Positive Intelligence (PQ)

Pro-Development are proud to be accredited now to run the Positive Intelligence Programme. Having worked through the programme ourselves and getting so much benefit from it both personally and professionally, we decided to go onto to become Positive Intelligence coaches and are now excited to be able to offer this to our clients.

What is the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Programme?

Positive Intelligence (PQ) is a mental fitness programme which enables you to build ‘mental muscles’ that gives you the capacity to understand and respond to life’s challenges with a positive rather than a negative mindset.  These skills have a positive impact 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 1,000,000 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.

According to Positive Intelligence, we all have internal Saboteurs who generate all our negativity in the way they respond to challenges. Our Saboteurs cause all our stress, anxiety, self-doubt, frustration, regret, shame, guilt, and unhappiness. Saboteurs include the Judge, Controller, Avoider, Victim, Pleaser, Stickler, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Restless and Hyper-vigilant.

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.

Interested to find out more?

At Pro-Development, we can run a 45 – 60 minute Discovery Session which enables you to find out more about your own saboteurs and we’ll guide you through an exploration of the characteristics, impact and implications of your top Saboteurs, and you’ll experience what it is like to work with a trained PQ Coach.

Saboteur Discovery Session

We can all get a bit stuck sometimes and caught up in habits which don’t always serve us well. They often get in the way of us being our best, impact on our wellbeing and prevent us from building strong relationships.  Imagine breaking through that barrier and charting a clear mind of success for yourself, as well as your team.

What to expect?

• Understand the impact of your saboteurs.
• Outline strategies for your specific challenges.
• Devise a plan to move forward.

Who is this for?

Leaders and Managers who want to:

• Use mental and emotional energy more effectively and improve their ability to develop others.
• Manage stress better, increase happiness and improve self-confidence.
• Improve empathy and relationships.

Our Positive Intelligence 6 week programme

You can just complete the Saboteur Discovery session and will find this one session a real gift and can help you to start spotting your saboteurs but you may wish to continue onto the 6 week programme.  Here is a bit more information about the programme.

What you’ll get if you go onto join the 6 week 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.
• New mental habits that 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 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 us, 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;
• 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.
• We 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).

So your first steps are to book a Saboteur Discovery Session.