Train Your Brain to Silence Your Inner Saboteurs with Shirzad Chamine

Summary

Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan: Train Your Brain to Silence Your Inner Saboteurs with Shirzad Chamine

In this enlightening episode of Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan, host Heather Monahan welcomes Shirzad Chamine, a New York Times bestselling author, Stanford University lecturer, and a pioneer in mental fitness. The episode delves deep into understanding and overcoming internal barriers known as "saboteurs" that hinder personal and professional growth. Through engaging discussions, personal anecdotes, and actionable strategies, Shirzad offers listeners a roadmap to rewire their brains for sustained positive change.

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Shirzad Chamine’s Personal Journey

Shirzad begins by sharing his transformative personal story, highlighting how adversity fueled his passion for helping others overcome internal obstacles. Growing up in poverty and struggling with clinical depression for the first 30 years of his life, Shirzad faced significant challenges that eventually led to a pivotal moment in his career. After a devastating professional setback—being ousted from the CEO position of his venture-backed software company—he embarked on a quest to understand the internal forces that dictated his behavior. This journey of self-discovery and research culminated in his groundbreaking work on mental fitness and the identification of internal saboteurs.

Shirzad Chamine [00:00]: "If you're serious about sustained change, you do really need to rewire your brain and rewire your reflexes."

Understanding Saboteurs and Their Impact

Saboteurs are defined as automatic, negative thought patterns that undermine our well-being, performance, and relationships. Shirzad explains that these internal saboteurs are deeply ingrained neural pathways in the brain, formed as defensive mechanisms during childhood to cope with various stresses and challenges.

Shirzad Chamine [00:00]: "They have built neural pathways, which is the brain's muscle power. So the only way to truly change is we need to intercept these and then choose differently."

Strategies to Overcome Saboteurs

Shifting from Saboteur to Sage

Shirzad introduces the concept of the "Sage," the positive counterpart to the saboteur. The Sage represents our inner wisdom and positive potential. To shift from saboteur-driven reactions to Sage responses, Shirzad emphasizes the importance of intercepting negative patterns and consciously choosing alternative, positive actions.

Shirzad Chamine [00:00]: "You can't fight muscle with insight. You need to fight muscle with muscle."

10-Second Techniques (PQ Reps)

A cornerstone of Shirzad's methodology is the use of simple, 10-second exercises known as PQ Reps (Positive Intelligence Reps). These techniques help individuals quickly shift their brain activation from the negative saboteur region to the positive Sage region, facilitating immediate and lasting change.

Shirzad Chamine [27:35]: "If you're serious about rewiring your brain after doing the saboteur assessment, you may want to look at the app guided program that we offer."

Personal Examples of Saboteurs in Action

The Controller Saboteur: Shirzad’s Daughter

Shirzad shares a compelling example of his daughter, Tisa, who embodies the "Controller" saboteur. Originally a naturally driven and organized individual, her inclination to control became a saboteur under stress, leading to micromanagement and team resentment. Through her conscious efforts to engage her Sage through PQ Reps, Tisa transformed her leadership style from authoritarian to inspiring, fostering a more collaborative and innovative team environment.

Shirzad Chamine [20:00]: "Instead of sharing my idea and pushing my idea, I asked everybody what they were inspired to do... they were feeling their own peace in it."

The Avoider Saboteur: Shirzad’s Son

Similarly, Shirzad discusses his son, who represents the "Avoider" saboteur. Initially an easygoing and adaptable individual, overuse of these traits led to procrastination and conflict avoidance. By employing Shirzad's techniques, his son learned to recognize the onset of avoidance behaviors and take proactive steps, such as committing to just 10 seconds of action, which often leads to continued progress and resolution.

Shirzad Chamine [43:10]: "When you pivot to that, you're more likely to continue going and finish the task."

Neuroscience Behind Rewiring the Brain

Delving into the science, Shirzad explains that consistent practice of PQ Reps can physically rewire the brain. Studies have shown increased gray matter in positive brain regions and decreased gray matter in saboteur regions within eight weeks of dedicated practice. This neuroplasticity underscores the effectiveness of his methods in fostering long-term behavioral change.

Shirzad Chamine [00:00]: "In MRI imaging, you can literally visually see there is more gray matter in the positive region of the brain and there's less gray matter in the outer region of the brain."

Exploring Other Saboteurs and Their Strategies

The Pleaser Saboteur

The "Pleaser" saboteur stems from an innate empathy and kindness but can lead to overcommitment and neglect of personal needs. Shirzad advises distinguishing between genuine, joyful giving and reluctant pleasing driven by fear of rejection. Techniques include asking oneself, "What would please me?" to prioritize personal well-being.

Shirzad Chamine [29:22]: "For the pleaser, we call it ask the question. What would please me?"

The Victim Saboteur

Those with a "Victim" saboteur often feel uniquely disadvantaged and prone to self-pity. Shirzad encourages fostering unconditional self-love as a remedy, using techniques like visualizing a childhood picture to reconnect with one's inherent worth and reduce dependency on external validation.

Shirzad Chamine [50:09]: "The 10 second technique is give yourself a big loving hug... and love yourself in that moment."

Conclusion and Next Steps

Heather Monahan wraps up the episode by highlighting the profound impact Shirzad's work can have across various aspects of life, including personal relationships, professional endeavors, athletics, and education. She encourages listeners to take Shirzad's Saboteur Assessment available at positiveintelligence.com to identify their top saboteurs and engage with the guided app program for structured improvement.

