Measuring Mental Fitness (PQ)

Mental fitness is a measure of the strength of your positive mental muscles (Sage) versus the negative (Saboteur).  

Saboteurs react to challenges in ways that generate negative emotions such as stress, disappointment, self-doubt, regret, anger, shame, guilt, or worry.

Your Sage handles challenges through positive emotions like empathy, gratitude, curiosity, creativity, self-confidence, and calm, clear-headed, laser-focused action. 

The relative strength of your positive Sage versus negative Saboteurs is called PQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient).  

PQ is the measure of your Mental Fitness. It’s the best predictor of how happy you are and how well you perform relative to your potential. 

You can boost your PQ significantly with practice. 

Introducing the PQ Program!

Designed like a mental fitness Bootcamp, the PQ Program gives you the insights, motivation, and structure to practice 15 minutes per day for 7 weeks. 

The program combines weekly video sessions with daily app-guided practices to boost your 3 core mental fitness muscles. 

Weekly 1-hour Video Sessions

In these highly engaging sessions, Shirzad Chamine guides you through experiential exercises that deepen and personalize your understanding of the mental fitness tools. You leave inspired and energized for the week’s daily practices.

Exclusive App Guiding Your Daily Practice

Each day a different focus for daily practice is assigned through a personalized companion app available exclusively to program participants. 

This builds one small muscle at a time, laying down new neural pathways to form lasting positive habits of your mind. The cumulative impact by the program’s end is substantial.

Interactive PQ Gym

Innovative 10-second PQ Reps build up your Self-Command muscle. You learn to be clear-headed and calm even in the midst of great challenges, able to command your mind to shift from Saboteur to Sage response.

Daily Progress Tracking

The app tracks your daily progress against minimum targets associated with new neural pathway (muscle) formation. Personalized daily coaching tips from Shirzad continue to both encourage and challenge you to keep going. 

Cohort Community with Certified PQ Coach

Your coach remains an active member of your cohort community, answering your questions, providing coaching, support and facilitating accountability. Participants report the online cohort community to be key to sustaining their enthusiasm for daily practice. 

BONUS!

Two private 45-minute coaching sessions with Doni or a PQ Certified Coach (value $1000) to supercharge your learning and PQ muscle growth.

Click below to join our waitlist for the next PQ Program!

 8 Weeks of Inspired Practice

Week 1: Starting Strong Orientation & Introduction

Week 2: Boost Your Self-Command Muscle

The first week you learn innovative 10-second PQ Reps that boost your self-command. This enables you to run your brain rather than being run by your Saboteur-hijacked brain. Self-command is key to intercepting unhelpful mental habits and rewiring your brain to respond more effectively.  

• Try out and discover PQ Reps that are most effective for you.
• Reach the minimum target for PQ Reps/day to achieve rewiring goal within 6 weeks.
• Use the app’s breakthrough PQ Charge Meter to ensure optimal brain activation before important activities.
• Declare an audacious aspiration–what you want to achieve through this program.  

Week 3: Intercept the Judge Saboteur

For this entire week, you’ll intercept and weaken the most damaging Saboteur, the Judge. You discover how judging yourself, others, and circumstances is a key source of your stress and quite damaging to your performance. Most participants discover their Judge to be far more prevalent and damaging than they suspected. 

• Expose your Judge’s hidden lies, limiting beliefs, and negative patterns.
• Reveal your Judge’s impact on performance, relationships, and stress.
• Practice intercepting your Judge before it hijacks you.
• Rewire your negative neural pathways by redirecting the Judge response.

Week 4: Intercept your Accomplice Saboteurs

This week you intercept and weaken the top accomplice to your Judge Saboteur, identified through the Saboteur Assessment from the following: Avoider, Controller, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Rational, Hyper-Vigilant, Pleaser, Restless, Stickler, Victim. 

• Expose your accomplice Saboteur’s hidden lies, limiting beliefs and negative patterns.
• Reveal this Saboteur’s impact on performance, relationships, and stress.
• Discover how to quickly intercept this Saboteur before it hijacks you.
• Rewire your negative neural pathways by redirecting this Saboteur’s response.  

