Who's REALLY sitting in the driver's seat of your?life?

I’ve been on a mission to get to know, understand, and recreate myself for as long as I remember.?

It started when I was in high school, with some thought-provoking conversations with my aunt who was on her healing journey from an alcoholic father and husband. This opened the world of AA to me. I got to know that community and learned so much from their open meetings. I was deeply touched by the vulnerability and honesty of their stories, of how they reached rock bottom and their painful and inspiring paths to healing and sobriety.?

I felt the calling to deepen my knowledge of the psyche and how to help people in difficult situations. Another reason was to understand the motives behind their sometimes self-destructive behaviours. This directed me to take a psychology degree. In parallel, I chose to go through the journey of working on myself through psychotherapy. I didn’t want to be one of those psychology students who studied psychology to solve their own problems, because it simply didn't work this way. Freud was right about not being able to see your own self-defence mechanisms, even if you know them all by heart!?

All of that was my commitment to get into the core of my own heart (pun unintended!). Take a closer look at the suppressed, rejected and shamed parts of me in order to unleash the beauty chained in the shadows of it. I became my own case study and this will never end! I embraced new approaches, philosophies, methodologies, and theories I could measure myself against. I kept discovering new facets of my character I was unaware of, and slowly unravelling and understanding my behaviours.

And where am I going with all this? Right. So recently I’ve been introduced to a very simplified, yet extremely comprehensive and eye-opening construct that keeps pulling me out of my misery in a SPECTACULAR way. On a daily basis.?

Within 10-second bursts!?

It’s called PQ (Positive Intelligence Quotient). Simply speaking, it measures how quickly you can recover from a stressful and negative situation, by changing the narrative around it and taking swift, empowering actions.?

Historically, we used our brains to survive, reproduce and keep ourselves safe in life-threatening situations. The last one also happens when we are children while developing our sense of the world. It was supportive to a certain point, but, later in our adult life, it may not serve us well anymore.

Let’s put the hat of a scientist on for a second here.

According to studies using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures the small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity), there are two main areas of the brain that are responsible for either negative or positive responses to our thoughts and feelings.

Let's start with the negative ones, as those are the ‘default’ options our mind is going for. Saboteurs (is how PQ creators name them) are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions when you handle life’s challenges. They exist in the brainstem, limbic system, and parts of the left brain.?

They produce much of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, shame, guilt, frustration, and mind chatter.?

These emotions are only helpful for a few seconds, as they alert you to dangers or issues. However, continuing with these states of emotions hurts your ability to see clearly and choose the most supportive response. Imagine holding your hand on the hot stove for longer than a second. Yup, that's the issue!

Your Sage, on the other hand, lives in an entirely different region of your brain — the right part of it — the middle prefrontal cortex, “empathy circuitry”. It generates positive emotions while handling life’s challenges.?

These include empathy, compassion, gratitude, curiosity, the joy of creativity, and calm, clear-headed laser-focused action. This region is wired for creativity and big-picture awareness of what is actually important and the best course of action.

Activating this region results in the release of endorphins (your positive hormones) that counter the negative impacts of the stress-induced hormone — cortisol.

Why is this important to know? Because, in any situation in life we (most probably) chose the default, an ‘auto-pilot’ response that we’ve learned very early in our childhood as a self-defence mechanism to keep ourselves safe. As mentioned before, those strategies might not be as good for us as adults, because we can cope with difficulties in different ways than we did as children. And so we can access the Sage response instead.?

For that though, we need courage, love and self-compassion to face imaginable fears, failures and the unknown. That would ultimately push us towards the growth of our potential and direct us to the path of the life we’ve always desired.?

We can learn to trust ourselves and see ‘failure’ as a learning opportunity, and fear as an invitation to explore what’s on the other side of it. Usually, it’s pretty magical. This allows you to take laser-focused actions to manifest the most joyful and abundant life.?

So what’s the real work here??

It’s being relentless in becoming self-aware and identifying what type of judgements and sabotaging thoughts are running through your mind in every possible moment. Once you know that you can label it, it already softens its power over you, because when you stop and get present you can choose a different response to an event. Whether it’s an aggressive judgement, closing someone in the box of ‘I don’t like you, you've got nothing to teach me’, a limiting belief or a lowering self-worth thought or avoiding confrontation, it can all be rephrased.?

It’s the journey of UNLEARNING those unsupportive strategies and LEARNING new habits of mental strength to cope with life’s challenges in a new, creative and action-oriented way.?

If this sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, go ahead and test your Saboteurs . The work starts here. Then, if you decide you want to build your Sage muscle, let me know, and I’ll be happy to guide you back into the driver’s seat of your life!?

If you want to learn how to fire your sabotaging driver and hire a more joyous and empowering one, get in touch and I’ll be happy to guide you!

I'm currently during my PQ certification and have 2 slots for new clients!

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