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I did the free coach training with a pod and read this book along with it. We are provided with an e-copy of the book as part of the training, but I like to read the hard copy whenever I can. Plus, they e-book gets cut off after Ch 8 and I wanted to read the whole thing. I was able to find a hard copy of the book through the library system.
I really appreciate learning about the PQ Brain, the Survivor Brain, and the Saboteurs. As a coach, this additional perspective of how our brains can limit us is valuable for me and for my clients. I also enjoyed working with a pod and having weekly meetings to discuss what we learned. The app is also helpful in getting in PQ reps and building the muscle. I highly recommend this as a coach. I didn't end up signing up for the paid training, as I felt I received a lot from the free training. However, I can see the value in the paid training to dive even deeper.
I thank Shirzad for his work in this area and for sharing the concepts with us. Our world and the people in it would benefit so much from these PQ skills.
“Both your Saboteurs and your Sage may lead you to success, but they do so by taking very different paths. The Saboteurs push you into action and success through anger, regret, fear, guilt, anxiety, shame, obligation, etc. But the Sage pulls you into actin through compassion, curiosity, creativity, the joy of self-expression, a desire to contribute and create meaning, and the excitement of action. Would you rather be pushed or pulled? Only the Sage lets you achieve success without sacrificing happiness and peace of mind.” pg. 51
“By their very nature, Saboteurs do far greater damage when they do their work while hiding under the radar, pretending they are your friend or that they are you. Observing and labeling them blows their cover and discredits their voice. Notice the difference between saying ‘I don’t think I am capable’ and ‘the Judge doesn’t think I am capable.’” pg. 52
“The Judge accomplishes its staggering destructive sabotage by having us feel negative and unhappy through constant faultfinding with (1) ourselves, (2) others, and (3) our circumstances. It does so under pretense of being rational and reasonable and trying to be helpful. The Judge knows how to hide well and might in fact have become so invisible that we’re unaware of its existence.” pg. 55
“Most successful, high-achieving people are privately tortured by their own Judges. This is rarely obvious to those around them. Externally, we all show our happy and fully confident fronts.
This realization had a profound effect on me. For the firs time in my life, I felt fully ‘normal’—I realized that the Judge and the insecurities it generates are universal, an ailment common to everyone. When I interact with people now, I no longer wonder if they have a nasty internal Judge, but instead, how it is hiding and doing its damage in that individual.” pg. 58
“The Judge’s most damaging lie is that we are not worthy of love or respect by just being who we are. Instead, it forces us to constantly perform for them; this forms the construct of ‘conditional love.’ Most of us grow up experiencing love that tis conditional on being good or performing, and we get into the habit of placing the same conditions on self-love. But conditional love is not real love. It’s more like receiving a carrot for good behavior.” pg. 58-59
“This is another case of the push versus pull difference between the Sage and Saboteurs. While the Judge might push you into action through threats, fear, shame, or guilt, the Sage pulls you into action through anticipation of the joy of exploration and discovery; through the compelling and deeply seated human urge to find meaning in life and to matter; through the joy of creativity and possibility; through the longing of the human heart to connect, care, and be cared for; through appreciation of the mystery of life; and through a desire for clearheaded action toward desired outcomes.” pg. 60
“The Sage can help you do any of this [the actions associated with potentially firing an employee] without feeling angry, blameful, scornful, disappointed, or betrayed.” pg. 65
“. . . I state the following key principle of Positive Intelligence: All your distress is self-generated. To be more precise, all your distress in the forms of anxiety, disappointment, stress, anger, shame, guilt—all the unpleasant stuff that makes up your suffering—is generated by your own Saboteurs.” pg. 71
“Your Sage has access to your five great powers: empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and decisive action. With these powers, your Sage can meet all the challenges that you face in a way that will not only generate the best results but also lead to the highest level of personal satisfaction, peace of mind, and happiness along the way.” pg. 71-72
“This is similar to feeling pain when you touch a hot stove. A moment of physical pain should alert you to remove your hand to avoid further damage. A few seconds of psychological pain should similarly alert you to shift your mind to the Sage mode so you can deal with the situation without further distress and damage from your Saboteurs. If you don’t shift your mind, it is like keeping your hand on the hot stove and continuing to feel the pain that was only initially useful.” pg. 72
“The Sage perspective is about accepting what is, rather than denying, rejecting, or resenting what is. The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity. (I emphasize every to take away a loophole through which the Saboteurs could sneak in.) This may sound like a radical perceptive. It is the exact opposite of many of the assumptions of the Judge, which most of us have believed whole-heartedly for years or decades. The Judge’s perspective is that many outcomes and circumstances are bad—certainly not gifts—and are therefore legitimate reasons to feel distress.” pg. 72
“When our Judge says something is bad, we need to take that statement with a grain of salt—if not outright dismissal. Our Judge convinces us that we know what is good and bad at any given moment, but the truth is that we actually don’t.
