Bonus Episode: Master Your Spiritual Intelligence, Featuring Yosi Amram

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to humanity working. About 18 months ago, my guest today, his agent reached out to us here on the podcast about a book called Spiritually Intelligent Leadership. And I'm afraid I actually turned it down for a topic, uh, for the podcast at that time. In general, we tend to be very practical here, and it didn't seem to fit. But in retrospect, I have realized that that was a mistake. Quite a big one, actually. And as I've learned more about this concept, um, what it is, how it translates to transforming the performance of leaders and their organizations, I've started to realize that this is kind of critical for anyone who wants to thrive as a human in this new world of work. And they really need to be at least aware of this concept of spiritual intelligence and ideally cultivate it. And I think that applies whatever their religious beliefs are, a lack of them. We'll get into the relationship between these various concepts as we go through today. Anyway, so a few weeks ago, I reached out to the author, Dr. Yossi Amram, with my tail a bit between my legs, and I asked him if he'd be interested in granting us an interview. And he graciously agreed. So we chatted about at that time, not just about his book, but his kind of remarkable personal story and his thoughts on the transformative impact of AI. And we're going to get into all of those things, I hope. Today, Dr. Amram created the first measurable definition of spiritual intelligence, and he's been an executive coach to more than 100 CEOs, as well as being a CEO of public corporation himself. So there's tons to talk about today. Uh, I want to get right into it. Welcome to the podcast, Yossi.

Speaker A: Thank you, Paul. Thank you for that kind of introduction. And, um, hopefully I won't let it get to my head too much, but luckily I have somewhat of a brown skin, so you can't see when I'm blushing. So.

Speaker B: All right, well, I want to start actually really real basics. I want to start by grounding us in the term, because I'll admit this is a relatively new term for me, and I think it might be for some of our audience. So for people that are hearing the term for the first time, what even is spiritual intelligence?

Speaker A: Great. Uh, and I'll also touch on a couple of things in terms of what you talked about. You're focused on things that are practical, and I think that's hugely important. So, uh, yeah. What is spiritual intelligence? So let's start with something we more people are familiar with, which is emotional intelligence. And the obvious question most people ask is, well, how does spiritual intelligence relate to emotional intelligence? So just to review, what is emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence is the ability to draw on emotional resources and information to help manage emotions in ourselves and others in daily life. Up until the concept of emotional intelligence came into the forefront, um, by first by two academicians in 1990, and then popularized by Daniel Goleman, we saw a dichotomy between emotional and reasonable. And so if I said, paul, do you know people in your life that are emotional? That won't necessarily be the greatest compliment. But if I say, oh, do you know people that are emotionally intelligent? Oh, that's great, right? So by analogy, there's a similar split between the practical and the spiritual, which you talked about, which is kind of like spiritual. Most people, people associate with kind of woo woo and mystical and so on. Very esoteric. But going back to what is spiritual intelligence? To answer more directly. So, like emotional intelligence, the ability to draw on emotional resources, spiritual intelligence is the ability to draw on spiritual resources and embody qualities that have been celebrated throughout all the world's wisdom and spiritual traditions. So let me pause there. What are these spiritual resources and qualities? So these are classical things like purpose, service, trust, gratitude, integrity, humility, compassion, forgiveness. These are qualities that, through my research and others, had been highlighted as those that lead to good life for thousands of years across all the traditions. Uh, wisdom tradition starts from the Greeks to the, you know, the Buddhists, the Taoists, the Hindus, the Jews, the Christians, the Muslim, the shamans, etc. These are universal qualities that are common across all the spiritual traditions. And, um, so I call them spiritual intelligence. Now, what's exciting is that knowledge that humanity has possessed for thousands of years through these traditions is now being validated through different fields of study. One is the field of positive psychology. People like Marty Seligman, who developed this thing called the Character Strengths Inventory and Values in Action, they were interested not only in psychology, like Freud was, how to deal with pathology, but what leads to meaningful quality human life. And they identified 24 character strengths. And what were those things like purpose, service, humility, humor, transcendence, etc. So over half of the qualities that are identified in the Character Strengths Inventory in positive psychology map directly into the qualities that I mentioned, uh, in spiritual intelligence that are universal across the traditions. Another field of study. So we have the spiritual traditions, we have positive psychology, and then we have leadership development. So that's a whole field of people studying what contributes to leadership. And, you know, for example, one of the top Consulting companies in the world. Bain and Company studied thousands of companies and employees to look at what happens to employees that are inspired. And they found that employees that are inspired are twice as productive as people that are just going about their job. And then they looked at what were the qualities of the leaders that got employees inspired. And guess what? The same qualities. Service orientation, servant leadership, presence, centeredness, uh, attentive, listening, compassion, etc. So you have convergence from the spiritual traditions, positive psychology, leadership development, that's telling you that these qualities, when developed, embodied and resourced in us as human being, lead to better quality human life for ourselves and, and make us more inspiring leaders for others. In my research, I showed, for my doctoral research, I showed that spiritual intelligence complements emotional intelligence and each makes a unique contribution to leadership effectiveness in terms of morale, commitment, uh, and lower turnover. Since then, other researchers have taken this measure that I validated and found that leaders that have greater spiritual intelligence, uh, produce better financial results for their business units. In a study with banks, it was shown that banks where employees on average have higher spiritual intelligence, produce better ROI on their assets compared to the other banks. So the point of all of this is that this is real, practical, tangible, measurable and positively impactful. I know I gave you a mouthful,

