The Spirit Collective

The Future of Leadership: Amy Elizabeth Fox on Spiritual Intelligence and Navigating Chaos

• Ariane de Bonvoisin

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What if the leadership skill that matters most in the age of AI and chaos is not what you think?

The world's top CEOs are quietly turning to spiritual intelligence, trauma-informed leadership, and inner practices to navigate chaos, employee engagement crises, and communication breakdowns.

Amy Elizabeth Fox, co-founder of Mobius Executive Leadership and co-author of Leading in Chaos, has spent twenty years inside Fortune 500 boardrooms advising senior leaders. She reveals what no MBA program, leadership development course, or workplace communication training will ever teach you.

What we cover:

  • How re-inhabiting the human being transforms organizational culture and employee engagement
  • The role of love and relational safety in leadership development and workplace communication
  • Trauma as the fundamental human wound driving workplace conflict and disconnection
  • Developing spiritual intelligence as a necessary leadership skill in today's chaos
  • Practical ways to cultivate soulful, psychologically safe workplaces even in tough situations
  • The shift from traditional problem-solving to re-sacralizing work
  • Inner practices and community as the foundation of sustainable leadership
  • The future of leadership: integrating inner life with outer success in the age of AI

Amy Elizabeth Fox's book Leading in Chaos, co-authored with Nicholas Janni, is being read by Harvard MBAs and meditation teachers alike.
It's time for a different conversation.

Connect with Amy Elizabeth Fox:
Leading in Chaos: https://amzn.to/4fyaZhD
The professional article mentioned in episode: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities...
Website: amyelizabethfox.com
Mobius Executive Leadership: mobiusleadership.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amyelizabethfox
Instagram: @mobiusexecutiveleadership
Facebook: facebook.com/MobiusUS

Connect with The Spirit Collective:
Website: spiritcollective.com
YouTube:    / @ariane-de-bonvoisin 
Instagram: @arianedebonvoisin
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/arianed1
X: @clickariane
TikTok: @arianedebonvoisin

If this episode moved you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you can think of someone who fits this collective perfectly, please send it their way.
#spiritcollectivepodcast #leadershipdevelopment #spiritualintelligence #consciousleadership #traumainformedleadership #leadinginchaos #employeeengagement #workplacecommunication #mentalhealthcoaching #organizationalculture #itstimeforadifferentconversation

 

Connect with Ariane:

Introduction and highlights

SPEAKER_01

The soulful workplace never forgets that there are human beings in the organization. They can't check their feelings at the door, they don't check their nervous systems at the door, and they don't check their emotional needs at the door. Most organizations don't have the difficult conversation because people are scared to tell each other confrontational things or to hurt each other's feelings. As we create workplaces that are more connective, we're going to see new thresholds of performance that maybe we've never seen before.

SPEAKER_00

Hi, this is Ariane, and welcome to another episode of the Spirit Collective, where I talk to remarkable people about a side of their lives they rarely talk about, their spiritual path. It's time for a different conversation. She runs one of the most successful leadership firms in the world. As co-founder and CEO of Mobius Executive Leadership, she spent two decades inside the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and global professional services firms, advising CEOs and senior teams on how to lead through change, complexity, and chaos. Her new book, with Nicholas Jani Leading in Chaos, is being read by Harvard MBAs and meditation teachers in the same breath. But Amy will tell you it was never really about success or strategy. It was about presence. For more than 20 years, she's been quietly building her company and her life around a radical idea that the depth of your work with others is limited by the depth of your work with yourself. I love that. She epitomizes what this podcast is about. Success and spirituality can be seen as one world. They can coexist and they are deeply interconnected, both individually and in business, and that MBAs and meditation can be best friends. She's a student of the teacher Thomas Hubble, and more recently a devoted student of Patrick Connor, a dear friend of mine and a teacher as well. She's a pioneer of trauma-informed leadership. Amy Fox is one of my dearest friends and sisters. She's one of the kindest and smartest people I know, and someone whose work and presence I deeply respect, and I've

Welcome — Amy Elizabeth Fox joins The Spirit Collective

SPEAKER_00

come back to again and again. Amy, welcome to the Spirit Collective.

SPEAKER_01

I'm so honored, thrilled, and overjoyed to be with you, Ariane. And I feel exactly the same way about you. Really. Thank you, Amy. Of course.

SPEAKER_00

So I want to start off with the language and the words that we use around this subject. I think that's really important right up front. How

Grounding the language: what spirituality and love mean in business

SPEAKER_00

would you help someone who's listening to this feel at home in this conversation around terms like consciousness, spirituality, even love, and how those fit in business? I think we need to ground people more in the language of it, and then we're going to have this incredibly beautiful conversation.

SPEAKER_01

That's a wonderful place to start. Let me take them individually:

Re-inhabiting the human being — how soulful workplaces transform culture and engagement

SPEAKER_01

spirituality and love. I think an easy doorway to think about what I mean by spirituality in the workplace is the reinhabiting of the human being who's working there. So all of our workplaces, the organizational cultures, were built on a fairly technical or mechanistic view of what work was, which means they're disembodied, they're unrelational, they put a huge primacy on autonomy, on self-management. They're unspiritual by definition and they're unartistic. And when you take all that life force and you say you have to leave it at the door, along with your emotions, along with your human related relational needs, what you have is a very dry environment where you have to measure employee engagement. If you help people to re-invigorate the workplace into a thriving, living human system where people are caring and co-creating and have time to rest and have time to integrate and metabolize experience and share things that really matter to them and are inspired to collective purpose, that's a spiritual workplace. That's a workplace that has dynamism, that has joy, that has creativity. I believe that increasingly, as the world gets more and more chaotic, any workplace that doesn't invite the full humanity back into its cultural fabric, its organational dynamics will find people so exhausted, so oversaturated with information, so depleted and hopeless that they won't be able to engage high performance, meaningful contribution, uh commercial innovation. So I think

