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

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

What if your biggest obstacle isn’t OUT THERE, but in YOUR OWN mind? In this episode, I sit down with Shirzad Chamine, best-selling author of Positive Intelligence. We break down how to overcome the inner saboteurs that hold you back. We talk about why so many people stay stuck in stress + guilt, and how YOU can rewire your brain for CONFIDENCE, PEACE, AND SUCCESS. Shirzad shares mental fitness exercises to science-backed mindset shifts, so you can start building the life you DESERVE. In This Episode, You Will Learn The #1 skill MOST people IGNORE. How to SPOT your top SABOTEURS before they take over your mind. The 10-second technique to REWIRE your brain for PEACE and CONFIDENCE. How to BREAK FREE from guilt and shame. How to build an inner VOICE that UPLIFTS you. Why EMOTIONAL MASTERY is your biggest UNLOCK in business, love, and life. The mental MUSCLE most people NEVER train. Resources + Links Learn more about Positive Intelligence at positiveintelligence.com/assessment Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/monahan Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/MONAHAN. Want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic? Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com/MONAHAN. Get 10% off your first Mitopure order at timeline.com/CONFIDENCE. Get 15% off your first order when you use code CONFIDENCE15 at checkout at jennikayne.com. Call my digital clone at 201-897-2553!  Visit heathermonahan.com Sign up for my mailing list: heathermonahan.com/mailing-list/  Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com  If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Follow Heather on Instagram & LinkedIn Shirzad on Instagram & LinkedIn

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 Piqueur of brain activation and then choose different and if 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's more gray matter in the positive region of the brain and there's less gray matter

in the saboteur region of the brain. You have rewired your brain in a way that it actually shows up in MRI imaging within eight weeks. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, you're going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. 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 guest. Shurzad Shameen is the New York Times bestselling author of Positive Intelligence, Stanford University lecturer and pioneer in mental fitness. Shurzad'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. My pleasure, Heather. I'm so glad to be here. Okay, how did you get into this work to begin with? It sounds so incredible,

but not like 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. And 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 when I was 30. And so it turns out that there is a lot that messed me up as I was growing up. And it all culminated in I had started a software, 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 of 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 school. 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. And 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. And 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? And 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. 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 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. Right. 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've come to now, but I'd love to get into the Samp Shore 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. Yeah, as a matter of fact, Heather, when I stand in front of an audience, as 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 and then what can you do about it, which is a lot

of the tools, the neuroscience based tools that we bring to shift this. So I think this is the human story. This is not just my story. It just happens that my story was a situation where my 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 sabote 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? You know, it'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 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 this. I was taking a sense of it.

I'm like, strongly disagree, strongly disagree, strongly disagree. And then I started thinking to myself, am I am I faking it? 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 slowly I started going back over more to the middle. And do you hear people describe taking the assessment similarly to that?

Yeah, we like to not believe that there is still work we need to be doing. And one of the things that I refrain for people is that one way to look at saboteurs, first of all, why do we all have saboteurs? Saboteurs are patterns, mental patterns that we develop when we are kids in order to survive mentally and physically, in order to fend 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 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. You lost me. So if we all know that we have strength, and when we lean into those, that is also amplified. When we overuse them. So 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. So 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. And we can use the examples of your specific saboteurs for us to talk about examples of this. Okay, let's dive into it and do that, please. So I said, well, you know, it's your option if you want to share your saboteurs with me.

And you said you are an open book, so you shared your saboteur assessment results with me. And the top one is the hyperachiever. So what does that mean? If you tell me your saboteur is a hyperachiever, your top one, what I can immediately know is that one of your great strengths actually is that you're achievement oriented.

The goals for yourself, you want this life to have real, you know, 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, like 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, 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 and 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 with regarding this avatar 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 just being achievement-oriented, that's a wonderful thing. What are some of the strategies that you teach to help somebody do that?

Well, you mentioned before this program started that somebody had told you and 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 spend 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 rats 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 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 child 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 practices, use the child 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, at the end of a 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 at yourself in the mirror and actually feeling absolute deep love for yourself. 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. Wow, that's beautiful. And it sounds so good. 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.

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, you know, 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 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 of your head. Let's say you have this hyperachiever thing oh my god my achievement is everything my identity is on the line if I don't make this I'm gonna be terrible and everybody's gonna hate me and who am I and I self-love and self-respect where he suffers?

If all of those things is what's happening, what's the likelihood of you 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 a 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 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, a very critical meeting and the boss or the chairman of the board, whatever are, you know, 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, 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. Wow, that makes total sense. Thank you for explaining that. Meet a different guest each week. Play along with the change.

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Okay let's get to your saboteur, which I think from the story you shared is the controller. 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 this, 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 a 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? So my daughter has the Contreras avatar. So she has been grown up with some of this stuff and she has been a great observer. So she is in third year of college

and I just a few months ago I was recording a new video on the controller and I reached out to her and 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 reason 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. And 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 cause. And instead, what I realized is that what I needed to do is first of all calm myself down, let go of the leading 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 walk, go around the table and instead of sharing my idea, I'm pushing my idea. I ask everybody what, 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. So, 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 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? 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 a control of the 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, you know, blind focus that you cause a lot of casualties. You bulldoze over people. You don't really hear them and include them. And so people feel controlled, resentful, or push back. How can you have this be more of a pull than a push?

And 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 emotional 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 initial emotion And if it is negative which includes stress anger frustration I pay attention to my initial 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. So there's a lot of signals that says, hey, T-Sai, you're in controller mode right now. And what she has learned to do, which is the technique we teach, is these, are these 10 second techniques we call PQ-ROPs

that shift brain activation. So they quiet the saboteur region of the brain where all the saboteurs live and begin to energize the stage, 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. So they each take 10 seconds. So if we try this ourselves 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 PQ-Rab. 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. And so as you shift to that, and my daughter had done that so she had shifted, then in that positive mode you have deeper access to these sage superpowers. And 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 hurt. 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 or 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 say superpowers, which is how she orchestrated this meeting with people in a very different way than the controller would have done. Wow, I love that.

