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MALE SPEAKER: I was on Amazon.com looking for some
mindfulness meditation reading and somehow I came across this
book called "Positive Intelligence," written by
Stanford professor Chamine.
And it was an absolutely fascinating book because it
talked about what we could do to impact our emotional
intelligence.
And also, what are the limiting
factors in our career?
So without much further ado, I'd like to pass it over to
Professor Chamine.
SHIRZAD CHAMINE: Thank you [INAUDIBLE].
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's an honor to be here at Google because I don't know if
you know it, but you have changed my life.
Google has changed my life.
My research on my book, and my book, would be less than a
third done if it weren't for you guys.
So you have changed my life and I'm here to reciprocate.
And if you allow me to, I will.
And I'd like to start, in terms of what the topic of
this work is, with a quote that I consider heartbreaking
because on the one hand, it's so tragic, and on the other,
it's so true.
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the
grave with the song still in them." Thoreau wrote this
quote about 150 years ago.
And despite the tremendous progress that we have made in
science and technology and all sorts of other things, sadly,
I think this quote is just as true today as it
was 150 years ago.
And the only thing we need to change about this quote is now
he would say "most men and women lead lives of quiet
desperation and go to the grave with the song still in
them." So what this quote is about is just two areas that
I'm passionate about are two dimensions.
And the two dimensions, the first one is the dimension of
happiness, what he calls quiet desperation.
Now you may be looking around and say, gee,
I'm not quite desperate.
Maybe my neighbor is, the guy sitting next to my left--
to my left or right.
I'm not quietly desperate but actually you are.
Let me tell you how you are quietly desperate.
So the modern version of this quiet desperation that too
many of us are leading it's what I would call things such
as-- and see if that resonates for you-- constant stress,
constant anxiety, constantly wondering if you're good
enough, if you have done enough, if your career is
progressing well, what tomorrow will bring,
constantly disappointed with the performance you have done,
or the performance that the others have done.
So I take this collective category of what I call
negative emotions, and I call that category "general
unhappiness." And what I would like to say is that based on
my research, we are just as unhappy today as we
were 150 years ago.
Its manifestation has changed.
That's one dimension I'm very passionate about changing.
The second dimension that this quote talks about is "going to
our grave with the song still in us." What that dimension is
about is about performance, is about achievement.
Not any achievement or performance, but meaningful
achievement and performance.
Because I believe every single one of us is born with a
unique, beautiful song in us.
And most of us go to our graves not knowing how to
manifest it and how to bring it out.
That's about achieving the highest possibility of your
achievement--
reaching your true potential for the difference you can
make in the world, for the performance that you're
capable of, and what it is that you can contribute.
So my work is about how can we have you be significantly
happier, and also significantly more capable in
achieving your true potential.
The reason that-- now as you can imagine, you guys are
working really hard.
You probably have read tons of books that have been--
hundreds of books written since Thoreau wrote that
quotes about increasing your happiness and increasing your
effectiveness.
So how come we haven't made that much progress in changing
that over 150 years?
And how come when you have tried to become significantly
happier, significantly more effective, using tools,
technologies, books that you have read-- how come the
results have been incremental and have fizzled after a
while, not dramatic the way that we
want it to be dramatic.
And I just like to use an example and tell you why.
And the example is imagine that there is this guy who
lives in a village.
And he has--
his greatest possession, his sole source of livelihood is
this huge tree that he has in his garden.
And this tree has hundreds of leaves, and these leaves are
his source of livelihood.
As he sells them, they need to be big and strong and healthy.
And imagine that this guy wakes up every morning and
drags himself drudgingly to the base of this huge tree,
looks up, and with great disappointment notices that
there are lots of leaves today that are looking wilted and
looking dehydrated.
And what he does, day after day, is he painstakingly
climbs this very huge tree and gets to reach these very hard
to reach branches and painstakingly takes one leaf
after the other and polishes it and sprays it with water so
that it's less wilted and less dehydrated.
And leaf after leaf after leaf, until every minute of
the day is over, until every spray of water that he has,
every drop of water is gone, and until every ounce of
energy is exhausted.
It's the end of the day, and the next day is going to start
on the same routine.
Now you and I know-- we look at him and you
say, you know what?
And as we notice the fact, the crazy fact that he never gets
to water the roots of this tree.
He's busy going up there and dealing with the leaves.
And the reason is he's left with no time and no water at
the end of day to water the roots of the tree.
You and I look at that and say this guy's kind of cuckoo.
He's a little insane.
Why doesn't he just water the roots of the tree?
We feel kind of superior thinking that, right?
We are much smarter than that guy.
But I hope you won't take it personally, but I do believe
that that's exactly what you do, day in and day out.
And that the reason that we still live lives of quiet
desperation after so many years is that our attempts at
improving our happiness on the one hand, and improving our
performance on the other hand, are very analogous to us
dealing at the leaves level.
We are busy polishing the leaves and
spraying them with water.
And we have forgotten--
we actually never learned that we don't know how
to water the roots.
And I'm here to tell you that you can actually find a way
to, if you focus on what the roots are, that you can find a
way to be dramatically more effective in what you do, and
dramatically happier.
And have time to actually lay under the tree and enjoy the
shade, too.
And that's how I believe that this technology that I bring,
positive intelligence, can actually change your life and
have me pay my dues back to Google, because you have done
the same for me.
And now the interesting thing is that in the past 15 years
or so in particular, there have been powerful pieces of
research in four different areas of discipline that have
given us really wonderful clues about what is at the
root level, what is at this common root level for what
creates dramatic improvements in happiness, and at the same
time dramatic improvement in performance.
There have been four areas of science and research that have
had powerful insights to that.
So I'd like to tell you what those four areas are, and then
from that, figure out--
how to put these pieces of the puzzle together about what is
the root level, and how do we make sure that we tend to the
root level.
