Excel on the Job

Anita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth. To help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Shirzad Chamine, who is the author of Positive Intelligence. We're going to talk a lot about that today. And chairman of CTI, a premier organization that has trained coaches and leaders in most of the Fortune 500 companies.

He has personally coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams. Prior to becoming CEO of CTI, Shirzad was the CEO of an enterprise software company. Currently, he is also on the faculty of Yale and Stanford, where he lectures, at Stanford specifically, on positive intelligence. Thank you so much for being part of this call today.

Shirzad Chamine: Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be talking to the Chicago Booth audience.

Anita Brick: Let's kick off with something kind of basic. I know positive intelligence, or PQ, is the frame of reference that you use to help people realize the maximum of their potential as business leaders. Tell us how PQ can help someone excel on the job.

Shirzad Chamine: Yeah, the subtitle of the book is “Why only 20% of teams and individuals achieve their full potential.” The premise is that your positive intelligence quotient, which is your PQ score, really, it's measuring the percentage of time that your mind is serving you as opposed to sabotaging it. So instantly, I'm introducing the fact that every single human I know, including myself, spends certain periods of time self-sabotaging without even being aware of it.

Clearly, you can have a whole lot of strengths and build a whole lot of flow. But if you have a saboteur that then destroys half of the building or some of it, then you're not ambitious as not as if you were able to get rid of that sabotage and only be left with your friends.

Anita Brick: What are some things to be aware of? I mean, how do you even identify what your saboteur or saboteurs are?

Shirzad Chamine: Yeah. Let me give some names to them. They have 10 of them altogether. They have names like the judge, the controller, the victim, the pleaser, the avoider, the stickler. Everybody has the judge saboteur, the universal saboteur. And then there's an assessment, a free assessment, a positive intelligence outcome. It takes five minutes and it's free. And that assessment helps you figure out what is your other top saboteur. Or it's your bar chart of your saboteur.

One thing I do want to say about that well. Who are these guys and where do they come from? They are mind patterns, belief systems, habitual ways of thinking and reacting at the end, forming in our early childhood. And they are initially ways that we come to learn to survive in the world.

So let me answer: emotionally, these habits, those are initially your buddies, can help you survive. The problem is they get entrenched in your mind. You become unconscious that they even exist. And then you're adults. They are no longer serving you. They are just left standing between you and really being your full potential.

Anita Brick: Once you know what those are—and that's great. Thank you so much for access to the assessment. Now let's say that someone is a judge and a controller and an avoider. What does someone do once they know what that configuration looks like? What can they do to turn that around or to minimize the impact of the saboteurs?

Shirzad Chamine: So the real problem is saboteurs. First and foremost, the toughest job I do with people is to help them see that these characters are not their friend, but their enemy, because each of them lie to you. The controller tells you unless you try to control everything that moves around you, nothing ever gets done. The stickler tells you unless you do everything perfectly, you're not going to succeed.

The judge tells you that unless I keep beating you up all the time about your flaws and shortcomings and mistakes, you're going to get lazy and not amount to anything ambitious. Each of these guys have lies that are so convincing … when I see somebody say, well, that's one of my favorites, my friends. So the first step is to really, really, really call them on their lies and realize that actually, you don't need to be beating yourself up all the time.

You don't need to be so tough. You don’t need to have perfection all the time, and you have a stick. Something, all of these things. So the first thing is exposing the lie so that we create a mugshot of the enemy, the internal enemy. The mugshot basically says, here's the name of my saboteur, here’s the lie it tells me, and here’s the pattern. And here is typically when it gets triggered in me. That’s the way I feel when the controller, the stickler, that a lot of these … When these guys get me triggered, this is how I feel. After you kind of recognize all of that, which again, the assessment can really help with.