The role of love and relational safety in leadership and workplace communication

SPEAKER_01

the notion that you could keep spirituality out is it's it's past its sell by date. That's beautifully, beautifully said. Thank you. And love, um, you know, I've had the privilege of working with thousands of executives for the last 20 years. And what I find is that when you help people to name the emotional costs and relational costs of living behind a wall and interacting in routinized superficial ways, everyone will describe some of the same very poignant problems. People are too lonely, people don't feel free to dissent with their leader because they don't feel connected and safe. People don't feel valued and attuned to in their unique gifts, people don't feel close to the people they work with. They are struggling with things in their personal lives that for which they don't feel they can ask for support or even witness or even consideration. Um, so when you think about it, we're working with people side by side for 20 years, and they don't know my son has autism, or my mother just got put in a nursing home, or I'm thinking of moving cities and I'm trying to sort whatever the um private matters of the heart are. People are struggling with them alone. And you and I know it takes a village, it takes a community. We require belonging to be emotionally stable and resilient. And that resilience is the necessary prerequisite for real trust, for real psychological safety, for generative collaboration, for collective intelligence, all the things that businesses know they need from leaders have as a foundation at least a fabric of care, a fabric of mutual generosity, a fabric of intimacy. I've been starting to talk

Corporate intimacy — why we cannot handle today's chaos without it

SPEAKER_01

about corporate intimacy because I don't think we can handle the complexity and chaos that we're in now without that kind of interdependent relational fabric at the heart.

SPEAKER_00

Amy, you are one of the most articulate people I've ever heard on this subject. I want you to take us back to your growing up years. Were you were you brought up in a tradition of faith, spirituality, religion? Is that what

Amy's personal path — growing up Jewish, Ram Dass, and a life of devotion

SPEAKER_00

you still are today? Or or what, like when did you know what your path was around this subject for you personally?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's a lovely personal question. Um, I was raised in a Jewish household uh by two academic parents who were extremely involved in human rights, civil rights, um, democratic politics. And I think what I got from my growing up were two things: a reverence for the sacred, a sense that life was more than uh going through a day on behalf of work or projects or uh transactional things, that you had to have reverence for the fabric of life, that you had to study wisdom and inculcate a sense of the numinous. I got that for sure. And I also got a very strong sense, as did all my sisters, of how important it was to live a life of contribution and of service and to care for what's around you, um, the natural world, your neighbors, your community, etc. Um, but my my path really um was radically changed in uh July of 1989 when I uh went to spend a week with Ramdas, who later became my dear friend, and and I had the privilege to teach with him every year. And on the last night of that retreat, uh they were singing Hindu kirtan, which is the devotional repetition of uh Sanskrit names of the divine. And I really didn't want to go because I'm tone deaf. And the idea of singing in public just horrified me. I was vain enough to think that wasn't going to be a fun thing. And I went, Ariane, and they started the singing, and I my heart just broke open in 365 degrees in really, I think, a recognition of the frequency of a devotional heart, what it means to live your life in praise, in reverence, in humility, in unity. Um, and it was such a kinesthetic, emotional, full-bodied uh recognition. And uh, and that has shaped my path ever since, without a doubt.

SPEAKER_00

It feels like it was a a remembering of a truth that sometimes we are we are not reminded of in childhood in some ways.

SPEAKER_01

And and then the specific thought I had at the time, which is who who knows how you understand this, I don't think of it in literal terms, but my thought was I waited my whole life to come back to this song.

SPEAKER_00

Beautiful. So, Amy, would you would you say as an adult, um would you say that you are a spiritual person, a faith-based person, a connected person, a loving person, or are they all words that point to the same thing, really?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think you could say in one sense they're all pointing to what it means to live with a wide open heart and uh quality of surrender. Um, but I think I would say, first of all, I'm a mystic. I'm somebody who thinks a great deal about the reality of the divine realms and the presence of subtle realms and and and support and guidance and holiness. I think a lot about that. And I create the architecture of my life with a awareness of that, let's say, a deference to that. Um, and and yes, I think you know the specific um practice of devotion of bhakti yoga, which is my path, it's real emphasis is on what is the quality of love that you carry for yourself to begin with, like how much self-forgiveness, how much integration of your early hurts, how much presence have you cultivated so that you live in an inner state of self-blessing and can receive uh life very openly. And then for you know, it extends out in concentric circles in some ways until you have a heart that can really hold everything. And uh Krishna Bas says uh the practice of kirtan gradually and inevitably opens the heart, which I will I really love.

SPEAKER_00

So for someone who is open, um what would you say to, you know, if there are students that are are ready um and they're hearing you, you know, and you are you are a student and you are a teacher and you are a healer and you are a mystic. I know that about you. Um how do people start? How do people deepen their path? How do people deepen their practice? I I believe at at everyone's core, everyone is spiritual. Um, and it's just a matter of taking off some layers or seeing clearly. So, how how do people start? They hear you, they're inspired, and they're like, I don't feel that, or I don't know that, or I've never tried that. What would

How to start and deepen a spiritual path — the twin flames of healing and awakening

SPEAKER_00

you say?