And the first thing is the area of positive psychology.
And in positive psychology, my colleagues have contributed a
very huge part of this puzzle of what the root is.
And one of the biggest insights of positive
psychology is that after centuries of thinking that the
way you can get to be happier is by performing
and achieving higher--
perform and achieve higher so that you can be happier--
positive psychology has turned it on its head, and shown that
actually, higher achievement and performance does not lead
to higher happiness.
But higher happiness does lead to higher performance and
achievement.
A happier brain is a much more capable, much more
resourceful, much more creative brain.
So that's a huge contribution that positive psychology has
made to this puzzle--
what's at the root.
Other contribution is that actually 90% of the valuation
in people's happiness from one person to another is
explainable based on what is happening inside of their own
head, not based on what's happening in their life in
terms of wealth and possessions
or any of that stuff.
Those are huge contributions to the puzzle of
what's at the root.
The other very important discipline that has given us
great new insights about this, about what's at the root, is
neuroscience.
And what we know of neuroscience is a few very
exciting things.
With functional MRI, neuroscience has shown us is
what areas of the brain, if they are stimulated, can
actually have you feel all these positive wonderful
feelings that collectively create happiness.
So there are areas of the brain that if you stimulate
them, if you learn how to activate them, you will be
feeling much happier, much more positive feelings
regardless of what kind of situation you're dealing with.
And the second contribution is that the brain is like a
muscle, and that with some simple little exercises you
can actually develop the muscle of command over your
own mind, so that you can command which part of your
brain can be activated, and which part of your brain will
be quieted down.
And that's a very powerful contribution to this puzzle of
what's at the root of happiness and higher
performance.
And that there are areas of the brain that will get you
not just higher performance, but also higher happiness if
you're able to activate them.
The third area of very exciting work in the past 15
years plus is in cognitive behavioral
psychology, what we know.
It's kind of a little bit of the psychological corollary of
what I shared about neuroscience a minute ago.
The psychological corollary is that in most people's mind
there are some really dysfunctional habits of the
mind, automatic habits of the mind that create a lot of not
only your unhappiness about your problems with highest
achievement, they get in the way of you performing at the
highest level.
There are just these automatic habits of the mind that gets
triggered and they go--
we go on automatic drive and they don't serve us.
And very excitingly, what cognitive behavioral
psychology has shown us is there some relatively simple
ways to actually reprogram the mind to replace some of these
dysfunctional habits with much more positive habits that have
you be not only a lot happier, but also a lot more effective.
And the final piece of this, the puzzle, that's an exciting
contribution to this is the area of performance science.
And in particular, about 15 years ago we had emotional
intelligence.
Daniel Goleman and his colleagues made a huge
contribution to us beginning to understand that actually,
when it comes to, especially, professional achievement, the
highest achievement, the highest performance that you
can get actually comes from having high emotional
intelligence competencies that are in the soft skill domain
rather than hard skill and IQ.
So for the highest level of achievement, especially in a
lot of professional fields, the soft skills are what
ultimately make the difference, rather than either
your IQ or harder skills.
And that has been a huge contribution to this puzzle.
So what I'm here to show you is that-- so this is all
exciting, and there's one problem with it.
The problem is that it can be pretty overwhelming to figure
out how to connect all the dots between these things, and
actually-- so what in the world do you do differently
tomorrow based on all this insight?
One of the CEOs that I was coaching telling me that he
has read five books on neuroscience.
He's so excited that he knows--
he can tell you exactly what part the brain gets excited
then lit up when he does well.
But he has no idea when he's sitting tomorrow in a meeting
with his staff, and there's conflict in his staff-- what
the heck I do differently now?
How do I go from my understanding of the brain to
what do I do differently when two of my team members are
always fighting with each other?
How do you connect the dots between all of this beautiful,
wonderful scientific research to what's actionable?
So basically that's where my contribution comes in, in
construct of positive intelligence.
What positive intelligence is--
sitting on these four powerful cornerstones of science, what
positive intelligence does, it creates a unified framework
that brings in the best of these fields but very, very
importantly does what it is that you need to do at the
root level.
At the root level things need to be simple.
Things need to be actionable, and things need to be
measurable.
So how do you make things really simple, because the
root is simple.
The promise of the root is if you water the roots, lots of
awesome things happen on their own.
How can we make sure that it's a simple framework, it's an
actionable framework, so that I can tell you what to do
differently tomorrow when you're sitting in a meeting
and things are not going well?
And it needs to be measurable.
How do we make sure it's actually working?
And those are the things that positive psychology--
with the original research of positive
psychology we add to this.
And basically it is about going to the very core, the
root, the common root of what creates your optimal happiness
and what creates your optimal performance.
And the way that it works with positive intelligence--
a definition of positive intelligence is that basically
at the core, at the root level, the most important
thing for you to pay attention to is the war that's
constantly raging inside of your own brain.
Inside every human being's brain there is a war every
minute of every day, raging between two different voices
and the mind.
One is the voice that serves you.
The other is the voice that sabotages you.
And positive intelligence is defined as the percentage of
time that your mind is serving you, as opposed
to sabotaging you--
the percentage of time that your mind is serving you, as
opposed to sabotaging you.
The premise being that every single one of you--
I just met you.
You're a wonderful group of people.
But I know that you are busy self-sabotaging
yourself all the time.
How do I know that?
Because I have yet to meet a human being who doesn't have a
level of self-sabotage.
It is just impossible.
And so the question is, how often do you self-sabotage,
and what's the amount of time that you self-sabotage versus
serve yourself.
And with positive intelligence we actually put frameworks to
this that makes it more understandable.
So basically, the voices that are sabotaging you, we call
the saboteurs.