Speaker B: but, uh, no, no, that was very helpful. I just want to dive in a couple of other things just to make it like, super tangible for people.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So first off, I know from our prior discussion that it's. You mentioned that it was entirely possible to be spiritually intelligent and for example, be atheist. So draw the connection between, or draw the similarities and differences between the specific religions, the religious tradition as you talk about, and then religious thoughts, faith and how all of that connects.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, um, artificial intelligence. So, yeah, it's important to distinguish between being spiritual and being spiritually intelligent. That's kind of like what I was trying to, by analogy, motivate the difference between being emotional and being emotionally intelligent. So I've, uh, as you may have mentioned, worked with over 100 CEOs, and they have ranged across the spectrum from being religious to being spiritual but not religious, to being agnostic, to being atheist. So you don't need to be spiritual, you don't need to be religious for sure to have these qualities of a sense of purpose, to live, you know, as a servant leader, uh, to embody trust, to express gratitude and appreciation, to live with integrity, uh, and humility, etc. So you can be an atheist and live a life of purpose and show a lot of appreciation and gratitude to people around you and express compassion and care and tap into your intuition and all these other qualities that make you spiritually intelligent.

Speaker B: So, uh, and in the, and in the book, you say something extremely simple early on. Um, it's one of those things where it seems so obvious. You read it and you think, why did I never think of that? But you, which is, uh, sometimes the, the most significant pieces of wisdom that anybody ever reads are like that, aren't they? But you say that something along the lines of in order to be inspiring, you need to be inspired. And I think this is a really interesting aspect because leaders talk about a lot, about the idea of, you know, providing inspiration in others, but they don't as often focus deeply on what inspires them. So could you talk about, uh, in practice, what that means, what leaders need to do in order to ensure there's a foundation of inspiration in them before they can go about inspiring other people?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's great. So leadership, first and foremost is an inside job. We can't expect to lead nor inspire anybody else until and when we can lead and inspire ourselves. So, uh, it seems like we relatively basic and obvious as you think about it, but so much of our culture is the focus externally. Like, okay, how do people perceive me? And you know, you could try and be inspirational to others by taking public speaking talks and you know, having good jokes and good humor and engaging, etc, you know, all those things, which is fine, it's good to have in our bag of tricks. But ultimately, if it's not coming from an authentic place, that our inner fire is burning hot and strong and our light is shining, then we're going to burn out. Uh, and over time, people will see through it. So we can't fake it for too long before we get caught on. So we first need to be inspired ourselves. Now I'll just say one other thing, which is the connection between leadership and inspiration. I mean, one of my first Harvard Business School cases was managers and leaders are, uh, they the same or different. Manager's important role. We make decisions, we hire, we allocate resources, etc. But what do leaders do? They inspire. Well, what is the root of the word inspire? It's spirit. And what is spirit? It's the animating life force, the breath of life. So what animates us? And we'll talk casually with friends and people. How's your spirit today? Now, we're not necessarily talking about any kind of mystical experience. Experience, just like our sense of aliveness, our sense of passion, enthusiasm for life. And that's kind of our life force. So how do we get inspired? Well, we have to find out what is our purpose, our calling, what is our personal mission statement, so to speak, that says, okay, who am I as a human being? You know, uh, 14 billion years into the evolution of our cosmos, there's never been another Paul Slater like you or Yossi Amram or anybody else. We are unique creatures with that have been endowed with unique gifts from life, and we naturally want to actualize and embody those because when we do, we feel fulfilled. We. And then when we use them to contribute, then we feel like our life has a meaning and connection. So one thing is to ask ourselves, what am I here to do? What's my life about? And then when we connect deeply with our essence and our uniqueness and find a way to express our unique talents, superpowers, gift, and use that to contribute, then our, uh, life has a sense of purpose. And then when we can align our individual purpose with the purpose of the team, the organization, the business, the community we're part of, we're lining up our individual purpose and the greater purpose that we're part of. And then we're finding fulfillment in using our skills to contribute to that purpose. And that gives us a sense of power and alignment, inner alignment, so we don't feel divided and that feels empowering. Um, I hope I'm making sense.

