November 25, 2023What is positive intelligence? And how does it relate to happiness? Is happiness expected in life? For many years I considered this thought frivolous, touchy-feely, and nonmaterial. Until one day I was listening to the renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith recounting a dialogue with some of the top executives he was coaching. They responded in the same way, “we never thought about it”. The next comment was, “do you know that you will die one day?!” The lesson here, is that we will all die one day, so we may as well, be happy now!
When COVID spiked in 2020, shuttering businesses and upending lives, people were panicking about shortages of basic supplies and hand sanitizers became a commodity. I was returning on a road trip from Sonoma County back to my home in Chicago. Knowing the isolation requirements and social distancing, I was concerned with how life would be, and can I be happy now?
Discovering Positive Intelligence
I came across Positive Intelligence coincidently online. It sounded interesting. It piqued my interest, so I dug in. I discovered that Positive Intelligence is about handling stress, building resilience, and managing our feelings and emotions, and countering the negative thoughts that run rampant in our heads, they are called “saboteurs”. The counter force to tam these negative thoughts is called “sage”. There are practices to engage-in daily to power our positive intelligence, weaken the saboteurs and strengthen the sage. These daily practices, help us build our mental fitness muscle.
Happiness and Wellbeing
The body of work and research in this field is still in its infancy, it draws on research from positive psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and performance science.
I soon discovered the work of Shawn Achor in his book on the Happiness Advantage. Shawn’s work is phenomenal in many ways as he takes a scientific approach to a subjective feeling that is hard to measure. Shawn’s work aligns well with the body of knowledge on wellbeing and living a healthy life.
Then I found the work of Shirzad Chamine and his best-selling book on Positive Intelligence. Shirzad’s work is evidence-based supported by research done in elite organizations including Stanford University. Also, Shirzad’s Positive Intelligence program is technology-enabled, supported by a mobile app to facilitate the daily practice of mental fitness and sage muscle training.
I was intrigued by the findings of Shawn and Shirzad, there is true potential for people to be happy. Positive Intelligence practices help in controlling automatic negative thoughts, assist in becoming less judgmental, and less fearful. We can train ourselves to be vigilant but not hyper-vigilant, to be rationale but not hyper-rationale. These saboteurs could be tamed to gain emotional mastery and maximize our wellbeing and influence as leaders.
Human Nature and Happiness
I learned that human beings by nature, are creative, resourceful, and whole. We have the power within us to be bold, creative, curious, and happy. We can find solutions to daily problems, we can find answers even in the most difficult situations. We can train ourselves to be resilient, to tap into our superpowers. We are in control, we have a choice, we can constantly judge ourselves and live in our negativity and let it rob us of our happiness or we can learn to change our thoughts and focus and be happy.