Heather Monahan [54:26]: "Take the assessment. Everybody listening right now. I'm linking it in the show notes. It is worth five minutes of your time to start understanding yourself and have these 10 second solutions so that you can perform at a higher level and feel better."

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Key Takeaways:

• Identify Your Saboteurs: Recognizing internal negative patterns is the first step toward overcoming them.
• Engage the Sage: Cultivating the positive inner self can counteract negative saboteur behaviors.
• Consistent Practice: Utilizing simple, actionable techniques like PQ Reps can lead to significant brain rewiring and sustained positive change.
• Personal Growth: Overcoming saboteurs enhances well-being, performance, and relationships across all areas of life.

Listeners are encouraged to explore Shirzad Chamine’s resources further by visiting positiveintelligence.com to embark on their journey toward greater confidence and fulfillment.

Transcript

[Shirzad Chamine]

If you're serious about sustained change, you do really need to rewire your brain and rewire your reflexes. So all these saboteurs are my automatic way of reacting to life's challenges. I've done it for so many years. They're the automatic way, which means they have muscle power in my brain. They have built neural pathways, which is the brain's muscle power. So the only way to truly change is we need to intercept these and then do this thing that I just talked about, the picurops, these brain activation, and then choose differently. And each time you choose differently, you begin to lay out a new neural pathway and new wiring and muscle power in the brain. That's the positive side. And so what I talk about is you can't fight muscle with insight. You need to fight muscle with muscle. So in order to really change, you need to lay down the neural pathways of positive response. In MRI imaging, you can literally visually see there is more gray matter in the positive region of the brain and there's less gray matter in the outer region of the brain. You have rewired your brain in a way that it actually shows up in MRI imaging within eight weeks.

[Heather Monahan]

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me. We are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

[Shirzad Chamine]

I'm ready for my close up.

[Heather Monahan]

Hi and welcome back. I'm so glad you're back here with us this week. Oh my gosh, this is going to be so exciting for everyone. I can't wait for you to meet our guests. Shirzad Shamin is a New York Times bestselling author of Positive Intelligence, Stanford University lecturer and pioneer in mental fitness. Shirzad's groundbreaking work integrates neuroscience, cognitive behavioral psychology, positive psychology, and performance science into practical applications that have transformed millions of lives across the globe. Shirzad, thank you so much for being here today.

[Shirzad Chamine]

My pleasure, Heather. I'm so glad to be here.

[Heather Monahan]

Okay. How did you get into this work to begin with? It sounds so incredible, but not like.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Something someone would just fall into multiple stages in it. But basically I grew up in poverty, in a ghetto with a father that I was terrified of. It turns out I was in clinical Depression the first 30 years of my life. I didn't even know that I was diagnosed in clinical depression. I was 30. It turns out that there is a lot that messed me up as I was growing up. It all culminated in I had started a venture backed software company, been a visionary, attracted all these luminaries, and Investors to my company and great investors and great team members and also clients. And a couple years into it, I walk into my office and my heart sinks because in my boardroom was sitting the chairman of the board, my president and vice presidents. It was a palace coup. What was happening is people had gone to that board and said, shirzad has shifted from being a visionary leader to such a horrific micromanaging and controlling leader. We can't stand working for him anymore. On that day, it was the most painful day of my professional life. I was demoted as the CEO of the company I had founded. The pain was so searing that I had to figure out what is going on inside of me. Who am I? Am I this visionary leader that attracted all these people to me, or am I this horrific leader nobody wants to work for? How come I went from one to the other and what's going on inside of me? Who am I and how did I get here and how did I stop the pain? And so that became a huge turning point for me in trying to figure out what's happening inside of me, how to reclaim the positive part of me and quiet what had taken control. And that was the beginning of a lot of research and the work that I did that led to this body of work.

[Heather Monahan]

That's an incredible story. First of all, I love that you didn't just stop with it, but you dove into it even more. I think that feels fear is a green light. That means go and go faster. And I live by that. And I'm so happy. You clearly do as well. Sometimes the hardest thing to look at is the mirror.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Right.

[Heather Monahan]

But you certainly did. So I did your saboteur assessment, which you've done so much research. I mean, there's obviously years before what you initially dealt with and faced and where you come to now. But I love to get into the saboteur assessment and how you've helped millions of people in business and in life. Maybe not necessarily going through exactly what you went through, but going through situations where they're being held back by things that they're completely unaware of.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah. As a matter of fact, Heather, when I stand in front of audiences, I say, you know what? I have good news and bad news. The bad news is every single day, you are actively sabotaging your own well being, your own performance and your own relationships. Every single day, you're actively sabotaging your well being, performance and relationships. How do I know that? Because we all do it. The question is not if you do it. The question is in which way do you do it because there are 10 different ways depending on the saboteurs you have, then what can you do about it? Which is a lot of the tools, the neuroscience based tools that we bring to shift this. I think this is the human story. This is not just my story. It just happens that my story was a situation where what we call saboteurs, the agents of internal self sabotage, which you call villains in your book. I mean, I know your book is also about the internal villains that we have. It's pretty much the concept of saboteurs. And so we all have these characters inside of us. How do we intercept them and how do we shift to the inner sage instead of the inner saboteur? So the counterbalance with the saboteur is the inner sage. The Stanford students call this Jedi mind training. And they say, you know, this is inner Jedi versus inner Darth Vader. So whichever words you want to use is about the battle inside of your head between different voices, different forces, and how do we empower one side and quiet the other?

