Unlock the transformative power of Spiritual Intelligence with the guidance of Yosi Amram, a seasoned clinical psychologist and executive coach. In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Amram walks through the intricate tapestry of Spiritual Intelligence—unveiling how qualities such as purpose, compassion, and integrity are not just aspirational, but practical tools that can amplify your personal and professional life. We tackle the common misconceptions that shroud the concept, clarifying how Spiritual Intelligence is a universal asset that transcends religious boundaries, enriching leaders and individuals alike with deeper satisfaction and heightened productivity.
Yosi provides a peek into his book, "Spiritually Intelligent Leadership: How to Inspire by Being Inspired," offering you keys to unlock and harness your spiritual essence for a more impactful presence in all walks of life.
Take the Spiritual Leadership assessment!
Website: yosiamram.net
Looking for leader and team development for your organization? Contact us today!
info@belemleaders.org
Until next time, keep doing great things!
Unlock the transformative power of Spiritual Intelligence with the guidance of Yosi Amram, a seasoned clinical psychologist and executive coach. In this enlightening conversation, Dr. Amram walks through the intricate tapestry of Spiritual Intelligence—unveiling how qualities such as purpose, compassion, and integrity are not just aspirational, but practical tools that can amplify your personal and professional life. We tackle the common misconceptions that shroud the concept, clarifying how Spiritual Intelligence is a universal asset that transcends religious boundaries, enriching leaders and individuals alike with deeper satisfaction and heightened productivity.
Yosi provides a peek into his book, "Spiritually Intelligent Leadership: How to Inspire by Being Inspired," offering you keys to unlock and harness your spiritual essence for a more impactful presence in all walks of life.
Take the Spiritual Leadership assessment!
Website: yosiamram.net
Looking for leader and team development for your organization? Contact us today!
info@belemleaders.org
Until next time, keep doing great things!
Hey there and welcome to Conversations, where today we have Yossi Amran, a licensed clinical psychologist and an executive coach catering to CEOs, entrepreneurs and other influential leaders, previously a founder and CEO of two companies that he has led through successful IPOs. He has coached over a hundred CEOs, many of whom have built companies with thousands of employees and revenues in the billions. He is a pioneering research in the field of spiritual intelligence and the author of spiritually intelligent leadership how to Inspire by being Inspired. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a PhD from Sophia University. Dr Amran is committed to enabling individuals to unlock their potential through spiritual intelligence, which we are going to hear about today. Yossi, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:I'm great, I'm delighted to be here with you and hear these kind words of introduction and still feeling the effect of your prayer and enjoying your smile. So it's awesome.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, so tell us where you're coming to us from today.
Speaker 2:I am today in Northern California, near Santa Cruz. It's a Northern California Bay area and I'm close to the ocean, so I get this energy and the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other side, on the California coast.
Speaker 1:Nothing better than that. Oh, I love it, thank you.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, congratulations on your book. I think it's fantastic, and that's what I'm going to talk about today, because I feel that people don't truly, including myself, and that's why I'm so glad that you're here with us to really unpack what spiritual intelligence is. I would love for us to just jump into that and tell us what is it.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. Well, spiritual intelligence is very analogous to emotional intelligence, like most people have heard of, and it's kind of permeating our culture these days. But emotional intelligence is basically the ability to draw on emotional resources and information to help manage our own and other people's emotions. So, by analogy, spiritual intelligence is the ability to draw on and embody spiritual resources and qualities and values that have been hailed by all the world's spiritual traditions, qualities such as purpose, service, compassion, integrity, humility, joy, beauty, higher self and so on. These are qualities that, regardless of one's tradition whether you come from a Christian tradition or a Jewish or a Muslim or a Hindu or Buddhist, and regardless of their theology and cosmology, these qualities are considered as virtues. They have been shown through the field of positive psychology, in fact, and leadership development, to contribute to our well-being and our power and effectiveness as leaders. So it's a long definition, but the essence of it is the ability to draw on and embody spiritual qualities and resources in daily life to help functioning and well-being.
