Does your story have a balanced structure?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How you choose to structure a speech, article, or book matters. Way back on September 14, 2009 I blogged about Design, Balance, and Bonsai and compared trees similar to the pair shown above. If your structure (as a mind map) looks as unbalanced as the one shown on the right, then you should revise it. On March 22, 2011 I blogged about Speech geometry: lines, circles, forks, and combs.

 

Last week I borrowed the 2012 book Positive Intelligence (Why only 20% of teams and individuals achieve their true potential and how you can achieve yours) by Stanford professor Shirzad Chamine from my friendly, local public library. You can read a preview at Google Books. I was perplexed by his unbalanced structure. In Chapter 1 he defines the Positivity Quotient:

 

“PQ stands for Positive Intelligence Quotient. Your PQ is your Positive Intelligence score, expressed as a percentage, ranging from 0 to 100. In effect, your PQ is the percentage of time your mind is acting as your friend rather than as your enemy; or, in other words, it is the percentage of time your mind is serving you versus sabotaging you. For example, a PQ of 75 means that your mind is serving you about 75 percent of the time and is sabotaging you about 25 percent of the time. We don’t count the periods of time when your mind is in neutral territory.”

 

In a post at his Positive Intelligence blog on August 1, 2019 titled Why PQ matters more than IQ and EQ he claims our minds include internal enemies (Saboteurs) opposed by a friend (The Sage), and we work as follows:

 

“On one side of this battlefield are the well-disguised Saboteurs, who wreck any attempt at increasing either happiness or performance. On the other side is the Sage, who has access to one’s wisdom, insights, and often untapped mental powers. The Saboteurs and Sage are fueled by different regions of the brain.  We are literally of two minds and two brains.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a Master Saboteur (The Judge) and his nine Accomplices, as shown above. In a more religious time they could have been called our Demons. (The Positive Intelligence web site has a Saboteur Assessment for your nine accomplices).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opposing them just is The Sage, who has five powers, as shown above. In a more religious time he could have been called our Guardian Angel. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If we think about that battlefield as a sports championship, then it would be more natural to have two opposing teams of ten, as is shown above. But almost a decade later it’s too late to change that structure.

 

Like Dale Carnegie (originally it was Carnagey), Professor Chamine revised his last name (originally it was Bozorgchami). Under the original he is known as the author of a well-known letter, which has been discussed by Jeff Schmidt at Poets & Quants on August 10, 2014 in an article titled Advice to the Next Generation of MBAs.

 

Images of an American football team and an English football(soccer) team were adapted from the Library of Congress.