Your mind is your best friend. But it can also be your worst enemy.
Every day, your mind is sabotaging your performance, wellbeing, and your relationships.
Saboteurs are the powerful internal voices that trigger negative emotions when facing challenges in sports and life.
These automatic mental patterns shape how you think, feel, and respond in crucial moments. Every instance of stress, anxiety, self-doubt, and frustration stems from these Saboteurs at work. They don't just impact your game—they undermine your performance, well-being, and relationships.
How We Self-Sabotage
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Saboteurs are the voices in your head that generate negative emotions when you handle life’s challenges. They exist in the brainstem, limbic system, and parts of the left brain. They produce much of your stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, shame, guilt, frustration, and mind chatter. These negative emotions are only helpful for a second as they alert you to dangers or issues. However, staying in these emotions hurts your ability to see clearly and choose the most impactful response.
Your Sage lives in an entirely different region of your brain, the middle prefrontal cortex, “empathy circuitry,” and parts of the right brain. It generates positive emotions while handling life’s challenges. These include empathy, compassion, gratitude, curiosity, joy of creativity, and calm, clear-headed laser-focused action. This region is wired for creativity and big-picture awareness of what is important and the best course of action.
Activating this region results in release of endorphins that counter the negative impacts of stress-induced cortisol.
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The Thrive Region (Sage)
The Survive Region (Saboteurs)
The breakthrough contribution of Positive Intelligence® research is through factor analysis to discover the core factors that impact both performance and wellbeing. This research revealed that there are only 10 negative response factors (10 Saboteurs) and only five positive response factors (5 Sage Powers).
Discovering these root-level factors of performance and wellbeing dramatically simplifies personal and professional development. Intercepting one’s Saboteur and activating one’s Sage automatically results in a wide array of impacts including stress management, relationship improvement, performance, creativity, leadership, resilience, and happiness.
This is because we are rewiring the brain at the root level rather than treating symptoms.
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Breakthrough Research
Your brain is made up of neurons. When a signal travels down a neuron, it results in activation of other neurons based on synapses that connect neurons. But there are multiple choices for which direction the signal would travel. The question is which neuron will be activated. Every time a neuron activates another neuron, they become more closely wired together, making it more likely that the signal will go in that direction the next time around. This constitutes a “neural pathway.”
This is how a repeated action becomes an automatic habit. In Positive Intelligence®, we use the powerful 10-second PQ Rep technique as a way of intercepting the old Saboteur responses, so we can pause and choose a new Sage response. Repetition results in Sage neural pathways (muscles) to counter the old Saboteur muscles. That is why our training results in sustained change, as opposed to results fading over time. Mental fitness is about building mental muscles and not just stopping at insights.
© 2025 Positive Intelligence. All Rights Reserved.
Mental fitness is increased when new mental muscles are strengthened through positive habits. Our program focuses on growing three specific mental muscles, which become visible as new neural pathways in MRI imaging within eight weeks of practice.
Saboteur Interceptor Muscle
Your Saboteurs generate all your negative emotions, including stress, anxiety, self-doubt, anger, avoidance, inner critic, insensitivity or discontent. Mental fitness requires the ability to intercept and discredit the Saboteurs.
Self-Command Muscle
Boost your ability to command your mind to quiet the Saboteur region and amplify the Sage region. Using simple daily exercises, you learn to run your brain, rather than allow your Saboteur-hijacked brain to run you.
Sage Muscle
Your Sage is the one in you that handles challenges with a clear and calm mind, and positive emotions. Your Sage accesses 5 positive powers. For peak performance, you learn to boost all 5 powers and know when to use which power.
Through a breakthrough process called PQ Reps, you develop greater mastery over your own mind, quiet the negative, and activate the positive region of your brain.
You get to intercept your top Saboteurs the moment they try to hijack your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
You get to practice the Sage Perspective that every problem or challenge can be converted into a gift and opportunity.
Continue mastering your mind with the support of our Mental Fitness Gym app. True mastery is a lifelong journey of recommitting to positive habits, self-awareness, and empowering self-talk.
Build your foundation of mental fitness by strengthening three critical mental muscles to shift the balance of power from your inner Saboteurs (your negative self) to your inner Sage (your positive self).
© 2025 Positive Intelligence. All Rights Reserved.
15 minutes/day of app-guided practice enables you to build stronger mental muscles (neural pathways). These exercises are bite-sized to fit your schedule and customized based on how you self-sabotage.
© 2025 Positive Intelligence. All Rights Reserved.
Daily Practice
Weekly training videos deliver deep experiential exploration of the week’s focus. You’ll feel inspired and energized to practice during the week in order to sustain the benefits experienced during the video sessions.
Weekly Focus
You’ll feel motivated through instant feedback on exactly how much progress you’re making towards building the three core muscles of mental fitness. Brain rewiring may be visible in MRI imaging within eight weeks.
Measurable Progress
We help you establish a support and accountability group with other program participants. Research has shown this to be a critical success factor for establishing lasting new positive habits of the mind.
Community Support
Most trainings result in short-lived improvements. For sustained results, we focus on building neural pathways that form lasting new habits. That’s why we call this “mental fitness.”
Our factor analysis research has revealed the foundational root-level enablers and disablers of optimal performance and wellbeing. We rewire the brain at the root cause level.
Mental fitness requires three core muscles. Saboteur Interceptor, Self-Command, and Sage. Meditation only focuses on Self-Command, which is why it is not sustained by most.
Focus on Habit Formation
Treat Root Cause, Not Symptoms
Develop All Three Core Muscles
You can’t defeat an adversary that you don’t see or one that successfully pretends to be your friend. The first step to conquering your Saboteurs is to identify them and expose their lies and limiting beliefs.
© 2025 Positive Intelligence. All Rights Reserved.
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© 2025 Positive Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved. No reproduction, alteration, translation, publication or distribution, inanyform, printedor electronic, is permitted without the express prior written consent of Positive Intelligence, LLC. POSITIVE INTELLIGENCE®, PQ®, PQ COACH™, CERTIFIED PQ COACH™, and P+ logo™are trademarks of Positive Intelligence,LLC. DISCLAIMERS: Thecoach identified herein is an independent member of the PQ Coach program, and not an employee, agent or representative of Positive Intelligence, LLC. The coaching program offered herein is independently owned and operated by the coach, and is not affiliated with or endorsed or sponsored by Positive Intelligence, LLC. PROGRAM CONTENT AND MATERIAL DO NOT CONSTITUTE MEDICAL OR MENTAL HEALTH ADVICE AND ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROFESSIONAL CARE, DIAGNOSIS OR TREATMENT OF ANY MEDICAL OR MENTAL HEALTH CONDITION.