Our Judge’s perspective is narrowly focused—it has severe tunnel vision. It reacts to the immediate effect of something, ignoring the many longer-term possibilities of its impact that could easily be the opposite. Life of course doesn’t stop at the immediate effect.” pg. 73-74
“The Sage, however, is anything but passive. Its perspective is that everything is a gift and opportunity, but it doesn’t believe that as a matter of passive and blind faith. The Sage uses its five great powers to turn that perspective into reality and actively create a gift out of a bad situation. If action is required, the Sage is quite decisive and takes the necessary steps. It moves into action, however, without any of the distress, interference, or distractions of the Judge or the other Saboteurs.” pg. 74
“Anxiety, disappointment, frustration, shame, blame, and guilt, the Judge’s favorite feelings, are never your best fuel for action. Those fuels might propel you forward, but with a huge amount of pollution and wasteful friction along the way. The moment you allow yourself to feel the distress of the Judge, you have validated his perspective; you are wasting precious moments of your life in distress. In addition. . . when your brain shifts to distress mode, tunnel vision sets in. Your distressed brain focuses on problems rather than opportunities. The Judge and the Saboteurs that the distressed brain activates spiral in on themselves and snowball once they get started, thus making sure the ‘bad’ situation will indeed be a bad situation.” pg. 75
“The human brain is wired to perform two primary functions: survive and thrive. In survive mode, your Survivor Brain takes control, primarily looking for the negative and dangers to your physical and emotional survival. In thrive mode, the PQ Brain looks for opportunities to grow, discover, explore, create, be in awe and appreciation, and reach its own full potential.
When PQ is 75 and above, the PQ Brain is mostly in charge and the Survivor Brain is doing its job in the background. Your Sage thought patterns loom large in thrive mode and your Saboteurs take a back seat. When PQ is below 75, the situation is reversed.” pg. 129
“Frenzied multitasking, the great addiction of the twenty-first century, is actually not as productive and efficient as single-tasking, which is aided by the more calm and focused PQ Brain.
A group of Stanford scientists have recently shown that people who regularly multitask with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time. . . .
Professor Nass continues: ‘Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is: you know what, you’re really lousy at it. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking . . . they get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. . . . We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.’” pg. 142
“The strange glamorization of multitasking isn’t the only false Saboteur assumption that results in wasting time at work. For example, if your Judge holds the ‘no pain, no gain’ belief, you might ignore easier solutions or not trust that they will work. Or your Hyper-Achiever may convince you that working more always results in accomplishing more. But that’s not true; beyond a certain level of workload and stress, productivity plummets, meaning that working more actually results in producing less. This is partially because higher stress fuels your Saboteurs and energizes your Survivor Brain. As we have seen, the Survivor Brain is optimized for imminent danger, not steady productivity.” pg. 142-143
“All stress is Saboteur generated. Under the Sage’s influence, you focus on doing what needs to get done, but you don’t sweat the outcome. You know that whatever outcome you reach, you will be able to turn it into a gift and opportunity. This includes making a big mistake or failing. Imagine what happens to your stress if you go all out and passionately pursue the outcome you desire, while never getting attached to that outcome. This is a paradox, of course, that givers your Saboteurs an aneurism and that only your Sage understands. Your Sage knows that you are more likely to achieve your outcome if you don’t feel that your ultimate happiness and success depend on it.” pg. 152-153
“Positions are typically held and defended by Saboteurs, who by their very nature are not interested in resolution. Saboteurs are only interested in being right.
