Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what appears only in the roots.
Rumi
In order to grow, we need to know ourselves. To understand what triggers certain behaviour, we need to identify the root cause.
Adiela Akoon, Lost in a Quartrain
A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.
C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
I have recently been introduced to the principles of Factor Analysis. It is a method for modelling observed variables, and their covariance structure, in terms of a smaller number of underlying unobservable, or latent, `factors´.
The factors typically are viewed as broad concepts or ideas that may describe an observed phenomenon. For example, most consumption behaviour might be explained in terms of a basic desire of obtaining social recognition. These unobserved factors may be more interesting to the social scientist than the observed quantitative measurements.
Factor analysis is generally an exploratory/descriptive method that requires many subjective judgments. It is a widely used tool and often controversial because the models, methods, and subjectivity are so flexible that debates about interpretations can occur. Like many statistical models it can be misused to shore up dogma, spread propaganda and generate `fake news´.
This being said, factor analysis is a useful tool for investigating variable relationships for complex concepts such as socioeconomic status, dietary patterns, or psychological scales. It allows researchers to investigate concepts they cannot measure directly. It does this by using a large number of variables to estimate a few interpretable underlying, or latent, factors.
One very accessible example of factor analysis, used by Shirzad Chamine in his Positive Intelligence (PQ) Coaching Programme is that of colours. If we were to ask a general audience how many colours exist, you may get a variety of answers, from hundreds to thousands, depending on their family status, education, pastimes, and interactions. Yet, we may remember hearing one time at school that there are only three primary colours; namely red, yellow, and blue, from which all the other colours are derived. By mixing these three colours in different combinations and quantities, we will achieve all the other thousand upon thousands of colours. Using factor analysis, we can `drill down´ the number of underlying factors, in this case, to three, and we can identify each one individually.
Another example that has become clear to me over the years in the sphere of behavioural psychology is that of the primary drivers for any human behaviours. While we identify many manifestations of human behaviour such as shame, guilt, apathy, hatred, grief, fear, desire, anger, and pride, on the one hand, and courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love joy, peace, and enlightenment, on the other, when we drill it all down, we find that there are only two primary drivers for all human behaviours, namely fear and love.
If we accept this premise and the fact that it is an integral part of the human condition to occasionally slip back into fear despite self-knowledge and the best of our intentions, we can then focus on what will help us to shift from fear to love, thus impacting our entire range of behaviours by tackling factors at the primary level. This is where we have the greatest leverage.
One of the methods I was taught some years ago was to write a gratitude list every time I began to feel sorry for my self. Now I can recognise that the act of writing such a list brought my energy back into the field of love and the symptoms of the fear-based sojourn, in this case self-pity, were swiftly dissipated. Gratitude and entitlement cannot sit side by side. It was the disappointment at the non-fulfilment of my grandiose stance of entitlement that had led to the self-pity. Having gotten this far, I can then go on to address my stance of entitlement.
Shirzad Chamine goes on to elaborate that the results of his research in factor analysis as it relates to human happiness demonstrate that three primary factors are at play. They are the Saboteurs that each of us have, the five powers of the Sage immanent in us all, and our capacity for Mind Control, i. e. our mental fitness in terms of getting our minds to work for the benefit of our well-being rather than becoming and remaining enslaved to our (often destructive) thinking.
If this is indeed true, we can concentrate on these three areas in the following ways:
1) Identifying and owning our saboteurs. The PQ hypothesis is that we all share the same main saboteur, namely the Judge. Each of us also has a main accomplice saboteur, one of the following nine: Hyper-rational, Controller, Stickler, Pleaser, Victim, Avoider, Hyper-achiever, Restless, and Hyper-vigilant. After the introductions, so to say, we begin to observe how they operate, hitherto often at a level below our conscious perception. Thereafter we can apply innovative techniques to anticipate them before they swing into action and disempower them to a degree that they can no longer hijack or derail us.
2) Recognise the five Powers of the Sage as our true essence. These are the Powers of Exploration, Empathy, Navigation, Activation, and Innovation. Over time, they have been buried under layers of wreckage wrought by the saboteurs. This process can be described as an act of re-membering who we truly are. Here too, there are extensive tools and methodologies to strengthen these powers in our daily lives.
3) Build our mental fitness such that we can achieve the goals set out above. This is achieved by mental exercises, simple exercises based on the latest results of empirical neuroscientific research. They are analogous to the exercises we do in the gym to build and maintain our physical fitness. Anybody who has experience in the gym knows that practice must be regular and constant if we are to maintain or improve our current level of fitness. The same is true for mental fitness. If we are to get and remain sufficiently fit to achieve the goals with respect to the Saboteurs and the Sage, we need to embrace the fact that we have embarked on a life-long challenge, a challenge with no finish line and no annual vacation.
Of course, much of this is not new. Wise teachers have been practicing such techniques and encouraging us to do the same, since time began. The new aspect is that we can now verify the benefits of practices such as meditation, physical exercise, and even hugging, using the latest discoveries in neuroplasticity and imaging technology.
Hopefully, once started on this path, the benefits will far outweigh the invested effort, thus providing us with an inexhaustible supply of motivation for our daily practice.
These benefits can be manifested in as many applications of human behaviour as you can think of; business, health, nutrition, relationships, team building, parenting, societal, environmental, and political challenges, to name just a few. Herein lies the immense power of the so-called PQ operating System; once we get up and running, we can run any number of applications on one and the same system.
I am beginning to work with these concepts on a daily basis and already experience many benefits from doing so.
