Shift to a Positive Mindset and Thrive as a Leader in 3 Simple Steps
Overcome challenges and build resilience, being happier while doing so
A positive mindset is powerful in leadership. Sounds cliché, yet so underrated. With so much literature and research out there supporting the benefits of positivity in the work-place, it’s really surprising how little it is present in actual practice.
Having a positive mindset not only supports you to in reaching desired outcomes, but goes beyond into the ability to garner your team’s confidence and alignment, building stronger relationships that are more resilient and based on a foundation of trust. More importantly, if practiced enough, this ‘positive intelligence’ boosts your presence and well-being to the point of creating a sense of meaning and contribution in your life. And all this is independent from any external validation.
If you had to put it in one word, you are… happier.
It’s simple: when the mind is trained to find the opportunities in whatever circumstance, what was once a ‘heavy’ responsibility becomes more of a healthy sense of ownership and grounded purpose. It’s like you are floating just above the day-to-day challenges, thinking bigger. Better, even.
No one can escape the challenges of leading a company through constant change, but one can escape most of the constraints of conditioned reacting to these challenges. I say most because as humans, we need some of our conditioned reactions to survive. If your hand is on a hot stove, you need a pain signal to tell you that you are getting burned. But do you need to stay upset about your burned hand all day, or all week? That would certainly be a waste of precious time and energy.
We may know this, but old habits die hard, and we fall into the trap of what we know. New habitual responses and behaviors need to be practiced and integrated in order to break through to a new way of relating to things.
As a coach, it’s almost a knee-jerk reaction for me to say that having an accountability partner is key to creating and sustaining new habits (like through my Life Design for Founders framework). But even without a coach, knowing what the new operating system looks like and starting to do the work on your own is already a huge step in the right direction.
This operating system comes down to the 3 simple steps of Positive Intelligence®. These steps help you exercise your ‘positive muscles’ to eventually shift your baseline state to one that is more positive— regardless of challenge. But first — let’s clarify what positive intelligence is.
What is Positive Intelligence?
Positive Intelligence is your capacity to respond to life’s challenges with a positive rather than negative mindset. According to Shrizad Chamine, Stanford lecturer and author of Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve Their True Potential and How You Can Achieve Yours, it is all an internal game, where you strengthen the part of your brain that serves you and quieten the parts that sabotage you.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure — and you can measure positive intelligence. The Positive Intelligence Quotient, PQ®, measures the strength of your positive brain muscles. It is expressed as a percentage that tells you how much of your time your brain is acting for you, instead of against you.
A score of 75 is considered the ‘tipping point’ — a point at and above which you have a continuous uplifting of your mood, and below which you have more of a downward pull. (If curious, you can test your own score at this link).
The book cites extensive research done around individuals with higher quotient, who close more deals, take fewer sick days, perform better, and make better decisions than those with a lower quotient. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In order to increase your positive quotient, all you need to do is follow the 3 steps:
- Intercept your saboteurs
- Engage your positive brain
- Shift to the positive perspective
With that in mind, let’s go through each in more detail below.
#1: Intercept your saboteurs
Identify them first
Saboteurs are the characters that manifest as negative voices in your head. They have developed over time since your childhood to have their own system of thought, processes and feelings that literally sabotage your best interest.
The Positive Intelligence research categorized the negative responses from hundreds of CEOs and their teams and simmered them down into 10 different characters, described briefly below:
- The Judge: Advocates in absolutes, telling you what is right and wrong
- The Avoider: Avoids difficult and unpleasant tasks and conflict
- The Controller: Takes charge to control situations to their own will, anxious and impatient
- The Hyper-Achiever: Constantly performs and achieves for validation
- The Hyper-Rational: Uses almost exclusive rational processing, even in matters of the heart
- The Hyper-Vigilant: Anxious about potential dangers, never rests
- The Pleaser: Seeks acceptance by helping others while losing sight of own needs
- The Restless: In search of the next best thing, always busy
- The Stickler: A perfectionist that takes order too far
- The Victim: Suffers from emotional martyrdom to gain attention, focus on self
You might have already identified your most familiar ‘bad guy’ above. But if you are curious to find out more, take the saboteur assessment at this link.
Saboteurs are all about maintaining the status quo, even if that counters your growth. Their intention is to keep us safe, which they have been doing for years. They are so ingrained in us that we may not even realize they are there — or worse, we may consider them helpful.
This is the biggest hurdle I have with my coaching clients: If these so-called saboteurs have worked so well for them thus far, how can they be so bad?
I felt the same way. Allow me to illustrate with my own saboteur experience.
I am home to a powerful stickler saboteur. I owed a lot, if not all of my success to this character when preparing for piano competitions throughout my youth, as it helped me memorize the contents for an hour-long concert in excruciating detail. In my recent years, the stickler helped me transition into the world of startups and venture, helping me organize my thoughts and learn as fast as I could, while always aiming for perfection.
But here’s the kicker: Would I want to do all this being critical, irritable, tense, and highly sensitive to feedback? Or would I rather be calm, centered, confident, curious, and guided by my inner compass while doing so?
Of course I’d want the the second option. I just felt that wasn’t possible. But as the research proves, it’s not only possible, the outcomes of your work are even better.