Speaker 1:And you know what I hear a lot, especially certain generations, that they'll say that they're spiritual, they're not religious. Is that something that you hear or that maybe you can explain?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I hear a lot. A lot of my clients would fall into that category. I mean, just in terms of my clients you mentioned, I've worked with over 100 CEOs and they've been all over the spectrum, from devout practitioners of a particular religion to quote-unquote spiritual and not religious, which is very popular these days, and then to pure atheists. Now, what is amazing is that you could develop your spiritual intelligence and you may not agree or like this, but I think it's important that people could develop their spiritual intelligence regardless of their spiritual and religious affiliation. So, going back to these qualities I highlighted purpose and service and compassion and humility and presence and integrity. You don't have to be practicing or believing in any one religion or any one spiritual framework to embody them and to cultivate them. So, yeah, but you know a lot of people these days.
Speaker 2:I think I just saw recent research by a few that says that the biggest category are now in the US is called none, which is I forget the acronym, but it's basically that they're not affiliated with any religion. It used to be that the majority of population were affiliated one religion or another, whether it's Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim, but now the biggest category is people that are not. But, it's interesting still, the majority of Americans believe in higher powers. So they believe in higher power or some notion of spirituality, but they don't want to categorize themselves as affiliated with any one religion, which you know. Obviously there's been a lot of problems and damage done in the name of religion, but I also see that it's contributed a lot to humanity and I think being part of spiritual but not religious is kind of a personal experience and connection which is important. But I think what religion gives us is tradition and community and I think that's so important. So, yeah, so anyway, it's a complex, long subject.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure what's going there.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for answering that. What are some of the benefits of spiritual intelligence for us as individuals, but then also for teams and leaders? Because you obviously you work with CEOs, you know people in those higher level, but also you noted in your bio with entrepreneurs, so I would love to hear more about that, what the benefits are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm also work as a clinical psychologist with individuals and couples, so yeah, so yeah, I'm glad you're bringing that up. So spiritual intelligence has benefits at the individual level, first of all in quality of life, satisfaction with life, individual productivity and even relationship and marital satisfaction. So there are lots of benefits. Individually Now, as leaders, it's also very powerful and effective. In my own doctoral research I showed the leaders with higher spiritual intelligence lead teams that have higher morale, greater commitment and lower turnover. And that's after controlling for emotional intelligence. So emotional intelligence contributes to leadership effectiveness.
Speaker 2:Spiritual intelligence contribute to leadership effectiveness, but combined they do more than each of them alone. So they are complementary and reinforcing and together they're more than each of them. So that's not to knock either of them. They're both important. And the other point I would make is that, following my research, there's been other research that has shown that leaders with greater spiritual intelligence produce better financial results for their organization, which was kind of pretty amazing to hear. In another study it's been shown that teams and groups and particularly this one study was done with banks banks where the employees hold a higher level of spiritual intelligence better financial results and better return on assets compared to other banks. So the point is it contributes to leadership effectiveness, to individual productivity and group and team productivity. When everybody's leadership, spiritual intelligence, hire, the team as a whole functions better and is more productive. And, needless to say, people feel more connected, a sense of community, their happiness, their well-being goes up, so that all feeds positive energy which results in greater alignment, greater cohesion and, ultimately, better results.
Speaker 1:So how is this measured? So how do you get to that?
Speaker 2:Well, you mean the outcome. As I said, depending on the study, they looked at the actual financial results of the organization, whether it was profitability or revenue growth. In the case of the banks, it was return on assets, which is again a standard financial metric that are used to evaluate performance in the financial sector. I think the other aspect, though, is how do you measure someone's spiritual intelligence, so to speak? And that was my doctoral research, and I spent a number of years to create the first academically validated measure of spiritual intelligence, and it's both a self-report measure, where it asks you to basically look at your behavior over a period of time and look at questions as to the extent you brought compassion to your encounters and whether that helped you in your interactions with others, or to what extent you are driven and motivated by a sense of purpose that's beyond just financial rewards or career advancement, so that comes into service or purpose, and whether you are present in your interaction with others, and so on. So it's got 22 dimensions of spiritual intelligence and it's evaluating you on all of those.
