Leading with Soul: The Power of Spiritual Intelligence | Yosi Amram | 589

Today I want to explore how a person's life journey shapes the thought leadership practitioner. In other words, how do you find a topic that you're passionate about and willing to dig deep into, not only for your own learning, but because you want to share it with others? My guest today is Yossi Amram. He's a clinical psychologist, a CEO, a leadership coach, and an award-winning author. His thought leadership platform is around spiritually intelligent leadership. In today's conversation, we'll take a look at his own journey towards becoming a thought leadership practitioner, specifically how a dark night of the soul caused him to reassess his leadership practices, and set him on the path to thought leadership. We also have a conversation around the people who impact us at our thought leadership practice and the impact we hope to make ourselves. I'm Bill Sherman. This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Yossi.

Thank you. Pleasure to be here with you, Bill.

I wanna begin with a level set question. You are a clinical psychologist and you focus on this concept of spiritually intelligent leadership. Our audience has probably heard of emotional intelligence, other forms of intelligence. What is spiritually intelligent leadership?

Well, I mean, it starts with what is spiritual intelligence? So let me answer that. And as you said, most people are familiar with other forms of intelligence, like emotional intelligence, which really means the ability to draw on emotional resources and information to help manage our own and others' emotions. So by analogy, spiritual intelligence would be the ability to draw on and embody spiritual qualities and resources in daily life to help our daily functioning and well-being. So you might say, well, what are these spiritual qualities? And those would be the standard virtues and qualities that have been hailed by all the world's spiritual traditions. So it'd be like passionate purpose, compassionate service, trust, gratitude, integrity, humility, and so on. Now, how does that relate to spiritual intelligence? One is because these are the qualities that have been spoken about by all the world's spiritual traditions, regardless of their cosmology and theology, whether you believe in a deity like God or the Buddha nature or Father Sky, Mother Earth. These qualities have been celebrated through all the world's traditions. And so in a sense, but Also, let's look at the word spiritual, which shares roots with the word spirit, which comes from Latin, the animating breath of life. So spiritual intelligence, in a sense, is the highest and deepest expressions of our spirit essence or our life force energy, our sacred spark of life, this precious sacred life we're given. And then the ability to express that life force in its highest, deepest form is what spiritual intelligence is and embody it. So a couple more distinctions and then I'll pause. One is spiritual intelligence is very different than spiritual belief, whether you believe in God or reincarnation or the immortality of the soul, etc., or a spiritual experience. I may be meditating or walking in the forest or walking in front of the ocean and feeling my oneness with nature, etc. Those are all spiritual experiences. Important as they are, they are not spiritual intelligence. And spiritual intelligence is the ability to draw on these qualities and embody them in daily life. So spiritually intelligent leadership is the ability to draw on these forces and embody them in order to be an influential, inspiring leader. So you, as a leader, you bring your sense of purpose, your compassionate presence and service and servant leadership. You express gratitude, you know, your presence, your humility. These are the qualities that you express as a leader. Now, the good news is that modern leadership theory and even business consultants like Bain and Company have shown that these qualities lead to the most effective, inspiring leadership.

So we'll stay on spiritually intelligent leadership, and I want to ask you for an example. What does it look like? What is a spiritually intelligent leader, and how would I know one if I ran into them?

Good question. So spiritually intelligent leadership has, you know, 22 to 25 qualities that involves dimensions of spiritual intelligence, much like IQ has many dimensions—verbal intelligence, fluid intelligence, mathematical intelligence, crystallized intelligence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in spiritual intelligence, there are all these qualities. I mentioned some of them, which is purpose, service, compassion, gratitude, humility, etc., presence. So there's no one leader that I know of that excels in all of those, just like there's no one human being that has an IQ of 200 on all dimensions of, of IQ. So what does a spiritually intelligent leader is, is usually they are— have tremendous strengths and are off the chart in one of these dimensions. So one of them could be a sense of purpose and a devotion to a vision and a calling to service to that world. So you can think of Steve Jobs, for example, he was incredibly spiritually intelligent in some dimensions, and I would say very low spiritual intelligence in others. He was very strong visionary. He was a tremendous— had a tremendous sense of purpose about bringing computing and the beauty of computing to help people. And he was devoted to that vision. And in that way, he was inspiring and drew others to him. In many ways, he also had a big ego and was not very humble, even though the one book that he carried on his iPad was The Autobiography of a Yogi. So he was preoccupied with enlightenment and was a meditator and talked about how his greatest insights came from his intuition and quieting his mind. But in terms of embodying some of the qualities of spiritual intelligence, he was poor on some of them. So anyway, so I'm just trying to say I don't know any leader that excels in all of these dimensions. And our humility and our humanity is to say, okay, what are my strengths and how do I play to them? And how do I work to compensate and work on the places that I still need to grow?

