daily in the exclusive online community of the program participants to answer questions and cheer you on. He is a New York Times bestselling author of Positive Intelligence, translated into 20 languages, has been CEO of the largest coach training organization in the world, and trained faculty at Stanford and Yale business schools. He lectures on Positive Intelligence at Stanford University and works with Stanford’s NCAA athletes. A preeminent C-suite advisor, Shirzad has coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams.
When do the calls take place?
Group calls will take place every Wednesday for 8 consecutive weeks. As for the time, this will depend on those who join as there will be a mix of participants from different time zone across the globe. I will try to be as flexible as possible and adapt to everyone’s needs. White Glove upgrade will be coordinated accordingly.
Do you accept payment plans?
Yes, payment plans are available upon request.
What if I have a question that's not answered here?
For any questions, please contact Vanessa@UnderstandingEar.com
Not Quite Sure?
Please go to the Positive Intelligence® website to explore your own mental fitness.
Take the Saboteurs and the PQ Score assessments. Both are free and are full of information!
After that, schedule a complimentary consultation with me to go over your results.
Mental fitness and Positive Intelligence® are key components of any coaching that I offer because it’s critical for optimal results.
I look forward to helping you on this journey toward mental mastery!
Disclaimers
© Copyright Positive Intelligence. No reproduction, in any form, printed or electronic, is permitted without prior written permission from Positive Intelligence. www.positiveintelligence.com
© 2022 Positive Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved. No reproduction, alteration, translation, publication, or distribution, in any form, printed or electronic, is permitted without the express prior written consent of Positive Intelligence, LLC. POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE®, PQ®, PQ COACH™, CERTIFIED PQ COACH™, and P+ logo™ are trademarks of Positive Intelligence, LLC.
DISCLAIMERS: The coach identified herein is an independent member of the PQ Coach program, and not an employee, agent, or representative of Positive Intelligence, LLC. The coaching program offered herein is independently owned and operated by the coach and is not affiliated with or endorsed or sponsored by Positive Intelligence, LLC. PROGRAM CONTENT AND MATERIAL DO NOT CONSTITUTE MEDICAL OR MENTALHEALTH ADVICE AND ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROFESSIONAL CARE, DIAGNOSIS, OR TREATMENT OF ANY MEDICAL OR MENTAL HEALTH CONDITION.