People’s positions are often fed by underlying Assumptions. These often include many assumptions about the other party’s intentions. Even as an expert in this field, I have been humbled by how difficult it is to correctly guess another person’s needs and intentions. I have learned that it is critical to check with them rather than assume. Assumptions regarding others’ intentions are often incorrect and provide much of the fuel for conflicts. Our Judges are much more certain about the other person’s true needs and intentions than our data and experience warrants.” pg. 171
“I explained that rejection goes to the very heart of the survival drive. As a tribal species, the early humans’ physical survival depended on being accepted by the tribe. Outright rejection could literally mean death by losing the shelter and protection of the tribe. Rejection hurts the most primitive levels of the Survivor Brain. It energizes your Judge and accomplice Saboteur to their core and exposes their patterns for you to see clearly. This enables you to notice and label them, which is your best strategy to weaken them.” pg. 190
“The PQ Brain is capable of understanding and embracing paradox, and there is indeed a paradox here. In order to get the sale, you need to let go of needing to make the sale. In order to get the result that makes you happy, you have to let go of your concern for your own happiness during the sales process. You need to be completely focused on the other person, not as a sales technique, but truly in your heart.” pg. 193
“As you have learned, the master Saboteur, the Judge, has its roots in the Survivor Brain, the part of the brain tasked with helping us survive. The brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain, is involved in basic motivation for physical survival and issues the fight-or-flight response to danger. Above this primitive part of the brain sits the limbic system, which includes the amygdala, the moderator of our emotional response, including fear. The hypothalamus and pituitary gland secrete hormones in reaction to the amygdala, including the stress hormone cortisol. Cortical circulates throughout the body, focusing it on survival. During this survival focus, the left brain, with its concentration on concrete data and detail, is the primary participant.” pg. 211
“Researchers have now shown that our implicit memories result in emotions and impact our decision making without our conscious awareness. We rationalize why we do what we do without being fully aware of the memories, feelings, and assumptions that actually motivated our actions from our implicit storage. Every Saboteur has a series of ‘justifications’ to convince you that it is really your friend, but these justifications are often fed by implicit beliefs that have never been consciously examined. For example, your Judge might hold beliefs such as ‘no pain, no gain,’ or ‘too much kindness spoils people’ based on early experiences and associations that are not consciously remembered and therefore unexamined or unchallenged.” pg. 218
Book: borrowed from Glen Park Branch Library.
I really appreciate learning about the PQ Brain, the Survivor Brain, and the Saboteurs. As a coach, this additional perspective of how our brains can limit us is valuable for me and for my clients. I also enjoyed working with a pod and having weekly meetings to discuss what we learned. The app is also helpful in getting in PQ reps and building the muscle. I highly recommend this as a coach. I didn't end up signing up for the paid training, as I felt I received a lot from the free training. However, I can see the value in the paid training to dive even deeper.
I thank Shirzad for his work in this area and for sharing the concepts with us. Our world and the people in it would benefit so much from these PQ skills.
“Both your Saboteurs and your Sage may lead you to success, but they do so by taking very different paths. The Saboteurs push you into action and success through anger, regret, fear, guilt, anxiety, shame, obligation, etc. But the Sage pulls you into actin through compassion, curiosity, creativity, the joy of self-expression, a desire to contribute and create meaning, and the excitement of action. Would you rather be pushed or pulled? Only the Sage lets you achieve success without sacrificing happiness and peace of mind.” pg. 51
“By their very nature, Saboteurs do far greater damage when they do their work while hiding under the radar, pretending they are your friend or that they are you. Observing and labeling them blows their cover and discredits their voice. Notice the difference between saying ‘I don’t think I am capable’ and ‘the Judge doesn’t think I am capable.’” pg. 52
“The Judge accomplishes its staggering destructive sabotage by having us feel negative and unhappy through constant faultfinding with (1) ourselves, (2) others, and (3) our circumstances. It does so under pretense of being rational and reasonable and trying to be helpful. The Judge knows how to hide well and might in fact have become so invisible that we’re unaware of its existence.” pg. 55
“Most successful, high-achieving people are privately tortured by their own Judges. This is rarely obvious to those around them. Externally, we all show our happy and fully confident fronts.
