Focus on the future by developing Positive Intelligence
h/t Tim Urban
Don’t get stuck in the past, Focus on the future life paths
By now, this image by Tim Urban has gone viral on all forms of social media reminding us that we should focus on the future. We all know that the only life paths open to us are the ones in the future. Yet, we seem to spend a lot of time ruminating about our past and lost opportunities. I, at least, did spend a lot of time focused on the past, until I developed positive intelligence through a course by Shirzad Chamine.
Let us take the examples of Andy and Sara who lost their jobs on the same day.
Andy keeps thinking about all the reasons why he deserved to be fired and blames himself for losing the job. In addition he thinks that he will never find a job again since he just got fired. Who would hire someone who just got fired? He blames his boss for firing him and for being unfair. He continues to wallow in self pity.
Sara on the other hand quickly makes a list of lessons she learned from her previous job, the things she did well and the changes she would like to make in her future job. She applies the learnings immediately, meets former colleagues who liked working with her and gets referrals from them in their companies. She finds a job and makes sure she applied the learnings from her mistakes in her new job.
Sara has a high level of positive intelligence, while Andy does not.
Positive Intelligence
Positive Intelligence is the ability to control our mind to focus on the actions we can take to shape our future instead of living in the past or worrying about an uncertain future.
Our minds are made up of two distinct modes (i) Saboteur characteristics that are our enemies and (ii) Sage characteristics that are our friends. The relative strengths of Saboteurs and Sage characteristics determines our level of positive intelligence. When our mind acts more as a friend, aka in sage mode, we have higher positive intelligence and when our mind acts more in saboteur mode, we have lower positive intelligence.
Saboteur Traits
Saboteurs are habitual mind patterns that are deeply ingrained due to our experiences and are working against us in reaching our goals. The master saboteur that everyone posses is "The Judge". The Judge saboteur constantly compels you to find fault with your self, others and your circumstances. It generates a number of negative feelings like shame, disappointment, anxiety, stress etc.
The accomplice saboteurs are Stickler, Pleaser, Hyper-achiever, Victim, Hyper-rational, Hyper-vigilant, Restless, Controller, and Avoider. We all have some of these accomplice saboteurs along with the judge the master saboteur. These saboteurs are constantly creating negative feeling about both our past and our future preventing us from taking positive actions that could help us achieve our goals.
You can take the saboteur assessment to learn more about your own saboteur traits.
Sage Perspective and Powers
The Sage represents the deeper and wiser part that can rise above the fray, resists getting carried away by the emotional drama of the moment or falling victim to the lies of the Saboteurs. The sage perspective is about accepting the reality as is instead of denying, rejecting or resenting it. It is further about viewing every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity.
By viewing the each situation as a gift and opportunity we are able to unlock our sage powers to
Empathize with yourself and others and bring compassion and understanding to any situation
Explore with curiosity and an open mind
Innovate and create new perspectives and outside-the-box solutions
Navigate and choose a path that best aligns with your deeper underlying values and mission
Activate and take decisive action without the distress, interference, or distractions of the Saboteurs.
These Sage powers help us in realizing positive outcomes in any scenario.
Developing Positive Intelligence
In essence increasing Positive Intelligence comes down to weakening our Saboteurs and strength our Sage qualities.
Weakening our Saboteurs
1. Naming our Saboteurs and identifying their deep root cause
In order to weaken our Saboteurs, we need to dig deeper and identify the root causes of those our Saboteurs which are based on childhood experiences, and how we perceive reality. For example: My parents taught me that anything less than a 100/100 in a test was a failure, which resulted in me becoming a perfectionist. The challenge with being a perfectionist is that I used to hold others to an unreasonable standard even about small things and would get triggered when my expectations weren’t met. Having that realization helped me be more judicious with the things that I wanted to hold myself and others to a high standard.
2. Visualizing our Saboteurs at their worst
We don’t see our saboteurs in action, we just feel the eventual impact of them.
