Terminological clarifications
The Consciousness Quotient is a composite psychological construct, including traits, skills, and abilities that allow us to explore and optimize the conscious experience.
The Consciousness Quotient includes 15 patterns and facets of the conscious experience: perspective-taking, clarity of discrimination, quality of experience, spirituality-harmony, global self-identity, language use, physical self, energy self, cognition self, non-conceptual self, social-relational interconnectivity, inner growth, multi-modal integration, habitual patterns, awakening skills.
To be conscious means to have a degree of witnessing awareness and a degree of freedom of choice when thinking, feeling, sensing, and interacting with people and the environment. An essential element of the conscious experience is intentionality, which allows a person to choose deliberately what behavior to enact and what attitude to allow and select.
The everyday Consciousness Quotient is the habituated level of being conscious that is experienced in the morning, one hour after waking up and after having had a refreshing sleep, without being exposed to any significant stimulus (coffee, TV, radio, music, talking, or psychological stress, social interactions, food).
An enhanced Consciousness Quotient means a higher degree of witnessing awareness and being less automatic in thinking, feeling, sensing, and interacting with people and the environment, together with a higher degree of choice when initiating a behavior. It also means a better capacity for connecting with life and experiencing fresh aliveness through the body.
The Consciousness Quotient Inventory (CQ-i) is a self-assessment tool that evaluates patterns of behaviors, attitudes, attentional styles, and the usage of conscious skills, awareness, and the capacity to ‘feel awake and alive’, providing a complex exploration of conscious experience.
The CQ-i was developed through 18 studies across 17 years (2003–2020), and provides standardized ratings using the already familiar style of the Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Quotient (mean = 100). CQ-i scores are classified into six intervals with inclusive labels, selected to reflect the evolution in the capacity for being conscious. The 6-level classification is the same for the global score and the scales scores: emerging (significantly below average); basic (moderately below average); balanced (average range); well-balanced (average range); enhanced (moderately above average); heightened (significantly above average).
Per the American Psychological Classification, the CQ-i is a Level B test (‘tests that require specific training for administration, scoring, and interpretation’). The CQ-i online assessment platform provides an automatic scoring, based on the norming sample data, making the report easy to understand when used for self-exploration and personal development. Still, further interpretations of the CQ-i results require some understanding of psychometric principles, the facets being measured, and the discipline within which the test is used (e.g. education, counseling, personal development, organizational contexts).