And the voice that serves you, we call the sage.
So the sage is really our true voice, is the voice you can
trust, is the voice you were born with.
It's your unique voice.
And the saboteurs are things that get into your head.
Sometime in your childhood, I'll get into more detail
about where the heck do these saboteurs come from.
How come they're so universal?
They have by their very names like the judge, controller,
stickler, and victim.
Does any of that remind anybody of
anybody that you know?
Of course, not yourself, right?
You are the one--
by the way, if my wife is in audience, I always tell her,
tell them everybody has lots of saboteurs.
But my wife is this unique miracle, where absolutely,
that's just the one exception to the rule.
But since she's not here I can tell you, she has her
saboteurs too.
And so do every one of you.
By the way, there are 10 saboteurs altogether.
These are the four.
One of the things that's measurable about positive
intelligence is that you can actually measure the strength
of your saboteurs.
We can also measure the relative strength of your
saboteurs versus the sage.
And at the root level of your greatest happiness and your
greatest performance is this balance of power.
And it's a balance of power that's never completely here
and never completely there.
There is nobody who is 100 in PQ, in positive intelligence.
There's nobody who's a zero.
The question is, how do you shift the scale?
And as you do, dramatic improvements happen.
This is the psychological way of describing what's at the
root, but this correlates completely, one on one, with
the neurological explanation also of what's happening at
the root level of your mind.
And at the neurological level, you really are of two brains.
You have the survival brain region, and you have the
positive intelligence brain.
And basically what the saboteurs are, they are the
agents of your survival brain.
And what the sage is, it's the agent of your positive
intelligence brain.
These are entirely different regions of your brain--
entirely different regions of your brain.
So this is a slight generalization.
My book goes into a lot more detailed specifics, but just
to give you an idea, the survival brain region is made
up mostly of your brain stem, limbic system, parts of the
left brain.
The positive intelligence brain is made up mostly of the
middle prefrontal cortex, the ACC insular cortex, and parts
of the right brain.
They are neurochemically wired differently so that when they
are activated, they produce completely different emotions
and energy.
So survival brain's job is survive.
And that's the reason that everybody has a very active
level of survival brain, because from an evolutionary
perspective, that has been important to your survival.
Now notice the emotions that get generated by the saboteurs
and the survival brain.
These are the emotions that generate the quiet
desperation, the unhappiness, all the stress and difficulty.
It's collectively what I call unhappiness.
So when I talk about happiness versus unhappiness, I'm asking
the question, are you primarily here?
Or are you primarily here?
And happiness--
becoming happier is about spending more time here and
less time here.
Again, you can never be completely here, but you can
definitely move a lot farther that way.
Now notice immediately, something's become very clear.
I can make some dramatic generalizations.
Basically one of the most important things I can say is,
your unhappiness has nothing to do with what's
happening in your life.
It doesn't have to do with the fact that you have a bad boss.
By the way, I have heard there are no bad bosses at Google,
but just theoretically speaking.
Doesn't have to do with that, it doesn't have to do with the
fact that you just failed in your job.
Doesn't have to do with the fact that
you just lost a client.
Those are events that are happening in your life.
And what I will show you is that if the way you respond to
those events is by activating your positive intelligence
brain, you can absolutely be dealing with all of the
challenges of your work or life, while not feeling any of
those unhappy feelings.
And that basically, your unhappiness comes from the
fact that you are not in command of your own mind.
You get sabotaged, you get hijacked by this
region of the brain.
Why do we get hijacked so often by this
region of the brain?
Think about it.
All those negative energies, the anxiety, the fear,
paranoia and those kinds of things.
Think about thousands of years ago, our
ancestors in the jungle--
imagine the one that was very anxious, and very negative,
and assumed the worst.
If the tree was starting to shake and the leaves started
to shake, and our distant ancestors started thinking,
some animals is going to emerge from behind the tree,
the one who was really negatively biased, the one who
was running anxious, the one who had low positive
intelligence who assumed, I don't know enough here, but I
guarantee you it's going to be a hungry tiger
coming to eat me alive--
that one bolted before anything happened.
That one actually survived.
99 times out of 100, he or she was wrong.
But the one time he or she was right, it saved their life,
and they end up being our ancestors.
But imagine if you had, theoretically, this very
optimistic distant ancestor and the tree started shaking,
and she or he said, "I have a good feeling
about things today.
I'm just feeling very optimistic.
I think a panda bear is going to emerge from the tree and
give me a big bear hug or something."
How long do you think that ancestor actually survived?
So the predisposition to negativity was something that
was helpful for survival.
That part of brain kind of got developed
because we all have that.
The problem is, as you can notice by the way, that these
things kind of cascaded on each other.
Stress is the fuel of this brain.
And once this thing gets going it loops on itself.
When you're under high stress, which a lot of you are, it
begins to fuel all of this cascade of emotions up there.
You are more disappointed with yourself, you're more
disappointed with others, you are more anxious about what's
going to come next.
All of these things that come with the
saboteurs end up happening.
And the counterpart, by the way, it is something that is
helpful for performance.
We talked about happiness, but also performance.
Because what I'm going to show you later is that this region
of the brain is really good.
It's a specialist for figuring out what's wrong.
It's a specialist for seeing the tiger
where there is a tiger.
But it also sees tigers in a lot of places
there are no tigers.
It's really good at picking up what's wrong
and what's the problem.
The problem is, that is not really good for creativity.
It's not really good for resourcefulness.
It's not good for seeing out of the box.
It's the brain--
we know that physically, when you go to this mode, you get
tunnel vision.
But what we are now also discovering that mentally,
intellectually, you get tunnel vision when
you go to that brain.
So most of us are living far more tunnel vision
than we need to.
We do not see the easy way out, easy answer out, because
we are stuck in the wrong kind of brain--
wrong part of the brain.
