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.