Speaker B: Well, you are to me, I hope and I'm sure sure you are to the audience as well. Um, I, I want to go into the personal story, a little piece of it because, uh, a little bit here because I just found it so fascinating when we spoke before. So many leaders that I've spoken to on the podcast have had a, let's say a winding road to get to where, uh, they're at. And you, no different in that regard. Um, you weren't always an expert on this stuff, but the gems of it happened early. So why don't you talk me through the first part of that journey in the military and then up to founding individual.

Speaker A: Okay, thank you. Yes, we all have strange pathways and they don't make sense only in retrospect. We live our life moving forward, but it doesn't make sense only in reflection. So, yeah, uh, when we can kind of see the thread and, and how all these things connect to bring us to this moment. So, yeah, my journey started. I, uh, was born and raised in Israel, a war torn part of the world. I was a math and science nerd, uh, shy, introverted kid. But like all Israeli men, I was drafted into three Years of mandatory service into the military. And to my surprise, I had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment and won all these leadership awards, despite the fact that the military command and control model really chafed at my soul. And which is just before you go

Speaker B: on there, you said to your surprise, was it clearly communicated to you why this was happening, or was it a mystery? Was the why even a mystery?

Speaker A: At the time, I think it was partly a mystery. But I can look back. I mean, somehow, for whatever reason, uh, I function reasonably well under pressure and in moments of crisis where other people around me would kind of get paralyzed, I was like, oh, this is what we need to do. And I'd call it out and people would say, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And, uh, so that's one thing. The second thing, I think, for whatever reason, I had an clear sense of inner self, and I wasn't this macho guy. I was more introverted. But I had clarity about who I am. And that gave me a sense of, um, kind of a North Star in a sense of inner discipline. And when I cared about something, I. I could get devoted to it. And so that discipline made me, uh, reliable and predictable. And that was super important for delivering stuff and for people to trust me. So it's those kinds of things that somehow were latent in me that. That somehow started to express themselves. So what I was trying to say is that the military is a command and control model, which is necessary in battle. You don't have time to take a team of people into a conference room and brainstorm and whiteboard how to deal with a, uh, situation, but it's what's necessary. But on the positive side is that kind of pressure cooker creates, uh, real camaraderie because he has a sense of shared destiny. We're in this together, and we're kind of will live or die together. And you hear stories of somebody will jump on a hand grenade and absorb stuff to save their team. So it's kind of that paradox of, uh, which got me interested is like, how do you create an organization environment that supports the individual and. And brings out their talents and their uniqueness and helps them actualize, but also do that, you know, without going so hyper individualistic, where you were like, it's all about me, me, me, and forget about the community or the team. And that was kind of what became my overarching interest, which led me to come to the US and study engineering and business and so on, all with the aspiration to someday start and build my own Companies, which you alluded to was. The name of my company was called Individual, which was a name I chose to reflect the fact that I wanted to support each individual within this uh, context of community or team. Uh, also the name Individual stood for the concept, the product concept, because we were the first company to do personalized interactive media. So for those that remember, we used to have days of fax machines before email, before Internet, and that was the fastest way you could get information. You know, fax me that, fax me that. So you'd come to work in the morning or whatever, wake up and on your fax machine would be Paul's personal newspaper that was custom individualized to you. And then we had self learning agents that you, you would tell us which articles were relevant or not. And based on that we adjust your profile as we scan the wire services and online databases and so on. So that was the concept. And I raised tens of millions of dollars and built it, uh, from the VCs and corporate partners and like Microsoft and major newspaper chains, et cetera. So all of that was pre Internet until the Internet came. And then it became clear that all of that fax business was going to go away and the things we're selling on a premium subscription basis was going to become free and ad supported on the Internet. So that was uh, a pretty significant crisis for me because it was very threatening to our business model and kind of.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, so we'll get into that piece of it in a moment. I'm curious, was there a single moment what the Internet was becoming like the idea of a personalized web? Was there a single moment where you had your aha, uh, or was it more of like a gradual realization that facts was not the future?