And I'll give you a lot more examples of this.
Right now I know it's a little conceptual, but I'm going to
give you a lot of examples.
In real life, how does this happen and why does this end
up being the root of both higher
performance and higher happiness?
One other thing, by the way, is that as you look at it, you
can either talk about being in survival brain or saboteur
mode, or talk about positive intelligence or sage, it
doesn't matter, because one is at the psychological level,
the other is the parallel on the neurological level.
So one of the things that I want to show you now about how
we measure this is that like I said before, to be at the root
level, we need to make sure things are simple and also
measurable.
So the way you measure this positive intelligence quotient
or PQ is the percentage of time you are in sage mode
versus your saboteur modes.
And we can actually measure it based on the amount of time
you spend in different kinds of emotions, because as you
can see from the previous slide, the emotions are a
telltale sign of which part of your brain is activated.
So we can begin to measure what that is, and therefore
really help you figure out how you're going to be improving
this, and if you are about to improve this.
And by the way, the final thing I want to say about this
before actually trying to make this a lot more concrete for
yourself is what we have done now is connect this idea of
positive intelligence, the PQ, with a lot of different
researchers, a lot of my colleagues in the field.
There's a whole plethora of connections that are made
between this idea of what's the level of positive
intelligence in you and what you're going to do in terms of
both performance and happiness.
Some are pretty intuitive, and for example sales--
this is very hot with salespeople.
Just imagine the difference between a
sales person who wants--
he gets a rejection, or she gets a rejection at 10 AM, it
takes that person two hours to recover from being angry and
upset and self-doubt and stress and all that stuff
before they'll be able to pick up the phone and have clean
energy in making the next phone call, versus somebody
who is going to be able to shake off those feelings in
two minutes.
What difference do you think is going to make in terms of
their performance?
How quickly you recover from negative emotions to positive.
And that's one final point I want to make about this, is
that the question that might be raised is, is there any
room for these negative feelings?
Is there any room for feeling angry, feeling anxious,
feeling upset, feeling disappointed?
And the answer is yes, but say about 5% is useful.
The rest of it is not.
And to give you an example of why and how, think about your
physical body.
Do you think it's useful for you to feel pain
at a physical level?
Absolutely.
If you did not feel physical pain, you would go to the
kitchen and when the oven, the stove was left on, you'd put
your hand on the oven.
Because you don't feel pain, you'd burn
your hand to the bone.
Therefore, you need to feel pain.
But when you go and put your hand on the hot oven and feel
pain, what do you do?
You take off your hand.
How long do you feel the pain before you get the message?
You get the message in a tenth of a second.
The equivalent of that in our work and life is, OK, a
failure has happened in the middle of your project.
You have made a really bad mistake.
You have just lost a client or something important like that.
Is it good to feel angry, disappointed,
any of these feelings?
Absolutely, because otherwise you'd not be paying attention
to anything.
There would be no consequences.
But how long is it helpful for you to stay in those modes?
For 10 seconds, for a minute, for two minutes, before you
find a way to say OK, wake-up call.
There has been a mistake or a failure.
What do I do now?
And the part of your brain that's going to help you
figure out what to do now is this part of the brain.
This is good for a wake-up call.
This is good for actually figuring out
what the heck to do.
The problem with most of us is we keep looping in this part
of the brain, because we remain upset and disappointed
and anxious and all that stuff.
So yes, there's value to them, but not for long.
By the way, a final thing I would say is--
I promise is the final thing, I keep saying finally--
you see something there called--
you live 10 years longer if you have high positive
intelligence.
This is new science, so I know some of you are skeptical--
where the heck is this number coming from?
I won't tell you.
You need to go read the book.
There's a really fun story about how come we know that
people with high positive intelligence actually live 10
years longer.
It shouldn't be a surprise to you, because think about it--
the neurochemicals that the survival brain produces are
neurochemicals like cortisol, stress hormone coursing
through your body.
These days it's 24 by 7.
Those things were intended to get activated once every five
days when there's an actual tiger in the
jungle, not 24 by 7.
Your body's not supposed to be running on
stress all the time.
The fact that you live 10 years shorter if you have
survival brain activated all the time, versus the positive
intelligence brain, where the chemicals are endorphins--
all the cool things that make you feel high.
If you live life being high without resorting to external
drugs, you live 10 years longer.
And I'm here to show you how to turn on this cool
manufacturing facility in your own brain, to make really cool
chemicals that have you feel high and live longer and have
higher performance.
OK, so now to get more specific in terms of
how do we do this.
Going back to one, we want things to be measurable.
If you're at the root level of what's happening, what's
impacting your performance and happiness, it needs to be
simple, it needs to be measurable, and it needs to be
actionable.
So please hold me accountable to those three things.
There are three strategies for how to increase your positive
intelligence.
And please pay attention to whether you believe there are
simple, actionable, and measurable.
The first strategy is, hey, weaken your saboteurs.
If your positive intelligence is the relative strength of
your saboteurs versus sage, then obviously weakening your
saboteurs, weakening the bad guys, is one way to increase
your positive intelligence.
Now as you know, I'm into research.
I lecture on this topic at Stanford.
By the way, I recognize some of the faces from my Stanford
lectures on positive intelligence.
It's good to see there are repeat customers.
I'm very happy.
It's a good sign, and I'm really happy to see you guys.
So I love research, but I also once in awhile believe in a
picture is worth more than a thousand words.
So to tell you about saboteurs, let me use a
picture, not numbers.
Now what I want to show you is what we all used to look like
before saboteurs started messing with us.
So if you're a lady, this is what you used to look like
before saboteurs started messing with you.
This is how we are born--
full of possibility, full of positivity, full of awareness
of how awesome you really are.
