The AQ™ Reception Quiz
A reader’s self-assessment
This self-assessment is a reader companion to Authentic Intelligence™. It’s designed to help you locate yourself inside the AQ™ framework, not to deliver a clinical or psychometric measurement. Formal validation of an AQ™ instrument is part of the research agenda this book proposes.
Instructions
Unlike a personality test, this measures reception. Rate each statement based on how you actually live, not how you’d like to. AQ™ doesn’t grade on aspiration.
- 5 Almost always true
- 4 Often true
- 3 Sometimes true
- 2 Rarely true
- 1 Almost never true
Reception
- Before I can explain why, I sometimes know that something fits or doesn’t fit.
- I notice a quiet pause inside me when a decision looks good on paper but hasn’t settled.
- There are moments where the right answer arrives whole, without me working it out.
- I can recognize the difference between thinking, feeling, and knowing, even when I can’t fully articulate it.
- When something registers as off, the awareness tends to persist, even when logic and emotion are pointing the other way.
Discernment
- I can usually tell a clean knowing apart from a fear-driven gut clench.
- I notice when my mind constructs a logical explanation faster than the situation could actually be processed.
- I can distinguish reading a room emotionally from registering something underneath that has nothing to do with the people in it.
- When I’m activated or anxious, I know my reception is compromised, and I wait before acting on what feels like a knowing.
- I recognize when I’m rationalizing a decision after the fact instead of orienting from a clear signal.
Trust & Action
- When my knowing and my logic disagree, I take the knowing seriously instead of dismissing it.
- I have walked away from situations that looked correct on every measurable level because something underneath did not confirm.
- I don’t require external proof before I trust what I’ve registered, though I’m willing to find it later.
- I notice when I’ve been overriding a persistent signal and the cost it’s taking on my energy and creativity.
- When the people around me can’t see what I’m sensing, I still hold the awareness without needing them to validate it.
Your Reading
Add each section’s reading out of 25 to see where reception is strong and where it’s getting interfered with.
Reading Your Reception Profile
Signal Suppressed
AQ™ may be transmitting, but it’s being filtered out before it can register. Common in environments where IQ is treated as the only legitimate intelligence and any non-rational signal gets pathologized. The good news is reception is recoverable. Most people in this band have spent years overriding what they were sensing, and reading this book is itself part of restoring access.
Signal Present, Often Overridden
You register the pre-cognitive knowing, but rational explanation or emotional momentum usually wins the moment. You may already recognize the cost: decisions that should have been simple are getting harder, energy is narrowing, things are slightly off in ways you can’t quite name. The signal is intact. The override is the variable.
Signal Active, Building Fidelity
You know AQ™ when it shows up, you can usually tell it apart from the noise, and you’re acting on it without requiring a permission slip from your logic first. The work here is refinement: catching distortion earlier, trusting reception in higher-stakes moments, and letting all three intelligences operate in their natural sequence rather than letting any one of them dominate.
Signal Clear, Integrated
You orient from resonance and let IQ and EQ work with what AQ™ delivers, rather than the other way around. This isn’t certainty in every moment. It’s a working relationship with the THI™ functioning as it was meant to. The growing edge in this band is usually about transmission: helping other people recognize what you’ve already learned to register cleanly.
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