But what you are left with is knowledge that when you have feelings and negative feelings—stress, anxiety, shame, guilt, sense of insecurity, all of these feelings that are a negative feeling—you realize that every single one of these things has been generated by the saboteurs, and that becomes the way that you catch these guys in action. So you're sitting in the middle of a meeting with your boss, and all of a sudden you start feeling the sense of all of, of stuff getting frustrated or disappointed or insecure and, you know, these, you instantly know, oh, I'm being hijacked by my saboteur. At that point, what we do …

Anita Brick: But before you go on, what if the words of sabotage come out of the mouth of someone else? It's one thing to judge yourself. But what about when someone else is judging you? It doesn't look like it's coming internally. It looks like it's out there. How do you resolve that?

Shirzad Chamine: Yeah, that's a wonderful question. And indeed that's part of the power of this framework, which shows you from a background in neuroscience, what happens is people have mirror neurons, which typically mimic each other's brains, but unconsciously and automatically, which means if the person in front of you, if your colleague or your boss or your spouse is coming from the judge saboteur, or any of the other major saboteurs, then unless you're very conscious in doing this practice, you will automatically be shifted to your saboteur.

So let's say your boss is coming from the judge saboteur. And if you have the control saboteur, then if you are not careful, you will automatically then be hijacked by your controller. And what that meeting will become is a battle between his judge and your controller, which is what all conflicts are made of. So the first thing that I say is the moment you see their saboteur come up, you need to be doing what I call PQ reps. You do some 10 second reps that literally shift your brain to the part of your brain that quiets the saboteur and gives rise to its opposite, so that at the very least, you're not hijacked by your own. You don't escalate the problem.

Anita Brick: Give me a scenario. So let's say you and I are going over a big project plan with you. There is this very intense capitalization of this project, and I miss something. And all of a sudden you're all over it and you're like, OK, you must have missed a lot of other things too. And my judging saboteur comes up. How do I have the composure to, in the moment, not get sucked into all that? What do I do practically to not get sucked into that?

Shirzad Chamine: If I have composure and I connect that to literally brain muscles, which I call positive intelligence brain. How strong are the muscles of that region of your brain? Do you have the stamina to withstand a saboteur attack? And that's where positive intelligence comes in. If you have low positive intelligence—80% of people have a level lower than what they need to reach their potential—then you will be hijacked.

So how do you then feature positive intelligence and build up stamina? So basically there are three ways to do that. One is to identify the bad guys, the saboteurs in your head. And we can then—there are strategies for that. The other is to strengthen the good guy in your head, I call that the sage. And there are some strategies for that.

And the third one, which is very simple, very powerful, is to literally build up brain muscles in the region that I call your PQ brain. You literally are of two brains. You are neurochemically of two brains. One region of your brain, as I call it, is a survival brain. That region uses a lot of your limbic system, a lot of your left brain. That a region of your brain is literally wired to be anxious, to be upset, to react, to always run on negativity because those types of actions were actually helpful for our ancestors to be paranoid and run away from anything that looks like a tiger so they survive.

The problem is that that region is not wired to feel any peace or calm or curiosity or any of this good stuff. It’s just wired to feel that negativity. So one of the things you need to do is build up the muscles in the other region … which consists in more of that middle prefrontal cortex…. The good news is that those muscles build up incredibly fast when you start practicing what I call the 10-second moment, where you literally bring your attention as much as possible for 10 seconds to some physical sensation.

So right now as people are listening to this podcast, you're sitting in your chair, not really feeling your weight on your seat. Really feel that whole weight of your body on your seat, or start noticing your next few breaths. Really be conscious of your breath. If you do any of these things for 10 seconds, psychology teaches you that you are shifting your mind to the positive aspect of the mind which has access to the sage with them and all these great things that they're talking about, and a regimen of 100 PQ reps a day and really build up and maintain those muscles. And you can do that while you're taking a shower, brushing your teeth while you're eating, while you're exercising.

You can do it while you're sitting in a meeting. It's so easy to get to 100, and that will build the stamina so that when you're sitting across a boss who is yelling at you from a judge avatar, instead of reacting with your controller or judge or victim's avatar, you will just be feeling your butt on the seat and sit on the floor, shifting your mind to the positive and telling your friend, which then gives you the wisdom to say, OK, my boss is completely hijacked right now. What will be the right course of action that will serve me and serve the cause of this project, and maybe even get this thought shifted to a better part of their own brain?

