Heal Your Mind

Your mind is your best friend. But it can also become your worst enemy.
Shirzad Shamine, author of “Positive Intelligence”

Why Would I Want to Take Care of My Mind?

Everything starts in the mind, and your internal experience of the world around you matters more than what is actually going on. I know you’ve heard me say this before, but I feel I can’t stress this enough because we humans have it all backward. Why? We were conditioned to trust so much in what our noses can smell, our skin can touch, our ears can hear, our tongue can taste, and especially what our eyes can see that it seems outrageous or woo-woo to trust something that is beyond sensory perception. However, we do it all the time!

How do you know you love someone? How do you know you’re happy or mad? Because you can feel it. Can you prove a feeling? Can you experience it with your five senses? No. However, it’s as real as the breakfast you ate in the morning. How about your memories? Try to remember something that made you happy or sad in the past, and you will probably experience those feelings again. So, even though nothing is happening in the external world, your internal experience is tangible.

The lemon experience

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine cutting a fresh, bright yellow lemon in half. Picture the juice dripping down as you slice through it. Now, bring that lemon half closer to your mouth and imagine biting into it, feeling the sharp, sour juice hit your tongue. Did your mouth just start watering? Did your face scrunch up a bit? Here’s the fascinating part – there’s no actual lemon! Yet your body responded as if there was. This simple experiment shows how powerful your mind is in creating very real physical responses.

Just like with the lemon, your thoughts and mental patterns create tangible experiences in your daily life. When you’re stuck in a toxic relationship, it’s not just an abstract concept – your body responds to the stress. When you’re building new habits, it’s not just about willpower – it’s about rewiring your mental pathways. Everything you experience, from joy to fear, from motivation to procrastination, begins as a thought in your mind. This is why mental fitness isn’t just a nice-to-have skill – it’s the foundation of every change you want to make in your life.

From a behavioral neuroscience perspective, this phenomenon can be explained by understanding how our brains process and prioritize information:

Sensory Bias: Our brains have evolved to prioritize sensory input, which is crucial for survival. The sensory cortices in our brain are extensive and highly developed, making sensory experiences vivid and immediate.
Interoception: The brain also processes internal bodily sensations and emotional states through interoception. The insula and anterior cingulate cortex play critical roles in this, making emotions feel as real as external sensations.
Neural Equivalence: Neuroimaging studies have shown that imagining an experience or feeling an emotion activates many of the same brain regions as actually experiencing it. This explains why non-sensory experiences can feel equally real.
Limbic System Activation: Emotions like love or anger activate the limbic system, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus, creating powerful experiences that feel as real as any sensory input.
Neurotransmitter Influence: Emotions and abstract concepts trigger the release of neurotransmitters and hormones (like oxytocin for love or cortisol for stress) that create tangible physiological effects, reinforcing their perceived reality.
Default Mode Network: This brain network, active during self-referential thinking and emotional processing, weights our internal experiences, making them feel as valid as external sensory data.

Why “Knowing What You Have To Do” Is Not Enough

We often find inspiration from reading quotes, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, or scrolling through endless Instagram reels. These sources of inspiration give us insight and make us feel like we have a better understanding of what’s going on. We hope that this new understanding will lead to positive change because… “now we know what to do”. However, it doesn’t, and after a few days, the inspiration is gone and we’re left with our old habits, thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, repeating the same words, making the same mistakes and getting the same results.

It’s frustrating, I know, but before you end up thinking that nothing will ever work for you, let me tell you why: Insight alone is not sufficient for sustainable change due to the deeply ingrained nature of our mental patterns and the way our brains function. This means that while intellectual understanding is important, it’s merely the first step in a much longer process of transformation and according to Positive Intelligence®, most of our behaviors and reactions are driven by automatic mental processes called “Saboteurs.”

These Saboteurs are deeply rooted patterns of thinking and reacting that we’ve developed in our childhood often as coping mechanisms and that “protected” us over the years. Insight might help us identify these Saboteurs and understand their origins, but it doesn’t automatically translate into changing them. This is because our Saboteurs operate at a subconscious level, often hijacking our responses before we have a chance to apply our newfound insights.

So, How do I Make it Work?