So I want to take a few steps down the path towards how you came to focus on spiritually intelligent leadership. And the place I want to start is listeners might think that, okay, you started with meditation back in high school, for example, right? And that actually isn't the case. You describe yourself as a math and science kid when you were young. Is that right? Yeah.

Yeah, I was a math and science kid and I grew up in Israel, so I'll see if I can concise my life story that got me to here, but it's not what you would expect. In a sense. So like all Israeli men, I was drafted into the military at age 18. Luckily, it was a quiet time and I was a shy boy and I was pacifist in my leaning. And to my surprise, I had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment and won all these leadership awards. But despite my success, the military model of command and control really chafed at my soul. And even though it's effective and required in battle, you don't have time to go into a conference room and do all kinds of charts and build consensus, you know, it doesn't inspire people and it doesn't apply well in our knowledge-based economy where you're motivating people based on their knowledge, their creativity, and so on. So you need to inspire them. So that motivated, or you might say inspired me, to seek to someday build an organization based on different values that are more humane and will support the growth of each individual, which led me to then want to become an entrepreneur. So I came to the US, I studied engineering at MIT and got MBA at Harvard and so on. And then I started a couple of companies. And the first one I was really focused on, Bill, it was called Individual, and it was focused on delivering personalized interactive media, your Bill's personal newspaper on your fax machine, well before the internet. And it had learning agents and so on. It would hone itself. But the other dimension was building a culture that was focused on the growth of each individual and their unique capacity in a team, in a community environment. But, you know, I was so devoted to that, I worked 70, 80 hours a week. I burnt myself out. I got depressed. I had a dark night of the soul, what is called in—

so I want to pause. Yeah, for a moment here. And underline something before we go into the Dark Night of the Soul. So you're someone who's leaned in on engineering and science, right? Yeah. And you come from a command and control experience in the military, and you land up in a tech startup, or what would be called a tech startup today, with fax, fax machines and intelligent adaptation and customization. So that's sort of bleeding-edge technology in the fax machine age at this point. Yeah, yeah, very much so. But you're also in what you're describing as sounds a lot like tech, modern tech culture of you're putting in 70 hours, the work is the thing, and you're not paying attention to culture, team building, and all of those things. Let alone paying attention to yourself. You're a founder who's trying to build a business. Yeah, well, the—

I agree with most everything you say except not paying attention to culture. As I said, the name Individual spoke for the culture that facilitates the uniqueness of each individual. So that was part of my passion, and that was part of my inspiration and motivation, is to build an organization that's not command and control Oh, but, but rather one that supports and inspires each individual to their greatest potential. So this was part of my passion. It was a business idea, but it was also an experiment in an organization and in leadership. And that's why I took it so personally. It meant everything to me, which is why I wanted it to be successful, which is why I worked 70, 80 hours a week. But along the way, even though you might say my motivations were pure at some level, At another level, my ego co-opted all of that, and then it became, I want to make a better world and empower people with information, and I want to build a culture that facilitates the individual. All of that was true, but at some point it was like, no, I want to do it, and I want to be successful, and I want to get rich and all of that. So all these egoic motivations were mixed in, and then my drive burnt me out. I worked so hard.