[Heather Monahan]

You know what's so interesting? Thank you for explaining that. What's so interesting when you were just explaining all this reminded me when I first took the assessment, I thought to myself, oh, gosh, you know, this poor guy. I actually have been doing so much work in my life on myself. I don't have any of these issues. This is what I was thinking when I. I thought, you know, like, I've transcended. I know that sounds foolish, but in my mind that's what I was thinking. And even when I was taking it, and I wonder how many people are like, I was taking the assessment. I'm like, strongly disagree, strongly disagree, strongly disagree. And then I started thinking to myself, am I, am I faking strong? Like, am I? Or is this real? And then I had to kind of stop a few times. And then I started thinking, oh, gosh, I used to struggle with this a lot, but then, am I still. Maybe a little. And so it's slowly I started going back over more to the middle. And do you hear people describe taking the assessment similarly to that?

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah, we like to not believe that there is still work we need to be doing. And one of the things that I reframe for people is that one way to look at saboteurs, first of all, why do we hold saboteurs? Saboteurs are patterns, mental patterns that we develop when we are kids in order to survive mentally and physically, in order to fend for ourselves, in order to get more love, in order to get more acceptance. In order to get more security, we all do it. And one way savagers develop is whatever your natural strength is, we are all born with different natural predispositions and strengths. Whatever your natural strength is, you overdo it, you go to it too often, and that becomes your greatest natural strengths become your greatest weaknesses. Because we overuse strengths. So if you tell me what your saboteurs are, I can tell you immediately what your natural greatest strengths are and how by overusing it, you have converted into your into a self sabotage mode. So there's a good news and bad news kind of combined in that it's two sides of the same coin.

[Heather Monahan]

You lost me. So if, okay, we all know that we have strength, and when we lean.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Into those, that is also amplified when we overuse them. The saboteurs are the ones in you that overuse or abuse some of your greatest strengths. And by overusing and abusing them, they backfire and actually cause sabotage. One of the things we show you is how to use that strength in a positive mode of your brain. Rather than saboteurs, which take that strength into the negative territory and have it cause backfiring and self sabotage, we can use the examples of your specific saboteurs. For us to talk about examples of this.

[Heather Monahan]

Okay, let's dive into it and do that, please.

[Shirzad Chamine]

I said, well, it's your option if you want to share your saboteurs with me. And you said, you're an open book. So you shared your saboteur assessment results with me. The top one is the hyperachiever. What does that mean? If you tell me your saboteur is a hyperachievery top one. But I can immediately know is that one of your great strengths actually is that you're achievement oriented, big goals for yourself. You want this life to have real things that you accomplish and that be used for the purpose. And something that at the end you look back and say, you know what? I spend my time and my life towards good outcomes and I have achieved a lot. That is a wonderful thing. Being achievement oriented is absolutely wonderful. Now, a hyper achiever, when it's taken too far, is the idea that you have attached your sense of self worth and self love to your achievement and you have made love for yourself conditional on what's your latest achievement, what's your latest achievement, what's your latest achievement. And what that results in is people who achieve and achieve and achieve and achieve. But once you achieve something, you work really, really, really hard to achieve the next thing. And then when you get there, you celebrate for A minute for maybe an hour for a day. And but you very quickly say, oh, that's not enough, that's just the latest achievement. I need to achieve this in order to feel good about myself. So you spend so much of your time between major achievements really striving to get to that achievement. And your love for yourself is conditioned on the achievement and the achievement achievement. The problem is there is no end to that. So I know hyper achievers in their 60s and 70s who have achieved tremendous amounts and they're still hungry for the next achievement so they can feel worthy. And so what we talk about in the shift regarding this saboteur is how can you keep the achievement orientation but make your self love and self acceptance completely unattached to the achievement so that you look yourself in the mirror at the end of even the toughest day when you have failed and made mistakes and all things have fallen apart. You look at yourself in the mirror and all you feel is unconditional, unwavering love and adoration for the beautiful being that you are and just disconnected to unparadoxically. That is going to result in you having greater achievement because as mistakes and failures happen on the way to the next achievement, you don't freak out as much, you don't stress out as much because your identity is not on the line. It's like, okay, I failed, what's the big deal? I'm going to brush the dust off myself and get up again. Because your identity is not under attack because your self love and self identity is unattached to the achievement. So paradoxically you end up achieving even more when you let go of being a hyperachiever and just focus on yes, being achievement oriented. That's a wonderful thing.

[Heather Monahan]

What are some of the strategies that you teach to help somebody do that?

[Shirzad Chamine]

Well, you mentioned before this program started that somebody had told you in your team that they had done a program that we did. And one of the powerful things in that program is something we did with the childhood picture. So that's a week in the program where we talk about the power of empathy and love brought first and foremost towards yourself and then towards others. Love directed towards yourself. We spent that entire week talking about how really the conditional love that we feel for ourselves is no love at all. The way we treat ourselves is like rat running a maze. And at the end, if you have been good and get to the end, we give you some cheese as reward. Don't want to treat yourself like a rat, you know, you want your love for yourself to be Unconditional meaning that as you look yourself in the mirror, you want to see the unchanging, beautiful essence being that you are that's unattached to anything. So that exercise is about how we want you to remember who you truly are. And we use the childhood picture as a way of remembering who you truly are. Before all these facades of who you think you are, you were born as a beautiful essence being. And that essence being is as unique as your fingerprint. And that essence being is gorgeous and beautiful from the moment you are born. And it's actually unchanging. That essence being never changes, just like your fingerprint never changes. Now that being is worthy of unconditional love. And so what we do during that whole week of practice is use the childhood picture as a way of remembering who you truly are and then falling in love with yourself. And I have people, you know, put that picture on their cell phone and on their desktop and they're constantly looking at that picture and falling back in love with their essence beautiful self. And because that essence being, it never changes. And at the end of the day, when you have made a lot of mistakes and failures have happened and achievement hasn't occurred, it doesn't do anything to you looking yourself in the mirror and actually feeling absolute deep love for yourself. And that nothing is wayward. So then in the middle of the day, when something I'm doing fails and goes wrong or whatever, I'm not threatened by anything. It's like that deep self love is intact and I recover much faster and continue on towards my goal. But I have separated the two from each other.