Anita Brick: In very practical terms, there are some questions from students and alumni about being stuck in one way or another. For example, one person was saying that he's been told that he's not an easy person to get along with, and he said he knows it, but he's not really sure what to do to change it because it's really hampering his career.

So if someone knows it sounds like maybe he's a little abrasive or maybe he's the judge, how does someone change their interaction with others? How does someone do that in very practical terms, so that they feel like they're making progress and they can see the progress?

Shirzad Chamine: In this particular case, this person probably has a strong number of habits or I'm not sure which one it might. It could be the judge saboteur. It could be a hyper rational saboteur, which is a saboteur some very smart, brilliant people have. The saboteur that promises you the only thing that really matters is the rational mind and that everything should be handled to their logical channel, which actually is quite destructive to relationships, because relationships are not really a matter of the rational mind over matter of emotions and connection and and trust and loyalty, those are not rational concepts. They're more emotional concepts.

Or, it could be the controller, could be the avoider, it could be any number of these things that have problems with the relationship. So there once again, I would say you want to awaken yourself, become aware that these guys are running the show for you and they do destroy relationships. So the other strategy that I talked about is increasing the power of your sage.

Sage has five powers and one of them is the power to emphasize and have the parentheses. So people will typically have these kinds of relationship troubles. They don't have much access to those powers in their mind to really empathize with other human beings. They have shut out the ability to really tune and connect and put themselves in the shoes of the other.

And as you do any of these exercises I’m talking about, automatically they access this highway in your brain I call the empathy circuitry. That highway gets traffic down more and neural pathways will build more and more in that area. So you’ll find literally sitting in front of another person that you used to be disconnected with just sitting there and noticing that you really can connect with them a lot more deeply at an emotional, trusting level.

And they begin to trust you more because they know that you have empathy for them. It literally is a brain muscle that you can build. Everybody can be far more empathic if they shift their brains in the positive intelligence part of their brain. That automatically gives them access to these powers that help relationships.

Anita Brick: It's a very important point because without an ability to empathize, you're missing so much information and even an ability to get greater productivity from your team.

Shirzad Chamine: Yeah, absolutely. And let me give you a very, very specific example of a technique here. Let’s say the good guy or gal in your head has five powers. One of them is empathy. For each of these powers, I have what I call a power gain to make it easy for you to access that power in your brain.

So what is the power gain for empathize? The empathize power. And it is what I call visualize the child. Visualize the child. So you're sitting there with somebody that you typically don't have much empathy for, partially because probably your judge saboteur is constantly looking at what's wrong with this person, what I don't like about this person. So you’re sitting across from them and feeling no empathy. And of course they're going to pick up on that. People pick up on this stuff.

So what do you do? I have the Visualize a Child power game as you're sitting across them and you begin to go back to your mind to visualize what this person must have been like when he or she was five years old. Imagine them on a playground. Imagine them on a beach, building a sandcastle, right? I'm curious and excited and joyous, running around, imagining how they would act, how they would feel, how they would…. It is almost impossible to see the five year old in somebody and not feel some compassion and caring for them.

And as you really look at every human face, when you stop seeing their saboteur and see past that, you will see that child still running around and, curious and wide-eyed and joyful and wanting to care and be cared for and all those things, and that instantly shifts the way you feel about them. That's an example.

Anita Brick: It's a great example because if there is this barrier, if it's like saboteur to saboteur, then I'm not going to have a dialogue with you. I might have a monologue, you might have a monologue, but we're not going to get anywhere. And someone has to step up and say, OK, I'm going to look beyond this. And that's a very, very concrete way to do it.

And our audience is very largely quantitatively focused and what you just suggested is very qualitative. It's very subjective. Those are the kinds of skills that are required to get to senior management, because people can be great technically, but if they don't have these other really strong, powerful interpersonal skills, they can never get to those senior positions.

