The Saboteur: There's a Voice in Your Head That's Been Lying to You for Years | With Shirzad Chamine

0:00Shirzad Chamine: If you're watching on YouTube, you're seeing me do something interesting, but let me describe it to our audio listeners. I'm looking intently at my finger, my index finger and my thumb and rubbing them together. Now, I know this looks very weird, but I promise you this little thing that I'm doing right now, it has changed not just my life, not just my son's life and not just the life of our guests, but the lives of millions of people around the world. And perhaps might be the most powerful takeaway of this episode. gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers.

0:36If you had your head under a functional MRI machine, you would have noticed that even with just this one PQ rub, you ever so slightly quieted the sabatole region of the brain and ever so slightly energized the sage-fire of the brain. You're going from a brain that's just running you to exercising self-command. So you're building your muscle of self-command. I am in command over my mind. My mind is not going to run the show with its saboteurs.

1:02Shirzad Chamine: And this is not pseudoscience. Two minutes after I was done with the interview, my son Dominic was having a meltdown and I taught him this trick, just absolutely melting down. Had him do this, 10 seconds later, done. Meltdown over. This episode is going to blow your mind. Now here's the thing, we have a legend in our midst. And the thing that's most surprising about this episode isn't the fact that he was formerly the CEO of the largest training organization in the world. It's not because he's trained more than a hundred thousand coaching. It's not because his saboteur assessment has been used by more than 2 million people.

1:40Shirzad Chamine: It is because this is one of the most accomplished people when it comes to positive psychology and mindset coaching. And he's coming back. He's coming back in the game. He didn't have to. And so I asked him, Why are you coming back now? The reason for it is this, that AI is going to be generating a massive level of disruption at an exponential rate of change. The human mind is not wired for adjusting to exponential level of change. So I think what's going to happen is a profound level of fear and stress at an epidemic level. A lot of people are going to wonder, who am I? What is my contribution?

2:23What is my worth? What's my value? there's going to be an identity crisis and all sorts of fear-based reactions.

2:28Shirzad Chamine: If you're listening to a show like Big Swings Only, there is something inside of you that is driving you to be great. And the thing is, that thing inside of you, that voice that you hear, sometimes it's kind of dark. But let me tell you, it doesn't have to be. One way of looking at what the saboteur is doing is it's taking your original natural strengths, and by overusing and abusing those strengths, it turns them into your greatest weakness. The person who is teaching us today is not a person who is doing this just from a research perspective. This is a person who was a CEO himself, who felt the pain of the inner saboteurs ruining his life and his relationships, used this science on himself to change his life, and now has changed the lives of millions across the world.

3:15Shirzad Chamine: My friends, you are in for a treat. This is the story of Dr. Shahzad Shamim. Welcome to Big Swings Only. This episode is brought to you by Granola and Quince. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai slash kwami. That's granola.ai slash kwami to get your time back. Three months free at granola.ai slash kwami. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. now available in Canada and the UK too.

3:55Shirzad Chamine: And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let him know it was me. That's the best way to support the show. Can you tell us a bit about your background? What led you into this? And because once I hear your story and see where you are now, it will definitely give people a lot of hope. Yeah, I have an interesting background. I grew up in poverty in the Middle East, in a ghetto with four siblings, my parents in a tiny little apartment. And my father was a terrifying man. He actually had a lot of rage and anger. And when I was growing up, I thought it was against me, but it turns out that we were part of a small ethnic minority persecuted for 13 centuries.

4:41So he was carrying 13 centuries of rage. And I didn't know that, of course, at the time i took it personally so i was in clinical depression as a kid very uh you know as a way of protecting myself speaking of saboteurs i had a victim saboteur i felt really sorry for myself it was a self-soothing kind of uh protection protecting that i was one of myself and the thing that changed my life was this uh whisper that i i don't know where it came from but the whisper I've always trusted. And it was a whisper that said, Sherzad, your path is one day to play on the world stage. And like your heroes, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, change millions of lives.

5:25Again, I have no idea where it came from. I always trusted. I've always been guided by it. And it was about having a life-changing impact, not incremental impact, but also massively scaled millions of people not fear and it's not about my ego it's not about me I it just is I've been following and trusting that voice and the first person the first life that I needed to transform was my own because I was in clinical depression I was diagnosed in clinical depression for 30 years of my life and so I was trying to figure out well how do I get uh you know heal myself How do I go from somebody who is achieving a lot but is absolutely miserable to somebody who can be happy while living my life and not destroying all my relationships like I was?

6:15and a very pivotal. And so what I was doing is I did therapy and I did coaching and I did transformational workshops with some famous people and all of these created temporary benefit, but it fizzled back to its old way. And I realized for some reason that all of these efforts were not treating the root cause, they were treating just symptoms and they weren't sustained in their impact. And then the most pivotal thing that happened that really shifted me to this work is I had started the venture-backed software company after Stanford Business School where I went, got my MBA and I had attracted some luminaries in Silicon Valley to be my investors, to be my board members.

7:00I had attracted my business school classmates to be in the company with me as president, reporting to me and all of those things were great. Hewlett Packard was our first customer, agreeing to prepay for the rights to the app to the software we were creating. So all was great. Two years into, so I was this visionary leader who had attracted all of this money and luminaries to my cause. Two years into the company, the product was late, the customer was unhappy, and I was under a lot of stress. And one day I went to get my lunch. Our offices were in downtown Palo Alto. I got my lunch. I came back to the office, second floor building in downtown Palo Alto.

7:40And as I stepped up to the second floor, my heart sank because I saw that in the boardroom seated were my chairman of the board and my president and my VPs. This was a palace coup where my president and VP had gone, VPs had gone to the chairman and the board and said, under stress, Shirzad has become such a micromanaging, controlling, judging a negative leader. We can't stand working for him anymore. It's either us or him as CEO of the company. So on that day, I was demoted as a CEO of the company that I had founded. And I couldn't walk away because I'd brought in all the investors and the clients and I couldn't just abandon them and leave.