[Heather Monahan]

Wow, that's beautiful. And it sounds so good. It sounds so, it sounds so real. And I also didn't realize that if I would let go of the outcome, I would be able to achieve more, which makes a lot of sense because the more calm we can be, the more we can find solutions, the more creative we can be and the more we can succeed.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah, we can use, I use a metaphor, I mean the scenario of say in sports when, because we use these techniques at Stanford with a lot of athletes, world class athletes, and the example I use is, let's say you're a basketball player and it's the last three seconds of the game and they pass on the ball to you, and if you make it, you win the championship. And if you don't make it, you're the goat. You have lost the season for the team. Now when the ball is passed on to you, the question is, what's going on inside your head? Let's say you have this hyper achiever thing. Oh my God. My achievement is everything. My identity is on the line. If I don't make this, I'm going to be terrible and everybody's going to hate me and who am I? And my self love and self respect really suffers. If all of those things is what's happening, what's the likelihood of him actually making the basket as opposed to the ball comes to you and you're completely present with the joy of the game. You want to make the basket, not because, oh my God, I got the win. You want to make the basket because this is a joyful moment where you experience all of your practice and the mastery of playing the game. You're in the joy and completely present to the game. And what we describe it with athletes is that you're in the zone. When you're in the zone, all of the voices have quieted of all of these things that are happening in your head. You're in the zone and experiencing joy. Everything is in slow motion and you're much more likely to make it. So that's an example in sports where if you're too stressed about making the achievement, you actually choke. But that example also applies when you're sitting in a meeting, that very critical meeting, and, and the boss or the chairman of the board, whatever, are disagreeing with you and things are not going well. What's happening to you? Are you able to just completely breathe, not be attached to how this thing, this meeting is going to go and I agree with you or not, and then you completely center yourself and with that clarity, creative possibility comes in. You figure out exactly how to respond and you shift the meeting to where you want it to be. It applies just as much to daily interactions in business and personal life as it does say to sports.

[Heather Monahan]

Wow, that, that makes total sense. Thank you for explaining that. Meet a different guest each week. I asked you to try to find your passion.

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[Heather Monahan]

I asked you to try to find your passion. Okay, let's get to your saboteur, which I think from the story you shared is the controller.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Well, I have a bunch of them, if you want to know. So under stress, our saboteurs go on hyperdrive because that's what we have learned as a way of dealing with challenges. So what had happened to me is I had gone from my sage, my inner Jedi, the visionary leader during the time of attracting people to the company and all that, to not under stress. The product was late, the customers were upset, and under stress, my saboteur, which had been controller, has gone on overdrive. And so the problem with the controller, which was one of my saboteurs, is that the harder you try to control people's action, the more they are forced to either reluctantly go along with you, but feel resentful, or they actually reject you and fight back. And so as I was trying to drag my team towards the direction that I wanted, they were completely uninspired and eventually end up causing a palace coup on me. So what do we do? My daughter has the controller, Salvatore. She has been grown up with some of this stuff and she has been a great observer. She is in third year of college and I just a few months ago was recording a new video on the controller and I reached out to her, said, tisa, tell me what you have learned about your controller and what are you doing about it so I can maybe share this in the video. And she said, dad, I just had a perfect recent example. I was in a class where the professor assigned us to a project team of five and gave us what the project task was. And it was a pretty challenging thing. And the moment he gave us the task for the project team, I instantly knew exactly how to accomplish it. What are the things that needed to happen and what was the outcome? And all that in my controller day, I would have come and instantly said, okay, I know exactly what to do, and here's what you need to do and here's what you need to do. And all of that stuff and caused all of the angst that controllers caused. And instead what I realized is that what I needed to do is first of all calm myself down, let go of the needing to control things instantly. So I shifted my brain activation the way she has learned to do and Then she said, what I did is go around the table. And instead of sharing my idea and pushing my idea, I asked everybody what they were inspired to do, what were in the back of their minds about the ideas and what they wanted to accomplish, and made sure the quiet ones were heard so that everybody was equally heard. And as people were talking, I realized some of this is improving my initial idea. So by the time it came to me, my initial idea had been improved with all of these other things I had heard. I incorporated that into my initial idea and vision. Then when I brought it back to the group about what we could do, they were feeling their own peace in it. And then they each had figured a way to contribute. So by the time we said, let's take action, people were just so inspired to go take action rather than feeling forced into action through me. That was an example of controller leader versus an inspiring sage leader. And she was describing how powerful it worked. So that's what we show is instead of having a push strategy of the controller, create more of an inspiring pull so that people are inspired to co create with you rather than be forced into your vision of things. So that's one particular recent example for.

[Heather Monahan]

Me and a beautiful example. So what was something that she did that helped her transition from a controlling leader to one who is instead attracting people in to be a part of the solution?