This realization had a profound effect on me. For the firs time in my life, I felt fully ‘normal’—I realized that the Judge and the insecurities it generates are universal, an ailment common to everyone. When I interact with people now, I no longer wonder if they have a nasty internal Judge, but instead, how it is hiding and doing its damage in that individual.” pg. 58
“The Judge’s most damaging lie is that we are not worthy of love or respect by just being who we are. Instead, it forces us to constantly perform for them; this forms the construct of ‘conditional love.’ Most of us grow up experiencing love that tis conditional on being good or performing, and we get into the habit of placing the same conditions on self-love. But conditional love is not real love. It’s more like receiving a carrot for good behavior.” pg. 58-59
“This is another case of the push versus pull difference between the Sage and Saboteurs. While the Judge might push you into action through threats, fear, shame, or guilt, the Sage pulls you into action through anticipation of the joy of exploration and discovery; through the compelling and deeply seated human urge to find meaning in life and to matter; through the joy of creativity and possibility; through the longing of the human heart to connect, care, and be cared for; through appreciation of the mystery of life; and through a desire for clearheaded action toward desired outcomes.” pg. 60
“The Sage can help you do any of this [the actions associated with potentially firing an employee] without feeling angry, blameful, scornful, disappointed, or betrayed.” pg. 65
“. . . I state the following key principle of Positive Intelligence: All your distress is self-generated. To be more precise, all your distress in the forms of anxiety, disappointment, stress, anger, shame, guilt—all the unpleasant stuff that makes up your suffering—is generated by your own Saboteurs.” pg. 71
“Your Sage has access to your five great powers: empathy, exploration, innovation, navigation, and decisive action. With these powers, your Sage can meet all the challenges that you face in a way that will not only generate the best results but also lead to the highest level of personal satisfaction, peace of mind, and happiness along the way.” pg. 71-72
“This is similar to feeling pain when you touch a hot stove. A moment of physical pain should alert you to remove your hand to avoid further damage. A few seconds of psychological pain should similarly alert you to shift your mind to the Sage mode so you can deal with the situation without further distress and damage from your Saboteurs. If you don’t shift your mind, it is like keeping your hand on the hot stove and continuing to feel the pain that was only initially useful.” pg. 72
“The Sage perspective is about accepting what is, rather than denying, rejecting, or resenting what is. The Sage perspective accepts every outcome and circumstance as a gift and opportunity. (I emphasize every to take away a loophole through which the Saboteurs could sneak in.) This may sound like a radical perceptive. It is the exact opposite of many of the assumptions of the Judge, which most of us have believed whole-heartedly for years or decades. The Judge’s perspective is that many outcomes and circumstances are bad—certainly not gifts—and are therefore legitimate reasons to feel distress.” pg. 72
“When our Judge says something is bad, we need to take that statement with a grain of salt—if not outright dismissal. Our Judge convinces us that we know what is good and bad at any given moment, but the truth is that we actually don’t.
Our Judge’s perspective is narrowly focused—it has severe tunnel vision. It reacts to the immediate effect of something, ignoring the many longer-term possibilities of its impact that could easily be the opposite. Life of course doesn’t stop at the immediate effect.” pg. 73-74
“The Sage, however, is anything but passive. Its perspective is that everything is a gift and opportunity, but it doesn’t believe that as a matter of passive and blind faith. The Sage uses its five great powers to turn that perspective into reality and actively create a gift out of a bad situation. If action is required, the Sage is quite decisive and takes the necessary steps. It moves into action, however, without any of the distress, interference, or distractions of the Judge or the other Saboteurs.” pg. 74
“Anxiety, disappointment, frustration, shame, blame, and guilt, the Judge’s favorite feelings, are never your best fuel for action. Those fuels might propel you forward, but with a huge amount of pollution and wasteful friction along the way. The moment you allow yourself to feel the distress of the Judge, you have validated his perspective; you are wasting precious moments of your life in distress. In addition. . . when your brain shifts to distress mode, tunnel vision sets in. Your distressed brain focuses on problems rather than opportunities. The Judge and the Saboteurs that the distressed brain activates spiral in on themselves and snowball once they get started, thus making sure the ‘bad’ situation will indeed be a bad situation.” pg. 75
“The human brain is wired to perform two primary functions: survive and thrive. In survive mode, your Survivor Brain takes control, primarily looking for the negative and dangers to your physical and emotional survival. In thrive mode, the PQ Brain looks for opportunities to grow, discover, explore, create, be in awe and appreciation, and reach its own full potential.
