Mental fitness for high-performing leaders and teams
Build leaders who are calm in the chaos.
Pressure is inevitable. Reactivity is not.
Be That Leader combines Positive Intelligence® mental fitness training with expert coaching and real-world leadership application. Your people learn to respond to uncertainty, conflict, change, and high expectations with greater clarity, emotional intelligence, courage, and control.
Built for CEOs, HR executives, and Learning & Development leaders who need leadership development to change behavior, not simply create a good training day.
Powered by Positive Intelligence®
Deepened through coaching
Applied where leadership actually happens
- 200+leaders and professionals trained
- Trusted by leaders across multiple industries
- Built for real-world pressure, not classroom theory
The problem
The hidden cost of reactive leadership
Your people may be talented, committed, and working hard. Yet under pressure, automatic patterns can quietly consume the very capacity your strategy depends on.
Execution slows.
Decisions drag. Priorities are revisited. Change creates more resistance than momentum. Leadership time is spent managing friction instead of moving the business forward.
Pressure hijacks performance.
Capable leaders over-control, avoid the difficult conversation, second-guess themselves, or push so hard that they lose the people they need most.
Energy is lost to friction.
Feedback feels threatening. Healthy disagreement becomes personal or disappears. Good ideas stay quiet. Accountability depends on the leader stepping in.
This is not an effort problem. It is a mental fitness problem.
The shift
Your people do not need more information. They need a better response under pressure.
Most leadership programs create insight. Insight matters, but insight alone rarely survives a tense meeting, an unexpected setback, or a difficult Tuesday afternoon.
Be That Leader helps people:
- Recognize the pattern
- Interrupt the reaction
- Practice a more useful response until it becomes available when the stakes are real
Under pressure, the mind defaults to
- Judging
- Controlling
- Avoiding
- Pleasing
- Perfecting
- Overachieving
- Anticipating everything that could go wrong
Positive Intelligence calls these patterns Saboteurs.
With practice, leaders shift toward
- Curiosity
- Empathy
- Creativity
- Clear thinking
- Decisive action
Pressure does not create the response. It reveals the response that has been practiced.
The method
From self-awareness to self-command
Positive Intelligence® provides the foundational mental fitness training. Be That Leader turns that foundation into an applied leadership practice through coaching, shared language, and real-world use.
- 01
Spot
Recognize the pattern. Leaders identify the Saboteurs that take over when pressure rises, and see the cost before the pattern runs the meeting.
- 02
Stop
Interrupt the hijack. Short, repeatable PQ practices build the ability to pause before reacting from stress, fear, ego, or habit.
- 03
Swap
Choose the stronger response. Leaders shift toward curiosity, empathy, creativity, clear thinking, and decisive action.
- 04
Surf
Lead through the tension. They stay present in difficult conversations, changing conditions, and uncomfortable moments, without becoming the chaos around them.
The goal is not to eliminate pressure.
The goal is to develop leaders who can perform inside it.
The approach
More than a workshop. More than an app.
Information can inspire people. Practice changes people.
- Facilitated conversations turn private insight into a shared leadership language.
- Coaching helps each person apply the work to the decisions, relationships, and challenges that matter now.
- The Positive Intelligence app supports it all with short, daily repetitions that strengthen mental fitness.
Assessment
See the patterns that quietly drive behavior.
Live facilitation
Learn with leaders facing real pressure.
Daily practice
Build the mental muscle to interrupt them.
Application and accountability
Use the work in actual leadership moments.
That combination is what helps the learning leave the workshop and enter the culture.
The program at a glance
What exactly is the program?
A 7-week leadership cohort that combines live facilitation, coaching, and the Positive Intelligence® app, built around the real pressures your leaders face.
- Length
- 7 weeks
- Format
- Virtual cohort of 10-20 leaders
- Live sessions
- 7 facilitated cohort sessions, one each week
- The app
- Short daily PQ Reps guided by the Positive Intelligence app
- Coaching
- Group coaching and application exercises. 1:1 coaching available separately.
- Assessments
- Saboteur Assessment and PQ Score Assessment
The participant experience
- 1Start with the Saboteur and PQ Score assessments to see your patterns.
- 2Practice daily with short, app-guided PQ Reps that fit inside a real workday.
- 3Meet with your cohort each week for live, facilitated learning.
- 4Apply the work to real decisions and conversations, supported by coaching.
- 5Sustain it with optional monthly reinforcement sessions after the program ends.
Results
The business return: more capacity. Less drag.
When leaders manage their minds more effectively, the organization gets more of the talent, judgment, creativity, and energy it is already paying for.
Mental hijacking does not only cloud judgment and drain energy. It shuts down the creative, solution-oriented thinking your teams need most.