So tell me about the long night of the soul. What was that? What triggered it? And what was that journey? Because that leads to how you land on spiritually intelligent leadership. So let's go there. What was—

Yeah, Night of the Soul. Yeah, good, good. I'll just say a couple other things. So I was trying to build a culture of, of inspiration for everybody, but because I was so driven, I was also in my ego, like all egos wanted to control things. So I became a micromanager in a way. In some ways I empowered people, but in other ways I was a micromanager. So I was working overworking. And then, as we pointed out, I started on fax machine using this machine learning software to deliver the customized news. And then the internet came along and it was clear that all of this stuff that we were charging money in subscription for was gonna become free and ad supported over the internet. So that was a big threat to the business and it was clear we had to move into then ad supported model. We had a gold mine because the profile of the users that was very valuable for advertisers. But we had to cannibalize our own, eat our own children as they say, to cannibalize our fax business that we were charging money on a subscription business to build a much larger audience on the internet that would be ad supported. And I was just very scared on how to do that in a way. I had investors, the top VCs, I had Microsoft, I had all these high-profile investors and there was this big pressure to succeed and I didn't want to fail and all of that. So I kind of froze and I got depressed. I didn't know how to do it and I lost confidence and I got depressed and burnt out. And out of that depression, I started to, you know, take Prozac and go to therapy and so on. And I don't know what happened. Ultimately, we recovered and then Now we were on a track to take the company public, and my mom passed away in the midst of our IPO roadshow. And just at one point, I was lying on a massage table trying to relax from all this craziness. And all of a sudden I had this spiritual opening and an awakening where my body relaxed and I felt that my body was made of consciousness. The floor that I was looking at through the cradle of the the massage table, I felt was inside of me. And I'd been interested in the mind-body problem. I was reading this book about the Self-Aware Universe and also— but something clicked and all of a sudden my sense of self dissolved and I experienced this oneness with all of reality and all reality was permeated by this consciousness. So that was an awakening experience that blew the circuits of my mind. And I was having all these downloads about where the internet was going in the future, and I wanted the company to be the leader in, in going there. I wanted everything to happen yesterday. So my ego again grabbed a spiritual experience and co-opted it like, no, I want to build Individual to be the greatest company. And had we followed my vision, we would have been the next Facebook or Google, etc. But I wanted it all done yesterday. I had that vision and But being a CEO of a public company, I was trying to get everything done. My board thought I was nuts. My team thought I was nuts. I wanted everything done yesterday. So this is the paradox. We have these great insights, etc., but then how do we integrate? How do we embody them? So I got pushed out of my company and it was a devastating blow. It was a trauma because my baby and all my life was focused on that. But that kind of led me to try and understand what was this all about. Was it craziness? Was it delusion? Which then changed the direction of my life. And then I went and studied psychology, and I tried to understand how much of it was pathology, how much of it was true thing. And that led me to this whole research on what is spiritual intelligence, which I could talk a lot more about, but I'll pause there.

Thank you. So I, I again want to make a connection back. You're the engineer with a tech startup that's going public who your step of, hmm, was invited to leave my company. Well, I'll go study psychology and go become a clinical psychologist, right? As the logical next step. I want to understand this. And let's talk about the research, because this goes into the building of the thought leadership. Although you could argue that much of your journey through your life had been leading to this point. But you said you did research. What did you research? How did you do it and what did you find? Okay, great.

So, so I had this spiritual awakening experience, as I said, and I said I was interested in what is this all about?, and I was interested in leadership, and I knew about emotional intelligence, which we talked about, and all the research that said that emotional intelligence contributes to well-being and life and leadership, et cetera. And then lo and behold, I read a book that mentioned the concept spiritual intelligence by Dana Zohar, and it was about rewiring the corporate brain. So the concept and the idea of spiritual intelligence was introduced by others before me, but it wasn't defined. And I set on a mission to understand what it is because I wanted to see how it actually contributes to leadership. So I wanted to see, is there a universal set of qualities that mean what is spiritual intelligence? So what I set out is to interview— I interviewed 71 spiritual teachers and leaders across all the world's traditions. I wanted to see if spiritual intelligence from a Buddhist perspective is the same as an Islamic perspective, as a Hindu perspective. So I had these 71 teachers. There were at least 4 from each of the world's major traditions, like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, shamanism, Taoism, and so on. And what I discovered is these themes that were universal. So there were all these qualities that I had mentioned, and that was very heartening to know that Regardless of your cosmology and theology, these are the qualities and virtues that you cultivate that have been spoken around for millennia. So that was the first stage of the research.

But then, then you took it to the applied side on the business side, right? Yeah.