SPEAKER_01

Well, in the book we talk about the sort of twin flames of the path, one being healing and the other being awakening. And I do really feel that we are the generation who are not being asked to step out of life and go to the monastery to pursue our spiritual life. My teacher Thomas Wubel, that you mentioned earlier, talks about mystics in the marketplace, the bringing down of the light into the fabric of life. And I feel very passionately about that. So I would say one thing you can start to do is to do practices of healing. And there are many, many modalities by which people can pursue therapeutic work, group work, process work, community work, uh, service as a healing modality. You can dance, you can sing, you can read scripture, you can recite poetry, you can spend time in nature, anything that sort of opens up a stronger ground and sense of center from which you can then welcome and integrate and metabolize what we know is pretty universally early childhood hurt, because our society is sitting on generations of untreated trauma. So nobody got away with a childhood that didn't have gaps of care, moments of painful uh distortions, dysfunction, difficulty. So we have

Trauma as the fundamental human wound — what we all carry from childhood

SPEAKER_01

to go back for the hidden parts of our psyche that are frozen in time in our childhood and allow those memories and sensations and experiences to be cradled, to be witnessed, to be held. I believe very strongly that that work has to be done in relationship, either by with a therapist or with a community of practice. I don't think we can encounter things that were overwhelming when we were young, even today, with all our resources, because that part of us is regressed in time. And you wouldn't leave a child alone to try to struggle for themselves. You would hold them, you would, you would rock them, you would soothe them, you would attend to them, you would be rain tenderness on them. So I think that's the first part. And the the awakening aspect, I think one of the things is to have times where you slow down. We're operating at a pace of daily life that is absent of white space, absent of time for reflection, meaning making, value sorting. So I think the first pillar is to do something in the domain of contemplation, stillness, spaciousness. I believe also very strongly in finding a teacher who is ethical and who's trustworthy and who you recognize in your soul is further up the mountain than you are. Um they don't have to be a fully enlightened being, they don't have to be an Indian guru, but they do have to feel to you like their music resonates in the caves of your heart, and that they have a willingness to guide you and a generosity of spirit to help you develop and expand. And um so maybe I would say the second thing is putting yourself in a lineage or in a practice or in a in a um context in which there's somebody to really guide and your awakening. Um, and in particular, as you go further along the path, you need to find somebody who's capable of doing work that is more mystical in nature and has initiatory capability to activate all of the subtle uh intelligences that we walk with and we carry, but are pretty much impossible to access up since somebody transmitting to activate them. And the third one is to um make sure that there's a deep sense of belonging in your life. I have the privilege to walk in the sangas of Thomas Huble and Patrick Connor and the Sangha of Mobius itself, which is a glorious global community of coaches and facilitators and trainers. And I think having soul family, like you and I, have the privilege to be so that you don't feel like you're in it by yourself and you can learn from each other, grow with each other, polish each other. That's probably the third pillar of the awakening walk that I would mention.

SPEAKER_00

Beautiful. Amy, I've got two questions that have come from that. You speak

The most universal wound: the original bargain and why we feel not enough

SPEAKER_00

about trauma and childhood. Um, what do you think is the most global, universal trauma in childhood that we are all carrying into our lives, into our marriages, into our workplaces? Is there one that is the most common that you've seen? Just to make it relatable, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01

I love the way Patrick talks about it. He talks about the original harm as formed in the original bargain. So we're born into a family, and our parents have whatever life experience they have, they have whatever hurts they received from their childhood. These things get passed down generationally. They have whatever absences of attachment and attunement that don't meet us in our full glory, in our full beauty, in our full yearning to be seen. And that gap is very painful for a child. To whatever degree they don't have enough holding, enough attunement, enough care, enough expression of emotion and connection in the family, um, they're left to hold themselves. And the dilemma, I think the central dilemma or the most foundational hurt is that a child is not capable of assessing my parents can't meet me, my parents can't hold me. It's too painful, it's too threatening. So the meaning almost every child makes of that is there's something wrong with me. And if I work on myself as a self-improvement project, if I do more chores, or I do really well at school, or I do really well at sports, or I take care of all the kids, and I also take care of the household, it it will get better. Um, and that deep feeling of I'm not okay and my needs are not being held, I think is the most primitive wound that we all carry. I mean, in spiritual terms, you could say it's the pain of being incarnated into a human life. It's the separation from the field of the divine. And I think that's also true. But the way it plays out psychologically in families is through this original bargain, which is I agree to see myself as smaller than I am through the eyes, the reflection of the eyes of my early caretakers.

SPEAKER_00

I want to jump into what a typical day or lunch or evening looks like for you, Amy. Like I'm curious. I don't even know this for yourself. I mean, the work stuff I understand, but I want to know the invisible side of Amy. Like you wake up and you do what? Like, do you have practices that are non-negotiable? And if you don't do them, your day goes very differently. Do you have things you do at night to sort of acknowledge? And, you know, I've I've heard a lot of practices on this podcast, but uh as well as I know you, this is an invisible side, which is what what grounds you, what connects you? Because I'm sure there's moments of disconnection, I'm sure there's moments

Amy's daily inner practices — what grounds her beyond yoga and meditation

SPEAKER_00

of reactivity, I'm sure there's moments of extreme humanity, like we all have for ourselves.

SPEAKER_01

For sure, those are all you know, and and you know, like many listeners, I I'm not sitting in uh ashram singing Om Namashibai all day long. I'm running a professional services firm and serving corporate clients and leading leadership programs. You know, of course, I have all those things of moments of reactivity, moments of insecurity, moments of fear, uh, of course. It's a very intimate, beautiful question. I don't know quite what to share. I I would say a few things. I deeply believe in a field of love. And I'm almost always believing that even what looks like in a superficial way, a very quick transaction, um, can lead into a meaningful love connection. So, as an example, I was flying last week through Zurich and I had uh I needed a wheelchair because there's something going on with my leg, and I had a guy who was driving my wheelchair, and we spent exactly eight eight to ten minutes together, and we will be friends the rest of our lives. Like he was such a beautiful being, and I was so moved by the quality with which he was caring for me, and the we started talking about our lives and our dreams, and it was just this rich unfolding that totally unexpected, totally gorgeous. So, one thing I would say that's maybe distinct to me is that I I never put a ceiling on how pregnant a moment could be with love, even if it's a form is quick, transactional. Love can happen and open up everywhere. So I would say that's the first one. Um in my Jewish uh practice, which I also continue uh each morning, I give gratitude for God having kept me safe through the night and given me another day. And before I go to bed, I do some mantras and I do some prayers that affirm essentially the oneness of the universe inside the divine mind and uh the desire not to be confused by worldly suffering about my faith in God. Um and then, you know, I sing, uh, as I said, I dance whenever I can. I love to cook, I love to create meals for my friends, I, you know, just the soulful things, I would say. There, you know, nothing particularly surprising, but to really make time for things that uh, you know, ignite your imagination or ignite. Your sense of poetics and aesthetics or beauty. You know, I I design and have a friend make all my clothes. And that's like a super creative, very privileged, fun thing that I get to do. And I go on these photographic journeys where I go to monasteries and temples and uh take photographs that are kind of timeless and eternal in nature. And so that's just a few things I would mention.