98%
report growth in emotional intelligence
92%
improve teamwork and collaboration
91%
manage stress more effectively
90%
use mental and emotional energy more effectively
84%
improve conflict management
85%
report greater happiness
Survey of more than 2,000 Positive Intelligence Program participants after seven weeks.
Calmer leadership in uncertainty
Leaders remain grounded enough to think clearly and communicate confidently.
Faster, cleaner decisions
Less second-guessing, over-controlling, and revisiting the same ground.
Healthier conflict
People stay in the conversation, challenge ideas directly, and repair trust faster.
Stronger accountability and ownership
Teams depend less on the leader to referee, remind, and rescue.
Greater adaptability
Change consumes less emotional energy and creates more forward movement.
More sustainable performance
High standards remain high without making chronic stress the operating system.
Where to start
Start where the leverage is highest.
Be That Leader can begin with a single leadership team, a cohort of emerging leaders, or a broader organizational rollout. We will help you match the experience to the behavior and business result you want to change.
Executive and senior leadership teams
Build steadier decision-making, healthier conflict, stronger trust, and a shared way to lead through pressure.
Managers and emerging leaders
Help high-potential people strengthen self-awareness, emotional intelligence, accountability, and confidence before poor habits become leadership defaults.
Organizational cohorts
Create a common mental fitness language across functions, levels, or locations, and give people a practical way to respond to change and challenge.
Workshops and leadership experiences
Introduce the core ideas through an energizing workshop, then build a pathway for people ready to turn insight into lasting practice.
In their words
What changes when leaders change their response
This was super helpful to me being new to my role as Employee Advocate. I noticed that situations were still happening in the store and my job wasn't necessarily getting any easier, but the way I was handling the situations became easier. For example, not going home and overthinking every situation.
BB · Employee Advocate · Retail
I was very surprised at how just how powerful it was. As excited as I was to take it, I really didn't expect it to be so useful and practical. I found that it affected almost every area of my "inside life" in a very positive way.
Greg · Store Manager · Retail
Learning about the saboteurs and sage, and understanding how they affect our perceptions and therefore our feelings - and ultimately happiness - has made a world of difference in my life. This course has given me the ability to recognize when "hijacking" is happening, and the tools to be able to self-correct.
MH · Employee Advocate · Retail
See it in action
See the work in action
Recordings from client engagements and conversations about mental fitness in real organizations.
Wegmans PQ webinar
Session recording aligned with the Calm in the Chaos message: mental fitness under real organizational pressure.
Open in VimeoWegmans Testimonials
How leaders inside the organization talk about the value of the work.
Open in YouTubeGolisano, Spotlight on You!, LaBella, and additional clips live in our media library.
Vistage Chair, executive coach, leadership trainer, keynote speaker, BSEE, MBA, and Acres of Diamonds founder.
Meet the founder
Scott's Story
Scott Gibbs is an executive coach, Vistage Chair, and founder of Acres of Diamonds who helps great people lead greatly. Grounded in his belief that “Reality is undefeated, and we can make birdie from anywhere,” Scott helps leaders destroy their Mental McDonald’s, become untriggerable, and remain calm in the chaos.
Before
I have had a Hyper-achiever personality as long as I can remember: never good enough for myself. No matter what I achieved, it was never good enough for me.
The turning point
Learning PQ principles changed my life. We lost our son in 2016 and that really caused my Hyper-achiever to go into overdrive. I wasn't good enough to protect my son. I wasn't good enough to save my son. Within 3 sessions of PQ I could see how my thinking was the source of my anguish. It was my stories about Marcus's passing that were impacting me. When I saw that truth, I set out to change my stories.
After
Was it true that I lost my son? Yes, of course. And, it was also true that I loved Marcus dearly, did everything in my power to help and save him. It was also true that Marcus donated 5 organs, including his heart. I've listened to his heart beat in another man's chest. Marcus gave another man life. That is a new story that I rely on to feel more powerful more often. I've learned to judge myself, others and events less harshly, while looking for what I can learn from non-preferred events that 100% of us experience.
Why I do this work
His mission is to awaken the leader within, so people can perform under pressure and become the leaders others want to follow.
We do not teach leaders to avoid the storm. We help them become the calm inside it.
Explore the experience
- The ExperienceSee how mental fitness moves from awareness to practiced leadership behavior.
- For OrganizationsChoose the right starting point for an executive team, leader cohort, or broader rollout.
- ResultsExplore the performance, collaboration, stress, and emotional-intelligence outcomes.
- The ScienceUnderstand why short, repeated practice is more likely to change behavior than insight alone.
- SaboteursMeet the invisible patterns that quietly tax leadership performance.
- ResourcesUse assessments and practical tools to begin the conversation.
Your environment will keep changing. The way your leaders respond can change now.
Let's identify where stress, reactivity, avoidance, or friction is costing your organization, and choose the right place to begin.