Shirzad Chamine: A lot of times I'm asked a question: I'm a junior person. I'm very good technically. How do I get a senior-level position? And what I tell them is this: number one, number two, and number three priority that I need to have is relationship. Relationship. Relationship leadership is all about the power to persuade. Persuasion is based on relationship and trust.

The question is how do I build my relationships? And that's where a highly quantitative audience that you're talking about, that's in trouble. I myself used to have some of them—got a master's degree in electrical engineering and used to work for AT&T Bell Labs, and believe that my greatest strength really was my rational mind. And that got me into a lot of trouble because I had the hyper rational saboteur thinking that everything could be resolved that way.

I learned the hard way that actually, when it comes to relationships, the most important thing is emotions and signals that are invisible signals: body language, trust, intimacy, vulnerability. All of these things are things that are not in the rational channel. And the harder you think of what's going on in a moment, the more disconnected you are from that important channel.

Because busy, busy thinking expands you more and more to the survival brain, where you are interacting with somebody. So your saboteur is completely disconnected from how is this person feeling in this moment, is there trust in this moment? If there is no trust, how do I shift the … to completely miss out on the most important signals of a relationship, to a really busy trying to rationally figure out at the moment attention to the wrong part of your brain?

And the way I describe it is, it's like you are a hammer, that because most of the success of that school comes from using the hammer of the rational mind, you see everything as a nail. Relationship is absolutely not a rational construct.

Anita Brick: You're absolutely right. Without relationships, you can't get things done. I think it starts earlier than senior management, leveraging that intelligence without the other piece is very, very limiting.

Shirzad Chamine: All I want to say is the research has proven—Daniel Goleman has research on emotional intelligence that shows that rational skills become increasingly important. As you go up in your right, you need to have enough of it to get your foot in the door. But once you're inside, your success is completely dependent on what you call the non-technical, non-cognitive skills of emotional intelligence. And I'm defining positive intelligence. That's an even more important set of skills that goes with that.

Anita Brick: I agree with you, and there's certainly been extensive research to support both IQ and PQ. One of the evening students asked, this was a different vantage point. So you're not someone with ten, 15, 20 years in a functional area wanting to get into general management. But here is a student. He asked, because if you could boil your experience down to a single lesson, what's one piece of advice you would give someone who is beginning a new position?

So here's someone with a clean slate, new company, new position. They know him a little bit because of the interview process, but beyond that, they don't really know him, and he has the ability to craft how he's going to be perceived. It sounds like one of the first things you should do is go to PositiveIntelligence.com and do the assessment to find out his saboteurs, but what else would you suggest that he do?

Shirzad Chamine: And the suggestion is what you just made. And I want to give a little bit of context. So there's a formula in the book that I use and says achievement equals potential multiplied by to be a positive kind of. So this person who is starting at the job has a huge lot of potential. And by potential in this formula, I mean the potential is made up of your IQ, of your IQ, your skills, knowledge, experience, all of these things.

And even though you are going into this job and you're a beginner, you’ve got to be careful about the fact that you shouldn't sell yourself short. You have been busy building your potential all your life. Everything you've ever read, everything you've ever experienced, all of your skills, all of your knowledge goes into this column that makes up your potential.

Then the question is how much of that potential you're actually going to achieve in this job and in achievement equals potential multiplied by two. That's where your biggest and fastest way to make sure more of your potential is achieved in this job, or anything else you do, is to increase your positive intelligence. Here’s the challenge. Your potential cannot be dramatically improved in a short period of time.

It's already huge. There's already so many things in the column that make up the special. If you try to just go learn and learn a new skill and learn and learn and learn and new knowledge, that's just adding a little bit incrementally to your potential problem. But to be a positive intelligence guy, you can increase that part of the formula by a third in just a couple of months. That's the fastest way for you to make sure that you're in my column.

Anita Brick: That's great. So here is a situation. This time from a weekend student, he said. I've been working for about five years and I'm easily taken over by the latest fire drill, and they're not usually my priorities. They're other people's priorities. That said, I don't feel that I'm building the strategic perspective I need to succeed because I'm overwhelmed by the small stuff.