SPEAKER_00

I love it because what I want to do is create a menu where it doesn't just look like yoga and meditation. Um, and no one's ever said the, you know, every interaction is an opportunity for for love and connection. Um, and that's one thing we do every single day is we interact with people. And it doesn't take us away into something we need to do by ourselves, or we have to be strict about, or we have to like, oh, I didn't do this today, and you know, that doesn't make me worthy. But actually, people are in front of us, and that is that is the practice, you know, and that is part of what our invitation is.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and and to just maybe double-click on that, because I think you're right, that that's very accessible for people. It's like cultivate a fascination for people's stories. Like life shows up in so many different expressions, culturally, generationally, individually. Thomas says uh uh precision is love. Like, take as a project getting to know the people in your life at one depth further or one more nuance further, like the beautiful question you just asked me. You know, we've been friends for years, but we've never talked about that. Come up with five or six things that really intrigue you and start asking the people close to you and watch how things deepen and soften and the connection grows. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You said something that I really liked. You said a phrase that says, if people aren't listening deeply, the universe will not participate in their creativity. Do you remember saying that? No, but I like it. I like it too. So, what does it mean to listen deeply? And what does it mean for the universe in some ways to participate and encourage and support? Like, I think people have an interesting relationship with the universe, the divine source, life itself. Some people are like, you know, uh, I don't feel lucky, I don't

How early trauma shapes our relationship with the universe and with life

SPEAKER_00

feel supported, um, especially if things are somewhat going not as the ego would want. And some people feel very held and very supported and very loved. Talk to me a little bit about this concept of the universe supports, the universe is there, the universe does not punish, the universe does not abandon. What is what is the relationship with life itself?

SPEAKER_01

Again, this is where trauma and spirituality can't be differentiated because when you've had an experience in early childhood that was tremendously challenging, uh, where you had to at a too young age take care of yourself or you didn't feel like you had real safety, then you project that going forward as your experience of the fabric of life. You can't know life in another way. And what will happen as a result of that is two things. You will not be able to discern really when a person comes into your life who's likely to hurt you. And instinctively you will be drawn to them because that's how trauma repeats itself. So that belief, it's not safe in life, I'm not safe, I don't trust people, life is hard, gets reinforced over and over because that's your experience. And you won't be able to discern when you're in an experience that could be reparative or restorative because it's different, because you will project onto the person the ways that they're abandoning you or hurting you or not showing up with you. So until the moment comes where you start to really do the healing work that's necessary to let that experience of the past really lie to rest in the past. That's the first moment when you might have the opportunity to start to notice and attend to and feel uh moved by how much life is flourishingly for you. And um, and that's a journey. That's not a sort of mindset or paradigm shift, it's not an analytic uh transition, it's a felt sense. It's a um yeah, it's very, very um foundational to how you experience yourself and others and life. Um I think everybody that's listening to us will have had an experience once in their life of an idea coming to them in a shower or walking in nature and suddenly thinking of a new project and that getting inspired to go home and do something, or uh being in a team meeting that's incredibly co-creative and generative and joyous, and some, you know, a whole fresh possibility opens up. That's what I mean by life whispering to you. I think that the more present we are, the more coherent our field is, which is to say calm, spacious, equanimous, the more white space we have is a simple way to say it, the more intuitive information, um, imaginal information, uh, and guidance I would believe can download and come into our field. And we might hear it as an idea, we might feel it as a gut sense, we might suddenly be a spark of an innovation, but all of that is an interaction, is a mutually uh generative field between us and the universe and organizations that learn how to create that kind of um group process that inducts that uh Otto Sharmer talks a lot about the you process and coming into enough stillness and making enough time and space for real emergence to arise. Um, that's where I think you're gonna see the most cutting-edge breakthroughs from people.

SPEAKER_00

Amy, did you hear a whisper from the universe that you needed to start Mobius with your sister? Did you hear that? I mean, you are the pioneer in this. I I think you started in 2005, 2006. Was it around then, if I remember serves me right? I mean, that's a long time ago. So did you hear a whisper? Did you feel it was urgent? Did you feel this was your way of what you knew life was going to be about for you?

SPEAKER_01

Well, yes and no, and then I'll tell you the fun story about the book, which did absolutely whisper to me. Um uh so Erica, my sister, is a longtime lecturer at Harvard Law School. And when we started

