Positive Intelligence

Book review of Shirzad Chamine’s book on how to think more positively

Like many others, I’m constantly looking for ways to up my game; more focus, more energy, more effective tactics and strategies for performance at work and in life. Most importantly, I’m always looking for habits I can incorporate into my life that will have lasting change.

I work at Google, and one of the most under-rated perks (and my personal favorite — ranked significantly higher than the food and other perks) is the amazing authors, speakers and thinkers that come to Google on an almost daily basis to speak and present their ideas. Many of these speakers are pitching their ideas or books on how to get more, how to be more effective, how to increase your happiness or productivity. In the first minutes of their talks, they all promise to leave you with actionable advice that you’ll have at the end of the talk. And, without fail, they always over-promise and under-deliver. I don’t know if it’s because they’re actually hoping to keep the secret sauce so you’ll buy their books — or whether they are just poor speakers. Shirzad Chamine delivered on his promise, and I had finished his book within a week of watching his talk.

Chamine promises to incorporate recent developments in neuroscience with organizational science, and positive psychology in order to give you practical ways to increase your life satisfaction and effectiveness. The most unique and relevant insight I took from this was that the parts of the brain that generate ideas and are generally associated with positivity are physically distinct from the parts of the brain that are responsible for negativity and defense. His premise is that we hit limits of our effectiveness due to internal sabotage that has its source in our overactive ‘lizard brain’ that is programmed to defend our physical and mental well-being. The fight or flight regions.

He describes common ‘saboteurs’ that manifest from these negative regions of the brain, and methods for identifying, pacifying, and ultimately reducing their impact on our decisions and feelings. He says they have their purpose, typically in helping us defend and maintain our mental well being, especially as we grow up. But, that we become over-dependent on them, and don’t realize how much they sabotage us without even knowing these patterns of thinking are there…

In his talk, Chamine explicitly says that meditation is one of the main methods of complementing the mental exercise of constantly labeling and quelling this constant internal sabotage, but also says that he knows most people can’t or won’t sit and meditate. He provides an alternative, which he calls ‘PQ exercises’ which entails putting your awareness on physical sensations you are experiencing. This is the second super-interesting aspect of his premise; namely, that these bodily awareness exercises seem to activate the same parts of the brain that meditation does. I’m a long-time (but not terribly successful) meditator, and this immediately clicked for me — meditation often starts with a ‘body scan’ and I have always had a hard time telling whether this ‘body scan’ is an actual meditation, or just a preparation for meditation. Chamine’s positing that you’re getting the same benefit I think makes a lot of sense, and he seems to say the science supports this. Of course, if you’re a Buddhist meditator, you know that your motivation for meditating is ultimately to achieve enlightenment and help others, but I don’t think Chamine’s version is contradictory or problematic. It’s just simplified and probably more palatable for those who don’t happen to connect with the spiritual or religions trappings of Buddhism. If the end result is more positivity and less defensive thinking, I think it’s actually completely in line with more secular versions of Buddhism.

Chamine argues that if you can do these exercises throughout the day for 21 days straight, you’re putting down a strong foundation to increase your positivity. Along with this, you need to be constantly going against your ‘saboteur’ tendencies — but, in a way that is also seemingly identical to Buddhist meditations with similar goals. Specifically, label these negative thoughts, and simply move on. Don’t rail against them — don’t feel bad that you’re having these thoughts — just identify them, and put them aside. Chamine also has suggested thought exercises to empower what he calls your ‘sage’. The sage is basically the mind under positive influence. He describes several aspects of this mind-state, including empathy, innovation, exploration, navigation and action. And, he gives a single, simple thought exercise for each that can be used to encourage ‘sage’ thinking and combat negativity and defensive thinking.

The ultimate premise is that by doing all of these things in concert, you can eventually reach a point where the proportion of your time spent in the ‘sage’ mode is much greater (he says 75% is a tipping point for significant life change) than the proportion of your time engaging the defensive thinking portion of your brain, and that this can result in significant improvements in life satisfaction, effectiveness, and kind of ‘pure action’ modes where you’re ‘in the zone’. While many of his methods are not technically or inherently different from many mindfulness-based stress reduction or meditation methods, he significantly simplifies the process, and gives you a unique (and I think new) way of doing these things. And, they are not simply focused on reducing stress, but on getting you into a place where work and challenges are only seen as opportunities, as well as giving you the tools to make the most of those opportunities.

While I’m only about 10 days into my journey, I can already see some improvements, and the logic of his entire premise and methods makes more sense than anything I’ve heard/seen or read over my many years on investigating ways to increase effectiveness and happiness. The simple premise that you’re actually engaging different parts of your brain for positive versus defensive thinking has, to me, been a tremendous insight. The implications are that lots of ‘exercise’ (practice) using the positive parts of your brain, and gradually phasing out the habits of using the defensive portions of your brain mean an ultimate shift in how you think. And, the insight that ‘body scan’ methods are close (if not identical) to certain kinds of meditation, which also engage the positive portion of your brain, is another hugely significant insight I’ve not come across before, and has helped me solve the problem of taking a good morning meditation session with me to face the day.

What are the implications if we were all to increase the percentage of time we spend in the positive regions of the brain, and decrease our negative thoughts?!