[Shirzad Chamine]

Well, the most important thing was again, with each of the saboteurs we talk about, so look at what strength it is that you're overusing here. So with my daughter, the strength, when somebody says, I have the controller saboteur, I know one of their strengths is they are very driven and action oriented and capable of marshaling resources and organizing resources into activities and actions more than others. Those are all incredibly. And they have a confidence of personality that they can indeed exert influence and feel confident about marshaling resources like that. Those are incredibly important leadership abilities. So as my daughter was growing up, I was telling her, you know, that's an awesome thing. That's a great strength you bring. Now, when overused, people will feel you go towards your goal with such blind focus that you cause a lot of casualties. You bulldoze over people, you bulldoze, you don't really hear them and include them. People feel controlled, resentful, or pushed back. How can you have this be more of a pull than a push? First and foremost, I needed to help her feel into the moments where the controller is about to take over. So with all saboteurs, what we talk about is the way you know you're in saboteur versus your Sage is the emotion and energy you're experiencing. All saboteurs generate negative emotions. So the best way for me to know if I'm in the saboteur mode is I pay attention to my energy and emotion. And if it is negative, which includes stress, anger, frustration, disappointment, regret, judgment, all of these things, that means I am in saboteur world. And that's the telltale sign that I am in that mode. So my daughter has learned that when she's in controller mode, she feels kind of rigid. She feels anxious for making sure control is exerted. She feels impatient and frustrated when other people aren't going around. There's a lot of signals that says, hey, Tisa, you're in controller mode right now. What she has learned to do, which is the technique we teach, is these 10 second techniques we call PQ reps that shift brain activation. They quiet the saboteur region of the brain where all the saboteurs live and begin to energize the Sage, the positive part of the brain, so that a shift can begin to occur. So what she has learned, and I can show you and your audience some of these techniques, they each take 10 seconds. If we try this ourselves, if you take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel your fingertip ridges on both fingers, that's an example of the 10 second technique we call a picure up. What just happened? If you had your head under an FMRI machine, we ever so slightly quieted the saboteur region of the brain that produces all of the negativity and all the stress and upset and ever so slightly energized the Sage part of the brain where your positive inner Jedi lives as you shift to that. My daughter had done that, so she had shifted. Then in that positive mode, you have deeper access to these Sage superpowers. One of those is deep is true empathy. So in that mode, she actually felt empathetic towards this quiet member of the group who otherwise would not have felt heard. So she had a genuine empathy to really want to make sure she's brought out and is heard. In that part of the brain, you are in touch with deeper curiosity and you're truly, truly beginner's mind curious. What are the other ideas? You have deeper access to your innovate mind. There are five superpowers, and innovate is one of them. So you're more creative. So as she shifted, she shifted and had deeper access to her Sage superpowers. Which is how she orchestrated this, this meeting with people in a very different way than the controller would have done.

[Heather Monahan]

Wow, I love that. And immediately I felt so calm. Like any sense of nervousness just right now, but still, it just made me feel incredibly calm. Wow, that worked very quickly.

[Shirzad Chamine]

So, so, so this, the neuroscience of this is really important. What we are really doing, we call it mental fitness. What we talk about is if you're serious about sustained change, you do really need to rewire your brain and rewire your reflexes. So all these saboteurs are my automatic way of reacting to life's challenges. I've done it for so many years. They're the automatic way, which means they have muscle power in my brain. They have built neural pathways, which is the brain's muscle power. So my controller has muscle power. My avoider, my judge, my victim, they all have muscle power. They have immediacy, which is because of the neural pathways in my brain. The only way to truly change is we need to intercept these and then do this thing that I just talked about, the picurops, this brain activation, and then choose different. And each time you choose differently, you begin to lay out a new neural pathway and new wiring and muscle power in the brain. That's the positive side. What I talk about is you can't fight muscle with insight. You need to fight muscle with muscle. So in order to really change, you need to lay down the neural pathways of positive response. Every time you do this, you literally rewire your brain. What Harvard affiliated neuroscientists showed is that this practice, within eight weeks of practice, you have rewired the brain so much that in MRI imaging, you can literally visually see there is more gray matter in the positive region of the brain and there is less gray matter in the sabotage region of the brain. You have rewired your brain in a way that it actually shows up in MRI imaging within eight weeks.

[Heather Monahan]

What's another strategy people could employ to help allow that to happen?

[Shirzad Chamine]

Well, for each of the saboteurs, we have different strategies. So is there another saboteur that you're curious about?

[Heather Monahan]

The pleaser.

[Shirzad Chamine]