8:32I had to stay. I had to keep going back to work and report to the people that I thought had betrayed me. You can imagine the pain. The pain was unbearable. I could barely breathe. And I was so ashamed I didn't even share this with my wife. I didn't even disclose to her this is what happened. So I was suffering alone. And I had to figure out how the hell do I get, do I stop feeling this devastating amount of pain? What's happening with me? Who am I? Am I the visionary leader who had attracted all these people to myself? for these two years or am i a leader that nobody wants to work for who am i really what's happening here and so in trying to figure all of that out i eventually uh you know brought in my my more scientific uh engineering background and realized that in order to answer these questions i need to go to root cause that all of these efforts i all of these attempts i had previously done to heal myself or grow myself weren't working because I wasn't working at the root level.

9:36And so root cause research is factor analysis research. You do figure out what's at the root of it all. And as an example, if you do factor analysis on colors, you realize that even though there seem to be thousands of colors, at the root of it all, there really are only three colors. All you need is a color palette of three. And so when we did factor analysis research with more than half a million participants from more than 50 countries, including a lot of CEOs, athletes, Stanford students and all, what we found is that the root of it all, when you ask the question, what's at the root of optimizing or sabotaging our well-being and performance?

10:21What's at the root of optimizing and we're sabotaging our well-being and performance, there really are only 10 negative root factors. It seems like we think there are hundreds of ways we screw ourselves up, but there are really only 10 ways. Those are the 10 saboteurs. That's the good news. And that's where the saboteurs came from, the judge, controller, avoider, stickler, victim, visor, restless, all of that. And then very interestingly on the positive side, what we find is that there are only five sage superpowers, five Jedi superpowers. So all you need is to be able to intercept your saboteurs that bring all your negativity and fear and then energize, do these 10-second exercises that quiets that region of your brain and energizes the Jedi region of your brain, the sage region of your brain, and then use one or more of these five Jedi powers, five sage powers.

11:20That's all you need. That's how massively simplified life becomes in terms of growing yourself personally and professionally, optimizing your building and performance. And that completely worked for me. So that absolutely transformed my relationships. I saved my marriage. It absolutely transformed my parenting. It transformed my leadership. so right now in my company I am considered a really awesome CEO not somebody that wants to not somebody who wants people want to do a past go on and I've since coached hundreds of CEOs and because it works I but I first tried it on myself before I brought it to the world

11:59Shirzad Chamine: you have been in this field for many years you're very well known you have the massive clients and And for me, I was very intrigued to see what was it that brought you back to share this message again with such urgency, considering the fact that so many people are already familiar with your work. Yeah, Kwame, I feel that while mental fitness and the work that I do has been important to the world, I think it has just become pivotal. And so I feel a real urgency to get the word out even more than before. And the reason for it is this, that AI is going to be generating a massive level of disruption at an exponential rate of change.

12:42The human mind is not wired for adjusting to an exponential level of change. I think what's going to happen is a profound level of fear and stress at an epidemic level. when AI is going to take over so much of what humans do today, like the analytical and technical and those kinds of tasks, a lot of people are going to wonder, who am I? What is my contribution? What is my worth? What's my value? There's going to be an identity crisis and all sorts of fear of race reactions. And what I know is that that becomes a contagious aspect in our brain. We call these saboteurs, agents of self-sabotage, so they will go on steroids.

13:28And so unfortunately, what I think we are looking at is a possibility of significant rise on fear, stress, tribalism, hate, and all those things that come with that territory. And what we do, mental fitness, is allows people to shift from the fear-based part of the brain to a part of the brain that's actually led by love, not fear. And because we have both of those parts within ourselves, so how do we help people lead not from fear but love and end up having quite a different and profoundly more hopeful reaction to the challenges ahead?

14:08Shirzad Chamine: incredible yes i and i agree 100 because we are there are times where we are afraid of specific things and that is scary enough and what is really challenging about this time is the lack of specificity because we see ai looming we see a lot of geopolitical turmoil and things like that but we don't know with precision what the future is going to look like and that uncertainty that it can really amplify the amount of fear that we're having. And you're right, the emotions are contagious. If somebody is having it, other people are going to have it. The insecurities, the problems that we haven't solved within ourselves, they're going to be magnified and shared at scale.

14:49Shirzad Chamine: And one of the things that I love about you is that everything that you do is so rooted in the research, but then also it has instant practical value. And so I want to speak to the skeptics in the audience who heard you say, shifting from fear to love, and they said, oh no, here we go, positive psychology, toxic positivity, those type of things. Let's snipe some of these biases early so we can get deeper with the content. When I lecture on this at Stanford, the Stanford kids call this work Jedi Mind Training. And what they mean by that is, hey, what we are looking at is the war inside of our brain between our inner Darth Waders and inner Jedi.

15:36Now, we give names to these inner Darth Waders. We call them the saboteurs, agents of self-sabotage. And so they have names like the controller, the avoider, the stickler, the victim, the restless, the pleaser. Our research has shown that there are 10 ways we self-sabotage. and those saboteurs are all fear-based and they bring out all of our negative emotions. They lead from fear and with negative emotions. And on the other side, what the Stanford kids call the inner Jedi, we call that the sage. And the sage is a positive part of your brain and it is centered in love, not fear. And what it does is it leads from empathy, curiosity, creativity, it's purpose-driven, and it can lead with calm, fearless action.