According to Shirzad Shamine in his New York Times best-selling book Positive Intelligence, to create lasting change, we need to build new “mental muscles” through consistent practice. This involves not just understanding our Saboteurs but actively working to weaken them while simultaneously strengthening our Sage perspective. Chamine’s research suggests it takes about 21 days of consistent practice to start rewiring the brain for lasting change.

Besides, willpower depletes like a muscle, yet habits run on autopilot. That is why the PQ® practices are designed to create new neural pathways that make positive responses more automatic over time. These practices include techniques like the PQ® reps, Sage perspective shifts, and empathy exercises. By repeating these practices regularly, we gradually train our brains to default to more constructive patterns of thinking and behaving.

What’s Positive Intelligence®?

Positive Intelligence® (PQ®) measures one’s mind’s capacity to respond to life’s challenges with a positive rather than negative mindset. It’s fundamentally about developing mental fitness and strengthening one’s ability to handle life’s difficulties in ways that enhance one’s well-being and performance.

It involves recognizing and managing your “Saboteurs” – negative thought patterns that undermine your efforts – while activating your “Sage,” representing the wisest part of your mind. This practice is about building mental muscles to handle life’s challenges more effectively, leading to improved performance in all areas of life, including work, relationships, and personal growth.

Shirzad Shamine’s breakthrough research demonstrates that the enormous variety of ways people sabotage their own effectiveness and happiness is caused by just 10 factors—their Saboteurs.

More importantly, he discovered that there are only 5 core positive powers – your Sage.

Take your FREE Saboteur Assessment

Explore The Positive Intelligence Program

Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Shirzad Shamine

What is Reality?

Many different perspectives point to the fact that life is not objective but rather an internal experience. Shirzad Chamine’s concept that “life is a self-fulfilling prophecy” resonates deeply across multiple perspectives, including behavioral neuroscience and yogic philosophy. This powerful idea suggests that our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and expectations about life significantly influence our experiences and outcomes.

The Behavioral Neuroscience Perspective

Behavioral neuroscience offers a fascinating explanation for this phenomenon. Our brains constantly make predictions about the world based on our beliefs and past experiences. These predictions shape our perception, filtering the vast amount of sensory information we receive to align with our expectations. This process, known as predictive processing, essentially creates a feedback loop where our expectations influence our perceptions, which in turn reinforce our expectations. Moreover, our beliefs and expectations influence our behaviors, often in subtle ways, leading us to act in ways that make our predictions more likely to come true. The brain’s plasticity strengthens these self-fulfilling cycles over time, creating deeply ingrained patterns of thought and behavior.

The Positive Intelligence® Perspective

From the Positive Intelligence perspective, this concept aligns closely with the interplay between our Saboteurs and our Sage. When we allow our Saboteurs to dominate our thinking, we tend to expect negative outcomes, influencing our actions and perceptions in ways that make those negative expectations more likely to materialize. Conversely, when we operate from our Sage perspective, we approach life with a more curious, positive, open mindset, which leads us to notice opportunities, act more confidently, and ultimately create more positive outcomes. The PQ® framework provides tools to shift from Saboteur-driven self-fulfilling prophecies to Sage-driven ones, effectively changing the trajectory of our lives through intentional mental practices.

The Yogic Perspective

The yogic perspective on this concept aligns with the ancient idea of “Yādṛśī bhāvanā yasya siddhir bhavati tādṛśī,” which translates to “as is one’s faith or belief, so is one’s attainment or realization.” This quote from the Yoga Vasistha² suggests that our thoughts, beliefs, and mental attitudes shape our reality and experiences. Yoga philosophy teaches that our thoughts and beliefs create subtle energy patterns called samskaras. Those mental marks are like grooves that create biased perceptions and shape our reality experience. These samskaras influence our perceptions, actions, and the situations we attract into our lives. The yogic path offers practices like meditation, pranayama, and self-reflection to become aware of these patterns and consciously reshape them, effectively changing the prophecies we’re fulfilling.

My experience with Positive Intelligence^®️

As you may or may not know, I’m Brazilian and moved to the United States in 2022, because of my husband, an American Citizen. Like any other immigrant, I was trying to figure out how to adapt my skills to the American culture and contribute. While I was updating my LinkedIn profile, I came across a sponsored message that really grabbed my attention! It resonated with me on a deep level, touching on some of my biggest challenges, both personally and as a coach. The message said something like this:

“Why after a few months, despite your or your client’s efforts, they tend to come back to their old habits failing to achieve lasting change?”