Week 5: Shift From Saboteur to Sage

After weakening your Saboteurs, it is now time to strengthen your Sage, the counterpart to your Saboteurs. Your Sage lives in an entirely different part of your brain, generates all your positive emotions, and achieves peak performance through a calm and clear mind. 

• Practice the Sage Perspective that every outcome or circumstance can be turned into a gift and opportunity.
• Use the 3 Gifts Technique to find the opportunity in setbacks. 
• Replace draining self-judgment with energizing self-acceptance and empathy.
• Boost speed of recovery from failures and setbacks.

Week 6: Boost the Sage Powers

The Sage region of the brain enables 5 primary powers. Analogous to the 3 primary colors, these 5 powers recombine to form all of the emotional intelligence competencies considered crucial to professional success. 

• Augment your mental toolbox with 5 Sage powers.
• Practice 3 techniques to activate each power.
• Know when to use which power–right tool at the right time.
• Boost emotional intelligence through combinations of the 5 primary powers.

Week 7: Take Clear-Headed, Laser-Focused Action

In our final week, you use your Sage’s Navigate and Activate powers to take clear-headed, laser-focused, decisive action.

• Use your Sage’s Navigate power to align your actions with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
• Use your Sage’s Activate power to act without fear or emotional distractions even in midst of great crises.
• Discover your Sage’s deep wisdom, far surpassing your analytical intelligence.
• Discover how your Sage generates your highest performance while enjoying every step–“in the zone.”

Week 8: Final Session — Sustain the Momentum

In this final session, you discover how to continue using your PQ tools for a variety of work and life applications.

• Learn how to further apply to peak performance in selling and persuading, conquering stress, managing conflict, and relationships mastery
• Discover how to use the PQ app to maintain your new mental muscles and Sage habits
• Chart your path to keep progressing towards your audacious aspirations
• Establish support and accountability agreements to sustain your momentum

The program requirements:

• The program is eight weeks in duration. We have a kick-off meeting week 1 and then conduct the program for 7 weeks, finishing up with a final pod meeting in week 8.
• You’re encouraged to read at least the first 8 chapters of the Positive Intelligence book (PDF provided at no cost or audio download) and complete the saboteur assessment.
• You will need to download the PQ app to your phone or mobile device that you will access every weekday for 15 minutes to engage in daily exercises building up your “PQ muscles” — it’s a slick, fun, engaging, and powerful tool!
• Each week, you will watch a video (over the weekend or on Monday) that covers that week’s PQ focus (1 hour/week)
• Each weekday, Tuesday through Friday, you will listen to the daily “Challenge” and then do “PQ reps” — a powerful mindfulness practice throughout the day on the PQ phone app (15 minutes/weekday)
• Each week we meet live for 1-hour to discuss progress, next steps and questions you may have about PQ. (60 minutes/week)

PQ Program vs. Traditional Training

Traditional training and development tends to have a short-lived impact for 3 reasons:  

1. Focus on insight rather than muscle. For example, the insight that being frustrated isn’t helpful doesn’t automatically lead to you not feeling frustrated. That would require mental muscles to shift brain activation.
2. Treating symptoms rather than cause. For example, teaching you techniques of active listening to improve empathy will have a temporary impact if your deeply-seated Judge Saboteur is not exposed and intercepted.
3. No common operating system. Since each training you attend uses a different framework—the 7 steps of managing conflict, the 5 secrets of managing time, etc.–the frameworks compete for mindshare and all fade away. 

Through extensive factor analysis research, PQ has identified the 10 root-level negative factors (Saboteurs) and the 5 primary powers (Sage). This enables a common operating system.  

All personal and professional development become applications of the PQ operating system. Whether learning to manage conflicts, manage time, or perform better under pressure, you’d apply the same exact operating system: 

1. Intercept Saboteurs
2. Issue Self-Command (through 10-second PQ Reps)
3. Mobilize Sage (Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, Activate)  

You’d be using one simple framework for a variety of applications, boosting root-level mental fitness.

This dramatically simplifies personal and professional development.  

Impact on Emotional Intelligence

Due to the power of factor analysis, the PQ Program boosts the root-level building blocks that automatically boost all 18 Emotional Intelligence competencies.