The pleaser. So, okay, so I said, if you tell me what the saboteur is, I can tell you what the strength underneath it. So if we know you have the pleasures avatar, what we know is that you were probably born with a natural predisposition to be very kind and empathic. Being sensitive, kind and empathic, a giver type of person, which is absolutely wonderful. Like that is a wonderful, wonderful strength. That is one of My natural strengths, empathy and caring is one of the reasons I'm successful in what I do. So I don't want to get rid of that strength. The problem is when that strength is overused, it becomes the pleaser's avatar. Because that strength may not be the right strength in all situations. It's just one strength. But there are situations where empathy is not the right thing to bring, where I need to actually be fierce and say no and set boundaries and push back. Those are different strengths. So the problem with the pleaser is that we overuse empathy in situations where other strengths are important and then we don't take care of ourselves. We don't ask for our own needs or our needs are not met. We give and give and give and we don't ask for and receive enough. And at some point we start being drained and we get frustrated and resentful and at some point we blow up because, oh my God, why are you such a taker? Well, the reason people are takers around us is because we have trained them in being takers. They don't even know what our needs are. We haven't asked for it. And we end up damaging relationships because we get resentful after a while. And so one of the strategies that we use with the pleaser is you gotta figure out at any given moment, are you saying yes and are you giving because your sage is choosing to give, because it's joyful to give, it's wonderful to give. Is it a sage choice or is it a reluctant pleaser choice? You're reluctantly saying yes and going along and all that because you really want people to like you and love you and be pleased by you, and in which case it is saboteur. And so again, you're paying attention to your emotions about it. When I am giving from choice, I feel the honor and joy of giving. It brings meaning to my life. And when I am reluctantly saying no because I can't, I can't, I can't say yes because I can't say no. And I'm worried about disappointing you and you not liking me. There's a neediness that I feel and if I pay attention, I realize there's a neediness here that's the pleaser or fear of disappointing and being disappointed rather than a choice of giving. In which case what we say is for each of these things we have 10 second techniques. So for the pleaser we say, okay, if you feel yourself in pleaser Mode, do your PQ reps that I shared before those 10 second brain activations. So you begin to quiet that part of the brain, activate the sage, and then the 10 second way of moving into the sage choice against the pleaser is we call it ask the question. What would please me? So in that moment, I want you to ask a simple question. What would please me? So that you get in touch with your needs, you get in touch with the love for yourself. Remember we talked before about that unconditional love? You get in touch with honoring yourself. If I were to honor myself, to please myself, to love myself right now, what would I choose to say or do? I might choose to say, no. I might choose to say, you know what, I have other priorities. I might choose to take care of myself. And so we shift to that with just that simple question.

[Heather Monahan]

Wow, that is so. And these are simple tweaks that somebody can make very quickly.

[Shirzad Chamine]

I would think we really incorporated not just cognitive behavioral psychology and neuroscience and positive psychology, but also the science of habit formation. How do you have people go from lifelong negative habits to new positive habits? And what we know is that unless the things that we want you to do are really simple and doable in the middle of a busy day, you're not going to do them. So therefore, a very key thing is you got to give people things that are so simple, like 10 second exercises, so that there's never an excuse that says, I just don't have time for this. Pretty much everything that we do is distilled to these 10 second techniques of shifting brain activation and choosing a positive stage response to counter the saboteur response. And for each of the saboteurs, we have a different 10 second thing. We help you see what your saboteurs are. And based on that, we show you what 10 second strategy would be helpful for it.

[Heather Monahan]

Is there one saboteur that more people.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Have than others that's a little culturally biased? So, for example, in the United States, the whole culture of the United States from the beginning has been achievement orientation. So in the United States, you see more people with hyperachiever than you see on some other cultures. Look at different cultures and which saboteurs tend to be a little bit more dominant. But having said that, in every culture, our rock Nile is being used in a hundred different countries. We have trained more than 100,000 coaches from more than 100 countries. And what we find is these saboteurs are universal. So they're pretty much a dominance of a lot of them in pretty much.

[Heather Monahan]

Wherever you go, you meet a different guest each week.

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[Heather Monahan]

I asked you to try to find Your passion, I would imagine. And I'm so interested to hear what your research tells you, that women are more pleasers more often and men and women would lean to one more than the other.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah, and you're exactly right. Jenny Singh is exactly right. And the difference is not dramatic, it's not huge. So we, for example, you're absolutely right. There are more pleaser women than there are pleaser men. And it's a few percentage points, not more dramatic than that. So we have a lot of men who have the pleaser saboteur, including myself, by the way. And another part of it is one of the saboteurs is hyper rational. So One of the 10 saboteurs is called hyperrational. The overuse of the rational mind, the overuse of the analytical mind in situations where the analytical mind is not the right tool. For example, when you're having a relationship conflict and a guy comes into the hyperrational and says, oh, I hear you, Yeah, I get it. And here are the three ways we can fix this problem. And they're not listening to any of the feelings, they're not bringing any empathy, and they're just going to problem solving. And from a cold rational place. That's abuse of the rational mind. That's being hyper rational and that's damaging the relationship. Right. So there are more men with the hyper rational than women. But still, having said that, there are a lot of women with the hyper rational.

[Heather Monahan]

Wow. It's shocking to me. And also one of the things that surprised me is there was ratings almost on all the saboteurs for me. And explain to you what that actually means, that we all have a saboteur, every single one of them.

[Shirzad Chamine]

At some level we have elements of all the saboteurs. But basically the reason we have the saboteur assessment is we want people to focus on working on their top couple of saboteurs. And the reason is if you give you a couple of things to focus on, then you're not overwhelmed and you learn the strategies against those specific saboteurs. And what happens is, as you learn to intercept those two saboteurs, the action ends up rewiring your brain in such a way where all your saboteurs lose some other power. The reason is we are literally shifting brain flow and oxygenation from the saboteur region of the brain. And all the saboteurs live in the same region of the brain and all the sage lives in a different region, which is why we are rewiring your brain in a way that there is increased gray matter in the positive region, decreased gray matter in the negative region. So all your saboteurs lose some of their strength, regardless of which one you focus on working on. So we have people focus on their top two saboteurs, and everything goes from there.