I’d like you to frame the answer to this by how would you apply the Three Gifts technique to his seemingly negative situation?

Shirzad Chamine: There are a couple of things about what's going on when somebody tells you that they feel overwhelmed and they talk about fire drills. I instantly say, well, guess which part of your brain is getting active when these things are happening? It's a survival brain. And the survival brain gets you lost in what's happening with that fire and you constantly lose perspective because that region of the brain really is not capable of a bigger perspective.

So the first thing and the most important thing that you need is to literally shift the part of your brain that has the capacity for a bigger picture. There is one part of your brain. It's the middle prefrontal cortex, which is the only part of your brain that literally can rise above itself at a higher vantage point and look down and see yourself in thinking, see yourself in acting as the observer part of you. So if you want to rise yourself above the fray and not be lost in the rollercoaster in the fire drill, you literally need to shift the part of your brain that's activated to the part that's capable of doing that.

That's a piece of your positive intelligence, right? How do you do that? The way you do that is simply in the moment where you’re about to get lost in the rollercoaster and the latest fire drill. Instead of going with that frenzy, you do the opposite. You bring as much of your attention, 10 seconds at a time, to the physical sensations.

You do this PCA and what that will allow you to do is shift the part of your brain that sees the bigger picture, hears you in front of this fire drill, and instructs you about, is this thing worthy of going out there, or do you want to actually separate yourself from this? I'm saying there's a much better way to go upstream and take care of the thing that's causing all these fires to happen to begin with.

So then you start walking away from the little, the little symptoms of the problem. Go work two days on the actual root of the problem, and you'll be the hero in the organization because they say, wow, I've been fighting the fire for five years now, and you fix it at the root level. Now, you don't have as many fires, and the only way you are able to do that is by not getting hijacked in the moment, by your saboteur. Making it can be very, very simple and you have to watch how your brain is activated. That's the best part of your brain that could be serving you right now.

Anita Brick: And how does the three gifts technique fit into that, or does it?

Shirzad Chamine: The three gifts technique? I use it in a different type of place, and that is when something quote unquote bad has happened and people are really upset about it, and it's that they're hijacked by their saboteurs thinking and talking about it. And that gets us to talk about the content. Part of The Saboteur is the sage voice in you.

The most important thing about the sage is the sage perspective. And the sage perspective is that absolutely everything that happens, everything that happens, every outcome and every everything that happens to you is a gift, an opportunity. Everything is a gift, an opportunity. So let's say you work really, really hard to get this big client, and you get the big client, and then the client fires you.

Your biggest client just fired you. And I literally have had the sales coaching call … to start with me and say, I'm really pissed off right now. I'm in a bad mood. I just lost our biggest client. What I do in a coaching problem like that is that the three gifts that I asked … I literally said I'm not willing to continue this conversation, because right now you're totally stuck in the judge saboteur. And I was saying, this is a bad, bad thing that just happened. I lost my biggest client. That may sound reasonable as a conclusion, but it's a lie of the judge that they will tell you that actually, even this crazy thing about losing this client is a gift, an opportunity.

And you will not continue this conversation unless you tell me at least three possible ways you are saying and my. Yeah, yeah, even the loss of your greatest client will have turned out to be a huge gift and opportunity for you. And of course, when I first bring this up, the other factor says, what the heck are you talking about? There's no …

Anita Brick: Right.

Shirzad Chamine: And the person saying that is the judge that’s in their head. That's so certain that something is that they say, no, not just a gift. But then I tell them I will not continue the conversation. So you should just tell me at least three ways to send me a gift. And after I'm gone, they have to—they begin to ship off their judge and say, OK, yeah, maybe if I really put this under my first, you're going to find, what are all the reasons that this client that fired does not hear really, really curious about it.

Maybe they find flaws with our product or with our pricing, or with our sales technique that will have us, after we fix them, it will have us gain 15 clients of that size. And in terms of if that opportunity or it will have us become aware of a major flaw in what we do, that is about to have us be leapfrogged by the competition.