Speaker 2:Now, most importantly is that it's helping people identify their strengths and opportunities relative to themselves, so it's not like to get our egos engaged and say which is kind of a paradoxical was like oh, I have higher spiritual intelligence than someone else and we can start to go into our egoic comparing mind. The idea here is to help people identify their strengths and their opportunities. So someone's strengths might be compassion they bring a lot of compassion into their interactions with others and helps their connections, etc. Someone else's strengths might be bringing quality of joy to their interactions and someone else may really have a strong access to vision, and someone else may be very mindful and present, and so on. So there are all these dimensions and qualities and it's to help people identify their strengths and their opportunities.
Speaker 2:And then most people, when they go through the assessment, find it helpful just the process of reflecting on ourselves and just oh yeah, I could bring more compassion to my interaction, I can bring more joy, I can be more intentional, I can be more mindful, I can be more present, and so on.
Speaker 1:I love that and those are to be celebrated, the things that we're strong in and even in those opportunities. Celebrate that there's an opportunity there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and it's important to understand, at least in my view. None of us are perfect and it's a constant practice of building the muscle, as they say, to build our capacity and to stay centered, to stay grounded, to stay in our heart, to be in alignment with our values. But there's so much that life throws at us and we kind of lose balance, we lose center. And then how quickly do we remember? How quickly do we come back? So, remember, what does that mean?
Speaker 2:If you think about the word is re returning to membering ourselves into the community, into the circle of life. So when we remember, we move away from being an isolated, separate individual to being a member of the circle of life that you know, with our fellow humans and life more broadly, and that resources us. So again, we look at the word resource. It's resource, so we return to source. That is our greatest resource. So when we so, we get off balance and then we remember and we resource ourselves, and so it's an ongoing practice. We're building new neural pathways and then finding more and more stability in that place so we, when we're thrown off, we can return faster.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really I'm listening to you and I'm thinking of those two words and how people say them all the time, but I think those who are listening are going to stop and pause and probably rewind and say I need to hear that again and really think about those two words differently.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we remember, we've remember. As I said is once we all think, oh, we forget something, we remember. But yeah, remember ourselves, remember our nature, resource ourselves by connecting to source and yeah, I like that. And there's always an opportunity. That's the beauty. Like you said, we forget and we remember and we could celebrate that we remembered.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So it's not. We don't have to go into beating ourselves up oh I forgot, oh, I forgot, oh I. But in the moment of realizing we forgot, implicit in that is the remembering. And then there's an opportunity to celebrate and bring more joy to ourselves and celebrate our growth. That's right.
Speaker 1:So how do you bring this in? Because you work with CEOs and I'm thinking sometimes, in especially corporate environment, it's like oh spiritual, no, we can't go there. So how do you bring this in?
Speaker 2:Well, by meeting people where they are. People you know face crises, face dilemmas, face, you know challenges. And the way I bring it in is by helping people find their essence, find their source and you know spark of life within them. And then they feel rooted in their depth and their essence and their spark of life and then they find their alignment with their calling, their purpose, and then it becomes clear to them how to navigate those situations. So I don't necessarily have to, you know, pitch them and tell them about, you know the religion or the spiritual thing, but they find those resources in themselves, they find that wisdom in their hearts, and so a lot of it is helping them connect and go inward. I mean, we're so culturally conditioned to look out and for our goodies you get this new car, you get this new thing. From the day we're kids we were given new toys, we're given candy and that makes us happy and that's great. We need to some of that to grow.
Speaker 2:But as we mature, our true power is from within us. Because if my true power, if my power and my satisfaction, comes externally, then I am disempowered. You know my fate, my destinies is in the hands of these other things where I'm outside my control, even when I can root myself in my essence, in my connection to the divine. If we use that language or that my soul, essence, my spark of life then I'm dependent on other people's approval for my self-esteem, for my sense of value. And I'm not a leader, I'm following. I'm more a politician, trying to figure out what do people want, and then I don't have my North Star, my inner compass.