[Heather Monahan]

So a couple other saboteurs really jumped out at me. The victim and the Avoider. I'm sure people tell you, like, there's individuals that come to mind immediately when I hear them.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah, we might as well talk. Call out some of the names. Like, there is the Avoider is a Controller. There is the Hyper Achiever, Hyper Rational, Hyper Vigilant. There's the Pleaser. There is the Stickler and the restless and victims, Then the judge, which is the universal saboteur that everybody has. And so you're curious now about. You said victim's avatar.

[Heather Monahan]

Yeah, the victim and the avoid. I know a lot of people who fit that bill.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah. The Avoider has two types of avoidance. One is avoidance of dealing with conflict and wanting kind of ignoring dealing with conflict long enough so that the conflict actually festers and blows up in your face so that avoidance ends up really costing you. Second kind of avoidance is just procrastinating against tasks and deadlines and things that you're not really excited and energized with. So you procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate again until things blow up in your face. So both kinds of avoidance causes a lot of anxiety. And my son, I talked about my daughter having the controller's avatar. My son has the avoidance avatar. They were born night and day different. So I said what the strength of my daughter was. She's an extroverted, energetic, hard charging, driven girl. She was there. She was like that when she was two years old and taken too far. That became the controversial avatar. My son is born with such a different predisposition. He is a life is a bowl of cherries kind of a guy. I mean, he's such a sweet, sweet, even keel, easygoing guy. Life is supposed to be a bowl of cherries. Things are supposed to be pleasant. You don't get rigidly attached to anything. Yeah, this will work, but this will also work. Everything is cool. So you go with the flow. And the strength of this is this natural, positive predisposition, being very flexible and adaptable. You don't get rigidly fixated on anything. You're very creative and adjusting in the moment. So it's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful quality. Right. And then taken too far, it becomes the Avoider's avatar. Because here I am wanting life to be pleasant and everything easy. And then some real big challenge is in front of me and I don't want to. It's not easy and pleasant. So I just avoid it altogether. I take a left turn instead of really confronting it and so taking too far, it becomes the avoider. So my conversation with my son was very different than with my daughter. It was like, son, you have this amazing, amazing strength. Use it when it serves and watch out when it is a self sabotage and the avoider. So in that sense, one of the things that we have, the strategy against the Avoider is that you pay attention again physically to see what are when the emotions of the avoider is shown up, you feel that yucky guilt about avoidance. You kind of know you're avoiding something important. You feel guilt and shame and stress about it. When you notice that instead of denying it, just recognize that's happening. Do these 10 second exercises to shift your brain activation and then look at the thing you have been avoiding and just choose to do 10 seconds. The first 10 second step towards not avoiding, the first 10 seconds towards actually taking action towards the thing that you have been avoiding. And all you're committing to yourself is that 10 seconds. We promise ourselves that if all we did was that 10 second and we didn't continue all the way to finishing the task, we would not blame ourselves, shame ourselves. We would pat ourselves on the back and say, bravo, you took the 10 second step. And what happens very often is as you take that easy 10 second step and Pat yourself on the back, you have shifted your brain activation to such a positive mode that you'll continue going and finish the task, finish dealing with the conflict, finish dealing with the issue. The main thing we have done is take the thing you have been avoiding and ask ourselves what's the 10 second first step? And just commit yourself to doing that first 10 seconds and then celebrate so that your brain activation shifts to the positive so you're more likely to continue.

[Heather Monahan]

Wow, that does not seem hard at all.

[Shirzad Chamine]

It works powerfully. That has absolutely been one of mine. And in that I share a lot of that with my son and it has been pretty life changing because it really powerfully works.

[Heather Monahan]

And how about the victim saboteur?

[Shirzad Chamine]

So the victim, the question is what in the world is the strength of the victim and what's the strength that's being taken too far? And there are a couple of things. One, typically when you look at people who have the victim saboteur, they do have a predisposition to be very aware of emotions and Very much paying attention to their internal emotional states and what's happening with me, what's happening, how am I feeling? So that emotional self awareness is very interesting that that is an actual strength because a lot of people don't have any awareness of their feelings and don't pay any attention to their internal stuff that's going on. So that emotional self awareness is very helpful and important and it's a strength. The other thing is that there is an orientation towards being individual and different and unique. So there is a real need for individuation and being unique. When you take those two things together, both of those are great strengths that can result in wonderful things you do in your life. But with the victim, they are both taken into a negative self identity that basically says I want to be unique. And the way I am unique is life is uniquely disadvantaging me. People are uniquely doing bad things to me. Negative stuff uniquely happened to me. Yes, I'm unique, but you stick with the unique self identity but in a negative way. Bad things uniquely happen to me. Poor me, poor me, poor me. And then that emotional self awareness into turn into focusing on the negative emotions that you're experiencing and having them spiral and spiral and spiral. So you're constantly drained about all of the upset and the frustration and the pity that you feel for yourself. And again it's, you're going to be getting tired of hearing this, but I had such a powerful version of this. And that was part of my victim saboteur was part of why and how. I was in clinical depression for 30 the years. And when I realized what was happening to me, what I realized is just like all these other saboteurs, initially they were helpful. So how was my victim saboteur helpful to me? I was in a terrifying environment and not getting any love or attention. Here I am a very sensitive kid and I'm not getting any love or attention. And so what victim savager did for me is if I'm not getting love, I can at least get pity. So pity and self pity, which is part of the victim feeling sorry for myself, I now realize was an incredibly soothing replacement for love. And for years I found it incredibly seductive to go to self pity because there's something very soothing about it. Until I realized that actually self pity and pity from myself or from others is a very poor substitute for what I really wanted, which was love. But in the absence of love, self pity and pity from others is at least better than nothing. It was a nice soothing replacement for what it is that I really wanted.