And but to do, to do that, there was another step, which is if you want to study something from a scientific standpoint, the first part I did is what's called grounded theory. It's thematic analysis of interviews and finding common themes in what people say. But in emotional intelligence, you have measures of emotional intelligence that then you could do studies and correlations. So it wasn't just, oh, you have this idea of emotional intelligence. People develop measures and showed that those measures are associated with good outcomes. So I had to then take this conceptual framework and develop a measure. So I worked I didn't have all the background in statistics. I partnered with somebody on the faculty at the school I was, and we developed the first academically validated measure of spiritual intelligence. So there's all kinds of psychometric properties that you have to do with construct validity and reliability and predictive validity and so on. I won't get too nerdy right now, but so that was the second stage, developing this measure. Then I could get into the question I wanted to look at, which was, does people who score higher on the spiritual intelligence, are they more effective leaders? So that was my third study where I had 42 CEOs and 210 members of their staff, and I administered to them the spiritual intelligence measure, a measure of emotional intelligence, and a measure of personality, because you have to control for other known variables. If you're saying this thing is important and valuable, you might say, well, does it add anything beyond what we already know, which is emotional intelligence? So I administered both spiritual intelligence, emotional intelligence, and personality because there's qualities of personality that also was known to contribute to leadership.

You're doing a comparative validation study there and benchmarking against a known measure to be able to say, okay, what does this add and are we replicating What's the incremental knowledge that's added?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what was really heartening was to find that emotional intelligence contributes to leadership. It explained 41% of the variance in the outcome. So, you know, and then spiritual intelligence explained 47%, 46, 47% of the outcome of leadership effectiveness. And combined, they explained 67% of the outcome. So that says that each of them has a unique contribution on its own, and that combined they add more value than each of them independently. So that says that spiritual intelligence had as powerful and actually a, a stronger effect on leadership effectiveness than emotional intelligence. But I'm not trying to compare and say it's more important, less important, but just it has a unique contribution like you said. Now, since then, other researchers have taken that measure of spiritual intelligence and have shown that leaders that score higher on spiritual intelligence produce better financial results for their organization. And that same study found that there was no incremental predictive validity on emotional intelligence and financial outcome. It was fascinating again, but the point is not to compare the two. Obviously they're both important, but I'm just saying at this point There's a large body of scientific research that says that spiritual intelligence is real and measurable and contributes to leadership, and as well as a number of other important outcomes in life in terms of quality of life, satisfaction of life, relationship quality, team productivity, individual productivity, and so on. So, oh, there's now a growing body of research over the last 15 years.

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So let's sit there for a moment.

You said, hey, I came across this term spiritually intelligent leadership in a book, right? Just spiritual intelligence. Oh, spiritual intelligence. Sorry. Yeah. So you said, hey, I come across spiritual intelligence. Well, how does that apply to leadership? How do we operationalize it and define it? How do we measure it? And then if we can define it and measure it, so what does it add anything to the conversation? Does it change performance at the organizational level? And this is an outgrowth of, I think, a couple things. One, the engineering and sort of science and math mind from the beginning, as well as then two, a search for answers from your own past and your own past experience, because you're now doing work in executive coaching, and you have the ability not only to look from a data and a science perspective, but you can also look a coachee in the eye and say, yeah, I was there. I was on the verge of taking my company public, and that's when the world went sideways. I— you've walked their shoes many ways.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's true, I can relate to them, and that's part of my gift. But, you know, you might say, to use another archetype, is, is that I'm a wounded healer. And oftentimes our greatest gifts as healers, as helpers, come from experiences and traumas that we have gone through. And that makes us able to relate to and know the path that others are walking, and then have the credibility and the empathy and the compassion for for doing that. So my trauma and my history is my greatest gift in terms of what I am able to do these days. And that's why I say it's my— like you highlighted, and I'm so— I feel so seen and appreciated by you that it's really my unique journey from all bringing the science and the engineering and then the military and the command and control and how to build an environment that inspires individual in a team context. And then my, my dark night of the soul and the awakening and the craziness and the trauma of being pushed out of my company, all of which they kind of enables me to do what I do today.

