Positive Intelligence — mental fitness for people who carry a lot

The next date isn't set yet. Pick ‘hear about the next discovery workshop’ in the form and you'll get the date and the sign-up link by email as soon as it's fixed. The cohort starts on 2 October — you can sign up for that independently.

One live session per week (60–90 minutes), around 15 minutes of app training a day and roughly an hour at the weekend for the learning module. The daily exercises fit into gaps: brushing your teeth, in the car, before a meeting. Deliberately built to fit a full life — including one with children.

We start with a short body-based exercise so everyone properly arrives. Then the theme of the week, framed briefly rather than lectured. Most of the time goes into real situations from your week — as a group and in pairs. We close with what each person takes into the next seven days.

No. We start at zero. If you've already worked with meditation, therapy or coaching, you'll find a structure here that organises what you have rather than replacing it.

The app guides you through the daily exercises, holds the learning modules and makes your progress visible. Access is included for a full year, well beyond the programme: the seven weeks lay the foundation, the year builds the habit. After that it's your call whether to extend.

You get the material, and we pick up what matters in the next session. The app keeps running either way, so you stay in rhythm.

The pod sessions aren't. What's in the room stays in the room — that protects the openness, yours and everyone else's. The learning modules in the app are available any time.

Honest answer: Positive Intelligence is a synthesis, not a method backed by a single randomised trial. Shirzad Chamine states he developed the model over roughly 30 years of work and data from more than a million people; a factor analysis condensed the patterns into ten saboteurs and five Sage powers. The building blocks themselves — cognitive reappraisal, self-compassion, attention regulation, interoception — are well studied in psychology and neuroscience. Positive Intelligence reports that the practice strengthens 17 of the 18 emotional intelligence competencies. What you get here is a well-built training system.

No, and the difference is the whole point. Positive thinking paints over a feeling with a friendlier sentence. Here it runs the other way: first notice what's actually going on, then regulate the body, then consciously decide what meaning you give the situation. “Anything can mean anything” isn't a euphemism — it's an observation. Circumstances carry no meaning in themselves; we assign it.

Three things. The diagnosis: you're not working on calm in general, but on your specific patterns, which you've named first. The dose: one- to two-minute exercises several times a day, rather than one long sitting that's the first thing to go when it gets tight. And the group — new mental habits hold far better when others are walking the same road at the same time.

Because under stress the route through the head is closed. In fight-flight-freeze the amount of information you can consciously process drops dramatically. The figure often quoted is around 40 bits per second, against up to 100,000 in a regulated state — whether those numbers are exact matters less than the direction, which you know from your own experience. That's why every intervention starts in the body: breath, palms, feet, face. Thinking comes after.

Yes. Positive Intelligence works with a PQ score reflecting the ratio between constructive and sabotaging mental activity. You measure at the start, watch it move across the weeks, and can hold the final number against your own experience. Usually more telling than the score is the feedback from people around you — that arrives earlier.

Three things participants name again and again. A vocabulary for saying what's happening in the moment. A handful of exercises that work in seconds. And a different reflex: the space between stimulus and response becomes noticeably wider. That's exactly why app access runs for a full year.

No more than ten people, so everyone genuinely gets room. The mix is deliberate: founders, executives, people from entirely different contexts, sometimes couples. That mix is where the value sits — you'll spot your own pattern in someone else first.

You decide what you share. There's no round where everyone has to deliver. In practice most people open up after two or three weeks by themselves, because they notice the others are living the same thing. Until then, listening is enough.

It stays in the room. No recordings, nothing passed on, not even anonymised. That applies to me as much as to everyone else, and it's the one rule the group commits to in the preparation call.

Usually especially then. People who know themselves well often have plenty of insight and little tooling for the moment it tips. That's exactly where this starts: not another realisation, but a trained response. Several participants with long therapy histories describe it as the piece that was missing.

Then come to the discovery workshop and look at it without deciding anything. The programme depends on both of you wanting it — convincing someone and then signing them up doesn't work. Scepticism is a good start, by the way: sceptical partners are often the ones who move the most.

€1,490 plus VAT per person. That covers seven guided weeks with weekly pod sessions, PQ app access for a full year, the personal saboteur assessment with a debrief, and the closing session.

Yes, that's the normal case. You get an invoice to the company with VAT shown. How to treat it for tax is best clarified with your accountant.

Friday 2 October 2026. Seven weeks with weekly pod sessions, plus the closing session afterwards. We agree the exact times together as a group before we start.

Cohorts run in German by default; English-language cohorts on request. The PQ app is mostly in English, and we work through the material together in the sessions, so you're never alone with it.

No. Positive Intelligence is mental fitness training. It doesn't replace psychotherapy or couples therapy and isn't intended to treat mental illness. If it becomes clear along the way that something else is more urgent, I'll tell you — and help with the next step.

Yes. You go through the programme together, and that's precisely where the value sits: you get a shared vocabulary for the moments that would otherwise tip. The price is per person.

That's what the Arrival Guarantee is for: walk the first three weeks with us — if you then sense it's not your path, you get the full amount back. No justification, no form.