“Because they stop at insight instead of training their minds to build new habits.”

BINGO! That instantly resonated because I knew from previous work I had done with ACIM (A Course in Miracles) and also Vipassana Meditation that the periods when I felt better about myself and my life were the ones I was actively engaging in some mental fitness training. So, after researching Positive Intelligence and taking the Saboteur assessment, I’ve decided to do the intensive 7-week coach training program.

Inside the PQ Program – My Honest Thoughts

I downloaded the app, and while waiting for the program to begin, I started listening to Shirzad’s excellent book, Positive Intelligence, beautifully narrated by him. This book clarified the system, the process, the rationale, and all the research behind it. The true stories showed me many practical applications and inspired me even more to do the program.

As the program started, I felt a mix of joy and amusement but, honestly, also discomfort. And I want to be very honest with you: to let go of those familiar voices that were running your life to try something new – even when it’s for the better – it’s very challenging. Because it feels unfamiliar, which is a red flag for our brains, and often, it’s where we hesitate, create excuses and objections, and go back to our familiar (notice I didn’t say comfort) zone. But I was too intrigued to back out, so I kept pushing through, despite the sometimes emotional discomfort. Even the intentional and necessary disruption of my daily activities to pause for reflection (the power breaks) could become a trigger.

So, in addition to the program’s daily tasks, I decided to regularly use the PQ Gym and do some extra PQ Reps—and I have to admit that the visual representation of my Sage Muscle counter going up provided an extra dose of encouragement. After two weeks into the program, the positive results started to show as more breakthroughs and insights emerged. Changing my reactions in real time was still hard, but I knew I was on the right track.

The Payoff

At some point in the program, I realized the importance of understanding what was happening -i.e., the reason why I felt the way I did, reacted to life the way I did, and how to use a new framework to change it. The sense of confusion regarding how to deal with life’s challenges and difficult situations and people that I used to feel vanished entirely. It became easier to pinpoint which saboteur voice created suffering in each situation and apply the Sage powers to change my perspective. Little by little, the difference in how I experienced the world and responded to others began to change, and, just like night and day, not only how I felt started to shift but also the situations.

As within, so without.
The Kybalion

I noticed many of my patterns and how I was contributing to the toxicity in my relationships. I felt more present for longer periods. I turned my attention to myself instead of focusing on what I could not control. I felt calmer and more content. I lost weight. My procrastination dropped, and doing what needed to be done turned into a pleasure, and the byproduct? I became less distracted and highly productive. I started to notice this space between acknowledging the situation and responding. Space in which I had time to notice and disregard the saboteurs’ voices and choose more positive responses by accessing my Sage Powers. But the best part? I’ve finally learned to use my mind as a powerful tool instead of letting the survival part of my brain run the show, creating chaos and repetition.

My Husband’s Experience

The transformation in all areas of my life was so profound that I decided to continue my training and become a PQ COACH™, and months later, I offered the Core PQ program to my husband. He accepted, not without some hesitation and what followed was more than what I could expect. I was able to witness his transformation and newfound curiosity about his mental habits and behaviors as he went through the program and experienced many positive results. As a diagnosed ADHDer, he deals with a lot of anxiety, lack of focus, impulsivity, and restlessness, which all combined take a very heavy toll on our relationship.

As he persisted in the program and did his PQ Reps, he began to feel more centered, less agitated during difficult situations, more aware of his restless and avoider saboteurs and their lies, and more importantly, he became more aware of the changes he needed to do internally – including looking for proper treatment for the untreated ADHD – so that he could be healthier and happier. And the byproduct of that? Our relationship began to change for the better. It’s still a work in progress, as we all are, but he’s now committed to improving his behaviors, which is golden.

Like a fish unaware of the water it swims in, we often don’t recognize the toxicity in our lives until we experience true peace for long enough.

The Relevance of Contrast in Life – or “What the hell is water?”