16:34And those are all manifestations of love, love for myself and others, love for discovery, love for invention, love for meaning and purpose, love for a purpose-driven action. So that's what I mean by fear versus love. And most people under stress, they go to their saboteurs and they are pushing themselves through fear. And I want people to stop pushing themselves with fear and start being pulled by love. Because those are the two primary forces within us, inner Jedi versus inner Dark Raiders. This work is about Jedi training. I want you to discover the profound Jedi powers that you have and learn how to lead from that in facing the challenges that are ahead.

17:18Shirzad Chamine: brilliant and i love the the metaphor too because it makes it very very real because there is in in a in a very real sense a metacognitive battle that's happening in our head and and we can hear that tension we can feel it and and kami there is a reason we love star wars the reason we love star wars is that it is telling every human story is because we see our inner struggles projected on the screen and we want the jedi to win because we want our inner jedi to him but they have no idea that's actually telling every human story that's the archetypal story of humanity from day one it has always been the case and it is the case that in any given hour of any given day there is a war raging inside each of us between our inner actuators and our jedi we just didn't know that and now we put names to it very importantly we put neuroscience behind it and we show you that this is absolutely doable.

18:12There are mental muscles you want to build. Inner Jedi has muscles that you can train, and you can actually force atrophy in the muscles of your inner Dark Vaders. So it's actually work that's neuroscience-based and quite impactful very quickly when you start doing the work.

18:28Shirzad Chamine: Okay, let's get nerdy now. I think this is where, for me, this is where it becomes really fun, because when you think about the concepts that we discussed, the inner Darth of Vader, the inner Jedi, fear versus love. You've been able to map this within the brain. And so can we give a brief overview on the brain structures that are going to be involved, first of all, but then also going back to the plasticity argument that you brought up? Because we're familiar with the Hebb's law, neurons that wire together, fire together, all those things, right? So we can strengthen the brain in that type of way.

19:04Shirzad Chamine: But something that isn't appreciated or discussed enough is the ability to intentionally atrophy the connections that have been sabotaging our success and happiness over time. Right. And that's the really important thing. What I talk to people, a lot of people are resigned about being able to significantly improve themselves. The reason is, I mean, just think about it. How often have you read a book that you said, oh my God, this is life-changing. I'm going to be so much better now. Or did a workshop where you said, well, I'm going to be the transformed self now and feel so much happier, do so much better.

19:40And how long did that last? Chances are that all of that euphoria lasted days if you're lucky, weeks if you're really lucky. And within a few months, you were back to your old ways. The reason you were back to your old ways is that books and workshops and a lot of other things that we try to do to improve ourselves end up focusing just on insight. And insight does not create habits. Habits are about building new neural pathways that take an insight into a repeatable behavior. And so what I tell people, if you're serious about change, you need to realize that sustained change requires 20 % insight, 80 % muscle building.

20:27and by muscle i mean mental muscles in the form of neural pathways that generate automatic habits and the problem is your inner dart waders have a lot of muscle power why because they have been exercising those muscles for since your childhood and so that's why our our saboteur behavior like the judge the controller the avoider stickler victim whatever saboteur you have they're automatic habits of your mind because they have they have become neural pathways in your brain that immediately react in the way that they're taught. You cannot fight the muscle of your saboteurs with just the insight of your sage, the counterpart to your saboteurs.

21:08You can't fight the muscles of the inner Darth Vader with just the insight of the Jedi. The Jedi actually practices every day to build those muscles. And so that's what we call mental fitness. In the brain, it shows up within eight weeks of this kind of practice that I'm going to be sharing with you within eight weeks, Harvard-affiliated neuroscientist showed a while back that you can literally see increased gray matter in the regions of the brain where the inner Jedi lives and decreased gray matter, actual atrophy, in the regions of the brain where the inner Darth Vader's lives. So you literally rewire your brain with daily practices because you're shifting blood flow and oxygenation and all that stuff from one region of the brain to another.

21:54And it is how we end up being able to do automatic new responses that are more sage and positive rather than saboteurs.

22:04Shirzad Chamine: Incredible. Incredible. And I love the fact that all of this has been substantiated in all of these studies because that really makes it difficult for skeptical people to just brush this aside because it's so robust and peer-reviewed and then tested at the highest levels. The largest organizations in the world have put this into practice, not because they wanted to make everybody feel good, it's because it drives results. And then it also happens to make people feel much better about themselves, their lives, their relationships, and things like that. so where should we start yeah I want to start with the judge saboteur because the judge saboteur is the only one that's universal everybody has a judge saboteur this is the disposition to have to amplify what's wrong and amplify what's negative and it's the voice that wakes you up at three in the morning and says you idiot why did you make that stupid mistake what's wrong with you When are you ever going to learn?

23:10Or is the one that says, who do you think you are? You're going to absolutely fail tomorrow in that meeting. So it's constantly focused on what's wrong with you, what's wrong. But then also it focuses on what's wrong with other people. So it's not just judging you constantly, but it's also judging other human beings. Focus on what's wrong versus what's right. And it's even worse than that because it's also focusing on what's wrong with any situation or circumstance. It's the voice in you that says, you know what? I don't have what it takes to be happy. You know, I will be happy when something changes about the circumstance.

23:44I just don't like the circumstance of my life. So the judge brings all your negativity in terms of responding to yourself, others, and circumstances of life. And the reason it's universal is because that was helpful for your evolutionary survival, for ancestors. ancestors the ancestor in the jungle who when the tree started shaking uh always assumed the worst who was negative who was paranoid and said i bet you the tiger is going to come out to eat me alive and they ran that negatively biased ancestors arrived they were wrong 99 out of out of 100 times but the one time they were right it saved their life now imagine if a distant ancestor was very positive and optimistic and said, you know what, the tree's shaking somebody.