[Heather Monahan]

So how were you able to change that?

[Shirzad Chamine]

Well, so you want a 10 second technique for the victim. So if the victim is desperately trying to get self pity and pity from others because the underlying issue is that they really, really, really want love, then the 10 second technique is give yourself a big loving hug. So what we do is say the underlying need that the victim is trying to fulfill is I need more love. But the way it does it, it gets pity. So let's go to the source of love. And ultimately the greatest source of love towards you is going to be yourself. So every time I find myself in a victim mode, attracting pity from others or from myself, I stop, I do my 10 second shift brain activation and I shift to really giving myself a big loving hug, remembering this beautiful essence, being that I am, and loving myself in that moment. And it reduces the need for me to bring either self love, pity from myself or from others.

[Heather Monahan]

And that worked for you personally?

[Shirzad Chamine]

The 10 second one will not work until you have done the deeper work on that unconditional self love. So that profoundly worked for me where I took my own childhood picture and put it on my phone, put it on my desktop and put it on my every word I saw. And I actually spent time every day looking at that picture. And initially in my victim mode, I was feeling sorry for this kid who had all these horrible things happen to him. So I would feel sorry for myself and I would feel rage against those who had done me wrong. But then I kept looking at this child and saying, this child does not need my pity and this child is not benefiting from my anger and rage. This kid could really benefit from love. So this is a practice, it's an exercise that you want to keep doing until you're able to intercept all those voices of pity, the victim or anger and the judge, all of that stuff, and instead really feel into the love for this kid. And because that's what's deserved and wanting here. And in that what I talk about is even self love requires building muscles. So unconditional self love is not a concept that you will hear right now and say, oh my God, from now on I'm gonna be on unconditionally loving. How often have we heard that and we haven't shifted. It requires rewiring the brain. There are neural pathways in the brain that I call the empathy circuitry. So in the book I have a couple of chapters on just the neuroscience of this. And there is a part of the brain that literally is what I call empathy circuitry, where when it's activated, you feel love. And if you are not in the habit of energizing that part of the brain, then you just have a muscle that you need to build. So I needed to look at that childhood picture and keep practicing feeling love. Feeling love. Feeling love so that it's not instant and immediate. I look at myself and I love myself. I started my Stanford TEDx talk by saying, I want you to know that I'm absolutely, incredibly and totally awesome. This is not coming from arrogance. This is coming from true love. I adore myself. I think I'm a wonderful, beautiful human being and I adore myself. I love myself and I think every human being is worthy of that love. Every human being was born with beautiful essence. And I want everybody to remember how amazing they are and not just think about it, but practice self love so that they rewire their brain to have strength in the part of the brain that feels love first and foremost towards yourself. That's where it has to start. And then when that part of your brain is energized and active, it is so much easier also to love others because it's just a natural state of being that we really are intended to be in.

[Heather Monahan]

The work that you have done and are doing is incredible. Obviously you're helping millions of people and thank you for what you've shared today. It helped me, I'm sure it's helped all my listeners. What should people do? What are next steps? Should people take the assessment? How do they work with you? How do they figure this all out?

[Shirzad Chamine]

If you want to remember just one thing, one ask please do this avatar assessment. It just takes five minutes and you go to positiveintelligence.com assessment so positiveintelligence.com assessment then in five minutes you get a bar chart of your saboteurs, you get a description of what they are and if you choose to do more work after that, we offer an app app guided program. So all over a six week period, we have you practice exactly what I talked about. One entire week we focus on your judge saboteur. Another week we spend entirely on your top two saboteurs. We spend an entire week on this empathized power of this unconditional self love. And we spend a couple other weeks on all of your other sage superpowers. And we ask for about 15 minutes a day of practice rewiring your brain. So if you're serious about rewiring your brain after doing the saboteur assessment, you may want to look at the app guided program that we offer it's also on the positive intelligence website so that you actually begin to do that.

[Heather Monahan]

And this is going to help people and their personal relationships, if they're athletes, if they're in business, if they're students, really in any aspect of life.

[Shirzad Chamine]

Yeah. I mean, the three buckets we talk about is well being. That is constantly being sabotaged by your saboteurs. So all of your stress comes from your saboteurs. Imagine if you keep shifting from the negative to positive emotions. By definition, you're going to be feeling a lot better. So your well being is going to be impacted. Performance, as we have talked about, is significantly impacted. Constantly sabotaged by your saboteurs and relationships. Saboteurs devastate our relationships. All relationship conflicts come from saboteurs on both sides having a tango with each other. So those are the three main buckets. Performance, well being and relationship. And rebuild the foundational operating system that optimizes all of these, which is why the work is being used in a lot of major organizations for performance. It's used by athletes and it is used by people who are really working on these relationships. Mastery elements. We have trained more than 100,000 coaches now, and those coaches specialize in all sorts of applications. And they just know that this operating system applies to all of those.

[Heather Monahan]

Well, you were such a help to me personally. Take the assessment. Everybody listening right now. I'm linking it in the show notes. It is worth five minutes of your time to start understanding yourself and have these 10 second solutions so that you can perform at a higher level and feel better. Shahrzad, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for being here today.

[Shirzad Chamine]

My pleasure. Heather, this has been such a joy talking to you. Thank you so much.

[Heather Monahan]

You are such a joy. All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

[Shirzad Chamine]

You don't stop and look around once in a while. You could miss it.

[Heather Monahan]

I'm on this journey with me.