Now if you're a guy, you look like a variation of this.
You think he knows how amazing he is?
Every strand of his hair knows how unbelievable he is, how
awesome life is, and what his potential is.
We are born with emotional, energetic access to how
awesome we are.
And our possibility for both happiness and creating good
stuff in life.
And then-- by the way, I can't ever leave this without
showing these two are my kids--
my beautiful son [? Kion ?], my beautiful girl [? Tisa-- ?]
they too at this stage of their life,
this is before saboteurs.
This is before anybody has messed with them.
So, and I guarantee that if I had a picture of you six
months old, a year old, you'd be as vibrant, as powerfully
in touch with your amazing beauty as a human being.
But at some point, every single one of us
starts losing the light.
At some point, these faces begin to dim.
This energy and joy begins to dim, and the
reason is the saboteurs.
Now in my own case, it happened pretty quickly.
In most cases, it takes longer.
But here's--
here is my own case.
Do you think this guy knows how amazing he is?
He used to know.
He was born knowing how awesome he is.
By the way, adorable, right?
Right, you agree?
It's amazing what a little bit of hair does to
you, or lots of it.
My wife assures me that she thinks bald is cool.
I don't buy it.
So basically, yes.
This is only about two years old, and as you can see in
this picture, something has happened to me already.
And what had happened to me was the saboteurs.
Now, saboteurs are not initially the bad guys.
The reason we get them is that saboteurs are actually our
agents of survival.
And the reason I have the look that the saboteur brings you,
and this is a dramatic look that the saboteur brings, is
that I really needed my saboteurs to
come and help me survive.
Now I'm going to tell you the story of how my saboteurs came
into my life and helped me survive.
You may not relate to it from your perspective.
You may have had an easier childhood, and all that, but
I'm going to tell you how even a happy
childhood results in saboteurs.
Basically, what happens is that as a child we have a need
to survive emotionally and a need to survive physically.
And the saboteurs come in to help make sure that you
survive both physically and emotionally.
So in my case, I was born a happy kid, a very sensitive
and adorable.
OK, that we already established.
But also a sensitive kid, and the problem was that I lived
in a two bedroom apartment in a ghetto with four siblings
and my parents in poverty.
But that wasn't the problem.
The problem was that my parents--
my father was a very angry and scary and violent man.
And for a sensitive kid like me, that was pretty
devastating, seeing what happened with me, with my
mother, with the kids.
So basically, life was not all that enjoyable.
And the key thing was that I wasn't getting much love or
attention from my parents.
Now, I needed to emotionally survive,
and here's the situation.
There is no way that I could have admitted to myself that
my parents were flawed.
Imagine how terrifying it would've been for me to say,
you know, Shirzad, you're out of luck.
Your life is in the hands of imperfect parents.
You realize how terrifying that is?
It's almost like being under the sea, scuba diving or
whatever, and then thinking that the thing that brings you
air is broken, and is going to stop
functioning any minute now.
That's terrifying.
My life was in the hands of my parents.
I needed to keep them perfect.
In order to keep them perfect, I needed this saboteur that
began to come into my mind, which I later called it the
judge saboteur.
What this judge saboteur said to help me survive was, "Hey
buddy, your parents are actually perfect beings.
And the reason these perfect people don't love you is
because you are such a loser.
You are completely unworthy of any love or attention.
They are perfect.
You're a loser."
It sounds cruel, but actually it was extremely helpful to me
surviving my childhood emotionally.
It would have otherwise been far more terrifying.
But notice that once this construct of the judge
saboteur started telling me, "Shirzad, you're a loser.
There's something fundamentally wrong with you,"
it also started judging everybody else around me,
except for my parents and finding fault in everybody
else instantly.
I would see anybody and instantly I would find what's
wrong with them.
Why do you think that was necessary?
Once again, the judge saboteur's saying, "Well,
Shirzad, you're a loser, but then don't worry.
Everybody else too is.
Everybody else is also broken and screwed up." It allowed me
to not be terrified by being the only loser in the world.
Now how conscious do you think I was of this construct
happening in my mind?
It was happening at this age.
There's no way I remember the genesis of it.
And most saboteurs start very early, so we are
unconscious of them.
So here I am growing up, and I'm a very ambitious person
and become the teacher's pet, straight A
student, all that stuff.
And I have no idea that I have this strong judge saboteur.
And then what happens that changes my life is that at
Stanford Business School, not far from here, I was in an MBA
class when I was a student there.
And in this class, what we did was put people into groups of
12, and we would meet once a week in a group of 12 and sit
in a circle.
And we had to tell each other the honest truth about how we
were really feeling about each other.
And most of the people in my life I had fooled into--
not realizing I didn't judge them or whatever--
the problem with this group is after awhile
they get to know you.
And so there is no hiding.
So at one point, one of the people in the group turned to
me and said--
and his lips were shaking, his hand was shaking--
he said, "Shirzad, this is really hard for me to tell
you, but I often feel harshly judged by you, and it really
bothers me." So I turned to him and said, "John, thank you
so much for telling me.
This is very helpful feedback." In the back of my
mind I was thinking, "Well, of course you feel
judged by me, you idiot.
You are the biggest loser in this group.
How else do you expect me to think of you?"
That's really what I was thinking.
But then a second person, a third person, and a fourth
person said exactly the same thing.
And believe it or not, I kept thinking, "Well, take a
number, guys.
You're the second biggest loser in the group, you're the
third, the fourth, come on.
It's amazing how this is lining up.
Look at yourself in the mirror, stop blaming myself
for your insecurities, all that stuff."
But then what changed my life is the fifth person was
sitting to my left.
At this point he got up in disgust and went and sat
across the circle from me and said, "Shirzad, I feel so
disgusted by your inability to hear the truth about what
people are telling you.
