How do PQ Reps disrupt your inner saboteur? Self-Leadership Tools
Picture this scene:
You’ve just reached 6pm after a long day of back-to-back meetings. While you’re utterly exhausted, you finally have a chance to wrap up your notes and respond to the messages that have been piling up all day.
As you finish catching up, your phone dings and a new message comes in. It’s from your biggest client, who has finally responded to your proposal; you’ve been working on this proposal for months and has ben a big bet for your end of year performance review. The client makes their skepticism known through their less-than-stellar response and the critical questions they ask in their email.
Instantly you’re hit with a bolt of stress and your mind starts racing. Energy from anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, or frustration suddenly power a barrage of stress-induced thoughts in your head. Even though by now you are mentally and physically exhausted, your stress-jolted mind urges you to push your need for rest aside to jump on the message and address the situation ASAP. Even though you’d really just like to go home now and deal with it tomorrow, suddenly you feel as though you have no alternative but to stay late and focus on how to fix things right away.
You can replace client with boss, stakeholder, teacher, or any other role, proposal with any other project, engagement or commitment in your life, and critical feedback with any less-than-hoped-for response or negative interaction— the outcome will still play out as a stress-influenced, reactive decision.
There’s a big problem here stewing in the stress.
If you allow your natural stress reaction to carry you into taking an immediate action to alleviate the feeling of being stressed, you’re being led by your lower brain regions and stress hormones, rather than your higher brain regions and your conscious will. When you’re led by stress, you’re more liable to sabotage yourself, rather than to make a smart, thoughtful decision.
Self-Leadership > Stress
Enter self-leadership.
Self-leadership is the practice of making calm, conscious choices that are grounded in your internal values and intrinsic motivations, rather than being pushed by stress or pulled by external influences.
In the situation above, here are some of the resultant issues that might come from a lack of self-leadership, and jumping on the problem right away:
You’ve already worked a long day, meaning your creativity and empathy is reduced, meaning the quality of any decisions or ideas will be of lower quality than later on or the next day
Your irritation and anxiety levels will be elevated, meaning your action may carry perceptible traces of these elements, that can damage your client relationship
If you take it upon yourself to respond immediately or to develop a plan entirely on your own, you’ll preclude the wisdom of engaging your subconscious with a good night’s rest and some time away, or help from other colleagues/advisors
In the end, the best response may end up be scheduling a phone call to simply get curious and learn more before doing anything else; but a stressed mind hates to leave things open, and always wants to take action immediately.
Introducing the Inner Saboteur
When we are operating in a reactive, stressed mode, we are taken over by what in coaching is referred to our inner saboteur, or inner critic.
The saboteur is a personification of the voices and thoughts in your head that speak up when your mind is fogged by stress. Your inner saboteur represents the thoughts which:
Beat you up for not being good enough and tell you to be more
Shame you into feeling you always need to do more
Make you feel like an imposter that needs to cater their actions so as not to be found out
Overwhelm you with resentments or anger and push you to project those emotions into your interactions with others
Cause you to anxiously overthink everything
Push you into other reactive actions that harm your long-term wellbeing in exchange for seeking short-term relief of your stressed state of mind.
These critical, sabotaging thoughts can be quite powerful and persuasive, but the problem is that listening to these thoughts doesn’t bring long-term stress relief, and can often dig you into a deeper hole or create new problems. Like a hit of caffeine or sugar, the relief wears off fast and makes your mind and mood crash.
We won’t dive into the inner-workings of the positive intelligence program, here so now we’ll shift to PQ reps.
Introducing PQ reps
PQ reps are 10 second exercises that you can do anytime, anywhere to interrupt your stress response and get a break from your inner saboteur.
PQ reps are like modernized meditation exercises, with a similar function but different form. PQ stands for Positive Intelligence Quotient and measures the percentage of time your mind is operating in a calm, executive thinking-mode driven by positive emotions like empathy, creativity, and curiosity. That’s in contrast to operating in a stressed and emotionally-reactive survival mode driven by negative emotions like anxiety, shame, guilt, and anger.
By interrupting your train of stressed thoughts and emotions, a PQ rep helps you to act more consciously, from your executive-thinking mind.
It’s like wiping away the fog on a window that builds up in the high humidity of stress so that you can again see the world clearly. If you don’t clear the foggy window, you’re far more prone to making assumptive, zero-sum, antagonistic, or self-sacrificing decisions, like always saying yes to please others or working so much that you burn out.
How to Do a PQ Rep
To clear the fog of stress, you focus your mind on something. It’s easiest to start with what your body can sense.
Meditation famously focuses your mind on the sensation of repeatedly breathing in and out; but since that’s not easy for many people to do I recommend PQ reps.
Some of the ways you can do a PQ rep include:
Listening to what you can hear; close by and far away
Feeling what you can feel in various body parts
Tensing your muscles, and then releasing them
Labeling what you can sense, or even what you are think
Do a PQ rep anytime you are feeling stressed, reactive, emotional, or realize you are hijacked by the saboteur thoughts.
Here’s a step-by-step instruction for one of my favorite PQ reps, which involves using your fingertips:
Sit comfortably and relaxed with your back straight
Take a deep breath, and close your eyes as you exhale
With your index finger and thumb, rub them together with such slow and intense focus that you can feel the fingertip ridges for 20 seconds
Well done! That two PQ reps!
You can keep going for a couple more PQ reps with these two steps:
Move all the fingers of one hand down the fingers and palm of the other hand
Concentrate on feeling all the sensations in both of your hands
That was 20 seconds, and 2 more PQ reps!
At this point, your mind window will be a little more clear, and you can think and access your executive-thinking powers of empathy, creativity, clear action, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation.
Like a muscle, the more you practice doing PQ reps to shift your mind out of stressed reaction mode, the easier it will get, and the more routine it can become.
Try out PQ reps for yourself, and see how creating space from stress to tap into your self-leadership mind goes.
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