Speaker A: I mean the facts, that facts was not the future was pretty clear. But how, and what that um, meant was gradual realization at first. It's kind of like, you know, they say the five stages of grief that first there's denial. It's like, no, no, I mean, you know, people still like paper and they're gonna like paper and yeah, computers are great, but people are always gonna like their piece of paper. So you go through rationalization too. And I went through that stage. So you go through denial and arguing and, but eventually there was some kind of an acceptance and, and at that moment I was like, holy shit, uh, how do we become an Internet company and what do we do with this revenue stream and this pressure from our venture capitalists to keep growing it? And we, in order to move to the Internet, we had to Offer things that were also free and ad supported. And then there was like, okay, well why people are going to continue there? So we had to cannibalize our own children, so to speak, in order to do that. And uh, was scary how to do that.

Speaker B: Well, around that time was when you had a very specific, I guess, experience, as we could call it, while you were having a massage. Right?

Speaker A: Well, that was a little later. So first what happened is I kind of spiraled down and kind uh, of hit a depression period where I had to disappear from the company. I didn't know how to stand up in front of my 200 employees and tell them what our Internet strategy we're going to do and how to survive. But I did persist and we did turn the company into an Internet business and then took it public, uh, and it was a high flying Internet stock at which point I was getting this massage to relax and had this spiritual awakening experience that uh, blew my mind. So I think that's what you were alluding to. But it was kind of two things. So yeah, most people spend months and years meditating to have kind of what's called an awakening experience. And that kind of happened to me spontaneously on the massage table as I was relaxing. I felt kind of this non, dual, non separation. It was more of a spiritual experience rather than spiritual intelligence. So this is an illustration how you can have a spiritual experience of oneness or whatever, but it doesn't lead to spiritual intelligence because it really blew my mind and I became ungrounded and it uh, actually threw me into a manic episode.

Speaker B: You really didn't know what to do with what you had experienced, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, or the insights that I got from it or whatever. So. And that was, that led to, you know, traumatic thing where I was pushed by my board out of the company. First they said, hey, you need to slow down and calm down. Because I was actually getting all these downloads about where the Internet was going and I wanted individual, my company to be the leader in doing that. That was before Facebook, before Google. And a lot of these things were kind of becoming clear to me that that's where it's going. But I wanted everything done yesterday. And my team couldn't keep up. And my board was like, couldn't keep up. So they're like, hey, why don't you take two, three weeks off and chill out? And I was like, no way. We got to do everything yesterday. So they said, okay, well we're going to pass a board resolution to put you on a voluntary leave of absence. There Was nothing voluntary about it. But when that hit the wire services or headline stories in the Wall Street Journal said, amraam, um, takes leave, individual stock drops 37% or a similar thing in the New York Times. And then two weeks later, later it was like, you know, uh, Amram was fired. So it was, I was kind of cancelled. And it was very shameful experience because I went from m. The top echelon of Silicon Valley CEOs that were all sought after as speakers and conferences and what's, what have you. And to someone that people wouldn't return emails and phone calls, as someone who went nuts, to put it politely. So, so, uh, so that was the

Speaker B: external perspective of you, was that this was a mental health episode and you were, well, you put it yourself that you were nuts. Is that your perception of how, of how you were thought of at that time?

Speaker A: Well, it was a confusing experience. Uh, so I think it's a, both end. I think it was a genuine spiritual awakening experience and it triggered a manic episode, which you can call it a pathological thing. So it is since been documented in the literature and what have you, that these things can happen, that people can have an awakening experience. But when you don't have the container in your personality and psyche to contain that energy that gets liberated and those insights and it can shatter that container, that vehicle. Now that doesn't mean the whole thing was delusional and I just had a chemical imbalance in my brain and whatever. But I did go on some meds for about a year, 18 months to get stabilized. So there are corollaries to it with, with brain chemistry and so on. But then I weaned myself all of that. And since then I've not had any mood disturbances like that. But I have access to similar spiritual states, uh, without now because I have built my vessel and I have built my capacity and it doesn't shatter my life and I could stay grounded and I can listen to people while I'm having these things. But the important thing is again to distinguish between spiritual experiences like I had and spiritual intelligence. So this very much illustrates the fact that you can have a spiritual experience but not embody, develop and actualize spiritual intelligence, because I was clearly not being spiritually intelligent in how I was behaving. But I had a spiritual experience. So then there's spiritual experiences. The, uh, other thing important to distinguish is it could be spiritual belief systems. So someone can believe in higher power, in reincarnation of the soul, in our oneness and interconnectedness or whatever those Would be all spiritual belief system and they're fine. But again, what matters is can I uh, embody gratitude? Do I have a sense of purpose? Can I uh, attune, attuned to other people? Can I be compassionate and forgiving? Can I be humble and want to do the right thing rather than prove myself right? Which comes from a place of insecurity and ego. And we all know when you have a team of people and people are putting themselves up by pushing others down, trying to prove that their ideas are better than others, it creates a toxic environment. So this is where we all kind of viscerally know when we're dealing with someone's ego.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's unpleasant and it's counterproductive. So the more we're focused on being motivated based on truth, being open to truth, open to others ideas because we are secure in who we are. So it's not about being meek, it's about actually being interconnected to our essence. And so we have the confidence in who we are. We could stand our ground and paradoxically at the same time be open to others. And then throughout that interaction of me standing my ground and being open to you, we can create a synthesis of our ideas and co create and collaborate, which is so important in companies or businesses where you got marketing that wants quick time to market and responsiveness and you got engineering who wants quality and innovation and you got sales and they want, you know, flexibility and pricing and whatever. And marketing is like no, we got to keep the. So you have all these conflicting tensions and as a leader, as a CEO, for example, if you're working at that level, you need to synthesize and balance and harmonize all these energies and forces, each of which has a value. Um, but you can't just let the engineering perspective rule everything or the marketing or the sales or the finance or what have you. So it's that kind of creative tension that, that where we stand our ground but are open to others ideas that you get more creative, uh, holistic solutions that can emerge.