24:33I bet you it's a koala bear coming out to give me a big bear hug. How do you think that ancestor lasted? So negativity was helpful for our survival. And I bet you, you have a variation of the judge. Then the judge, once it said something is wrong and I don't like what's happening, it brings in one of the other nine saboteurs. They are the accomplices to the judge to come and deal with the situation. One saboteur is the avoider. Avoider is the one that basically says, you know, this is not pleasant. I don't want to deal with this task. I don't want to deal with this conflict. I'm just going to avoid it altogether.

25:10So it comes with procrastination and avoidance. Another saboteur quite different is the controller uh by the way my son has the avoider and then my daughter has the controller so controller is one where you basically uh want things you want to impose your will uh your you charge hard and you want to impose your will you want to have your way uh regardless of what other other people want they feel controlled they're resentful that they are that you're controlling them and pushing them towards your will and not really incorporating what it is they want. We are all familiar with the controller in ourselves or somebody else in our life.

25:54By the way, as I say these two things, these two examples, I want to also point to one way of looking at what the saboteur is doing is it's taking your original natural strengths and by overusing and abusing those strengths, it turns them into your greatest weakness. So for example, my daughter and son were born as very different people. My daughter was born with this just extroverted, energetic, goal orientation, wanting to make stuff happen. That's wonderful, wonderful energy, which is a great strength that she brings. Taken too far, it becomes her controller. And so we don't want to get rid of the strength.

26:42We want to make sure the strength is used in the hands of your inner Jedi, in the hand of your sage, rather than the hands of the saboteur. That's when it backfires. My son, on the other hand, was born as a very sensitive, introvert. Life is a bowl of cherries. Life is pleasant and positive. Let's just be flexible and adaptable, even keel. Wonderful strength. taken too far, it becomes the avoider. This is not pleasant, interesting. I don't want to deal with it. So I have had very different conversations with my son and daughter as they were growing up, encouraging both of them to hang on to their strengths, but watch out when they're overusing that strength, which becomes their saboteur.

27:26So hopefully what I just described is how saboteurs are a universal tendency. It's not because you had a traumatic childhood necessarily. I mean, every human is born with some natural strengths, and every human ends up overusing those strengths in their childhood in order to get more love, more attention, more security. And that becomes the habit of their mind, which is the saboteur.

27:52Shirzad Chamine: Yeah. Makes sense. That's great. So we have the judge as the universal one, and then we have two of the accomplices. We have the avoider, and then we have the controller. What are the other accomplices?

28:32Shirzad Chamine: built for how people actually meet. You take the same rough notes that you always would, and in the background, Gornola AI is quietly transcribing the conversation. As soon as the meeting wraps, it turns all of that into clear, structured notes automatically. And it also runs through your device's audio, so there's no bots joining your call and nothing extra to configure. It just fits nicely into the tools you already use. You can stay focused on the conversation and still walk away knowing exactly what decided and who's doing what next. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer.

29:06Shirzad Chamine: You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai slash kwami. That's granola.ai slash kwami to get your time back. Three months free at granola.ai slash kwami. The first thing that I ever got from Quince was this pair of really nice formal pants, but they were stretchy and made for travel. So for me as a lawyer and businessman as I travel and I do these keynotes all over the world, it's really nice to be able to know that I could wear something that looks good in the airport, that's comfortable on the airplane, and I could wear comfortably if I have to roll into a meeting or an event right after getting off the plane.

29:44Shirzad Chamine: And it was only$60. And that's what turned me into a repeat customer. Because Quince focuses on wardrobe staples that are made with premium materials. So, for example, 100 % Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and as it's gotten colder, I've been leaning on their down jackets and wool outerwear too. They're solid, warm layers that don't feel like they're cutting corners just because the price is lower. And that's really the whole model. Because everything at Quince runs about 50-80 % less than similar brands simply because they cut out the middlemen and work directly with ethical factories. But the thing is, it's not only clothing either.

30:20Shirzad Chamine: They carry that same quality into bedding, bath, kitchen essentials, and furniture, all designed with the same care. I use Quince, and so should you. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to Quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was me. That's the best way to support the show. yes then we have the hyper achiever it's good to be achievement oriented but the hyper achiever makes your self-acceptance and self-love dependent on your achievement so your self-love is conditional and it's conditioned on your next achievement and you stress and stress and stress until you get that next achievement.

31:15But when you get that next achievement, how long will you celebrate? Minutes, hours, days, if you're lucky. And then that voice says, you're not enough, you're not worthy of my love. You've got to set this next achievement. And I'm not going to love you until you make that next big achievement. And so on and so on. Tony Robbins is a big fan of my work a while back. I tweeted, I think, something from my work, which was every year millions of people go to their graves still trying to satisfy the last condition that said for themselves to be worthy and to be happy. So this is a very common saboteur amongst high achievers.

31:57I saw you laugh when I was talking about this, Kwame. Is that one that you resonate with? Oh, my gosh. It is. Oh, my goodness.

32:05Shirzad Chamine: Yes. I had to learn how to celebrate wins. and for me I considered achievements kind of like breathing that breath was delightful but it means nothing because I'm suffocating now and so it was very very difficult but the first time that I went into therapy actually was after my second alumni award because I got one from the law school and I said, okay, well, we can, maybe we could write that one off. And then, and then I got another one from the, the Glenn school, the master of public policy in back-to-back years. And then I said, I don't, I don't know how to top this. I don't know what to do next.

32:48Shirzad Chamine: I am terrified because I always had this chip on my shoulder. Hey, you're not good enough until you achieve this and then this, and then this, and then this. And then I got those two awards that really said, hey, well, you are the kind of the epitome of the alumni we want to highlight. And I was really very uncomfortable with it. I was practicing celebrating and I was able to celebrate for a minute. But once it let down, I said, there's a lot of life left to live and I don't even know what to do next. And so it is haunting because a lot of times the most successful people are the ones who are most unfulfilled because they are trying to feed a beast that can't be satiated.