Speaker 2:So a lot of what I do is helping people connect with themselves, with their essence, and that's where they find the answer, that's where they find their true power. And again, as I said, that could be for anybody, regardless of if they're religious or spiritual, but not religious or atheist. They can feel it. We feel when we live in integrity with our nature and when we're integrity with our nature we're aligned, we're whole and we're not divided. When we're divided, we're misaligned and we're weak, you know, but just if you take something misaligned, it's much weaker than something that's whole and aligned.
Speaker 1:That's when we need to remember.
Speaker 2:That's when we remember and resource. You already remember. You're remembering what we talked about. That's right, I'm delighted.
Speaker 1:So that's how we do become inspired.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, what is inspired? I mean, what do leaders do? They inspire, right, I mean one of my first cases at Harvard, when I attended for my MBA many years ago, you know, was the difference between managers and leaders. And managers are the important. They manage resources, they make decisions, they allocate scarce resources, but leaders inspire. Now, what is the root of the word? Inspire is spirit. And what is spirit is the animating breath of life, right? So by its very nature we say to inspire or be inspired. It's injecting the life force, the spirit, the energy that animates life, that animates the organization, that animates the team. So we have to connect to the root essence of our life force, which is our spirit, and that's our source of inspiration. So we have to ignite that flame and find that inspiration inside of us. Before we can have any hope of inspiring anybody else, we have to be inspired. So that's why my book is called how to Inspire by being Inspired.
Speaker 2:And people get confused. Lots of people come to me and say I want to be an inspirational leader and I just ask them okay, do you want to be an inspirational leader or an inspired leader? And what's the difference? When you say I want to be an inspirational leader? How do you decide? If you are, you have to look out. Oh, what's the effect I'm having on others? No, right there, I left myself, I disempowered myself, because that verdict depends on them.
Speaker 2:If I say I am inspired, I feel it.
Speaker 2:I feel the aliveness, I feel the passion, I feel the power that comes when I'm inspired, when I have inhaled in the power of that spirit, and then it's circulating through my veins and my arteries and I'm just pulsating with aliveness and vibrating, and then that's my frequency that I'm radiating out. Helpable, yeah, it's palpable, and people that resonate with my vision and my mission and my values are naturally drawn in. So we get inspired, we elevate our frequency, we vibrate this energy, this aliveness, this passion, this vision, and then people that want to line up. And if they're not aligned with that, then it's better than not be part of our team, because then the team is divided, people are rolling in different directions. So whatever applies to us individually, the importance of alignment and wholeness and integrity applies at the team and organization level. The organization needs to be aligned, needs to be whole, needs to be in integrity, not with inner fighting which sometimes we experience within our own psyche and which divides us. So I mean the microcosm and the macrocosms, as above, so below, so to speak.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so imagine if all leaders really could harness that, what our organizations would be so it would be palpable. People would be following, people would be aligning and people would be getting excited.
Speaker 2:And they would be empowered themselves. So it permeates out. So it's good. Leaders inspire and create followers. But also great leaders inspire other leaders. So it's not just I get inspired and I'm this charismatic, powerful leader and people following me, which is great. I can boost my ego and so on, and look at me, but if I'm a really truly great leader, then I'm empowering my team to become leaders, because we're actually all leaders. We're all influencing each other, whether in a formal, yeah, right.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you. Whether it's in a formal organization, in a business or a nonprofit or a government organization, we're leaders. In our teams, and I mean in our families and in our communities, we're always influencing each other. And how we behave, how we show up in the checkout line in the supermarket, we're affecting each other. How we drive on the freeway, we're affecting each other. You know someone drives aggressively against everybody, riled up. You know, before you know it, it's a mess and everybody's anxiety and stress goes up and accidents go up. So I'm just saying is how we show up in our lives, we're always leading, we're always influencing.