Speaker B: Yeah, you've kind of segued neatly into my next set of questions which is getting into the more specifics of what you measure. Just before we get to that though, um, the quest to understand what was happening to you personally, to get a deeper understanding of that. Was that foundational to, towards your personal shift to doing your doctoral research and getting to a point where you could define SI or. It sounds like there was sort of like a gem of trying to deeply understand this that came from way before.

Speaker A: Yeah, that was A big part of it. Uh, so it changed the direction of my life. And indeed, I wanted to go and understand myself. One is, why was I so identified with the business to the point when it was threatened? I was getting depressed, and then was this awakening experience real, or was it delusional? And so that led me to be interested in spirituality. And I heard about the term spiritual intelligence that was, um, put forth by someone else, a woman called Dana Zohar, uh, in a book called Rewiring the Corporate Brain. But it wasn't operational as it wasn't measured. And if you want to study something scientifically, you got to know how to measure it so you could see how it's assessed associated with other variables. Um, and I knew the work that was done on emotional intelligence. So that was kind of the, uh, the impetus, the inspiration is like, oh, let's see if we can develop something similar on spiritual intelligence. So, yeah, that was a big part of it. The other big part of it is after, uh, I took the company public, and I had a second company that I took public. I became an angel investor. And I was often the, uh, first angel investor in other startups that people would come to me and I would go on people's boards, and I would mentor other entrepreneurs on how to build their companies. So I was kind of informally coaching, uh, these other entrepreneurs. And what I discovered is that you can give people the best advice, but unless you had the tools to understand and work with them in a deeper way about their childhood, their relationships, whatever, all of that was influencing seemingly, um, business decisions. But there were a lot of psychodynamic factors that affect how people approach their team building, their board and what they do, etc. So I wanted to help people in a deeper way. And I started finding that mentoring and helping others was more fulfilling for me than running my own company. So I became a psychologist for both of those reasons. One is to understand myself and this thing about spiritual awakening and spiritual intelligence, and also to have the tools to help others, to, uh, to work in a deeper, transformative way.