How Mobius Executive Leadership was built and the arrival of Leading in Chaos

SPEAKER_01

the company, as you said, in 2005, she was writing her wonderful book, Winning from Within. And we really started the company to be a platform for her book, which is in fact very cutting edge because it turns the lens of leadership development from behavioral change and skills training into a much more cultivation of the inner life of the leader. She is the pioneer in guiding our industry uh attention to the matter of inner transformational capabilities and mindsets. Um, and so in that sense, yes, we did, we did together decide to join forces and and move in that direction. It was a time in the industry where people were being saying things like, the two-day workshop is great, but what could you do in a day? And the well, I know you know this, and the one-day workshop is great, but what could you do in a brown bag lunch? And I just thought, oh no, uh, this is not, I'm not an infotainer kind of person. And I uh we both sort of felt, what if we made an offering that went in the opposite direction, counter-trend, and went longer and deeper and more profound and really sought to make a catalytic see, you know, a sea change in somebody's leadership capacities, in somebody's moral alignment, in somebody's sense of purpose and understanding of their fullest possibilities. And so we started offering five and a half day programs. Uh, and I didn't know if it would work, but right around that time, a small group of now very dear friends at McKinsey and Company were getting very interested in and investigating spiritual intelligence as a resource for leadership. And so in 2007, we joined forces. We had the privilege to be their alliance partner for almost 10 years, uh, and we did work together and we did research together, and we did application of Erica's work and beyond. Um, and so that's how Mobius got born. I also knew very early on that I wanted to do something radical in terms of cross-boundary collaboration. So it isn't an accident that I founded these two institutional global partnerships, but also a whole bunch of our theoretical competitors are in the Mobius ecosystem. We train together, we learn from each other, we share our uh knowledge together, and we incubate a whole movement in our field for more trauma-informed literacy and more introduction of emotional and spiritual intelligence. But what I couldn't have planned for was the glorious arrival of such extraordinary teachers. And Mobius not only has the privilege of hosting many of Harvard's most feminine thought leaders as senior experts, but we also have an extraordinary array of mystical and energetic master teachers as Mobius' master transformational faculty and a group of extraordinarily gifted trauma therapists who work with us in programs as transformational coaches. So, you know, Egon's and Yeah, yeah. You finished with the story in the book because it's really charming. So I was meditating last summer, and while I was meditating, I literally heard Leading in Chaos. And I thought, oh wow, that's a best-selling book. Somebody should write that book. And then I ignored it. And then a week later I heard Leading in Chaos. And I thought, are you asking me to write this book? I don't have time to write a book. I'm running a company, I'm traveling around the world, I'm leading programs. I can't write a book, but then I got it a third time. And if God knocks on your door three times in a row, you pay attention. So absolutely.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's anyway. Beautiful. I'm so glad you read the book. We're going to uh we'll definitely add it onto the show notes and make sure people can get it. Amy, I love the term spiritual intelligence. And I'm wondering, um, you know, Egon Zender, of course, is a big talent and recruiting firm.

Spiritual intelligence as the next frontier of leadership in the age of chaos and AI

SPEAKER_00

There are many worldwide. Do you feel and predict that spiritual intelligence is going to be, I would I wouldn't say on people's resumes, but do you think it's going to be the next frontier of intelligence that people not only must develop for themselves, but it's going to be something that companies are going to be asking for? And just just frame what spiritual intelligence is. If someone's just listening to this nugget, what is it?

SPEAKER_01

Well, let's just talk about the context we're in for a moment. So the current term for the chaos that we're seeing in the zeitgeist is Bani, which stands for brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. So you could talk about the competencies that we need in a time such as that, in very more conventional terms, you could say, you know, the picture is so fast moving, we need to get better at pattern spotting. The fixture is so fast moving that we need to align on narrative skills to help people have a shared story. The picture is so intricate and interwoven that we're going to need collective intelligence where myriad voices from different facets of the system come together to even define what problem we're in, let alone generate solutions. So I could talk about it in conventional terms, but in terms of spiritual intelligence, let's take them one at a time. If all the systems, structures, and processes we count on for security and for anticipating that the future looks like today in a reliable and consistent manner are brittle, are fragile, are falling apart, then that groundedness or that centeredness is going to have to come from within. That's a facet of spiritual intelligence. Can I hold space while the room moves, while the picture moves, while the context moves, the adaptive challenges and the speed and acceleration of the challenge of the adaptive demand is only going to grow. If you take anxiety, raising levels of fear in the face of uncertainty, unpredictability, huge levels of transformation, then I, as a leader, have to cultivate a quality of lowering the fear, the ability to lower the fear in myself and in the system around me, to regulate and co-regulate our nervous systems so that we calm down, so that we recenter, so that we can really listen to each other, build on each other's ideas, be open to persuasion, cognitively curious. That's a emotion, that's another spiritual intelligence. Do I have the ability to manage my own emotional arising? If things are nonlinear, meaning not just the speed of change, but the catalytic radicality of the change, like AI would be an obvious example, then I need to cultivate exponential imagination. A scenario planner said to me two weeks ago, horizon three thinking is over because the idea that there's a horizon three five to seven years ago from now is antiquated. It's next week. Um, so we have to speed up our ability to literally envision the world that isn't here yet. Spiritual intelligence. And the last one, incomprehensible, you know, a world that we can barely put our heads around. You could say I have to cultivate intuition, you could say I have to be more prepared to receive guidance, you could say I have to get sensitized to the implicate order in the chaos. Ultimately, I would say I have to learn to befriend the mystery. I have to be at peace with what's the unknown. The edge of the unknown we're going to permanently be living on. That's also spiritual intelligence.

SPEAKER_00

Can you very quickly tell leaders and CEOs that have a high level of spiritual intelligence? Can you kind of scan them? Can you can you get a feeling? I'm for someone listening and they're

How to recognize high spiritual intelligence in a leader

SPEAKER_00

going, huh, I wonder if my spiritual intelligence is high or medium or low? How would they know?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, sure. I could give a couple of criteria. What are the level of intimate confidences people feel safe to entrust you with? What conversations do people bring you as a leader? Do they tell you the truth of their lives? Do they tell you when they're afraid? Do they tell you when they've made a mistake? Do they ask you for help? Those are all indications by the ecosystem around you that you're demonstrating a kind of emotional and spiritual reliability. Beautiful. Love that one. Yeah. I think a second one is do you find yourself in constant repetition of what's known? Or are you alive and quickened and sort of glistening with the novel and the new? And to the degree that you're repeating your in the past, and to the degree that you are pushing the frontier of what's possible and you know, hacking the deadness that so many of us are struggling with, the numbness, the dissociative quality. If you're if you're bringing a kind of vitality and uh self-expression to your family, to your work, to your service life, that would be another one.