Speaker 1:That's right and that's the message that I hammer home, it seems all the time, because people don't understand that. They think the word leader means something else and that it doesn't apply to them, and sometimes they just need permission to call themselves a leader and to understand that. Exactly how you said, it doesn't matter how do we say, it doesn't matter if you're on a hierarchy chart or not. Yeah, they're always in a leadership role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have the opportunity to influence others, but that has to do with you know, do you get passionate, Do you have a vision or an idea or something? And I also want to emphasize that. You know, we typically think of leadership as you know, those that lead from the front, people that have a vision of the future, and they said this is where we're going and follow me. It's kind of what I call Yang quality of leadership, and there's also the Yin quality of leadership, which is leading from behind, and that's not so much about I know where we're going, you guys follow me. It's more like, okay, I'm going to be here and support you from behind.
Speaker 2:And if you look at the Bible, some of the greatest leaders were shepherds and they were picked because they cared for the flock, and from behind. So you know the biblical story is Moses was chosen because he carried the weak lamb and God was like okay, if you care that well for the week among, then you can lead, and so when people feel like that level of care and support, then naturally want to follow, and so, but that's more leading from the front and behind, and the greatest leaders I see can switch back and forth depending on the situation. Sometimes they have a vision and they get ahead and say follow me and they get everybody rallying behind that vision and that mission. Sometimes they fall behind and they help people discover their own way and have their own vision for themselves and then they're taking more of a coaching, mentoring, empowering role and I think that's very powerful and very important it is.
Speaker 1:All right, let's see what we have here. So how do we cultivate deep and grow our spiritual intelligence?
Speaker 2:Well, it's a practice and my experience is it's like building any new habit or muscle is to focus our intention and attention on one quality. And so we say, okay, for the next month I want to bring more joy to my activities. And then what are the practices that bring me joy throughout my day? You know, what brings me joy is walking on the beach every morning and watching the pelicans and the birds as they feed, and the dawn of the new day and the beautiful sunrise, and dancing and music and cooking and talking to my family, my children. So those are the things. I bring more mindfulness to doing that and I cultivate the quality of joy and then I make it more permeate my day and do I show up to meetings gloomy or do I try and elevate people's spirit, etc. So once I build that habit maybe it takes me 30 days and I'm now practicing joy I could focus on another quality. It could be compassion, it could be mindfulness, the presence, whatever it is. And so, yeah, in the word practice it's kind of funny, it has two meanings.
Speaker 2:In the English language we say, oh, I'm practicing this for some future games, some future performance, but when you also think about it, a doctor has a family practice or has this. That is what they do. It's not like they're practicing medicine for something else. They're practicing medicine. This is their work. So what we practice is what we become. So if I practice joy, then I become joyful. If I practice compassion and compassion, if I practice humility, then I'm humble. If I practice integrity, then I'm an integrity. So, but you know, we need these training wheels to get us to find that and so that over time we could be, that we become more and more of that quality that we're cultivating. I hope I'm making sense.
Speaker 1:No, you are making sense because, as you said, what are their 22,?
Speaker 2:22 different elements to the 22 qualities and they cost these, they cluster around, you know, these domains of meaning and grace and inner directedness, and truth and wisdom, and so, and under each of those there's multiple. So, for example, under grace, there's trust, you know being trust, and they call it faith and trusting. Because as leaders, it's critical and as human being, it's crucial that we have trust and faith in life and otherwise nobody's going to be motivated if we don't believe that we can accomplish anything over time and the future is going to be good for us or the goals we set. So so trust is one important quality, as as gratitude, as is beauty, as is joy. So when we bring these qualities, we're kind of interacting with others with grace. We bring in this positivity of trust and gratitude and joy and beauty, and so that's just an example of one cluster of qualities that, in this framework, and what I like about what you're saying is that we don't have to work on everything at once.
Speaker 1:We can just take that pause. Do a 30-day work on something, not feel overwhelmed by it, because that's not what this is about. We don't want you overwhelmed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we need to build trust in ourselves. So when I say the quality of trust, we can say it's trust in God, it's trust in the universe, it's trust in our team, it's trust in ourselves, but we have to trust ourselves also. So if we take on too many, too ambitious, we're overwhelmed, we're not going to attain what we start to not trust and respect ourselves, which disempowers us. So, yeah, it's super important to take qualities, and one at a time, and set to ourselves attainable goals so we can build our confidence and our faith and our trust in ourselves, which gives us more energy and more motivation to keep going Like I'm successful at this. I can do this, as opposed to I cannot.