And immediately I felt so calm, like any sense of nervousness just, and I'm not nervous right now, but still it just made me feel incredibly, wow, that worked very quickly. So 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 voider, my judge, my victim, they all have muscle power. They have immediacy, which is because of the neural pathways in my brain. So the only way to truly change is we need to intercept these

and then do this thing that I just talked about, the PQROS, this brain activation, and then choose different, and each time you choose differently, you begin to lay out a new neural pathway, a 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. And every time you do this, you literally rewire your brain. So what Harvard affiliated neuroscientists showed is that this kind of practice,

within eight weeks of practice, you have rewired the brain so much that in MRI imaging, you can literally visually see there's more gray matter in the positive region of the brain and there's less gray matter in the saboteur region of the brain. You have rewired your brain in a way that it actually shows up in MRI imaging within eight weeks. What's another strategy people could employ to help allow that to happen? Well, for each of the saboteurs we have different strategies. So is there another

saboteur that you're curious about? The pleaser. The pleaser. So okay, so I said if you tell me what the saboteur is, I can tell you what your what the strength underneath it. So if we know you have the pleasers' Abattoir, 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 Saboteur. 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.

So our needs are not met. We give and give and give and we don't ask for and receive enough. At some point we start being drained 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 don't... 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 got to 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 the 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, in which case it is sabbathor. 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 say,

or saying yes because I can't say no, and I'm worried about disappointing you and you're 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 the choice of giving in which case what we say is for

each of these things. We have 10 second technique. So for the pleaser we say, okay, if you feel yourself in pleaser mode do your PQ wraps that I shared before those 10 second rain activation. So you begin to quiet that part of the brain, activates the sage. And then the 10 second way of moving into the sage choice against the please there 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. Wow, that is so, and these are simple tweaks that somebody can make very quickly, I would think. We really incorporate it, 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 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. So pretty much everything that we do is this still to these 10 second techniques of shifting brain activation and choosing a positive sage response to counter the saboteur response. And for each of the saboteurs, we have a different 10-second thing. So we help you see what your saboteurs are. And based on that, we show you what 10-second strategy would be helpful for it. Is there one saboteur that more people 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 Roknil is being used in a hundred different countries. We have trained more than a hundred thousand coaches from more than a hundred 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 wherever you go. Meet a different guest each week. Raise our hands and turn it up. Confidence cleared. Let me guess, you'd rather get a root canal than shop for car insurance? Yeah, you're not alone. It's a total headache.

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That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N to timeline.com slash confidence. That's T I M E L I N E dot com slash confidence. 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. Yeah, and you're exactly right. Your instinct 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 by the way. And the another part of it is one of the saboteurs is hyper rational. So one of the 10 saboteurs is called hyper rational, 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 in with the hyper-rational and says, oh, I hear you, yeah, I get it. And here are the three ways you 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 an abuse of the rational mind.

That's being hyper-rational. And that's damaging the relationship, right? So there are more men with hyper rational than women, but still having said that, there are a lot of women with hyper rational. 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 it explains to you what that actually means, that we all have a saboteur, every single one of them at some level. We have elements of all the saboteurs, but we 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. We have people focus on their top two saboteurs, and everything goes from there. 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 those. Yeah, we might as well call out some of the names, like there's the avoider, there's the controller, there is the hyper achiever, hyper rational, hyper vigilant. There's the pleaser, there is the stickler, and the restless, and the victims, and the judge, which is the universal saboteur that everybody has.

And so, you're curious now about, you said victims avatar? Yeah, the victim and the avoider. I know a lot of people who fit that bill. 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 Controversial Avatar, my son has the Avoiderous Avatar. They were born night and day different. So I said what the strength of my daughter was. She's a extroverted, energetic, hard charging driven girl.

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 a 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 wanna, it's not easy and pleasant. So I just avoid it altogether. I take a left turn instead of really confronting it. And so they can 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 avoiders 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 exercise 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 promised ourselves that if all we did was that 10 seconds 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. Wow, that does not seem hard at all. 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. And how about the victim saboteur? 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's 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, you know, 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 a unique self-identity,

but in a negative way. Bad things uniquely happened to me. Poor me, poor me, poor me. And then that emotional self-awareness, it's turned 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 gonna 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 years and when I realized what was happening to me what I realized, 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. I'm not getting any love or attention. And so what victim saboteur 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.

So how were you able to change that? Well, so you want the 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 gonna 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-pity from myself or from others. And that worked for you personally? 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 to judge all of that stuff and instead really feel into the love for this kid and because that's that's what's deserved and wanting here. And in that what I talk about is even self-love 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 going to be unconditionally loving. How often have you 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 wire 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. 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. Well, 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? If you want to remember just one thing, one ask, please do the saboteur assessment. It just takes five minutes.

And you go to positiveintelligence.com slash assessment. So positiveintelligence.com slash assessment. Then you get, in five minutes, you got 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 a app, an app guided program. So 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 of 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 in the Positive Intelligence website so that you actually

begin to do that. 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? 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 with 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, wellbeing and relationships. And we built 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 used by athletes and it is used by people who are really working on these relationships,

mastery elements. We have trained more than a hundred thousand coaches now, and those coaches specialize on all sorts of applications. And they just know that this operating system applies to all of those. 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. Shazad, thank you so much for the work you're doing and for being here today. My pleasure, Heather. This has been such a joy talking to you. Thank you so much.

You are such a joy. All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be.