You’ve heard about emotional intelligence, but what do you know about positive intelligence?

What if, every day, you were sabotaging yourself and your happiness? This is what happens when your life is ruled by negative emotions. It damages your relationships, your mental health, your productivity, and your potential to live a happy and fulfilling life.

You may have even tried to make changes in the past, but found it difficult to sustain them until they eventually fizzled away. You may have read books and attended courses in the hope of increasing your work performance or your happiness – but any improvements didn’t last. This is a common experience when we let fear and internal negative voices work against our best interests and stop us from achieving our best.

But the good news is, you can learn positive intelligence techniques that can help change the way you think and support you in making positive, lasting changes.

What is positive intelligence?

The positive intelligence quotient, or PQ, is a measure of your mental fitness. It evaluates your ability to use your positive emotions in dealing with life’s daily challenges. Just as your level of physical fitness will determine if you can climb steep hills without losing your breath or breaking out in a sweat, greater mental fitness will enable you to handle life’s challenges without getting stressed out or experiencing negative emotions.

The theory of positive intelligence was developed by Shirzad Chamine, based on his analysis of more than 200 different scientific studies spanning performance science, neuroscience and cognitive psychology. He has lectured and trained on the subject at Stanford University, and the Positive Intelligence programme he founded is informed by research involving more than 500,000 participants, from CEOs to elite athletes.

How we accentuate the negative

Positive intelligence training teaches you how to identify the negative voices in your head that hold you back, and provides highly effective and easy-to-learn techniques to tame your negative emotions. All of this will help you to respond to challenging situations calmly and effectively.

We’ve all heard from a negative inner voice. You might have an important meeting in the morning and wake at 3am in a panic, thinking, ‘Things are going to go wrong. I don’t know enough. I’ll forget what to say and will look silly. No one will like my ideas. I might get fired!’

Rooted in fear, these negative voices can influence how we think, feel and respond. They generate negative emotions such as stress, self-doubt, anger, fear, guilt or regret, and, ultimately, they work against your best interests. They don’t help in anyway but instead drain your mental and emotional energy, making it less likely that you will perform at your best.

Everyone has these negative voices, which the positive intelligence community call ‘saboteurs’ because they sabotage our wellbeing, happiness and relationships. The negative self-talk and doubt they stir up can lead us to miss out on opportunities.

How does positive intelligence training help?

In the 3am panic scenario, imagine what it would feel like to switch focus to the positive emotion of curiosity. You might ask yourself, ‘What do I need to do to prepare for tomorrow’s meeting?’ And if you’re already prepped, you can accept that you have done all you can and return to a good night’s sleep – after which you will be in a much better mindset for your meeting and so perform better.

Positive Intelligence training helps people to shift their thinking and quieten their inner saboteurs by forming new habits and neural pathways for these thought processes. It rewires your brain for a new way of thinking, and gives you the tools to develop and maintain a positive outlook. This can have positive, lasting results such as improved relationships, better parenting, stress management and conflict resolution.

With positive intelligence training, you can learn to identify saboteurs to the point that you’ll see them at work in those around you, giving you a deeper insight into others and why they behave the way they do. This greater understanding will better inform how you react and drive more positive outcomes.

And once you are aware of your own saboteurs, and realise how they are holding you back, you will be ready to take action and ‘put manners’ on your doubts, fear and negative self-talk. But it is up to you to take that first step. Remember: If you change nothing, nothing changes.