Speaker 1:Yes, and these are in the book yes, where people yeah these are qualities.
Speaker 2:There are case studies for each quality. I have relatable case studies from leaders and how they come in and they have no access to it and how I work with them to help them find and awaken that quality and use that capacity to address the challenge. And then, along with each quality, there are exercises that I call your turn. So then it guides you through applying it. And so, yeah, spiritual intelligence not. You read this book and you get something out of it, but it's not just a cognitive understanding. It's like you know, you can. It's like with spirituality or religion. I say, okay, well, I understand, and it's important to have faith or trust in life. Okay, I can understand that cognitively, but how do you rewire yourself to have that faith and trust? It's an ongoing practice. To cultivate faith it's an ongoing practice Interesting.
Speaker 2:You know, I come from Israel. My original mother tongue is Hebrew and the word in Hebrew for faith or trust is Emuna, and it shares root with imun, which means practice, and oman, which is art. So to develop faith or trust, it's an ongoing practice and it's an art form. It's not just, oh, you say, okay, I need faith. Okay, great, that's a good idea. But let's see what happens when life throws you challenges and you're like do you still maintain the faith, do you still maintain the trust and believe that this is serving some goodness, or do you get cynical about life and feel like a victim? So I'm just saying, with each of these qualities, there are suggested practices to help people work on that and bring it into life in their own life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and practice isn't a dirty word, it's something that we all need to do and I love that you brought in and I'm not going to say this but I love that you brought in the medical practice, because what people don't understand is that doctors are always practicing. I mean, everybody's coming in. They're unique. They may have something that, yes, maybe they've seen before, but they still may need to go to their book and figure it out, or practice in their craft of whatever it is. I love that you brought that in. And we do need to be practicing in order to cultivate those habits and, as you said, gaining confidence through that practice is how them we're going to say oh I did this, think of it as an experiment for 30 days and see how you come out. I love that.
Speaker 1:And then move on to the next.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and, as you highlighted, the doctor is practicing in both senses of the word. They're practicing, they're doing it, they're practicing whatever family medicine or whatever kind of medicine they're practicing, but each time they're practicing, they're improving and deepening the skill, which is less the way we are. When we practice gratitude, we're being grateful and we're deepening the grooves of gratitude in our brain. So it's more living our lives in gratitude.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Accounting our blessings, you know.
Speaker 1:That's right. So what haven't we talked about that's important for you to share today before we close?
Speaker 2:Well, I think.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you touched on something which is obviously in the beginning. If someone comes from a particular faith tradition, then they have one access point to that spirit, you know, and through if you're coming from a particular Christian faith tradition etc. Then you know how to tune into that frequency and through prayer, like you did, invoking, and then that kind of invoked and awakened the spirit in you, and so that's awesome for people who have that. Perhaps your audience is kind of already steeped in that tradition and they have an access point. And I think that's a great way to start and ignite that spark and draw in that spirit. And then from there, like work on these other qualities of gratitude and compassion and integrity and humility and so on. But if someone does not have that, then it's like, okay, how do they connect with their sacred spark of life?
Speaker 2:And what I find is that is one pathway and this is not to negate the other we just talked about, but just to complement.
Speaker 2:It is to first connect with our breath.
Speaker 2:So we can do that right now and just take a few deep breaths together, feeling the rise and fall of our belly and our chest and, if it helps, putting our right hand on the center of our chest and feeling our heartbeat and lower hand on the lower belly, feeling our feet on the ground and support of the earth, mother Earth below us, feeling the verticality of our spine as its channel for energy that connects our head pointing at the heavens and our feet rooted in the ground.