When PQ is 75 and above, the PQ Brain is mostly in charge and the Survivor Brain is doing its job in the background. Your Sage thought patterns loom large in thrive mode and your Saboteurs take a back seat. When PQ is below 75, the situation is reversed.” pg. 129
“Frenzied multitasking, the great addiction of the twenty-first century, is actually not as productive and efficient as single-tasking, which is aided by the more calm and focused PQ Brain.
A group of Stanford scientists have recently shown that people who regularly multitask with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory, or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time. . . .
Professor Nass continues: ‘Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is: you know what, you’re really lousy at it. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking . . . they get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. . . . We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.’” pg. 142
“The strange glamorization of multitasking isn’t the only false Saboteur assumption that results in wasting time at work. For example, if your Judge holds the ‘no pain, no gain’ belief, you might ignore easier solutions or not trust that they will work. Or your Hyper-Achiever may convince you that working more always results in accomplishing more. But that’s not true; beyond a certain level of workload and stress, productivity plummets, meaning that working more actually results in producing less. This is partially because higher stress fuels your Saboteurs and energizes your Survivor Brain. As we have seen, the Survivor Brain is optimized for imminent danger, not steady productivity.” pg. 142-143
“All stress is Saboteur generated. Under the Sage’s influence, you focus on doing what needs to get done, but you don’t sweat the outcome. You know that whatever outcome you reach, you will be able to turn it into a gift and opportunity. This includes making a big mistake or failing. Imagine what happens to your stress if you go all out and passionately pursue the outcome you desire, while never getting attached to that outcome. This is a paradox, of course, that givers your Saboteurs an aneurism and that only your Sage understands. Your Sage knows that you are more likely to achieve your outcome if you don’t feel that your ultimate happiness and success depend on it.” pg. 152-153
“Positions are typically held and defended by Saboteurs, who by their very nature are not interested in resolution. Saboteurs are only interested in being right.
People’s positions are often fed by underlying Assumptions. These often include many assumptions about the other party’s intentions. Even as an expert in this field, I have been humbled by how difficult it is to correctly guess another person’s needs and intentions. I have learned that it is critical to check with them rather than assume. Assumptions regarding others’ intentions are often incorrect and provide much of the fuel for conflicts. Our Judges are much more certain about the other person’s true needs and intentions than our data and experience warrants.” pg. 171
“I explained that rejection goes to the very heart of the survival drive. As a tribal species, the early humans’ physical survival depended on being accepted by the tribe. Outright rejection could literally mean death by losing the shelter and protection of the tribe. Rejection hurts the most primitive levels of the Survivor Brain. It energizes your Judge and accomplice Saboteur to their core and exposes their patterns for you to see clearly. This enables you to notice and label them, which is your best strategy to weaken them.” pg. 190
“The PQ Brain is capable of understanding and embracing paradox, and there is indeed a paradox here. In order to get the sale, you need to let go of needing to make the sale. In order to get the result that makes you happy, you have to let go of your concern for your own happiness during the sales process. You need to be completely focused on the other person, not as a sales technique, but truly in your heart.” pg. 193
“As you have learned, the master Saboteur, the Judge, has its roots in the Survivor Brain, the part of the brain tasked with helping us survive. The brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain, is involved in basic motivation for physical survival and issues the fight-or-flight response to danger. Above this primitive part of the brain sits the limbic system, which includes the amygdala, the moderator of our emotional response, including fear. The hypothalamus and pituitary gland secrete hormones in reaction to the amygdala, including the stress hormone cortisol. Cortical circulates throughout the body, focusing it on survival. During this survival focus, the left brain, with its concentration on concrete data and detail, is the primary participant.” pg. 211
“Researchers have now shown that our implicit memories result in emotions and impact our decision making without our conscious awareness. We rationalize why we do what we do without being fully aware of the memories, feelings, and assumptions that actually motivated our actions from our implicit storage. Every Saboteur has a series of ‘justifications’ to convince you that it is really your friend, but these justifications are often fed by implicit beliefs that have never been consciously examined. For example, your Judge might hold beliefs such as ‘no pain, no gain,’ or ‘too much kindness spoils people’ based on early experiences and associations that are not consciously remembered and therefore unexamined or unchallenged.” pg. 218
Book: borrowed from Glen Park Branch Library.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
There was some really good content in this book, but overall it was shadowed by a lot of “fluff.” I wish there had been more depth, and citation of research.