So this journey has led you to what I would describe as evidence based thought leadership. It's based on science, it's based on research. And as you said, there are more and more studies that are following the questions that you asked. What do you want to accomplish with your thought leadership? If you had the magic wand, what would you wish for?

Well, like you said, most people have heard of emotional intelligence, you know, 30 years ago, 35 years ago, when the first research was done by Salovey and Mayer, on these two academic Commission that wrote a paper on emotional intelligence and later popularized by Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence. You know, 30 years later, the whole world speaks about emotional intelligence, accepted as the zeitgeist. You know, until then we used to think, oh, emotion, it's irrational, and then there's reason. And then there was like, no, there's emotional intelligence that brings the two together. Nowadays, most people in our culture are saying there's spirituality and that's woo-woo and esoteric and you know, all kind of stuff. And then there's practical. And so I want the world to, you know, in 10 years, 20 years, however long it takes to bring into the zeitgeist this idea of spiritual intelligence to say and have it broadly understood and accepted as an important construct and concept that we need to elevate humanity the same way emotional intelligence was. And I think it's crucial at this point in time in our, in our world where there are all these existential crises and threats and wars and environmental issues and polarization politically. And unless we understand our interconnectedness and some bring some of these qualities into the leadership, into the zeitgeist, I think we as humanity are really up for a pretty problematic future. And I don't know if we can survive it without understanding some of these fundamental spiritual truths that, uh, and our interconnectedness, and bring in a sense of purpose and compassion and, and service and, and, uh, care for each other. So I think this is, this is crucial at this point in time. And, uh, this is my, my passion, my mission, my calling, is to help awaken greater spiritual intelligence in myself and ultimately in the world.

So a couple of things. One, as I think about your comment about emotional intelligence, right, and we've had a parallel thread running through. I know for a period of time— I don't know currently, but in the past, one of the earlier adopters of emotional intelligence was the US Army. And at a period of time, they were requiring pretty much everyone from enlistee all the way to the top brass to learn about emotional intelligence. So going through that command and control and then layering on emotional intelligence into it talks about how the world changes over time. But I want to ask you—

well, that's, by the way, that's fascinating. I didn't know that. That's very exciting.

It is. And as I said, and that information is at least 10 years out of date, so I don't know if that is true today, but to know that everyone in the U.S. Army was touching emotional intelligence at some level and some portion is huge, right? Yeah. So I want to ask you a question. You've worn a number of different hats and titles. Over your career and your life. So from soldier to entrepreneur to clinical psychologist, researcher, executive coach, have you ever thought of yourself as a practitioner of thought leadership? And if so, when and how did you have that moment where you're like, oh yeah, I'm doing this?

Yeah. So I never thought about it, but when I look at my life, yeah, I would say I was, you know, I was a thought leader in my entrepreneurial experience where I was the first company to do personalized newspaper and say, oh, you know, there's no reason for us to get all my information through these magazines that are mass printed. We have software, we have desktop publishing, we have fax machines. Why don't we personalize? That was a, a creative, innovative idea. I had— was previously contemplating these philosophical questions about the mind-body connection and how is it that matter and consciousness co-emerge in our universe. And I've written papers about that. You know, I've been looking at, you know, this problem of the is-ought problem in philosophy. What's the relationship between normative statements and descriptive statements, which the philosopher Hume said you can't bridge the two, and there's no real— there's no rational basis for any systems of ethics. So I have dabbled around as a thought leader in different domains. I never really thought about it that way, but yes, I, I have been a, a thought leader, I think, um, which means just being independent, thinking about things deeply, and you know, going on limbs that others haven't. And then sometimes I fall on my face and sometimes I come up with something interesting that's valuable.

And asking the question of what if, if we look around the corner, is there an opportunity, whether it's, you know, delivering personalized newspapers or if we look at spiritual intelligence it's the asking the questions and then pursuing them and being able to have the wisdom to know, okay, this is going somewhere versus that was interesting personally, but it's not relevant to anyone else, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And asking the right questions and willing to ask questions that others sometimes don't ask. I mean, you know, I don't know whether it's 50%, 80% of the thing is asking the right question and then willing to look at it deeply and willing to examine in a fresh way assumptions. And that's how the greatest innovations happen, is, you know, we're willing to ask questions and, you know, take sacred cows and say, no, well, maybe this isn't so true. That's how science progresses, new paradigms, you know, scientific revolutions happen. And So yeah, it makes life an exciting adventure, both in, in an embodied way as well as intellectually.