According to the work done by Barbara L. Frederickson and her Broaden-and-Build theory of positive emotions, when feeling positive emotions, your attention and awareness is literally broadened. This helps you be more creative and cognitively flexible even when challenges arrive. You can build resources to undo the psychological effects of anxiety and anger and build resilience. Move aside, saboteurs!
Intercept them before they take action
Once identified, it’s time to intercept. You can do this in 2 simple steps:
1. Stop and observe yourself every time you have any negative emotion.
Yes, every time you have any negative emotion. What caused this negative emotion? Was it something in you, in others or in the environment? What thoughts arose?
2. Name it.
It is as simple as saying: “Oh, there goes the Stickler again…”
This awareness and naming create a successful interception. The next part involves getting the correct gears in your brain into action.
#2: Engaging your positive brain
The neuroscience
The fact is that you can’t simply switch from being aware of your saboteur and naming it to just being happy about everything. You need to engage the region of the brain from which the positive perspective can arise. Without it, you will be stuck with your saboteurs.
When in saboteur-mode, the active region of the brain is the survivor brain, comprised of the brain stem, limbic system and the left brain. This is the home of the ‘flight-or-flight’ response, which redirects blood to the heart and limbs to enable a quick escape and narrows the mind’s focus solely on signs of danger.
The positive or PQ brain region is what must be engaged to activate the positive perspective. This region consists of the middle prefrontal cortex, the ‘empathy circuitry’ and parts of the right brain, and is responsible for helping you pause before taking action, stay centered, and self-soothe your fear. It also holds access to your intuition, described by Shirzad as ‘The Sage’, and is home to the positive perspective we seek.
Engage the body, engage the Sage
Engaging the positive brain is accessed by focusing intently on your physical sensations for a minimum of 2 minutes. That’s it. Do that deliberately and after a few days it will get easier.
To help you get started, you can use the following physical sensations and prompts:
- Sight: Connect vividly with one thing in front of you, or outside your window. Notice the subtle nuances of color, shading, texture and shape. Notice the detail at different distances and how they beautifully overlap.
- Sound: Listen for all sounds in your environment. Focus on one of them for some time, then switch to focus on another one intently. You can do the same for a piece of music, and focus on the individual instruments.
- Touch: Use your fingertips to touch the fabric of your pants, your skin or your chair, and allow yourself to feel the texture, temperature, resistance or softness through movement. Switch between the focus on your fingertips to sense the touch from the receiving side.
- Bodily sensations: Feel the weight of your body in your seat. Notice the weight on your feet, limbs, joints. Try to feel each one of your toes or each one of your fingers by just focusing on them individually. Feel the air of the ceiling fan brush against your skin.
- Breath: Focus on the rising and falling of each breathe. Notice the how it moves from stomach, to chest, to throat and nose, and nostrils. Focus on the subtle feeling of breath going in and out of your nose, and the tickling sensation on your upper lip.
The real key to connecting to your bodily sensations is not in the doing, but in giving yourself permission to let the change in focus have an impact on you.
It’s a conscious choice to simply be open to receiving what is already there. If you are using your eyes to look out into the view outside your window, allow the color and texture to captivate you. If listening to the melody of a song, allow yourself to take it in and feel it’s pull. When taking 3 deep breaths, simply receive the nourishment that those inhalations already have in store for you.
To sum it up for you busy leaders who have a bias towards action: Through not taking action, and instead, intentionally letting whatever it is take over you, you are making more progress.
Eventually, the challenges that create negativity in you will prove to be the access point to your unique, positive ‘sage’ perspective.
#3: Shift to the positive perspective
In order to make the shift, you can ask yourself any of the below three questions in what Shirzad likes to call the Three-Gifts technique:
1. What gift of knowledge or learning are you receiving in this situation?
2. What strengths or qualities would you need to grow to deal with this situation?
3. What gift of decisive action can you take now thanks to this situation?
There are many different names for this positive perspective. The ‘older wiser self’, the ‘Leader Within’ from the Co-Active® Leadership model, or ‘The Sage’. No matter what term you use to describe it, it holds the wisdom to answer those questions.
But how can you be sure you are in the positive perspective?
It feels like the knowing side of you, not in an intellectual sense but more so in a gut-feeling sense. You just ‘know’. You feel capable of compassion mixed with a healthy sense of ownership and boundaries. You feel connected and empathetic, curious and explorative, capable of innovation and creativity, even. You possess clarity and direction. And to uphold this way of being, it takes sincere courage and yes, decisive action, both of which are very present.
This state is supported by one core belief: that in every outcome and circumstance there is a gift and opportunity.
If you follow these steps consistently enough, culminating in this feeling of opportunity, it will become more and more natural to you. And as you grow with this new perspective as more of a default, your speed of recovery will become quicker to the point that what used to ruin your day becomes a momentary alarm signal.
Yes, anyone can do this. And if you want to grow as a leader, inside and outside the office, this is not a nice to have. These steps are the path to getting there.
Thank you for reading. Please give me a clap if you liked this and share your comments below!
If interested to get signed up with a small group of fellow leaders facing similar challenges, create a private group with your own team, or if you would like to explore these tools one-on-one, I am a Mental Fitness Coach™, and would be happy to help. Simply email me at me@beckykux.com and we can get started.
Becky Kux is a coach to founders and senior leaders in positions across Southeast Asia and beyond who partner with her to discover their authentic leadership essence. You can follow her on Linkedin and email her at me@beckykux.com