I literally can no longer sit next to you." And at that
point, finally, the facade of my judge saboteur was broken,
and I finally saw, "Oh my God, they are right.
I have this automatic habit of the mind where I judge
everything instantly.
I instantly find faults with others and myself, and it's
something that--
it's just such an automatic habit I never think about it."
And that's the moment where I realized that I had this rude
little judge saboteur.
And of course, as you can imagine, that realization
changed my life.
Because as I started looking into it, I also later
realized, hey, I have a couple of other
nasty guys in my head.
I also had other saboteurs.
And I did some research in this work and finally realized
there are altogether 10 saboteurs, the judge being the
masters saboteur.
I had a couple others, but then so do everybody else.
That part I really loved, finding out that everybody
else has saboteurs too.
But at that moment, the terrifying realization was
that I thought I was the only one who had the saboteur.
So I want to just in the interest of time, move a
little faster and get into just talking about how the
saboteurs are in these two different--
there's a grid of these nine saboteurs and that the two
dimensions are motivation--
what the saboteur gets you, and the style with which that
saboteur gets you, that thing that you're looking for.
And that results in this cast of characters--
the controller, hyperachiever, restless, stickler, pleaser,
and hypervigilant, and avoider, victim,
hyperrational.
This is the nasty cast of characters that's running the
show in many of our heads, the judge being the one that
everybody has.
Then the question is, which other saboteur do you have?
And I have worked with hundreds of people--
I have actually literally coached hundreds of CEOs and
their executive teams.
I have worked with people on the manufacturing floors.
I have not yet found a population that is not
significantly hampered by the saboteurs.
This is the source of our quiet desperation in life, and
how we do not achieve a lot of our potential in the world.
So there is an assessment at the end of--
actually at the end of this talk, I'm going to give you,
there is an assessment online that you can go and in five
minutes you can get a bar chart of your saboteurs.
And the reason I want you to do that is that one of the key
ways that we want you to weaken your saboteur is this.
If the saboteur is your internal enemy, I what do we
do with criminals?
We create a "Wanted" poster.
And why do we create a "Wanted" poster for criminals?
So that we can catch them the moment they show up.
So ultimately, you want to create a "Wanted" poster for
your saboteur--
what's its name, what's its habits, what's its
characteristics, what's its belief systems.
And the assessment online is going to help you figure that
out, figure out what your judge's characteristics are,
and what other top saboteur that you have.
And then what you do after that, one of the key ways to
reduce the power of your saboteur over you is that
every time--
since you have done the "Wanted" poster, when it shows
up in your head you can immediately recognize it.
So all you need to do-- one of the key things that you can do
is when the thought shows up in your head, you just label
that thought as saboteur and let go, instead of trusting it
or pursuing it, because now you know it's your enemy.
So just notice the difference between me saying "I am going
to fail tomorrow" versus "My pesky judge saboteur says I'm
going to fail tomorrow." Do you see the difference?
Do you feel the difference?
You take away the power, the credibility of these nasty
characters in your head the moment you label them,
recognize them as not your friend.
Label them as they show up and let go.
And that gets us-- so that's how you weaken your saboteur.
In the book there are other strategies for how to weaken
your saboteurs.
The second strategy--
remember the first strategy was weaken your saboteur.
Second strategy is, OK, if you can weaken the bad guy but can
also strengthen the good guy or gal inside of you, and
that's your sage.
Now one of the key things about the sage is the sage
perspective.
And the sage perspective is a radical departure from how
your saboteurs have do you deal with life's challenges
and difficulties.
And here's the sage perspective.
Every outcome or circumstance can be turned into a gift and
opportunity.
Every outcome or circumstance can be turned into a gift and
opportunity.
And a key way to strengthen your sage is to actually begin
to embrace that perspective.
Now to help you embrace that perspective I want to share
with you a story, and also share with you a little bit of
an experiment somebody did to prove this hypothesis.
So first, the story.
And it's a story that comes from Taoist China.
And it's a stallion story, where--
it's a story of a farmer who lives on a farm with his
stallion and--
by the way, before I tell you this story, let
me ask you the question.
If you have a prized possession in your life, and
your most important prized possession gets stolen, do you
think that's a good thing or a bad thing?
Most of you would say, with the normal mindsets, of course
that's a bad thing.
What kind of stupid question is that?
If a loved one falls down and breaks their leg, is that a
good thing or a bad thing?
Once again, stupid question.
Of course it's a bad thing.
And basically the sage says, nonsense to that.
The sage says it's a gift and opportunity.
And that's what this stallion story is about.
So this farmer lives on a farm, and he has a prized
possession, his stallion.
He enters the stallion into a
competition in a nearby village.
And the stallion wins first prize.
His neighbors come to congratulate him, and the
farmer says, "Who knows what's good and what's bad," which is
a very puzzling response.
The thieves in the neighborhood have found out
that this stallion has won first prize.
It's more precious.
So they come and steal the stallion.
The neighbors come to bring condolences.
Once again, the farmer says, "Who knows what's good and
what's bad." Again, a very puzzling response.
Another couple of weeks pass, and the stallion, who is very
free spirited, he runs away from his captors, finds his
way back to the farmer's farm, and has befriended all of
these beautiful wild mares, and comes to the farm with all
these precious wild mares, in addition to himself.
The neighbors come to bring their congratulations.
Once again, the farmer says, "Who knows what is good and
what is bad." Another week or so passes, and the farmer's
teenage son is riding one of these wild mares to tame it,
and he's thrown to the ground and breaks his leg.
The neighbors come to bring their condolences, and once
again, the farmer says, "Who knows what is good and what is
bad."
Another week or so passes.
By the way, by now you have noticed this village is a very
eventful village.
Every week something monumental happens.
I'd like to live in that village.