33:27Shirzad Chamine: And that's a scary place to be when you're on the top of the mountain wondering where to go next. And the fear that they have is if I stop feeding this tendency that I will then not want to achieve anything. And that's a complete falsity. I talk to people about hey, you know, when you were a kid on a beach what did you do? Say, you know, I built sandcastles and then I'd say, why did you why would you build sandcastles? Is it because somebody was looking for your achievement and all that stuff? They would say, no, it was fun I wanted to build sandcastles because it was fun. And so that's what I talk about, that the human And you can push yourself through the fear of the saboteurs, like the hyperachiever saying, you've got to do better, you've got to do better, you've got to do better, because otherwise you're not worthy.

34:26That's pushing yourself by fear. On the other hand, the sage pulls you through love, love for yourself and others, love for discovery, love for invention, love for action, love for purpose. and so if you let go of the fear-based saboteurs, you don't become a couch potato. You don't sit on a couch and just watch TV. If you're led by your sage, you are pulled by love constantly, love, passion, joy. You're not going to just sit there and do nothing and actually you achieve more. Why do you achieve more? Because when your hyperachiever is driving you, you're always terrified. The moment that you set this big goal for yourself and then as you're trying to make your way towards that big goal, we always know things go wrong.

35:19A lot of things go wrong before you achieve your goal. The problem is if your hyperachiever is pushing you towards that achievement, you just freak out every time that there's a glitch

35:29Shirzad Chamine: because your whole identity is on the line. Oh, my God, what happens if I don't achieve this thing? So you overreact. You waste a ton of mental, emotional energy in dealing with your stress related to achievement and the glitches that happen. Now, if you are, so what I tell people is, okay, I don't want you to set any less ambitious of goals, absolutely set ambitious goals, but I want you to love yourself unconditionally as the sage would, and then try to achieve this goal out of joy and passion and fun so that then when a glitch starts happening, you don't freak out. It's like, okay, there's a glitch here.

36:07how do I get back to a calm, clear, let mine and figure out how do I get back on track? So you're more likely to achieve that target. And by the way, you're more likely to set higher targets. Why are you willing to set higher targets if you're in sage mode? Because when you're so terrified about your identity being challenged, if you fail at something, you actually preemptively don't set a big enough target for yourself because you're terrified about setting a target at which you will fail and that's going to be devastating to your identity so you don't dare sometimes set a high enough target for yourself.

36:48So if you shift from hyperachiever to your sage achievement orientation, you will, first of all, potentially set even higher targets for yourself and you're more likely to achieve the target and, more importantly, you're going to have fun along the way, a lot more fun along the way. You're not trying to wait for the final destination to feel a little bit of fun. You are enjoying every step of the way along the way.

37:14Shirzad Chamine: Brilliant. You're so right. You're so right. And I know you're right because you've studied this and demonstrated millions of times. So that's one reason you're right. And then also, it was really scary to try this, but I treated it like a little test. I said, Kwame, you don't need to change yourself completely. just do an experiment. Try it for a week. Be happy. Be the happy achiever. Can you do that? Okay. That week, did you die? You didn't. Okay. And things still got done amazing. Why don't we try a month? And then now it's just the stated way of being. And it is utterly delightful. Because again, just like you said, I was afraid that this dark energy was what was driving me.

37:59Shirzad Chamine: And but that was the Darth Vader. And being more of a Jedi still allows you to be effective and truly driven by love. And I feel deeper connections with my family, my team, myself. And it doesn't feel like everything is an existential threat to my identity. and Kwame that you know the thing you're saying is so common I can't tell you how many heads of sales or CEOs I've talked to who say that they think stress gives them their performance edge and the fear gives them their whole edge and they are terrified about letting of letting that go because again they think I'm no longer going to achieve now we do want to acknowledge that a lot of high achievers are pushed there through their fears right we know that but we also know that sage leadership is far more profound in scapegoatty when people ask me for you know one of who is my model for sage achievement i i mentioned uh nelson mandela who in every way embodied what we are talking about he was always coming from love uh never ever ever let go of very very lofty the achievement orientation and goal orientation, but it always was coming from love, which meant, for example, that when he was in jail, instead of feeling hate towards his jailers, he brought in the sage empathy, power, empathize.

39:34Let me understand this jailer. What is it in them that has them do what it is that they're doing? And by that understanding the other side, That was a huge part of his leadership and strategy to liberate his whole country. And after he liberated his country, there was a truth and reconciliation modality of, again, really living, coexisting together rather than trying to kill the other side. And there just was so much of what's possible with sage leadership rather than the traditional modes of leadership that we know.

40:10Shirzad Chamine: Yeah, so true. Powerful example. Powerful. So for the people listening, I hope that changed your mind when it comes to the way that you operate and also gave you hope. And also, if you listened and you said, hey, I haven't heard my saboteur, that's because we haven't finished it yet. So we have the judge, the avoider, controller, hyperachiever. And then what's next? It's another hyper. It's a hyper-rational. Again, is rational mind a good thing? It's absolutely an awesome, awesome, awesome tool. Hyper-rational means you're overusing the rational mind in times and places where it actually isn't the right tool.

40:52It backfires. As an example, when you are, I can't tell, I was coaching the CEO who was hyper-rational. He wanted me to help him with his marriage. So he was there with his wife and she went on for like five minutes, really frustrated, very emotional talking about what had been very helpful to, very hurtful to her. And in this hyper-rational mode at the end of all that he said with his arms crossed, yeah, I hear you. There are these three ways we can fix the problem. I mean, with that level of coldness and analysis, and she wanted to reach out and strangle him because in his rational mode, he was not able to hear, to empathize, to have the other person feel cared for.

