Positive Intelligence
Positive Intelligence names the automatic self-sabotaging voices in your head - the Judge and its accomplices - and trains a fast mental habit, the PQ Rep, that switches you into a calmer, more resourceful Sage response before you react.
Five cards lay out the Sage's full toolkit - Empathize sits first because it's usually the easiest door in, not because the other four are locked without it.
Reach for this when…
- Under pressure you go straight to self-criticism or control instead of curiosity.
- You can name your own pattern under stress but can't seem to interrupt it.
- A team defaults to blame or perfectionism the moment something goes wrong.
How to run it
- Learn to recognise the Judge and its nine accomplice saboteurs running your reactions.
- Take the Saboteur Assessment to identify your own top two or three.
- Practise a 10-second PQ Rep - a short sensory reset - to shift out of Saboteur brain.
- Use Empathize as the gateway into the Sage's other powers - Explore, Innovate, Navigate, Activate - for the live situation.
- Repeat daily; the shift only sticks with real repetition, not one insight.
A worked example
Situation. Somsri Boonmee co-founded a small project-management SaaS company in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and noticed she snapped into Controller mode - rewriting every release herself - the moment a deadline slipped.
Applied. She ran the Saboteur Assessment, confirmed Controller and Hyper-Achiever as her top two, and started using a 10-second PQ Rep before every stand-up where she felt the urge to take over.
Result. Deadlines still slipped sometimes, but she stopped rewriting her engineers' work at 11pm, and two of them started shipping faster once she backed off.
The catch
The 10-second rep sounds trivial and is easy to drop once the novelty wears off - it takes weeks of genuine repetition to change a habitual response, not one workshop. The saboteur language, handled carelessly, can tip into self-blame rather than insight, and the evidence for the model sits mostly within Chamine's own programme rather than independent replication.
Naming your saboteur is not the same as starving it. The Judge doesn't go quiet because you can spell its name.
Origin: Shirzad Chamine