It's exciting.
So another week or so passes.
A war has broken in the area.
The Imperial Army's coming to every village to conscript
able-bodied adults, and they have to bypass his son, the
farmer's son, because he has a broken leg.
By this time in the story, the neighbors have gotten the
picture, right?
They don't even bother to come and bring their
congratulations because they know what the
farmers going to say.
What is the farmer going to say?
"Who knows what is good and what is bad." Now, there is
one thing about this story that's
different from our sage.
In this story, the farmer miraculously passively waits
for the bad thing to turn into the good thing.
Now our sage is very active.
Our sage says, "I can and I shall turn this bad thing into
a gift and opportunity." So please, if you miss your
numbers for the quarter, do not go to your manager and
say, "Boss, I have missed all my numbers, but who knows what
is good and what is bad." Don't do that.
Say, "I have made mistakes here, but I know how to turn
it into a gift and opportunity."
And once you do that, once you assume the sage perspective of
everything can be turned into a gift and opportunity, your
brain shifts to the region of the brain that's your positive
intelligence brain.
That brain is far more capable of being resourceful.
And one of the most powerful, inspiring examples that a
researcher by the name of Richard Wiseman did to prove
this point is that he actually brought some study subjects
that were running on low positive
intelligence, in his terms.
They felt unlucky and things like that, versus another
group that runs on high positive intelligence who are
feeling lucky and optimistic and that kind of thing.
He gave both groups this challenge that said, there's
this newspaper that I've created.
The newspaper had many, many pages.
Find out how many pictures are in this newspaper as quickly
as you can and you get a reward if you find the right
number really fast.
The first group that was running on low positive
intelligence, they paged through every page in the
newspaper really painstakingly, counted all
those pictures, and proudly announced within about two
minutes on average-- two minutes on average they said,
"Hey, there are 43 pictures on this newspaper."
They felt very proud of themselves that they performed
and got the right number.
Here's the interesting challenge.
The second group, who are running more on high positive
intelligence, they came back within 10 seconds and gave the
right answer.
You know why and how?
They saw that on the second page of the newspaper, the
entire half of the newspaper in two-inch high letters said,
"Stop counting.
There are 43 pictures in this newspaper."
That's how a brain that's running on positive
intelligence region operates.
It sees opportunities.
It sees the panoramic view.
It's not tunnel vision.
The question I have for you is, how many of you are having
your life be difficult and your work be difficult because
your saboteurs are telling you it's just so.
Because the part of your brain that is used in the no pain,
no gain-- used to life being difficult, and challenges
being stressful, is running you, versus the part that can
figure out on second page, the answer is right there.
The easy answer is right in front of your nose.
The sage perspective is not a matter of spiritual leap of
faith, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you believe in the sage perspective, your brain shifts
into the region that will be able to actually turn whatever
the challenge, difficulty, failure, even your failures
and mistakes, and turns them actively into gifts and
opportunities.
It's not a matter of faith.
It's a matter of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Your saboteurs are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So is your sage.
And once you actually activate the sage, with this
perspective you actually get automatic access, because of
that part of your brain, to five powerful sage powers.
And what I do in the book is show you that every life
challenge or every work challenge can be handled by a
combination of these five powers that you have
it inside of you.
If you shift to that region, you'll tap into it.
And you'll be able to handle all your challenges without
ever resorting to things that make you anxious and negative.
And these five powers are empathize--
rather than beating yourself up and beating other people up
when difficulties happen, can you be
compassionate with yourself.
You have access to that in positive intelligence brain.
Explore--
can you be a fascinated anthropologist with great
excitement, figure out what's going wrong, rather than the
shame or blame or difficulty or anxiety.
Innovate--
can you be truly out of the box?
The positive intelligence brain is wired for creativity.
The survival brain is not a very creative brain.
It gets stuck in the box.
If you have shifted yourself, you have access to far more
creativity.
Navigate--
when you generate lots of options, can you navigate your
path and figure the option that's more aligned with your
deeper sense of purpose and meaning-- the part where your
song lives?
That's how you end up singing your true song in the world.
And finally, activate--
and with activate, the way I describe it is
like the Jedi activate.
When the Jedi is being attacked by lots of enemies at
the same time, the Jedi takes action with complete focus and
complete peace.
There is no anger, there's no stress, there's nothing.
There's just pure action.
Can you move into action with the clarity and calm
and focus of a Jedi?
That's why, again, your positive
intelligence brain gets you.
Survival brain has you take action with all this drama and
all this waste of energy-- emotional and mental energy,
so your action is not going to be as impactful.
And again, the book is all about how different people--
real-life leaders, CEOs that I've coached--
have used these five powers to achieve both greater happiness
and also effectiveness.
And that brings us, finally, to the last of the three
strategies, which is strengthen
the PQ brain region.
This one is about going right to the heart of the matter.
How do you make sure you build the brain muscle that
automatically has you be much more in the positive
intelligence region of your brain, rather than the
survival brain.
The first two strategies were at the psychological level.
This strategy is at the neurological level.
So those brain regions that I talked about-- the ancient way
of making sure you shift to that brain region--
what do you think the ancient way has been?
Meditation.
So meditation has been the ancient way, proven beyond any
doubt now by researchers that has a profound, lasting impact
if you regularly meditate.
Here is the problem.
About 10 years ago, I started requiring every one of my CEO
clients to do 20 minutes of meditation a day, or anybody
who wanted to be my client.
Everybody promised-- not a single person said no.
What percentage of them do you think actually did it?
About 10 percent.
The problem with meditation, I found, is that it's not simple
and actionable.
For a vast majority of people, it's not a tool that works,
unfortunately.
Even though if you use that tool, it's a
very profound tool.
So I went back to the functional MRI and the studies
and tried to find another way where we can activate that
region of the brain without it being such a high bar.