Speaker B: So, as you mentioned, as part of your research, you were looking to create a measurable definition of this. So talk to me about what that measure looks like. I'm guessing it's not like, uh, an IQ or something along those lines. Right. I know that you have multiple. For example, there are a whole bunch of different dimensions, some of which you've alluded to already, um, that form part of this.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I interviewed people that were nominated, leaders from their peers of people that that walk the talk, so to speak. And I came up with these qualities and then we developed this measure and looked at all its psychometric properties to make sure that it's uh, psychometrically sound and it has predictive validity and all. I won't get into the nerdy talk about psychometrics and statistics and how it's different than emotional intelligence, etc. So in this measure there are these domains of meaning which relates to perfect purpose and service in finding meaning in difficulty and adversity and turning that into an opportunity. There's a domain of a set of qualities that relate to interacting with grace, which has to do with trust that things will work out, which imbues somebody with hope and optimism. It has to do with gratitude and sharing appreciation, has to do with joy so that you can imbue your interactions with a sense of fun and playfulness which breeds more creativity and, and so on. And then finding the beauty in things that has a domain that has to do with being inner directed so that you're connected to your North Star and you're following your truth and you can discern what is true as opposed to just being a popularity, uh, contest politician, which is not really leadership. Um, there's a domain dimension having to do with truth, which is motivation based on truth and, and which means openness to learn from others and from the market and from your inner experience. And then this thing of doing what is right as opposed to being right. There's a domain that has to do with wisdom, which is the ability to tap into uh, non linear modes of knowing like our gut sense, our intuition, our higher self and so on as a domain of presence which is so crucial in these day and age where we're so distracted, everything's competing for attention. So but the quality of our interaction suffers if like right now, here you and I are here and I notice you're paying attention. But if you started to look at your phone and you know your thing was dinging, I was like, is he really paying attention? And then I would be like not invested so much in the conversation and I would start to drift away. And you see that in, in business meetings, in personal interactions and, and so on. So presence being clear with our intention and managing our intention, um, in, in the moment. And then there's a dimension has to do with community, which is how we bring people together around a shared set of purpose and values and the mutuality of care that people have a sense we're in this together. So these are like the different dimensions of spiritually intelligent leadership. And uh, to me they make sense. I mean, sounds fancy spiritually intelligent leadership, but I, I would find it hard to argue or believe that someone would argue, oh, we don't want a sense of community. Or you don't want to motivate based on truth, or mobilizing meaning is not so important, or being interdirected as a leader is. Who cares? I mean, these all kind of make sense. Uh, now you might say, well, why call it spiritual intelligence? Uh, and the reason is that these qualities are common across all the spiritual traditions 1 and 2. When you connect and root yourself in, in your life force energy, in your essence, you might call it your spirit, these qualities naturally emerge. So when we're connected in the depth of who we are to our life force, then these things naturally emerge. But so this kind of starts to go into how does one get inspired? It's we got to connect with ourselves. Our source of power can't be outside of us because that would be disempowering. So if we look for the source of our power and inspiration externally, then we're dependent on that. And so it's like when I ask people, do you want to be inspiring leader or an inspired leader? Most people are like, what? What's the difference? Well, to decide whether you're an inspiring leader, I gotta look at externally and see, well, are you, is Paul inspired by me right now or not? And so I'm like starting to play to please you. And yeah. As opposed to going deep within myself and getting inspired. And then like, okay, well, if you resonate with my vision, what I'm about, then you'll get inspired. It will strike a resonant chord in you. And if you don't, then, you know, I should surround myself with people that do. And then you have a community, uh, with a shared intention, which is super powerful.

Speaker B: Yeah. That was actually one of the things that occurred to me when I was reading the book, which was that there's so much conversation these days about the term authenticity, and it's used constantly. And many people talk about the fact that in today's world, being authentic is one of the most important traits in a leader. Well, authenticity is very difficult to pin down entirely. But I believe that true authenticity comes from the idea that the person that is presenting themselves to you believes what they're saying and they. And in other words, what they believes

Speaker A: in it in their depth. In their depth.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And it's uh, and it is emotionally resonant to them and therefore it's emotionally Resonant to you. Right. Versus the classic leader who understands that they're supposed to say that they're outrageously excited by this or this or this or this because they've read it somewhere versus actually being outrageously excited by it and then you capturing that. And I think one of the most interesting aspects in terms of the way that technology is, is developing is that we live in a world now where you can be authentically you, you can be personally inspired and people will self select in to joining you on that journey. So you don't have to start from the perspective of how do you, how do you phrase your words so that you appeal to m. Most of them possible. Instead you can just be authentically you and people will join you that are like minded. And I think that that's a very, it's a very interesting aspect as to why this is important right now versus just generally important.

Speaker A: Yeah. And just to pick on what you're saying, a couple of things. One, it's a core tenet of marketing. Right. You can't be all things to all people. So, so you got to differentiate yourself. And like in the market of employees or friends or whatever, you gotta say, okay, this is who I am and the right people will be drawn to me. But you know, so that's one piece. The other piece, when, uh, you're talking about authenticity, you gotta know who you are to be authentic. So you gotta connect to your depth. And so it goes back to the Greek dictum, know thyself. It's hard to be authentic if you don't really know who and what you are. You're not in touch with yourself, you're not in touch with your truth. So then it's like, well, who am I really? And then we are like a chameleon and we don't know who we are. So that goes into back to this dimension. I talked about being inner directed. And when you're inner directed, you know who you are in your depth and then your, your behavior and, and words and actions are all aligned with that. So there's an alignment between your depth, your words and your action. You're living in integrity and that's your authenticity. But if you're disconnected from your depth, then there's not that alignment and that divides you. So you're not really aligned with who you are and your essence.