David Foster Wallace, an influential American novelist, essayist, and professor known for his complex and often satirical exploration of contemporary culture, once shared this allegory: “These two young fish are swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually, one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’

The allegory illustrates how we often take our immediate environment or circumstances for granted, only realizing their nature when we step outside of them or gain a new perspective. Contrast —whether visual, conceptual, or experiential—provides the necessary context for us to perceive, understand, and analyze differences. Without contrast, many distinctions would be imperceptible or meaningless to us.

Having experienced betrayal and toxic relationships throughout my life, and with almost no positive references in my family or friends to look up to, I was mostly unaware of what could be considered toxic and what would be considered a safe and nurturing relationship. Of course, it felt uncomfortable, but at the same time, it was all I knew. It was kind of “normal” to me, and worse, it was familiar. But, as my passion for mental fitness matured and I continued to practice, I finally started to identify the toxicity in others and myself, name them, and set healthier boundaries.

But more importantly, I began to perceive when I entered survival mode (or Saboteur mode) and contributed to perpetuating the misery cycle, for me and others. Why? Because now I was finally leaving it for long enough to know the difference. I could, at last, notice the contrast and choose what felt right for me. And trust me, when it happened, it felt amazing!

It’s clear to me that there are still many points in my personality that need improvement, but again, I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track. So if you choose to cross the bridge that leads to true healing and empowerment, leaving behind the crowd that screams, “It’s their fault – whoever they might be – , and there’s nothing you can do about it,” know this: Mental fitness is for life, as well as physical fitness. And deepening the analogy, remember that this is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. So prepare accordingly: just keep educating yourself and doing your inner work. Results will come in due time.

The Invitation to a Happier, Healthier, More Fulfilling Life

This is your opportunity to pause everything and start over. It is your chance to stop constantly looking over your shoulder and choose to leave survival mode. It’s time to create a new, exciting life instead of just getting through the day. It’s your chance to live from inspiration and intention. But remember: Leaving what’s familiar will feel uncomfortable for a while, but if you are moving in the right direction, it is certainly worth it! This is why I am so eager to share this fantastic transformational tool with people like you who are tired of repeating the same patterns, situations, and relationships.

So, if you’re ready to recover from toxic relationships and trust yourself again; if you genuinely want not just to heal but thrive; if you are ready to stop with the excuses that are sabotaging your present peace as well as the future new life that is possible for you, join me on an incredible journey through this science-backed program! I invite you to learn and apply its operating system to improve every area of your life, from relationships to career success.

If you want to embark on this transformative journey with me, I’m sure your future self will thank you for it.

Build Powerful Habits with PQ^®️ Training

Now that we’ve explored how powerfully our minds influence our internal experience and external reality, you might wonder: “How can I harness this potential to create positive change in my life?” This is where the Positive Intelligence® (PQ) Program comes in.

Developed by Shirzad Chamine and based on extensive research, the PQ® Program offers a practical, scientifically grounded approach to rewiring your mind for greater success and well-being. It provides the tools and techniques to not just understand, but actively reshape the mental patterns that have unconsciously guided your life.

Through this program, you’ll learn to identify and weaken your ‘Saboteurs’ – those negative thought patterns that undermine your potential. At the same time, you’ll develop and strengthen your ‘Sage’ – the wisest part of you that can handle any challenge with a clear, positive mindset.

The PQ® Program isn’t just about gaining insights; it’s about creating lasting change through consistent mental fitness exercises. Over the course of several weeks, you’ll engage in daily practices designed to build new neural pathways, making positive responses more automatic and empowering you to truly shape your reality.

Whether you’re looking to boost your performance, improve your relationships, or simply find more joy and peace in your daily life, the PQ® Program offers a transformative journey. Are you ready to take control of your mind and, by extension, your life? Let’s explore how the Positive Intelligence® Program can work for you.

And if you read it all, congratulations! Your dedication to improving your life is truly inspiring.

Now, you have two options before you:

Take action. Seize this moment of inspiration to transform your life, regardless of your current circumstances. Embrace the opportunity to think differently, feel renewed emotions, and adopt empowering behaviors. No excuses, because you feel that enough is enough.
Do nothing. I get it; you are inspired by what you’ve read. But unfortunately, inspiration will fade, my friend. And in a while, you will return to your usual routine—thinking the same thoughts, feeling the same feelings, and acting in the same ways—allowing life to pass by as you remain a victim of circumstances.

The choice is yours. Will you step forward into change or stay where you are?