And what that way is is what I call a PQ rep, a positive
intelligence--
PQ stands for positive intelligence.
You need to get about 100 PQ reps a day for--
and what a PQ rep is, it's 10 seconds of bringing your full
attention, as much as you can, to any of your physical
sensations.
And it's something you can do any minute of any day in the
middle of anything that you're doing.
For example, right this moment, begin to feel the
weight of your whole body on your butt.
You have been sitting on your butt, but have you been aware
of your butt?
No.
You haven't.
You have been in your head.
So become aware of your butt right now, for
the next ten seconds.
And that will activate a region your brain that ends up
building your positive intelligence capabilities.
Or it can be any sensations.
Rub two fingertips against each other with such exquisite
attention that you can feel the fingertip
ridges on both fingers.
If you do that for 10 seconds, you'll be able to actually
activate that part of the brain.
The most common way, the next few breaths, feel the rising
and falling of your chest or stomach with
your next few breaths.
More fun ways, even when you're not in the middle of a
meeting, next time you have lunch, can you, for God's
sake, just a few bites, a few bitefuls, can you actually,
exquisitely taste the amazing taste of what you have put in
your mouth?
Can you close your eyes for 10 seconds and really feel what
it is you put in your mouth?
When you're taking a shower, can you feel the
water on your skin?
Can you hear the sound of the water?
When you're hugging your loved one-- this is my favorite--
next time you're hugging your loved one, can you hold on for
10 seconds?
Long enough to actually feel their heartbeat,
or feel their breathing?
It will have an impact on your relationship.
So what I have done, hopefully, with this third
strategy is again, make it simple and actionable.
Can you get a few PQ reps a day?
An hour, so that it builds up to about 100.
I have shown you that you just got three PQ, three or four
right now, sitting here.
You can get there.
The question is, will you?
One of the other final insights I want to show you
about this third strategy is the following.
One of my biggest mistakes through many years of trying
to transform myself into a much happier person, a more
capable person, was the lie of the insight model.
The lie of the insight model is, if only I
read the right book.
If only I get the right insight, and get the answers,
I'm going to be transformed.
The lie there is that actually, in reality, personal
transformation is more of a fitness model.
You would never go to a workshop on physical fitness,
come back and say, honey, I'm fit for life.
I figured it out.
You will never do that.
You'll say, "I'm motivated to go to the gym every day," but
then you've got to go to the gym every day.
My work has been-- because these are muscles.
These are brain muscles that need to be developed and
maintained.
My job has been, show you how fun and easy it can be.
Your job is, do you care enough for an orbital shift to
a much higher level of sustained happiness and
effectiveness?
Do you care enough to put as much attention on it as you
did in learning how to play golf, or tennis, or all sorts
of other things you do every day?
So I'd like to begin to wrap up by basically pointing you
to PositiveIntelligence.com.
It's where you can find a free 5 minute saboteur assessment
to figure out a bar chart of your top saboteurs.
In a couple of minutes, you get an assessment of your
positive intelligence--
what is your PQ score, so how are you doing, and then keep
track of your progress.
And please send me emails on your progress because I love
to know what this work is doing in the world.
The dream that I have is the following.
I believe by figuring out the roots--
the root level of what creates much higher happiness and
productivity, that we now finally, after all these
centuries, can create a world where in 20, 30, 40 years,
we'll basically be reading Thoreau's haunting and
heartbreaking quote and say it used to be like that.
And the dream will come alive, really, when we finally begin
to teach our children this.
Imagine how insane it is that we teach our kids literature,
and history, and math, and everything, except we don't
teach them probably the most important thing, which is
mastery over their own mind.
The science and technology of happiness and highest
performance--
why do we not teach this stuff?
So help me make sure in 20, 30 years we are teaching this in
every high school.
Imagine the kind of world we're going to
build if you do that.
And one final thing I want to say about that.
If you want to spread a fire, you need to
possess the fire yourself.
You cannot spread that fire unless you have let the fire
inside your own heart and mind.
Please light it.
You're worth it.
You deserve a lot more happiness and peace of heart,
peace of mind.
You deserve a lot more effectiveness in reaching your
true potential in the world.
And this hopefully, I've shown you a way to do that.
For final sense of how universal this is, I just want
to show you this last slide.
This is my little girl [? Tisa ?].
I had missed her a lot after a week of being on a trip.
She hugged me and it is a spontaneous kiss that we had.
Somebody took a picture.
But I'm just showing you this final thing because I want to
show you how universal the saboteur phenomenon is.
She's a real angel, right, in this picture?
I want to show you her demon.
She has an Incredible demon inside of her.
She had created this little 5 1/2 by 11 thing for me and my
wife, saying, "I love you, Mommy and Daddy." And we just
loved it so much, we put it on the
bedroom door in our bedroom.
So then once she got it, she wanted to do something and I
held really hard boundaries with her.
And she was really upset with me and went away.
And a few hours later, I was passing the corridor, and
passed the door to my bedroom, and this is what I saw.
So not only had she crossed out "Daddy," but to make sure
I got the message, she put No up there.
So she has a little demon inside of her, the saboteur.
I told her, it hurt my feelings, whatever, I helped
her shift to the sage mode.
And the next day she actually said to me, "Daddy, I have a
surprise for you.
Close your eyes." She held my hand, brought me to the front
of the bedroom.
This is what she had done.
She had actually cut out the bottom, replaced it
with the new Daddy.
And what I said to you before is every challenge and problem
is a gift and opportunity.
Look.
Daddy is now bigger than Mommy.
Daddy is bigger than Mommy.
The whole thing just worked out great.
This stuff works.
Please go do it.
And thank you for your time.
I'll stay here for your questions.
Thank you.
Thank you.