SPEAKER_00

Um, I don't know if

What a soulful workplace actually looks like — even when firing people or cutting costs

SPEAKER_00

you termed the the word soulful workplace. Um, I know when I was preparing this, I saw that many times. I I want you to help me and listeners understand what it means to be in a soulful workplace when you are firing someone, when you are cutting expenses, when you are having a difficult board meeting, when you are giving someone feedback. Um, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01

A soulful workplace never forgets that there are human beings in the organization. They can't check their feelings at the door, they don't check their nervous systems at the door, and they don't check their emotional needs at the door. So you ask yourself questions of how am I tending to the emotional and relational needs of the people who are building our organization? I've been talking lately about um building nests inside organizations. So you join a company, you get assigned a role, you join a team, you're part of a division, but you also get assigned to a nest, which is a small cross-functional group of employees in that company who come together once a month at lunch just to support each other, just to share the truth of their lives, to share their histories, their ancestry, their culture, get to know each other at an entirely different level and dimension, um, and then support each other as they travel through their work life. Um, a second thing that I think is really important is when you bring a team together, ask them to tell the story of their leadership values, starting two generations back in their family. And what's beautiful about that is you get incredible stories of resilience, of triumph over hardship, of lots of different cultural elements and flavors that people don't normally feel permission to discuss in the workplace. But more importantly, when a group shares their life stories, we fall in love with each other. You can't hear somebody's story and their struggles and their hardships and their victories and their, you know, expressions of their unique soul light and not feel a care and a deep compassion and a desire to help them succeed and thrive. So a soulful workplace is building deep cords of connection. And I think a second thing is it's asking itself reflective questions on how it's serving or harming the fabric of life on a regular basis. A soulful organization doesn't exist for only short-term profit. It has uh ethical guidelines, it has moral guidelines, it has in Kabbalah they talk about the move from the will to receive to the will to bestow. A soulful organization is asking itself, what is it we are bestowing into the fabric of life?

SPEAKER_00

How would you from this place handle a difficult work situation? You're firing someone, you're giving someone some negative feedback, um, it's a very tricky board meeting, it's a public company, uh, the stocks gone down, uh, there's a risk to the bottom line. I I I want you to bridge

The integration of love and rigor — why they are not opposites

SPEAKER_00

those two because taking care of humans, uh, I mean, I'm I'm I'm on board with that. I would like, what's the what's the bridge? What's the piece of the puzzle? How do you do it from a place of humanity and kindness and love and still watch the bottom line?

SPEAKER_01

First of all, I think it's uh I mean it's a really important question, but I think it's a false uh polarity. I don't think you have to choose between high performance and business success and care. I just think that's part of the way we inhibit the natural impulse of caring because we've told ourselves that it's going to be too distracting or it's gonna take too much time or it's you know antithetical to asking people to contribute in a serious way. We're talking about the integration of love and rigor. So most organizations don't have the difficult conversation because people are scared to tell each other confrontational things or to get hurt each other's feelings. When you do real emotional and relational work, there's enough trust and enough sense of faith in each other that you're more likely to say what you did isn't up to my standards, or when you the mistake you made here was negligent, or that failure was actually an important risk to take and a really worthy experiment. But we now need to look and do a systematic after action review. Why didn't it work? And we have enough trust in our team to have a really concentrated and honest conversation. So in my mind, the more love and safety people feel, the more likely they are to have the tough business conversations, to make the tough business decisions, to make the tough uh business choices and to enact them with kindness.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And as I hear you, I kind of go, you know, one of the dominant emotions in the world and in work right now is fear. And actually, what you're speaking to is replacing fear with kindness, with love, with authenticity, with honesty. And when something else takes over, then there isn't a fear around having those hard conversations.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And one in my programs, I ask people to make an inventory of all the symptoms of fear in community, in organizational culture, and in society. And you get these enormous flip charts of tremendously poignant costs that range from isolation to fragmentation and polarization to, of course, violence and degradation. So we're talking about exactly as you said, Arian, lowering the level of fear, which ought to, and I believe does, enable collaboration, enable mutual generosity, and help people get out of a kind of self-protective, self-oriented ambition and start to think on behalf of the enterprise, start to think on behalf of the whole. So you're

Replacing fear with love as the operating system of organizational culture

SPEAKER_01

talking about widening the lens of what's in your scope of care. Um, and that can only lead, I think, to more innovation, more creativity, and more contribution. I wanted to also just go back to what you said about the boardroom and they're making a tough decision and everybody's under pressure. Part of the dilemma. Of what we're talking about is that under stress, people will get hijacked. And we know that when people are triggered, they move into one of two modes: hyperarousal, they get more aggressive, more assertive, more combative, more likely to be polarized and fractured, or they go into hypoarousal, which is they shut down, they stop contributing, they withdraw, they freeze. Neither of those modes is going to be very good for collective intelligence, for harvesting the synergy of everybody's expertise and ideas and experience. So it's very practical what I'm talking about. A boardroom and making an incredibly hard decision is perfectly fine to do the decision in isolation of emotional intervention until they're not. And then once too many people are triggered, they're not going to be able to access the most rational decision, the most prudent and wise decision, the most sustainable decision, because they're not going to have their own analytic and problem-solving faculties on board. So you have to take a pause. You have to say, wow, this is hard. And just spend a few minutes acknowledging what's emotionally true in the room. Doesn't need more than that. And then you go back to the business at hand. But if you skip over that part, you've got a bunch of five-year-olds in the boardroom making a decision.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's so true. I was going to say, for for anyone who's listening, who is going, you know what, that sounds good. These are two women speaking. It sounds more like what the feminine does, as opposed to, you know, being the masculine and being the leader and being tough and making hard decisions. What do you say to that? And I know I'm making a generalization here, but how how does this fit with the sort of newer frontier of leadership for men and women combined?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, we have historically used metaphor uh to call left brain functions masculine and right brain functions feminine. And we are talking about the right brain intelligences, which historically in the world of business have been relegated, you could say, to second-class citizens. We haven't put as much primacy or value on intuitive, on relational, on emotional, on spiritual intelligences. That's just true. However, um, in a time such as this, I think it will be impossible. I really want to say it as gravely as I feel it. Unless we have practices of renewal, practices of restoration, and practices of renaissance, we will not be able to deal with the time of chaos we are in. And we already see it. There are people coming to work every day who go home and aren't sure that their house is going to be safe overnight, that their children are safe when they go to school. They're living under a level of violence, uncertainty, threat that is unsustainable for anybody who isn't being held. So I'm certain that in companies all around the world, people are having to think about how are we going to care for our people during this time? And what I'm suggesting