41:36The rational mind is absolutely a horrible place to lead with when it comes to things such as conflict, because in conflict, the other party wants to feel heard and seen in their emotions, first and foremost. And I know Kwame in your event negotiation work, that was the first step that you had in your compassionate negotiation work. Hear the other person's emotion, feel their emotion, acknowledge their emotion. That's all the empathy card, obviously. So the hyper-rational destroys relationships, destroys trust, destroys loyalty. All of these important things in leadership and relationships are matters of the heart, not matters of the rational mind.

42:21inspiration, motivation, trust. All of these are matters of the heart, not the mind. And they require a different part of you, the empathic part of you, not the rational part of you. So the hyper-rational basically does a lot of damage to relationships as a leader and as a human. Amazing.

42:40Shirzad Chamine: Yeah, yeah. And I can see now also how people will have multiple shades of each saboteur to a certain extent. And tell me if I'm wrong on this, but it sounds like, especially with the folks who are hyper rational, the example that you gave is perfect. People are, again, it's led with fear. The fear of what? It seems like in that case, it's the fear of deep connection and also vulnerability. Being able to be seen on a deep level with such clarity, because there might be a concern that If I connect with somebody with that level of depth and vulnerability and give legitimacy to that vulnerability in them, then they might want that from me and I'm not comfortable doing that.

43:28Shirzad Chamine: So it's easier to hide behind the hyper-rational mindset and just focus on optimization and outcome-oriented perspective instead of actually connecting. Yeah, there's a lot there, Kwame, and it's different from person to person, but I can give you my own example. I had the hyper-rational. That's one of my highest ones. In my case, how did it become my tendency? I was living in an environment where my feelings were all painful feelings, feeling sad, feeling rejected, feeling depressed, all of those things, feeling unwanted. So emotions were not a safe place for me to go to. On the other hand, the rational place was a place where I could control the outcome, where I could be the smart kid in class and the teachers would love me as a smart kid in the class.

44:21I would get acknowledgement and all that stuff. So the rational mind got me goodies. It got me respect. It got me attention. And it got me a place where I could control the outcome, not have to be with these nasty things called emotion that are too often painful. And I had to learn, and as a hyperrational adult, I destroyed quite a few relationships before I realized, oh, that was helpful as a defense as a child, but right now it's destroying my relationships. And then back to your point, being willing to actually come from emotion, connect with somebody else, and be in the messiness. Emotions are a messy thing.

45:03We can't control them. So if you go into that territory, then you've got to be willing to actually remain present with somebody and allow this to go where it wants to go rather than trying to control things with a rational outcome. So true. So true. Okay, nice. Next, number six. It's my third and final hyper. It's hypervigilant. So again, is it good to be vigilant? It's absolutely great to be vigilant. The problem with hypervigilant is that it finds risks and danger in everything. and is always anxious about so many things that could go wrong. And as you worry about everything being able to go wrong and trying to protect yourself against them, your focus is diluted.

45:45So you actually don't have enough focus on the few things where you do need to be vigilant. So in being hypervigilant, you actually are not vigilant enough about the few things where true danger exists because you're wasting too much time on things where you really should let go and not worry so much. and know that you can't manage things even if they did go wrong.

46:08Shirzad Chamine: Would it be possible for somebody to live a life where they have their typical saboteurs, they have their go-to, whatever it happens to be, but then something shifts and then, boom, something else becomes a dominant saboteur for a long and pervasive time? We typically have people work on the judge plus a couple of other saboteurs. so uh so typically we don't focus on one saboteur we focus on couple sometimes top three and sometimes people have different saboteurs at work versus home like somebody who is very controlling at work that takes so much energy out of them that they go home and say i don't want to deal with anything i'm just going to be avoider here and i i just want to reject because i i have just exhausted myself being controller so they end up being an avoider at at home which is a very different thing right and and so we have people focus on two or three the beauty of the work is that uh when you focus on the judge plus one or two other saboteurs the impact rewires your whole brain so much that all of your saboteurs lose power because you're just shifting brain activation from saboteur to sage so all of your other saboteurs also begin to lose power one other answer to your question is that as you work on a top saboteur it ends up no longer being your top saboteur after a while so for example victim was one of my top saboteurs again in clinical depression for 30 years and now since i've worked on my victim it's it's absolutely my lowest bottom saboteur i barely noticed the victim in all and uh so saboteurs do change in response your question, your top ones, as you weaken the top one, then something else becomes your top one.

47:59Shirzad Chamine: That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And again, that gives us a lot of hope as well, that we can make that shift. And then I know for me, the reason I asked is because I was not hypervigilant before. I'm very relaxed. I even asked Simone when it comes to work, I'm very chill, but it was when I had kids that I became hypervigilant. I became just obsessive. I bought this baby helmet for the baby. They didn't need it. But I'm like, no, given the baby's helmet, cutting their berries into like six pieces. And I'm like, who have I become? It became, I got insomnia. It was very hard to just relax.

48:38Shirzad Chamine: I'm getting, I'm better at it now. But that one caught me off guard because it wasn't one that I had before, but just boom, instantly changed me. You're mentioning the classical biggest shift in saboteur which is exactly in hypervigilant happening to a lot of parents that's exactly the thing we notice the most yeah clearly again where does that come from from survival uh over millions of years of evolution it had it had an evolutionary survival you can imagine the opposite of hypervigilant the complete opposite is a parent that's just too cool and doesn't pay attention to any of the dangers and also does that do to their kids survival chances so it's an overuse of a helpful thing called vigilance this is magical thank you i'm loving this um okay so we have six and now seven okay then we have the pleaser and once again the question is what is the strength that's taken too far to become the pleaser i have this one uh my i was born with this natural tendency to be very kind of giving and kind and sensitive, which is an obviously awesome strength, which is something that has been incredibly helpful for me being effective as a coach and as a leader.

