Are You Sabotaging Your Own Success?

Tap into Power of Positive Intelligence to Live Your Life with Less Stress and More Freedom to Do What You Want

On this episode, Charissa Sim, host of Zen Success had the pleasure of speaking with Barbara Fonti. Barbara is a successful entrepreneur and the Chief Business Coach at Big Dream Executive Coaching where she works with entrepreneurs and business leaders to help them achieve astonishing results. Barbara is an expert in the field of Positive Intelligence, The X Factor for peak performance, which you will learn in this episode.

She is certified in leadership coaching from Harvard University and is a certified professional life coach. Barbara is based in New York, but has a global client base. In the past, Barbara has held management positions at several Fortune 100 companies, where she won awards for management excellence, customer service and training, including the prestigious President’s Club and Chairman’s Council quality awards.

As a child, Barbara was a recovering introvert. She was shy. “I think a lot had to do with what was happening in my house. There was a lot of drama. I’d be the typical middle child, I became the peacemaker, and saw myself in my role as the person who was there to cajole everybody else. And to help them become stronger. I didn’t feel that there was room there for me, for my needs, for my desires for my fears or anything. So I learned to keep that to myself.” For her, it was better to be invisible. But she made a 180-degree progress in it. But it took work. And it took identifying the things that she was really most fearful and whether or not they were based, in fact, or just a narrative she created for herself.

Growing up, Barbara was certain that she wanted to create a safe loving home. She always knew that she wanted to be a mother, and that the only thing she knew. Barbara went into corporate America as the Director of Training and Education for a large financial services company. She had two little girls who are in elementary school and this great career. And they were at odds with each other. Barbara knew that she did not want other people raising them. She didn’t want nannies raising them. But she had to because she had no choice. Barbara had a strong why she made the leap from corporate America into sales, because she saw that as something that would give her flexibility. So she could be at the soccer game. So she could be a class mom once in a while and really participate more with them. They were young, and she didn’t know what the future held.

“Everybody told me I would starve. They said you’re not a salesperson. And, and I believed them too. But I also believe that I could learn things. And I saw it as an opportunity for growth, even though it scared me a little bit. I don’t know if I would have done it if I didn’t have those two girls as my, why.”

People come to Barbara for all types of reasons. But it always boils down to wanting to live their life, with less stress, and more freedom. And whether that freedom is financial freedom, or freedom from beating themselves up or just the freedom to do the things that they want to do to be able to find the time to live a full life and not feel trapped. She works with people on tactics and strategies.

“At the heart of this and what is really the foundation is what’s going on in our brains. And what are the things that are sabotaging our success and our thinking and our well-being. So we do spend a lot of time in those areas in the beginning and throughout the process.” Barbara emphasizes.

Barbara stumbled on this methodology called Positive Intelligence a few years ago, and she love it and it changed her life. “And it’s changed the lives of my clients for the better” she said. Positive Intelligence is a methodology that we can all incorporate in our lives, to not only achieve our goals but to live happier. Because we all know that there are these people that, we may see on a magazine cover, or they’re an icon for what would be considered success but they might be tormented inside.

The backstory on Positive Intelligence, it is the synthesis of decades of research of over a half a million people from around the world, all shapes and sizes. And so what the researchers did was they looked at how come there are some people who reach their potential and some don’t? And how come there are some people that live with more ease and flow and from a happier place and they show up in their lives? And others, which, unfortunately, is the majority, that we show up motivated by negative emotion? And what can we learn from those people that reach their potential and do so from a happy place.

And a lot of the research is synthesized by Shirzad Chamine, and he is the bestselling author of the book named, Positive Intelligence. “I read his book and I said, Aha! I had so many AHA. And I brought it into my coaching practice.” What Shirzad found is that we actually have three core muscles in our brains, that we can strengthen, so that we can show up in our lives better, and we can be motivated in our day to day by positive factors, rather than the negative ones like fear and stress and shame and anxiety, etc. Because most people tend to be motivated by those negative factors. And unfortunately, it takes a lot more energy to live that type of a life. And it does hold us back. So we help people identify those three core muscles and strengthen them. And I’m part of a global group of coaches who are the pioneers in this field. And so we teach people what we call mental fitness, which is exercising those three core muscles to live better and ultimately improve the quality of their lives.

According to Barbara, being mentally fit means that you can weather any challenge that comes, it means that you can find a gift or an opportunity in any seemingly bad challenge that comes. But we need to identify those challenges, those surprises, those stumbling blocks because if we’re not mentally fit, we are going to feel the stress of it. It makes sense if we look at what those core muscles are. Barbara thinks it is really impactful to identify our saboteurs because the one muscle that we want to use in our brain is what we call our saboteur interceptor. And that’s our ability to recognize those internal voices. And those patterns of thinking that may have served us in the past, but they’re not serving us now. And they’re actually sabotaging our success and our wellbeing. The strongest is our internal judge – The master saboteurs. Even the happiest people on Earth have an internal judge. It’s just part of our physiology as human beings. The internal judge that we have, we can use it to judge ourselves, we can use it to judge other people. And we use it to judge our circumstances. We judge people very quickly, sometimes too quickly, or just based on our experiences. So we have clouded judgment, and we judge or circumstances and automatically, we want to assign a label to it, oh, this is good, or this is bad.

The first thing we do to strengthen that interceptor muscle is to look for the judge or for any of our saboteurs. Start listening and looking for that judge and become aware of it. And when you notice it, label it. Because the power of recognizing it and labeling it is that it starts to lose its power.

And when we talk about saboteurs, we talk about a certain part of your brain that you’re residing in. The alternative to that is our clear headed space or the Sage brain. Imagine your brain to have two distinct parts. On one side of your brain, that’s where all those saboteurs reside. And the other part of your brain. Well, that’s where all the good stuff happens? That’s your Sage brain, and we call it your Sage brain. Because it’s clear, it’s lighter, it’s more focused, it’s the part of your brain where your learning centers reside. And it can handle your challenges that that come in your life with a clearer and calm mind. Ultimately improve the quality of our life.

That’s the place where we can practice self empathy, we can give ourselves a break. And we can empathize with other people, we can try to see things from their point of view, instead of just going head to head where are saboteurs like to be in our sage brain, that’s the part that gets curious. That’s our Learning Center, we can explore things for our lives, we can explore opportunities and alternatives and, and, and new ways of looking at problems. You have the power to take action is the opposite of having the fear.

Barbara’s business is called Big Dream executive coaching. Because she loves big dream. She is anything about big dream, because she changed everything. They host rooms that have everything from journaling, to get those aha and move forward. They also have mental fitness gym. And one of the things we can do really quickly for people is give them a quick assessment, it takes five minutes or less. And it will show people how well they’re currently performing relative to their potential. And we have our saboteurs’ assessment, it’s a two-minute thing that will show you immediately what saboteurs are showing up in your life. Just knowing that can make a huge impact in their lives.

If you want to learn more about Positive Intelligence, you can visit her website: Big Dream Executive Coaching. Barbara is also in LinkedIn and on clubhouse.