By standing in front of a mirror and enacting our Judge Saboteur at its worst, we can truly understand how harshly we judge ourselves and others. For example: If we saw in a mirror how we looked at our most angry self, screaming and saying mean things to ourselves for our mistakes, would we be able to do it again and hurt ourselves?
I couldn’t! I stopped judging myself as harshly once I saw my judge in a mirror.
3. Identify triggers and common Saboteur patterns
There are typically some common triggers we have for when our Judge and other Saboteurs kick in. If we identify those triggers and our common reaction patterns. We can start to develop alternate approaches to those scenarios.
Strengthen your Sage
While we all know how to use the Sage characteristics, they get blinded by our saboteur in our times of need. We don’t need them all the time for all the situations but if they are strengthened and sharped they are ready when you need them.
Here is how you activate / strengthen them.
0. Activate sage mode with the three gifts rule
Anytime something “bad” happens ask the question “what are the three ways in which this supposedly bad situation could turn into a gift?”
Every situation has opportunities when we look at a longer horizon and pivoting to this mode is the first step in moving forward.
1.Develop empathy for yourself and others
Empathizing is about feeling and showing appreciation, compassion, and forgiveness. Empathy has two targets: yourself and others. Both are important. Deeper empathy for yourself typically makes it possible to have deeper empathy for others. Empathy mitigates the effects of the judge and recharges us.
Two quick ways to build empathy: (i) Visualize yourself and others when they were children radiating all the sage qualities, how can you have negative feelings towards such internally beautiful sage like people (ii) Within your mind say to yourself “I love myself” or “I love x”, this immediately changes our physiology and emotions. It reminds us that we and the people around us may great as we are even with all our imperfections.
2. Explore with curiosity and open mind
We all explored the world with an open mind and curiosity as kids but as we grew our judge, hyper-vigilance, and all the other saboteurs pain our interpretation of situations, people and actions. We need to practice observing without judging to sharpen the saw of curiosity and open-mindedness.
Two quick ways to do this (i) Try to be an anthropologist just observing facts around you and not filtering out any information that does not match your biases (ii) Separate our facts from interpretation of the facts in any conversation.
3. Innovate and create new perspectives and outside-the-box solutions
While the Explore power is about discovering true facts, Innovate power is about creating new options. Usually our assumptions about our situation, the boxes we draw around ourselves and our habits hold us back. We need to practice activating this power to break through when we feel stuck.
There are a few ways to build this deliberately practice this (i) Write down all the assumptions we are making and question them to expand the universe of possibilities (ii) brainstorm and collaborate without any judgement by building on top of each others ideas. Use the Yes And improv approach to idea generation.
4. Navigate and choose a path that best aligns with your deeper underlying values and mission
Sometimes we get paralyzed with making a decision with a number of options in front of us. The sage power of navigation is to make decision based on a consistent internal compass. These could be value you want to live your life by or a core set of product principles you use to make decisions at work.
Couple of ways to practice this is (i) When faced with the fork in the road, imagine yourself at the end of your life looking back at the choices you are now facing. From that vantage point, what do you wish you had chosen at this juncture? (ii) What values do you want to live by? What do you want people to say when they give your eulogy and base your decision based on those (iii) What product principles or company values do we want to adhere to as we make this set of decisions?
5. Activate and take decisive action without the distress, interference, or distractions of the Saboteurs
Once we make a decision it is imperative to take action right away. All of our Saboteur’s get in the way of us taking action. The best way to mitigate them in the stage of action is to anticipate how the different Saboteur’s get in the way of taking action and pre-empting them. For example if your Judge wants perfection for a document, pre-empt it by saying this is just an outline. By the time I iterate on it a few times it will be perfect. If my Hypervigilence is preventing me for meeting with someone, pre-empt it by saying I still have the option to say no or walk away if I don’t like the conversation etc.
When we have high levels of positive intelligence we can bounce back from any setback and focus on actions we can take to creatively solve challenges in front of us and reach our goals. The great leaders I have worked with go from a set back to next steps instantaneously.
To learn more about Positive Intelligence and how to develop it, read the amazing book by Shirzad Chamine and take his course.