I am giving this book 4 out of 5 stars because I am not entirely convinced that it could be so easy to achieve peace and happiness as described in this book. "Easy" is the wrong word, although the steps themselves are simple and lucid, getting there will still require hard work. The book teaches us to recognize our saboteurs, strengthen our sage, doing "PQ" exercises (which is little more than awareness/mindfulness training). What I especially liked about this book is that it encompasses the ideas of Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth: create a better life". The basis is that the inner chatter in your head is not you, usually it's just a saboteur or judge at work. However, Shirzad Chamine is more concrete as to how to quelch your saboteurs and strengthen your "sage", the positive. The word of caution is that you mustn't just pretend, as pretending to be positive without actually feeling it puts you at risk of coronary heart disease and doesn't improve anything mucht.
I have, in accordance with this book, started labelling my saboteurs. From the website www.positiveintelligence.com I found that my chief saboteur is the controller. No surprise there, I have been aware of that for years. I suffer tremendous pain when I'm not in charge or have full control. Letting things float is just not my style. My second most frequent saboteur is the victim, and this came a surprise. I didn't know this, I hate being a victim, but apparently that doesn't stop me from playing that card to myself (oh poor me), eventhough I rarely do so openly. Another thing I didn't think I was doing all that much of - anymore - was juding other people. Muahahahaha. I was so wrong! As a leader, I consider it part of my job description, but I am doing my best reevaluating my position as I didn't think I was doing it by far as often as I really am.
I have also started doing "PQ" exercises, which is just 10 seconds of being aware of ones surroundings (mindfulness training, really): the feel of wind on the skin, different sights, smells, the weight of my body in the chair. One hundred "PQ" exercises a day for three weeks should, according to this book, lead to dramatic results. Let's see. I know I'm not at 100 yet, but I do notice that I am more relaxed and less anxious now.
I will continue to take the advice of this book into account and I certainly consider it money well spent.
I have, in accordance with this book, started labelling my saboteurs. From the website www.positiveintelligence.com I found that my chief saboteur is the controller. No surprise there, I have been aware of that for years. I suffer tremendous pain when I'm not in charge or have full control. Letting things float is just not my style. My second most frequent saboteur is the victim, and this came a surprise. I didn't know this, I hate being a victim, but apparently that doesn't stop me from playing that card to myself (oh poor me), eventhough I rarely do so openly. Another thing I didn't think I was doing all that much of - anymore - was juding other people. Muahahahaha. I was so wrong! As a leader, I consider it part of my job description, but I am doing my best reevaluating my position as I didn't think I was doing it by far as often as I really am.
I have also started doing "PQ" exercises, which is just 10 seconds of being aware of ones surroundings (mindfulness training, really): the feel of wind on the skin, different sights, smells, the weight of my body in the chair. One hundred "PQ" exercises a day for three weeks should, according to this book, lead to dramatic results. Let's see. I know I'm not at 100 yet, but I do notice that I am more relaxed and less anxious now.
I will continue to take the advice of this book into account and I certainly consider it money well spent.
I’d recommend to everyone. It’s a unique, simple approach to how the mind works and how you can make changes towards achieving control of your mind and accomplishing your goals.
Business world self and help team building book with excellent personal life applications. Discover how you self sabotage and learn practical steps to counteract those saboteurs and build your positive intelligence.
Well researched and well delivered. I'm already experiencing the benefits of increasing my positive intelligence.
informative
slow-paced
The book was written in a format that makes the content accessible and memorable. It did feel slightly like a personality-type assessment, which I always face with skepticism, but Chamine provides many anecdotes to testify to the validity of each that eases my suspicions. I found that following along with the inquires really helped to developed a solid understanding of the concepts and be able to apply them to my personal situations.
All that said, I struggle with any book that uses the brain doesn’t directly address mental illness and they way it affects brain chemistry.
All that said, I struggle with any book that uses the brain doesn’t directly address mental illness and they way it affects brain chemistry.