50:00Taken too far, it becomes a pleaser saboteur where I won't say no to requests, where I don't hold enough boundaries, where I don't push back, where I don't give somebody challenging feedback about their performance or whatever. And the problem with the pleaser is that, you know, you do these things in order for people to like you. And at some point, you get very resentful because you keep giving and giving and giving and they're not giving back enough to you because you don't even ask for what you need. And at some point, you just blow up and get resentful that you just give and give and give and give and people are taking advantage.

50:35well it's you you've set it all up as a pleaser uh and then people are surprised why you get so frustrated and upset sometimes when you don't want to give anymore so that's the pleaser yep i and i

50:48Shirzad Chamine: think a lot of folks especially the negotiate any anything audience can relate to that too because people pleasing is one of the things that holds people back you think about people pleasing in conjunction with the avoider potentially you have that that fear of engaging in meaningful productive conflict absolutely you don't ask for your your side and then you feel resentful for it yep yep and then what's after the pleaser after that we got the restless and uh restless is also a relatively universal saboteur where we all have a restless mind to some extent the buddhists call the mind the monkey brain because it jumps from branch to branch to branch and the problem with restless is that yeah it takes it even too far and the restless has this fear of missing out and no matter what's where you are and what's in front of you you think the next thing is going to be more interesting so you're never fully present for what's in front of you the restless claims that this is the way to make sure by jumping from one thing to another to another to another this is how you're gonna maximize the joy and benefits of life the problem is it does exactly the opposite because never you're never really present for what's in front of you so you're minimizing the joy and what it is you can get out of life not maximizing and uh it's it's just uh it's just uh also very devastating for relationships because people don't feel you're really present with them and also for performance because you don't finish too often you start too many things you don't finish them uh enough of them and so people come to not quite rely on your ability to for follow through and things like that wow yeah how do you get over that that that one seems like particularly challenging.

52:49Yeah, we, for all of the saboteurs, we have a three-step process. The first step is intercept your saboteurs, acknowledge that you're in saboteur mode and say to yourself, oh, that's my saboteur talking, I'm not going to listen to it. So that's the intercepting your saboteur the second thing that we do then is do these 10 second exercises that quiet the saboteur brain and energize your sage brain the third step is well now that you've energized your sage brain and you can access uh those five stage powers and respond with the sage power, the Jedi power, so to speak. So let's talk about that second step, which is how do you energize the sage brain?

53:45And there are these 10-second exercises we call PQ reps. PQ is an abbreviation of positive intelligence quotient. So positive intelligence is the body of work on this research. PQ stands for positive intelligence quotient. And a PQ rep is these 10-second exercise is that quiet the saboteur region, energize the sage brain region. And they're particularly helpful for the restless. They're helpful for all the saboteurs, but really, really, really helpful for the restless. And so we can practice some of this with, you know, with your audience right now. So if you take two fingertips, gently take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers.

54:36Gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. Great, so that was like 10 seconds, one PQ rep. and if you had your head under a functional MRI machine, we would have noticed that even with just this one PQ rub, you ever so slightly quieted the saboteur region of the brain and ever so slightly energized the sage power of the brain and you also brought calm to your mind, rather the opposite of restlessness. and the impact is that you're going from a brain that's just running you to exercising self-command so you're building your muscle of self-command i am in command over my mind my mind is not going to run the show with its saboteurs now one one particular is not going to change your life world but imagine if you did a lot of them just like one dumbbell rep for the muscle of your bicep is not going to build that muscle but what if you did 50 of them a day there's no way that in a few months you will not have significant muscle same exact thing for your brain so if you did a bunch of these pq reps and we have people do a bunch of them throughout their life throughout their day and we just did one as we're interacting with each other i just did one with you and i was doing it myself you can so you can really spread them throughout the day there's no way that your brain will not be rewired in a way that your all of your sage muscles are more accessible and your

56:16Shirzad Chamine: saboteurs start atrophying this is brilliant i was i was actually taken aback by how in-depth i started to get with this with this exercise i really it was almost as if I forgot I was here doing a podcast and then your voice when you brought me back interrupted I was like who said that because your focus went that's exactly it right you became incredibly focused wow and that's the whole idea self command you exercise self command your mind was kind of running its thing with chatter and then you commanded your mind to become that present and so it builds the muscle of self-command. It activates part of your middle prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of that self-command activity of the sage.

57:07And we end up, one of the interesting things that might be interesting for your audience is your brain produces somewhere within 10 ,000 to 60 ,000 thoughts a day. That's how restless it is. 10 ,000 to 60 ,000 thoughts a day. That's how restless our mind is. and most of those thoughts are useless and many of those thoughts are actually harmful. And how many of those thoughts were useful?

57:36Shirzad Chamine: That's such a good point. Let's do nine and ten with the saboteurs. Yes. Two more saboteurs left. The next one is stickler. So stickler is taking perfectionism too far. and where everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be neat and organized. And that's a lot of stress for the person who has a sticker saboteur and also those around them. Things are never good enough. And the problem is when you try to make everything perfect, you just spread yourself thin. So the few things where perfection is important are going to suffer. And so instead of that, we have people who have the sticker saboteur come up with an 80-20 box and say, what's the 20 % of things where things really do need to be almost perfect and what's the other 80 % category where good enough is good enough good enough is good enough relax don't torment yourself and others all the time because everything has to be in perfect order life otherwise will be very stressful and so that so stick where is perfectionism taken too far and finally the victim saboteur yes and the victim saboteur this is one where people tend to understand that well because we all have somebody who plays victim all the time and it's victim saboteur is about constantly finding that life or others are treating you particularly unfairly and that you're always complaining about what's being done to you by life or others and either bringing yourself pity or asking for others to bring pity and attention to you.