Speaker B: So you'll see when I was reading the book and actually let me just take a stop for a second to pay you a compliment on the uh, on the book itself for folks that listen to this podcast. I know from hearing from a lot of you that you read a lot. A lot of you read a lot of business books. And a lot of business books, um, are really centered around one very simple idea. And then you flesh out 50 to 80,000 words to support that very simple idea. This. This book isn't exactly like that. Right? There's a lot of lot. Well, A, it's a bit longer, and B, there's a lot to. What we're talking about here. We are literally talking about seven different, um, I mean, I refer to them as dimensions. I think you use a different word, but.

Speaker A: But, yeah, dimensions. Good.

Speaker B: Um, yes, seven different dimensions. And then even within that, there are like sub dimensions inside each of these dimensions. And so you're. You're basically creating. Helping lay people develop a. An understanding of an entire field versus just a. I don't want to pick on. Start with Y or something like that. But basically, rather than just a single concept. Right. Um, and so for people that really actually want to gain an understanding of a field versus a single concept, I really would recommend this because I found myself coming out of it thinking, having that kind of classic. Oh, I thought I sort of understood what people were talking about when they were talking about this, and I realized I didn't. You know, and in a. In a very, uh, in a very freeing way, it was like it opened my eyes up to, uh, uh, to a field that I. That I didn't really understand. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's multilayer.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I came out of it with two thoughts, uh, basically exactly the same time. So the first was this is really important because it's a set of capabilities that really could help anybody, leaders or. Or anybody else. We all lead at some. In some aspect of our lives anyway, from. It could help us move from surviving in this crazy world to thriving in it. Um, and so we should all be thinking about this. But then the second thing that I ended up at least feeling, uh, was that if you measured this. I know you don't measure this on like an IQ scale, but I feel like if you measured me on this and it was like a single number, mine would be really low. And the reason that I ended up feeling this way was because I have something called aphantasia. I don't know if you know about aphantasia. It basically equates to the absence of a mind's eye. Right? So I'm. I'm incapable of. Of visualizing in the sense that, uh, if you. If you ask me to Visualize an apple, I can't see anything. You know, that kind of thing. And that corresponds to some other interesting things, like I don't really have a visual memory, which means that my memory of past events is actually very, can, uh, be very hazy as well. So my question is not about aphantasia, which very few people have, but it's a broader question about neurodivergence, I suppose, which is. And let's make it a two part question. I guess the first part is there is one question that it's one thing to identify this as a set of capabilities that some people have. And then there's the second question as to how effectively this can be cultivated. Um, so that's the first part. So how effectively can. Can this be cultivated? And then secondly, if you're dealing, uh, with or working with people for whom their neurodivergence makes it more difficult for them to access these aspects of who they are, are there special considerations that we should be thinking about when dealing with neurodivergent people and their ability to be spiritually intelligent?

Speaker A: Okay, well, it's a good question. Uh, there's a lot more talk these days about neurodivergence and recognizing that in a way, we're all neurodivergent. I mean, there's this myth of the normal. So I appreciate your honesty and vulnerability about some of your limitation with this condition, which I can't even pronounce. I apologize. Aphantasia. So you have some problems with, with the visual field. But let me ask you, would you say you have other things that are unusually strong about you? I, I would venture to guess most people that are, have, uh, a limitation in one thing, they have compensating gifts in other domains. So you might have strong intuition or you might have, I don't know what, like blind people have strong intuition. So let me ask you, first of all, do you have some things that, that you're unusually good at?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I tend to be very, very good at abstract thought. Um, but it's interesting. I seem to do abnormally well at being able to kind of like separate concepts out intellectually. Um, but a lot of where my strengths lie seem to be in the sort of like more on the IQ side, a little bit on the EQ side. And I can see actually, as you go through the various scale, the various dimensions, I can see elements of it where I'm not poor. Right. It's not across the board. I do think that is the interesting thing.

