The Positive Intelligence Program is a 7-week mental fitness coaching experience developed by Shirzad Chamine and based on research involving 500,000+ participants. It's built around two core concepts: your Saboteurs — the mental patterns that drive stress, overwork, and burnout — and your Sage, the part of you capable of responding with clarity, curiosity, and perspective. It builds three core mental fitness muscles: intercepting your Saboteurs (the patterns that undermine you), activating your Sage (your wiser self), and strengthening your PQ Rep practice (daily mental fitness habits that compound over time).

The Saboteur Assessment is a free, research-backed tool from Positive Intelligence that identifies the specific mental patterns — Saboteurs — that are quietly driving your stress, self-doubt, and overwork. For management consultants experiencing burnout, the assessment typically surfaces patterns like the Hyper-Achiever, the Controller, the Stickler, or the Restless — all high-functioning on the outside, all costly on the inside.

After you take the assessment, you’re invited to have a 45-minute complimentary session with me to interpret your results about how your Saboteurs are getting in your way. It’s crucial because you can't change a pattern you can't see.

Your Coach Through Change (yctc) provides specialized transformation and mental fitness coaching for management consultants. The primary offering is the 7-week Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness Program delivered in a 1:1 virtual pods or 2 or more group pods. The program is structured, research-backed, and designed to fit inside a demanding consulting schedule — daily practices run approximately two minutes, with one weekly group session. It builds the mental fitness foundation that makes everything else — clearer decisions, stronger relationships, more intentional career choices — actually possible.

I also provide a complimentary one-on-one 15-minute discovery session to talk about whether PQ and taking the PQ Saboteur Assessment is feels like the next step to take in your life.

My mission is to empower you to reduce the noise, get clear, and move forward through mental fitness and assist you in transforming how you show up for yourself and others.

In today’s high-pressure leadership environments, simply being "healthy" is often not enough to sustain excellence. Mental fitness provides a distinct edge in three specific areas:

• Clarity Under Pressure: It allows you to think clearly and make sound decisions at "hour ten" of a grueling day, rather than succumbing to decision fatigue.

• Emotional Composition: It enables you to stay composed during intense conflict or high-stakes negotiations, preventing emotional "hijacks."

• Rapid Recovery: Mentally fit leaders don't just endure setbacks; they recover from them quickly. Instead of a slow erosion of confidence or energy, they bounce back to their peak state faster than their peers.

Performative resilience is the pattern I see in almost every management consultant I work with, the tendency to perform strength, adaptability, and composure so consistently that it becomes indistinguishable from having those qualities. From the outside, it looks like resilience. Internally, it's often white-knuckling. The signals: achievement that no longer lands emotionally, disconnection from your own physical and mental cues, and a growing gap between who you are at work and who you recognize yourself to be. It's not a character flaw — it's a completely logical adaptation to a culture that rewards performance above everything else. If something in that description is landing, that recognition is worth paying attention to.

The primary difference lies in the goal:

• Mental Health is about functioning. It refers to being sufficiently free from psychological injury or mental illness to "show up" and perform your daily responsibilities. It is a baseline state of well-being and is largely a private matter between you and your healthcare providers.

• Mental Fitness is about capacity. It refers to how well your mind performs under load, over time, and in conditions of high uncertainty. If mental health is the "baseline," mental fitness is the "ceiling"—it determines how much you can handle before your performance degrades.

Think of it like professional sports. No coach would confuse an athlete being injury-free with that athlete being competition-ready.

• Being injury-free (Mental Health) means you can step onto the field.

• Being conditioned (Mental Fitness) means you have the stamina to win in the fourth quarter.

Mental fitness coaching builds the foundation — the capacity to intercept self-sabotage, quiet the noise, and respond from clarity instead of autopilot. That's where most people start at yctc, and for good reason. It's concrete, structured, and delivers results fast.

Transformation coaching is what becomes possible once that foundation exists.

It's the deeper work: the career question you've been avoiding, the identity that no longer fits, the gap between what you've built and what you actually want. A transformation coach for management consultants helps you use that mental fitness capacity to make real decisions — about your next role, your relationship with the work, or what you want the next decade to look like.

At yctc, the two aren't separate offerings — they're sequential. Mental fitness coaching gives you Presence and Capacity. Transformation coaching is where Choice and Momentum happen.

You don't need to be in crisis. You don't need to have it figured out. You do need to be honest with yourself and at work. The consultants who get the most from coaching are the ones who have a growing sense that something needs to change, even if they can't name it yet, and who are willing to sit with that honestly rather than optimize their way around it. If you're not sure, the Saboteur Assessment is a low-stakes starting point. Or book a free 15-minute discovery call — it's a conversation, not a commitment.

The research gives us the big picture: across a cohort of more than 2,000 PQ Program participants, seven weeks of mental fitness training produced measurable increases in productivity, significantly lower stress, and stronger relationships — at work and at home. Within eight weeks of continual practice, the brain's rewiring is substantial enough to be visible on an MRI. This isn't insight that fades when the program ends. It's a structural change.

But research tracks averages. What actually shows up for management consultants is more specific — and more visible.

You start to notice fewer knee-jerk reactions. The patterns that used to drive conflict, rushed decisions, and exhaustion lose their grip. Decision-making gets clearer — you find yourself choosing based on what actually matters to you, not what appears urgent or safe. The next career move, the difficult client conversation, the boundary you've been avoiding — they start coming from somewhere real.

Most consultants are surprised by this last shift: you reconnect with what you actually want. Not what your career has been steering you toward. Not what the next level requires of you. What you want.

That tends to change everything downstream.

Three things distinguish this work. First, the niche: Yctc works specifically with management consultants — the frameworks, language, and examples are calibrated to your world, not adapted from a generic leadership model. Second, the credential stack: Aaron holds an ACC from the International Coaching Federation, a Certified Professional Coach (CPC) designation from iPEC, and Positive Intelligence (PQ) Coach certification — three distinct methodologies working together. Third, the framework: the Presence to Capacity to Choice to Momentum model is the actual sequence of the work, designed to move you from honest self-awareness through genuine mental fitness to values-led action. Most coaching starts with goals. This starts with where you actually are.

All coaching sessions are conducted virtually — which means you can work with Aaron from anywhere, whether you're based in Denver, traveling between client sites, or working remotely. Sessions are held via video call, and the PQ Program includes access to a daily mobile app so the between-session practice fits into your actual schedule. Virtual delivery has no impact on the depth or quality of the coaching relationship.

You can book a free 15-minute discovery call right on the YCTC website. This is a relaxed chat to help you decide if mental fitness coaching matches your needs. If you’re not ready for a call, request a free 5-minute Saboteur Assessment. It’s the quickest way to find out what might be holding you back.