CEO's, Executives and Spiritual Intelligence
In 1999, when Peter Senge wrote the Dance of Change, he described spiritual intelligence as the space, freedom and safety to bring your whole self to work. Nine years later how close are we to seeing and achieving that result?Disengagement, performance gaps, and stress-related illness are all indicators of a culture that is not a workplace where you can bring your whole self to work. If spiritual intelligence enables creation of business cultures that can receive talent, diversity and adapt to the speed of thought, then what must you embody in yourself in your formal or informal leadership role? Embodying the knowledge and wisdom to naturally create cultures that flourish requires commitment. 1. A commitment to self-actualization which amounts to retrieving passion, purpose, expression, mastery in emotional intelligence (the tool kit), social intelligence (the relationship network) and to constantly step through fear into uncertainty; a fierce commitment to knowing thyself.2. A commitment to trusting your intuition. Recent research from the Heart Math Institute indicates intuition covers three areas: intrinsic knowledge, energetic sensitivity, and non-local intuition. How in touch are you with those three aspects? Which one are you strongest in?
3. A commitment to listening to and leading from the heart and the awareness to know when you aren’t.
Why these? First, a commitment to self-actualization takes you down the road of curiosity. When you are curious, you are listening. Listening allows you to receive the signals that tell you when things are out of alignment either in yourself or your company. Self-actualization is a process, not a project and reflects the conviction to being and achieving your highest potentiality. The path to discovery has many options all guided by your intuition. Intuition has been assumed to be restricted to the domain of knowing what you know intrinsically and the magic that pulls that knowledge together into a ‘gut sense’ of what to do next. In fact, we are learning that intuition goes beyond the cognitive processing ability to include energetic sensitivity and non-local intuition. Energetic sensitivity is a gift that people can have and not know it. Like many gifts it is a blessing and a curse simultaneously because it requires daily balancing and a highly developed attunement to the body. There are a number of signals: feeling drained when under fluorescent lights, little tolerance for crowds, or chronic fatigue. Non-local intuition is a quantum phenomenon where information randomly shows up as flashes of insight or ‘knowing’. Finally, leading from the heart involves knowing how to keep the heart’s frequencies in harmony or alignment. The power for health and well-being is well documented in the scientific monograms on the Heart Math website www.heartmath.org . The techniques are taught to athletes, corporate managers and employees, students and anyone willing to learn how to reduce their stress, increase their well-being and access to the highest level of intelligence we have: our heart’s electrical connection to feeling and pre-cognitive knowledge. The power of these three domains is multi-faceted and merges a range of intelligences into an aligned set of personal technologies for seeing the simple in the complex and the possibilities in the midst of uncertainty. Diversity becomes part of the harmony rather than being experienced as discordant notes in a musical production. Individuals and companies who are focused on mastering a new way of leading themselves through life, find that creating cultures where employees can flourish does not require direct intervention; just clear intention. As an ancient Shamanic law states, energy flows where attention goes.