Speaker A: Yeah. So all of us have have, uh, some capacity in each of those. So you, you're strong in your abstract thought. I, I imagine one of the dimen spiritual intelligence is holistic thinking or systems perspective. And I would venture to get that you're going to be very good at that based on what you said. So you might have challenge in some things, but you might have real strength in others. And all of us have some capacity, uh, in each of those. It's just developing it. So it's like you say, okay, let's talk about physical health. Okay. They say, well, somebody is healthy. Well, you go to the gym, you want to become healthier, be fit, be whatever. There's how many different muscle groups. I don't know the human anatomy very well, but you can't just go to gym and say, okay, I'm going to do one workout and I'm becoming healthy. No, you work on your triceps and biceps and your thighs and your abs and whatever. I mean, if you get a full workout, there's I don't know how many muscle groups there are in the human body. So. And some people have really strong arms and other people have really strong legs and other people are natural swimmers and other people, body types are good joggers and. Yeah. So I think one is to, for each of us to identify our relative strengths and then leverage them to work on the things that matter the most. And one of the things in positive psychology, for example, or in coaching is, you know, we can have the tendency to focus on our deficiencies and try and strengthen those. And that can be important, but it's just as important to leverage our strengths. As a manager, you want to take people and figure out what are their strengths and put them in the roles that play into their strengths while they can also use those strengths to make up for their opportunities. Uh, so I hope I'm making some sense. So, absolutely.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll finish this off here with a question about the near future. I suppose you recently had an article, uh, published in Psychology Today about, uh, AI. We'll put a link to that, uh, in the show notes. But I wonder if you could share your thoughts about how we go about using these capabilities that we've been talking about today to thrive in an AI dominated world. And maybe we'll extend it even beyond just an AI dominated world, but this kind of crazy technology world in which we exist, that would include AI, but it would also include things like extraordinarily extensive social media use that I know you have an opinion on in terms of what that's done to our brains. So talk about that, talk about how we can go about thriving in a world where AI isn't just present but a dominant feature of society.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think it's great. Uh, it's a super important question. I've written an essay about it, I also gave some talk about IT and conferences, etc. But let's actually step back and, and go back to, if you go back 200 years, uh, 90 some percent of humanity was work involved in agriculture and uh, to produce the food. And then you had industrial farming and industrial revolution and you know, and then so people moved into factory workers and then nowadays most people, I mean, I don't know, I think it's like 3% of, of the jobs involved in farming and food production and I forget the percentage, but the majority of people are categorized as knowledge workers that they in office jobs and their productivity depends on what they know. So first we had industrial jobs on the assembly line, but then we brought robots and industrial automation. So we produce the same cars and airplanes and trains and all the rest of it with much fewer people. So we have knowledge workers and now we have AI that can automate a lot of those knowledge worker tasks. So yeah, so what are we going to be doing? What's going to differentiate us as human beings? And I think actually that makes si being particularly m more important because those qualities of inspirational inspiration and being inspired or connecting, um, having compassion, having creativity are going to become that much more important. And so we can view AI as a threat or we could view it as an opportunity because it will free up, there'll be more material abundance and provided we can distribute it, then that will free us to do these things that are more human connection based and more creative based and human heart based. So I, I can't imagine that someone whose family member is passing away and they're going through hospice wants to be accompanied by an AI chatbot. They want somebody to actually hold their hand and feel their heart. And so I think this going to put more and more emphasis on these deeper dimensions of our humanity. So I'll just say that. And you alluded to the social media etc. So like anything, these tools have a promise and they can, you know, Facebook's mission is to help connect the world. And you know, I, I still use Facebook, you know, to some extent. I post some photos and family members all over the world can see them, etc. People that I'm not gonna uh, send those photos to. And it gives me some level of connection with them. But if I rely on social media for my human connection, all the studies show that it actually leads to more isolation, more depression, more loneliness. So there are studies now with AI that people that over rely on AI and there's an atrophy to their brain. And we don't retain as much of what we created when we labored for it. So much like with the industrial revolution and automation, etc. Our muscles, physical muscles, not no longer necessary for our core survival. But we don't want to become couch potatoes and let our bodies atrophy. So we go on hikes, we go to the gym, we, we work out our muscles. So I think we have to do the same thing with our brain. Brains with our cognitive ability, yeah, AI is great, can help us synthesize information. I rely on it. But if we over rely on it, then our minds, our cognitive capacities atrophy and that would be a shame. So I'm, um, offering a more nuanced perspective rather than, oh, AI is terrible, don't use it. Or, you know, AI is going to be our savior or of everything. And, you know, we could just lie on the beach and do nothing and all the food and everything will be provided for us, which I don't think is so great. We, we need to be productive. We need to find meaning. We want to actualize our capacities and exercise our muscle to be productive. But that can take new forms in terms of human connection, in terms of creativity, in terms of compassion, um, companionship. These kinds of things will become that much more important. And that's how we, we find meaning and purpose and growth and actualization.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for joining us today, Yosi, and sharing your wisdom with us once again. The book is Spiritually Intelligent Leadership. We'll include a link to that in the show notes. Um, and really, really appreciate your time today.

Speaker A: Thank you, Paul. It's been a delight.

Speaker C: Humanity Working is produced by Matt Neal. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. It makes a huge difference in helping others find us. And don't forget, you can find all episodes and get our weekly newsletter@humanityworking.net net See you next time.