59:27And I know that this saboteur was my number one, and I now know exactly why I had it. The reason I had it is I wasn't getting a lot of love and attention from my parents. And so in the absence of love, the victim saboteur actually brought me that pity, which I found very soothing. So what I find is that pity is actually really soothing in the accents of love. There's a soothing thing that happens with that self-pity. And at some point as an adult, I realized, you know what? I actually deserve love, not pity. And so I stopped saying, I stopped just asking for pity for myself or for mothers. And so they actually deserve love, not pity.

1:00:13So that's when I stopped really believing that I needed the victim

1:00:17Shirzad Chamine: saboteur to soothe myself very interesting this especially the nexus between pity and love and it's almost as if we we know we want to nourish ourself with something and we pick something that it's almost like artificial sweetener versus sugar yeah exactly right this is it seems and tell me if i'm off on this because it seems that with the person who is the victim sometimes if you play the victim role very well, you can almost get a sense of status from the constant attention you're getting being seen as a victim. And then other people, I mean, everybody's brain is plastic in some kind of way.

1:01:04Shirzad Chamine: And so they get used to seeing you as the victim and they get used to interacting with you with pity because that's what you want and that's what they give. And so it sounds like with the victim saboteur in particular, this could be particularly difficult because you have to not just renegotiate your relationship with yourself and become the Jedi, but at the same time, you have to renegotiate your relationship with others. Because in many ways, they might have gotten used to, familiar with, and maybe even comforted by you having a consistently subordinate position. and now you're fueled by love, you have more self-love and you can see yourself at a higher level, they might not be comfortable with that.

1:01:45Actually, Kwame, what you're saying is relatively universal wisdom applied to all of the saboteurs. And every saboteur becomes part of our identity and then people interact with us with that identity. And what gets very interesting is how that works within relationships. So, for example, very often the person who has the controller saboteur doesn't marry another controller because somebody is going to kill somebody. So people who have a very strong charging controller saboteur tend to marry people who have softer saboteurs, such as avoider or pleaser. Because then there is a complementary nature of what's happening.

1:02:31And the reason that that happens, by the way, is we are not attracted to and fall in love with the other person's saboteur. You're actually attracted to and falling in love with the other person's natural strengths. And like I was saying before, the person who has the controller's saboteur has a very different natural strength than the person who has the avoider's saboteur. We get drawn to the other person for those strengths and fall in love with that, and that's a sage strength. And at some point, because that person is overusing those strengths in the form of their saboteurs, then we start really getting pissed at seeing that saboteur and what happened here.

1:03:08You know, you change. The person didn't change. Previously, you were bringing out the sage in each other, and now you bring out the saboteur in each other, which is the overuse of those natural strengths that draw us to somebody. Wow.

1:03:23Shirzad Chamine: Incredible. Incredible. I could talk to you about this forever, my friend. This is so helpful. And I know you already know this. You've helped millions of people. I'm so glad that you stopped by our show to help our audience. Before you go, let's end with something a little bit visionary here, because we talked about what brought you back into this, sharing this at scale. And I appreciate that you did. hypothetically if the if people were to listen to this and put it into their life and meaningfully incorporate that and we get to that magical Pareto principle where 80 percent of the people in the world have are being led by love not fear 80 percent of the people in the world have mastered that Jedi mind what changes in the world on our website we even have this as a statement of our vision, I invite people to imagine what happens to our world where every child is brought up with mental fitness, where they learn that they cannot trust every voice in their head, that some of those are saboteur voices, and they learn that they have an inner Jedi, inner sage, and that they can build those muscles.

1:04:38What happens to that kid's ability to withstand bullying, withstand bad teaching, or potentially even flawed parenting? What kind of relationships will those kids form with their peers? What kind of community do they get to build? When they become adults, what kind of politicians will they vote for? So just imagine what happens to our planet if mental fitness becomes as widespread as physical fitness is today with our educators, with our parents, with our kids, with our politicians, with our leaders. It will absolutely transform our world. There will not be these wars. There will not be all of the toxic politics that we have.

1:05:26And there will be a very different approach to life. So that will fundamentally change our planet. And we don't need to get to 80 % of people. Actually, Malcolm Gladwell has the idea of tipping points. So it needs to be a critical mass that causes a tipping point because SAGE can be quite profoundly contagious. And the reason is, again, the reason we love Star Wars is because we have a longing for the Jedi to win. And that's not just for Star that's just also we have a longing for our inner jedi to step in and to take charge of our lives so this work uh the sage stepping into sage becomes contagious for those around us when they see it happening with us they want some of that too that's how this has become you know contagious within my family with my kids they have this has become the biggest part of my parenting as my kids saw me do this work and said i want some of that too how are you doing it right And my company and everywhere I go.

1:06:27So I hope we're going to create a sage contagion,

1:06:29Shirzad Chamine: a Jedi contagion that the world needs so much with this work. And Kwame, as just the one step of what can people do, the most important simple first step is just become aware of your saboteurs. How do you do that? Just do the five-minute online saboteur assessment. It's free. Five-minute online saboteur assessment. place to find it is positiveentherges.com slash assessment positiveentherges.com slash assessment and that's where you get to find out who your saboteurs are and that awareness alone is going to begin the shift for you yes oh and quick thing too because I did it today and I've done it years in the past and it was very interesting to see how things shifted I said oh I did work on that oh no, this is bad.

1:07:19Shirzad Chamine: I got to work on that. So we're constantly growing and evolving here. So I appreciate that. So definitely take the quiz and we will link to that in the description. Awesome, awesome. Pleasure getting to meet you, Kwame. Yes, likewise. Oh my gosh, this is so great.