So let's build on that. If life is an exciting adventure, what question are you either asking now or wrestling with? Where is your mind now? Where is my mind now? In terms of the work and the thinking. What's the next question you're exploring?

Well, I'm exploring the question between spirituality and faith and religion and science and rationality. How do we reconcile spirituality and science, which I'm doing with spiritual intelligence? But more broadly, that's a question that interests me. And what's the role of these historical religions that our culture and society have been built on as we move forward? Do we just jettison all of that and just do this thing called spiritual intelligence, which is ecumenical, etc.? Or is there any value for these traditions that people grew up in that are more tribal and what have you? And what's the role of that? That interests me personally as someone who grew up Jewish. And I'm trying to figure out my relationship to my, you know, when I left Israel, I wanted to assimilate. I didn't care about Judaism. I came to the US. I was enough with wars in Israel, etc. But over the years I found like, no, this is somehow in my DNA, in my blood, and I've been trying to reconcile. So I'm doing spiritual intelligence, which is kind of cultivating these virtues in a way that's not dependent on any tradition, when that's part of its power. And but I'm also curious about where do my roots and how important are they to become more whole, to integrate my history to my ancestors, etc. That interests me these days. And, you know, what are the leverage points in spreading greater spiritual intelligence in the world? How to do that? You know, some day I wrote a book. I'm doing these gatherings about awakening spiritual intelligence. I'm doing a course with the Humanities team. I'm looking at maybe doing a TEDx talk. I mean, that's a question. How do ideas spread and what can I do to bring this into the greater mainstream? So these are some of the questions I'm wrestling with.

Thank you, Yossi. And one of the things that also resonates to me is with the question of faith. How does faith fuel spiritual intelligence and provide that drive towards those values and virtues that you talked about, right? And so understanding connections, there's a lot of questions that could still be explored for lifetimes, I think, in many ways around this. Yeah.

So we could talk about faith or a more— which tends to associate people over the association of blind faith and it seems irrational. But then there's the quality of trust, which is trusting the benevolence of the universe, so to speak. Einstein, I think, said one of the most fundamental questions that we face is do we believe we live in a friendly universe or not. And when you look in reality, it's hard to say, oh, it's a friendly universe. It seems pretty hostile. There's, you know, storms and earthquakes and volcanoes and wars and so on. And so we— and you could take the attitude like it's all random and it was quantum fluctuations and the quantum soup and random mutations that give rise to life. And as Richard Dawkins said, well, and people say, well, if you take that attitude, you end up feeling pretty despair, like life is meaningless and so on. And Richard Dawkins said something like, well, if that's what it is, tough shit, so to speak. Excuse my, my language. But so now there's no proof. They can't give you any proof that there is some kind of benevolence, you know, to the, to the universe, that, that the future is going to be okay. There's no proof, you know, by definition it's not provable, but it's a choice that we make. And, um, you know, we can either choose to believe that reality fundamentally is benevolent, and then we orient our life. And to me You can't prove it one way or another, but what is truth? If, if this is more functional perspective that works and helps us lead to a better world, then why not adopt that? And it's a practice. The more I practice the belief that things are okay, that somehow they will be okay, the more inspired and motivated I am, and the better chances are that the world will somehow emerge. So I don't know if I'm, I'm kind of going off.

So I want to point here that we have alluded to philosophy and philosophers throughout this conversation, and I think many roads into thought leadership ultimately lead to really big questions of who are we, What is a good life? How do we make an impact? And where do we apply our effort? Those are questions that, as you said, you could look across history and culture that have been asked in, in many, many places. I can't say every place, but that is the work of thought leadership, and it parallels sometimes the work of philosophy. Yossi, I want to thank you for joining us today for a great conversation around thought leadership and spiritually intelligent leadership. Thank you, Bill.

What a delight to go deep. I so appreciate the depth of your insight and the questions and taking us and willing to go into these deep places of philosophy and existential questions that I think are so meaningful and make our life an interesting intellectual adventure and meaningful endeavor. Thank you.

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