This chaos is not passing weather — it is the new climate of leadership

SPEAKER_01

is this time is not a moment in time. If you look at the historic advice in chaos, all of the advice given to leaders about how to handle chaos is get it grounded, do some short-term crisis management, and get back to the principles of how you lead in complexity. That's great when you have COVID and it's a temporary crisis. This chaos is not a temporary crisis. This is the rest of our lives. So we're going to have to acknowledge that we're at the limits, uh, the threshold of what the old command and control expert sort of linearity, what what kinds of resources that gives us to face this particularly unpredictable time.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think it was somewhere in your book you mentioned that this is not passing weather. This is the new climate. It's the new climate. Yes, exactly. I love I love that phrase. Um, it's interesting, you know, I was at the TED conference last week, and one of the speakers said that we're so good at holding people accountable now for work, for KPIs, for goals, for you know, yearly, yearly, uh, yearly profits, but we're not holding people. So we're holding people accountable, but we're not holding people. It's exactly this sort of thing that you're saying, which is we need to hold people first, and then we can expect and ask them um for certain performance, but it's not the other way around.

SPEAKER_01

I 100% agree with that. And just to stretch it a bit further, if we hold people well, they will naturally be accountable. You don't have to punish them, you have to motivate them, you have to enthrall them, you have to invite them to their contribution. And and I do believe that as we create workplaces that are more connective, we're going to see new thresholds of performance that maybe we've never seen before.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Amy, just because your work is is so powerful and it's so global, and you've, you know, you've worked way beyond just US-based companies. Is there

Practical ways to cultivate psychological safety and soulful workplaces

SPEAKER_00

is there a practice or are there a set of practices that are ones that you universally give to a client to get started? Um and is there anything that surprises them about them? Are they easy? Are they hard? Are they uncomfortable?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think in some ways, anytime you're stretching the boundary of um the integration of more personal life into a workplace, it's a little uncomfortable, it's a little awkward, it's a little, people aren't sure how it's going to be received, people aren't going to be sure about the impact. Um, but most of the experiments that I've had the privilege to be part of incubating turn out to be uh extreme contributors to the sense of thriving and the dynamism and excitement in those workplaces. So for example, I worked with a biomedical research company that was experimenting with giving people rotating desks. So the scientists, rather than being assigned to a research lab, were consistently assigned to sit next to different colleagues and incubate translation translational medicine out of the fact that they were constantly talking to and cross-fertilizing their own thinking with people who were incubating different ideas and for different medicine, different diseases. That was a beautiful thing. Organizations that put the most primacy on speed, on you could think of it as sort of um high-stakes organizations, the military, a hospital, a fire department, those organizations really invest in the level of trust and the level of safety people feel because they're dependent on people being able to be in a cycle of continuous improvement. And you won't get that kind of fast-learning, deliberately developmental organizational fabric without the kind of teaming that I'm describing. Um, so I do, I do believe that we're going to see fascinating experiments and in some ways start anywhere. You know, dedicate a room for meditation and let people come after a tough meeting, a tough conversation, a difficult decision, a business setback. Let them just come and sit still for a few minutes and catch their breath and down-regulate and calm down and get inspired again and then go back. Um, start by creating an invitation for everybody to bring their favorite song and let somebody lead the group in singing for three minutes in the morning every day. Uh, set a qigun course for you know every the last Friday of the month. There's millions of ways to re-um enchant the workplace in the way that I'm pointing to.

SPEAKER_00

Have you found a difference between US-based companies, companies in the rest of the world? Like what can we learn from each other?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think we have a tremendous amount to learn from each other because it's it's a really exciting movement that's just starting now. This is a very novel conversation in some ways. So I think we're going to learn a lot about as people innovate healing practices and spiritual intelligence practices. We're going to have tons of tons to share. And Nicholas and I in the book talk about the movement from best practice, which is very historic, um, problem-solving technologies for helping people work more effectively together and perform together, to next practices, which are these new ways of uh re-embodying and re-sacralizing uh the workplace. Um, so I I would just say, as a general rule, I'm super thrilled to be in a field that's just starting its experimentation. Um, you know, different uh parts of the world have different closeness to the spiritual lineages in which they rest. If you teach a program in India, you will of course have some participants who are steeped in the Vedas or steeped in uh understanding of a multi-lifetime journey of a soul and bring to the conversation uh an inherent and beautiful orientation towards devotion and towards care and towards the holy. Um, if you teach programs in Asia, you will get a reverence for the quality of stillness and slowness and the importance of having multiple rhythms throughout your day very naturally. If you teach courses in Europe, of course, you have access to architecture and art and poetry and the vast resources of the culture that has for hundreds of years been contributing to human uh artistry. Um, so I think each place has its own particular contributions to make, and we will over time synergize and synthesize those into a new vision of love where uh sorry, of work where the future of work is love. I really believe that.

SPEAKER_00

Amy, what do you think is your next frontier of leadership, of spirituality? It's like, what what are you what are you holding for yourself? Because I

Amy's next frontier — trauma literacy, consciousness raising, and the future of work

SPEAKER_00

know that when when you what you are holding is also what you're going to then bring out next to the world and to companies and to friends and to people. So what what are you sitting with these days? Two things, I think.

