How Can Positive Intelligence Coaching Help You Respond With More Confidence and Clarity?

Some people call it “The Voice.”

Some call it the “The Inner Critic.”

The Gremlin.

The Judge (Jury & Executioner.)

The Chimp. (For the readers of Steve Peters Book, The Chimp Paradox)

In the War of Art, Steve Pressman calls it ‘The Resistance.’

You know, that ‘thing’ that always seems to get in your way, negative, down-beat, cannot do, doom and goom.

Patterns of thinking that come, maybe stay a little too long but eventually go.

What if there was a way to recognise these patterns, to help you understand what gets in your way along with practical tips that will allow you to move towards the changes you want to make?

What Is Positive Intelligence Coaching?

Positive Intelligence, developed by Shirzad Chamine, is a mental fitness framework used in coaching. PQ stands for Positive Intelligence Quotient and is also used as shorthand for the approach.

It focuses on recognising unhelpful mental habits and developing the capacity to respond with greater calm, curiosity and purpose.

In coaching, this means exploring how your inner dialogue affects your choices, relationships and progress towards your goals — whether you’re an individual working through a career decision, part of an SME team, or operating within a larger enterprise. I work with clients across Belfast and throughout the North to apply this in real, day-to-day situations.

What Are the Saboteurs in Positive Intelligence?

PQ describes recurring, self-defeating patterns as Saboteurs. You might recognise the Judge in relentless self-criticism, the Pleaser in the urge to keep everyone happy, or the Avoider in putting off an uncomfortable conversation.

Recognising a pattern gives you something specific to work with.

For example, you might arrive at coaching saying, “I’m just not good at setting boundaries.” Through reflection, you begin to notice that you say yes because you fear disappointing people — even when you are already overstretched.

That awareness opens up questions: What am I assuming will happen if I say no? What do I need? How could I be considerate while being honest about my limits?

You can begin to see a habit you can work on, rather than a fixed truth about who you are.

What Are PQ Reps, and How Do They Create a Pause?

One of the challenges of personal change is remembering what you have learned when you are under pressure.

PQ includes brief attention exercises called PQ Reps. These involve focusing on a physical sensation, such as the feeling of your feet on the floor or your breathing. The intention is to help you interrupt an automatic reaction and bring your attention back to the present.

That pause creates an opportunity to choose. The greater the pause the calmer your response.

Imagine receiving feedback that feels unfair. Your first impulse might be to defend yourself immediately, withdraw or spend the afternoon questioning your ability. With practice, you may begin to notice that reaction earlier, take a moment and ask for a specific example before deciding how to respond.

The feedback may still be uncomfortable. You have more room to consider what is useful and what you want to do next.

What Is the Sage in Positive Intelligence Coaching?

PQ uses the term Sage (The Wise One) to describe the perspective associated with empathy, curiosity, creativity, purpose and clear action.

For you, this could mean meeting a mistake with a more balanced response: “That didn’t go as I hoped. What can I learn, and what needs to happen now?”

Trying to find the positive in every situation – even though its not always easy.

You can take responsibility while treating yourself with compassion.

You can question an assumption, consider another person’s perspective or try an approach you would previously have dismissed.

In coaching, these possibilities connect to situations that matter to you: preparing for a difficult conversation, taking on a new responsibility or making a decision you have been postponing.

How Does Positive Intelligence Coaching Create Everyday Change?

The potential benefits become meaningful when you notice a difference in daily life. Depending on your goals, that might look like:

• Speaking up even when you cannot be certain how your contribution will be received.
• Setting a boundary without feeling compelled to justify it at length.
• Approaching a difficult conversation with more curiosity.
• Moving forward after a mistake with less time spent criticising yourself.
• Making decisions that reflect your priorities and values.

Coaching gives you space to reflect on these experiences, recognise progress and adjust what you practise. The PQ framework offers language and exercises you can draw on between sessions.

Difficult feelings also deserve attention.

Frustration, worry or disappointment may tell you something important about your circumstances.

Part of the work is understanding what those feelings are signalling and deciding what response – or practical change – is needed.

The aim is to develop greater awareness of your habits and more confidence in your ability to choose how you respond.

A useful starting point is: where in my life would I like to feel more able to choose my response, and what difference would that make?

If you’d like to explore this in coaching, get in touch info@shift-control.co.uk

Thanks for reading

Frequently Asked Questions

What is positive intelligence in coaching?
Positive Intelligence (PQ) is a mental fitness framework developed by Shirzad Chamine, based on his work coaching Stanford MBA students and CEOs. Rather than measuring general positivity, PQ measures the percentage of time your mind operates from a constructive mode versus a self-sabotaging one — Chamine’s research puts most people well below 50%. In coaching, this gives a specific, trackable target (raising that percentage) rather than a vague aim to “think more positively,” which is a different and less useful thing.

What are the Saboteurs in Positive Intelligence?
Saboteurs are ten recurring thought patterns PQ identifies as the source of unnecessary stress and poor decisions: the Judge (present in everyone, and the root that activates the other nine — self-criticism, blame, catastrophising), plus accomplices such as the Controller, the Pleaser, the Hyper-Achiever and others. Most people have one or two dominant accomplices alongside the Judge. They’re called saboteurs rather than flaws because each one disguises itself as a strength — the Controller believes it’s being decisive, the Pleaser believes it’s being kind — which is why people rarely notice them without a structured assessment. In coaching, the value isn’t the label itself; it’s using it to separate the person from the behaviour, so a pattern becomes something to work on rather than a fixed trait.

What is the Sage in Positive Intelligence?
The Sage is the counterpart to the Saboteurs — a mode of thinking Chamine associates with five specific capacities: Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate and Activate. The claim is that Sage-mode thinking runs through calmer, more deliberate brain processing, while Saboteur-mode runs through a threat response, so you can’t reason your way out of a saboteur reaction in the moment — you have to interrupt it first. Worth being clear that this is a simplified, coaching-oriented account of the neuroscience rather than a clinically established model; its value in practice is as a structure for working through a difficult situation (feel it, get curious about it, generate options, decide what matters, act), not as a scientific claim to take at face value.

How does positive intelligence coaching work in practice?
It typically starts with a saboteur assessment to identify the client’s default patterns, then uses real situations the client is currently facing — a difficult conversation, a decision they’re avoiding — as the material for each session, rather than working with the concepts in the abstract. Between sessions, clients practise short attention exercises (PQ Reps) designed to interrupt an automatic reaction in the moment it happens, not just reflect on it afterwards. The mechanism that makes it different from general reflective coaching is this combination of a shared vocabulary for naming the pattern plus a habit-building practice for interrupting it — insight on its own tends not to change behaviour under pressure, which is the gap PQ is aimed at closing.

Is positive intelligence coaching only for leaders?
No — the underlying mechanism (interrupting an automatic negative reaction before it drives a decision) applies as much to a sole trader or an individual navigating a career change as it does to someone managing a team. It’s most commonly marketed through executive and leadership coaching because that’s where Chamine’s original research was based, but the coaching applications extend to SME owners, individuals, and people in larger enterprise roles equally. One honest limit: it’s a performance and mental-fitness tool, not a substitute for therapy — it isn’t designed for, and shouldn’t be used in place of support for, clinical mental health conditions.