Speaker 2:And then so we become this channel of energy and, as our spine is kind of an antenna, picking up these frequencies and connecting heaven and earth, which is what our role as humans are, is to bring the energy and the goodness of heaven down to this earth. So it's that's just one way, I find, to get centered and grounded and feel our life force, our aliveness, through our breath, through our pulsation of our blood flow through our veins and arteries and heart. And you know, that's that's one way I think people can, and it doesn't take very long, to get centered and grounded.
Speaker 1:this way resource. I'm ready for a nap, now that I did.
Speaker 2:So it was relaxing, huh.
Speaker 1:Relaxing, thank you.
Speaker 2:Do you feel more or less clearheaded?
Speaker 1:I feel more clearheaded, for sure I feel. I feel lighter lighter Okay.
Speaker 2:I do, I do feel so it's interesting, you're relaxed and and and alert and alert, yeah, yeah, so, um, so anyway.
Speaker 2:But I mean, if we, if we do these kind of practices few times a day, it doesn't take long. Uh, you know, it took us a minute to do this. You felt the effect. So people over time can, can do this on their own a few times a day between meetings. Instead of start coming into a meeting feeling frazzled is coming in, feeling centered, and so. But whatever the practice is, it could be center centering prayer. You know there's a I think is it Thomas Keating has centering prayer and you know I don't know different traditions, but for whatever, whatever it is, having these small tools that we can weave in throughout our day, and so our nervous systems are more calm, we're more centered, we're more available, our mind is clear, we're not reactive, we're more responsive to the situation and we bring more of ourselves, more of our resources to to bear and whoever, who and whatever is in front of us.
Speaker 1:I've done that with teams and opening like that, very similar to that, and it is amazing that then we're ready to go after we're all centered, we complete that, we take a moment to just enjoy that moment and then we're ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it could be a team prayer. I mean, it's so powerful when a group of people have a shared intention, when we're clear on our intention, it's like a rudder that keeps us on track and it's super important. But there's research that shows when you take multiple people and they have shared intention, then the power of that intention is multiplied, which is why you know spiritual communities and sanghas or churches or whatever are so powerful, because you have a group of people coming into a service with a shared intention and following a ritual and you, the energy of the space is palpable and then the whole space starts to imbue that. So, yeah, if you start a meeting with everybody doing that and affirming the intention super powerful and build a sense of community, which is so important these days.
Speaker 1:That is important. Yossi, I'd love to point people to you, like to your book, where they can find you if they like to connect with you somehow. What can we offer in the show notes for that?
Speaker 2:Well, a couple of things. First is my website is yosi-o-s-i-a-m-r-a-m it's two M's like Marynet, so yosi-a-m-r-a-mnet, and in there there are resources and links to the assessment tool. There's a free assessment tool for spiritual intelligence that I mentioned that people could take. There's more expansive resources, like for if someone wants to do a 360 assessment, and so on. But yeah, there's also a description of my book, which is available on multiple online and bookstores, whether it's Barnes, noble or Amazon or what have you. So the book is, as you mentioned, spiritually intelligent leadership how to inspire by being inspired. There it is, so thank you.
Speaker 1:Well, it has been a joy, a pleasure, oh my gosh, and I'm so relaxed still. So thank you for that. But we really went through a lot of things and I appreciate that, really taking people on an understanding, on this journey, of what spiritual intelligence is. And it doesn't have to do with religion, it is about spirituality, it is about the spirit. What did you call that? The spark of the.
Speaker 2:Sacred spark of life.
Speaker 1:Sacred spark of life. I think that's beautiful and it's about getting that sacred spark of life and then sharing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and just banning its flame, and so then, Getting the flames? Yes, and then we all have the flame and the heart that seeks truth, that seeks God, that seeks whatever, that wants this deep fulfillment. And when that flame is shining bright, then it radiates light and warmth and other people are drawn into that and that helps ignite their flame. It's like we all light up each other and then we light up the world.
Speaker 1:That's right. Let's light up the world, people, all right. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Well, I thank you, you're welcome and next time.
Speaker 1:You keep doing great things. Bye-bye, bye-bye.