SPEAKER_01

This past week, the McKinsey Quarterly published an article on the importance of trauma-informed leadership written by my longtime collaborators and friends, Romesh Srinivasan and Joanne Lavois. And I hope very much that the work of helping consultants and coaches and leaders to become more sensitized to the gravity and enormity of the trauma people walk around with and the implications of trauma compensatory strategies for how businesses functioned up until now will start to be speakable, will start to be explicitly addressed, will start to be table stakes for leadership development and executive development. And I have a huge passion around that. And Thomas and I are just starting an eight-week training for practitioners in trauma literacy that began last night. We have 200 people from all around the world, and that's very, very thrilling to my heart. What a beautiful thing. Yeah. And the other thing, Ariane, is uh like many people listening and many people around the world, I'm heartsick and heartbroken by the level of cruelty and dehumanization and escalation of polarization that we're seeing at this time. And I feel very called to and committed to being part of a movement of consciousness raising so that we do, in fact, take the parameters of our heart, widen them, and start to include all of life in our care and our custodianship and our stewardship. And I believe ours is the generation of trauma healing, and ours is the generation of restoration of the cultural fabric. I I pray that that's true. And I know you and I are will devote a lot the rest of our lives to those moments.

SPEAKER_00

That's exactly why we're having this conversation. Amy, you said something beautiful in somewhere that I read that you are now experiencing a peace that is unthinkable to you. I think you said 30, 40 years ago. I feel like peace really is what we're all looking for, way beyond

What peace actually feels like — and how to cultivate it in chaos

SPEAKER_00

success. Um, what is peace? How do you know that how do you know that you're you're there? And for people who who are like, I I would do anything to feel more at peace in the complexity, in the chaos, in the craziness, how how is that even somewhat attainable?

SPEAKER_01

My experience of cultivating peace and of now sort of entering the room of a door of a room of peace is has very little to do with what's going on in the outside world. It has much more to do with being very tender to the parts of your heart that are hurt and to the degree that you have unconscious rooms of your house that you don't dare go into, early hurt that seems overwhelming or terrifying to touch, judgment and blame and shame cooking in your system about who you are, what you're made of, what your essence is. That turmoil inside is the thing that takes us out of the seat of peace. And to every degree that you can integrate early hurt, to every degree that you can forgive yourself, that you can reconcile the things of your past and hold them with a sense of benign eyes. You know, we're all doing our best all the time. I really believe that. I believe everything that doesn't express itself as beauty is a symptom of trauma. Uh, you know, so the the movement to self uh resonance, maybe I'll say it that way, to reside in the unique beauty that each of us is. That's peace, I think. And then you have so much to contribute to a world that's not only chaotic but deeply hurting. When you have that sense of inner um integration, then you're much more likely to be able to be a bomb in Gilead to the level of fracture and um distance that we currently live in from each other.

SPEAKER_00

After all the work you've done on yourself first, and it is felt, it is felt even just through through your voice and through your presence. Um for people who are listening to this, you can feel it. For people who are watching it, you can see it. After all the personal work you've done, after all the corporate and professional work you've done with big big companies, big names, how would you answer the question, you know,

What is worth doing with this life — integrating inner life with outer success

SPEAKER_00

what's worth doing with this life? What's worth doing to actually feel like this life is worth um living? And whether it's success, however people define it, whether it's peace, however people define that, what how how would you bring it together? What's the answer for yourself that you keep returning to?

SPEAKER_01

I think there's a movement that happens as you mature and heal from looking outside of yourself for uh accolades for achievement, for thresholds of success, to starting to have an indwelling intimacy with yourself, it a sense of self-contact that um allows you to sort for yourself, for each of us, what's a meaningful life. There's no generic answer. I don't have a universal answer. I would underscore the importance and birthright of every person to be asking that question to their soul in a meaningful way and to feel at liberty to follow the natural impulses of the movement of their life. Because so many of us were raised to check boxes and look very far outside ourselves for the direction and contours of our lives. And I think if spiritual intelligence offers us anything, it offers us a chance to throw out the expectations of our family, the expectations of society, the expectations of the way it's always been done, and give ourselves a lot more license to let life guide us.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. It's beautiful. Amy, just for people who are listening, and we'll do the same in the show notes. Um, where can they find

Closing reflections and where to find Amy and her work

SPEAKER_00

your book? Where can they find out more about you and about the certification programs and that you offer? And for companies who might want to be, might want to, you know, be clients of yours. They're like, we can't do this by ourselves. We do need to bring someone else in.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, wonderful. So Leading in Chaos is available, as Ariane mentioned earlier on Amazon, everywhere. Uh it's written by Nicholas Diani and myself, and we'd be delighted if you got the book and we'd love to hear what resonates with you and if you're experimenting with the ideas, how you're bringing them to life in your company. If you'd like to talk about our leadership services, whether it's our leadership programs, our executive coaching or our executive retreats, you can go uh to info at Mobius Leadership or Mobiusleadership.com to find out much more about the works we do, work we do with corporate clients. And if anybody wants to know a little bit more about me, I would be honored to have you go to amie elisabethfox.com. All my archived podcasts are there, as well as a couple of presentations and a few mystical CDs that I've recorded.

SPEAKER_00

Amy, thank you for my work to yours. Thank you for all the work you're doing in the world. Thank you for the work you've bravely, courageously done yourself that you can offer to all of us. Um I adore you. I'm I'm grateful we are we're walking this path together.

SPEAKER_01

As am I. This was a delicious conversation. Luscious. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00

If this conversation moved you or inspired you, please follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if it really moved you, please leave us a five star review. It really does make a big difference. And finally, if someone came to mind while you were listening to this episode, please send it their way. Remember, new episodes drop weekly. I'll see you very soon.