And maybe this thing is actually going to save the company from going bankrupt because it's a wake-up call to really look at something to prevent us from doing so. They come up with those things, and then by the time they have come up with those things, their energy has shifted from the certainty that they have just been .. by a terrible, terrible thing to a place that says, well, how do I turn this into a gift and opportunity? And imagine how their energy is shifting now and how much more capable they are in actually turning this quote unquote bad thing and indeed turning it into something that's useful.

So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sage perspective is a self-fulfilling prophecy you can turn anything into, I guess, and adjust perspective as also stuff will thank prophecy if it keeps telling you this is a bad, bad, bad thing to happen, you're going to be deflated, you're going to be upset, you're going to be energized, and you'll turn a bad thing into the worst thing

because you're just not focusing on the right stuff right here on into survival. Right? So each prospect is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The question is, which one do you choose to live?

Anita Brick: Absolutely. I mean, one is completely debilitating and the other one can actually be emancipatory. I love the three gift technique. Sometimes I'm sure people say, you're kidding, right? Do you have time for one more question?

Shirzad Chamine: Yeah.

Anita Brick: OK, great. Just to kind of frame things up, you've talked about a lot of really wonderful things. Know your saboteurs, know how to leverage your sage. And we talked about how to apply it to different situations. Someone who's listening wants to begin to better position themselves in their career by increasing their PQ. What are three things that they could start doing right now?

Shirzad Chamine: Again, there are three strategies to increasing their PQ and weakening their saboteurs: go to the saboteur assessment and figure out their internal enemies. So anytime they show up, you know not to listen to those guys and not be hijacked. Right? On the other strategy, increase the power of your sage—your sage has the five powers and look at the book.

Learn the power game like that. Visualize a child by and assert that you. So then the back of your mind. You can play that game in the middle of a meeting, or in the morning, or at night, or whenever, so that you get access to those great powers of your mind that are going on tap. And the third and the most critical, and I can't overemphasize this, is the following.

The third strategy, obviously, you have to cure brain muscles. Here is something I’d like your audience to really think hard and long about. For the longest time, I used to think that the way to do personal transformation is read a book and be done with it, or go to a workshop and you are not transformed but you know what needs to be done.

But the real scenario is a little bit more like a physical fitness model, where you wouldn't imagine going to a workshop for today and doing physical fitness and coming home and telling your wife, honey, I'm done, I'm going to set for life. The model is more like, oh, in order to remain physically fit, I need to build muscle. Then I need to maintain those muscles. It needs to be a daily practice. And the same thing is, if you really want to achieve your potential, you really want to have a high positive mindset and maintain it. You’ve got to realize that there really is a brain map on the positive and thousands of brain muscles you need to do, honestly, to rest.

Today in the book, I talk about how extremely easy and fun it is to do that, but then you need to do it every day to maintain the tone and strength of those muscles. That's what will help you not get hijacked by the saboteurs and shift to the big perspective. And all of that great stuff that great leaders are capable of doing.

And you can get those because even while you're eating, to be more focused on what you're eating and enjoy it more. While you're driving, while you're taking a shower, while you're doing exercise, taking the dog for a walk. It's so easy to incorporate in your daily life, but it's a muscle to develop and maintain. How committed is your mental fitness? Are you committed to mental fitness as you are to your physical fitness? The question on that.

Anita Brick: Very good point. Well, good. And there is a chapter of the book up on the CareerCast site. I think I'm going to go do that free assessment at PositiveIntelligence.com and lots of other things there too. Thank you and thank you for this work. This is a very interesting shift. Assuming more responsibility for your own success and dare I say, happiness, and doing it in a way that is based on solid research and outcomes. Thank you very much and thank you for making the time for this call.

Shirzad Chamine: You're welcome. Anita, this has been a wonderful conversation. I appreciate the depth of your questions.

Anita Brick: Well, thank you and I look forward to staying in touch.

Shirzad Chamine: Take care.

Anita Brick: Bye, and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.