What’s the Difference between Positive Intelligence® and Positive Thinking?

In the interconnected realms of personal and professional development and well-being, both positive thinking and Positive Intelligence® have emerged as guiding approaches. While both contribute to building resilience, Positive Intelligence®differs in some key ways. Read on to gain a clearer understanding of how enhancing your Positive Intelligence® can help you navigate challenges and complexity with less stress and more ease.

Positive Thinking: Expecting Things to Go Well

Positive thinking revolves around maintaining an optimistic mindset and expecting a favorable outcome. It emphasizes the power of thoughts in shaping reality and encourages us to focus on constructive, hopeful thoughts rather than dwelling on negativity or potential obstacles. This can be empowering as it can help boost confidence and motivation to pursue goals.

While it can be undeniably beneficial for goal achievement and well-being, its limitation lies in its focus on passive anticipation of positive outcomes. When navigating adversity or unexpected difficulties, positive thinking may not provide us with sufficient tools to navigate challenges and grow from them.

Positive Intelligence®: Responding to Adversity with Intention and Clear-headed Action

In contrast, Positive Intelligence® (PQ) goes beyond simply expecting a favorable outcome. It also involves consciously strengthening the mental muscles we need to handle stress, setbacks, and negative emotions effectively, and stay present, curious, and creative, even in the face of big challenges.

Developed by Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence® also encompasses enhancing the capacity to both perceive and engage with opportunities for growth and increased resilience in the face of adversity.

Key aspects of Positive Intelligence® include:

• Heightened Self-Awareness: Cultivating a heightened awareness of your thoughts, emotions, and responses to situations, thereby enabling more conscious decision-making and taking actions that align with your values and vision.
• Saboteur Awareness: Recognizing and managing your inner saboteurs—critical, judgmental, or fearful thoughts about yourself, others, or circumstances—that undermine your productivity and well-being.
• Sage Perspective: Nurturing the ‘Sage’ mindset and approaches - clarity, empathy, curiosity, creativity, and conscious decision-making and action, even amidst complex challenges and circumstances.

Positive Intelligence® will support you to:

• Build Resilience: By strengthening your awareness of your emotional and habitual responses to stressors and your ability to navigate them with clarity and intention.
• Reframe Challenges: By strengthening your ability to identify opportunities for learning and growth in difficulties or setbacks, rather than viewing them simply as obstacles or disappointments.
• Embrace Complexity: By recognizing and acknowledging that our lives and work include myriad experiences - positive, negative, and in between - and learning to navigate them all with equanimity and grace.

Positive Intelligence® will equip you with the skills to thrive, regardless of the outcome. It encourages a deeper understanding of yourself and the world, and fosters emotional agility and adaptive responses to big challenges and changes.

Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space is our power to choose our response.

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Stephen Covey / Viktor Frankl* 

*This quote is often attributed to Stephen Covey, but he attributes it to Victor Frankl,
saying he read it in a book while on vacation in Hawaii, but he could not find the book or attribution again.

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in your work and personal life using Positive Intelligence® (PQ).