I think the best way to introduce you to Positive Intelligence is to share parts of a newsletter article that one of my Positive Intelligence clients wrote after participating in the program.
Positive Intelligence
“By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control….Let us not become conceited competing against one another, envying one another.” Galatians 5:22-23,26
One of the greatest struggles I think I have as a Christian person is the struggle with living in the heart of the fruits of the spirit. It’s easy to say and believe these values are good, but living in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control takes a certain presence of mind and peace of spirit along with a settled heart.
One of the best programs I’ve found that helps guide me into this spirit of “good fruits” is something called Positive Intelligence. While it is advertised as a mental fitness program, I’ve found it’s also a “heart building” program. As my brain gets better at catching negative or self-defeating attitudes within myself and learning when to expect and circumvent them from others, the kinder and compassionate and more open I find myself becoming as a person, leader, and pastor.
Positive Intelligence (PQ) is a comprehensive program that rewires your brain to help get out of the rut of self-defeating mental habits and attitudes. It’s one of the hardest things to explain, but the program essentially helps a person deal with their Saboteurs (negative thought patterns) and respond to others with a Sage mindset. This results in a more centered emotional state and a calmer starting place when engaging with difficult situations.
A good and relatively simple example from my life would be, I struggle with making phone calls. It’s hard to explain why – there’s anxiety involved for sure. Maybe you find phone calls great, but generally, if I don’t have an exact reason to call, I prefer communication in pretty much every other format.
What this struggle means is that, instead of making calls, I tend to avoid them. This is one of the Saboteurs of the PQ program (The Avoider) and one of the main ones I grapple with. I avoid doing things I’m not fond of doing. It’s a habit I’ve acquired over the years to avoid the pain of unpleasant situations.
What the Positive Intelligence program has helped me do is, instead of simply avoiding ALL phone calls, I catch myself in the process of avoiding them and ask myself a few questions about what the benefit of making the call will be or use some of the meditation-like practices of the program to calm my Saboteur Brain. It’s helped me to rewire my brain to the point that phone calls are not nearly the same kind of struggle as they were a year ago.
This has benefitted me tremendously as a pastor in communicating and in maintaining a fruitful spirit. It continues to help me weaken the Saboteurs and strengthen my Sage mind, which helps in all aspects of my life, not just as a pastor but as a wife, aunt, Godmother, and friend. – Pastor Rachel
We will be sharing much more about Positive Intelligence in newsletters to come! To find out more about Positive Intelligence, go to the Positive Intelligence page.
