Spiritually Intelligent Leadership: The Key to Inspiring Teams and Igniting Performance

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's Working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity.

0:49 In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor Elise Cortez. Welcome back to Working a Purpose program, which has been brought to you with Passionate Prize since February of twenty fifteen. Already. Thanks for tuning in again this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we have not met yet and you don't know me, I'm an organizational psychologist and local therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose. You'll learn more about us on how. We can work together at gusto dashnow dot com or my personal site at lascoretes dot com. Getting in today's program we have with us today. Joc Amram He's a PhD, a distinguished psychologist, an executive coach catering to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other influential teacher leaders, and a pioneer researcher in the field of spiritual intelligence. Prior to psychology and executive coaching, during a thirteen year period, he founded and served as a CEO for Individual Inc. And Vallasert, two highly successful tech companies that he led through successful IPOs. He's the author of Spiritual Intelligent Leadership, How to Inspire by Being Inspired, which we'll be talking about today. Our conversation includes coverage of the potency of spiritual intelligent, intelligent leadership, it's business impact, and a discussion of many of the core aspects of being a spiritual intelligent leader. He joined us today from Santa Cruz, California, Doctor Imron, Welcome to Working on Purpose.

2:23 Thank you and thank you, Doctor Lees. May I call you Lese? Please do yes, please do absolutely yeah, see, I will thank you. I'm so happy to meet too. I'm always grateful that you're a pr person has found us United US and I, as you know, read your beautiful book cover to cover. I want to just commend you on bringing this beautiful contribution to the world. I align with so many of the points you made it, as you now know through our LinkedIn exchanges. So I think we'll have a really good, yummy, juicy conversation about it. I am delighted and excited to be here with you and this opportunity. I'm enjoying your smile and I'm feeling inspired.

3:04 I'm glad and I will tell you the same thing that I told you before we got an air. I despairs repeating uh listeners and viewers. Yosi has embarrassed me publicly, as happened sometimes with my guest. I often read my guest books when I'm out, either on an airplane or when I'm exercising at the gym. And there were so many points when I first opened your book. You see, I was on the on the bike ipsid. Yes that's right, Yes, that's that's it, and I'm underlining and everything else that I know. People at the gym are like the weird old lady on the bike is at it again. She's lost it anyway, So I have you to thank you for now. People sure that I'm crazy. I'm honored. I thought you just since the work you do, you know, with inspiration, et cetera. But I have to we have to surface for our listeners and viewers.

3:52 What who haven't read the book yet. Let's talk just a bit about on your background before you found your way into coaching CEOs today. I just think it's important for them to understand just a bit of the high points of your journey that got you into the space shom in today. Okay, I'll try and cover that, you know, just a year and a half. It's a little more than that, but I won't reveal this is my deepest secrets. But anyway, I was born and raised in Israel, and like all young men, was drafted into the military at age eighteen, into mandatory three year service. I was a pacifist at the time. Luckily it was quiet time. It's horrific what's going on there now? And I was a shye introvert, math and science oriented kind of kid. And to my surprise, I found myself thrust into leadership and had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment, won all these awards. But despite my success, the command and control model of leadership in the military, which is necessary in battle, really chafed at my soul and I was to some days see if I can build an organization based on different principles and values that inspire greatness and bring out the best in people and helping them actualize their potential both as individuals and then in a team and in a community environment. And that's kind of what led me to come to the US and study engineering and business, and from there, as you mentioned, I was the founder

5:23 and CEO of two companies that I had the good fortune of taking public. Now in one of them, I know I was very focused and driven, and it was my lifelong passion. I was working seventy eighty hours a week over a six to seven year period, and then the Internet came in. It was a big threat to our business model, and I started to get depressed and frozen with fear and how it's going to affect our business and how we're going to reinvent ourselves and can we do that? And that was very stressful time. I persisted and pursue, and fortunately the company became a high flying Internet success and we went public. Our stock was rising, and I was stressed out and I was trying to relax and one day I was getting a massage, and while laying on the massage table, I had this transformative experience where all of a sudden, I felt like my body was made of consciousness. Everything was made of one enormous, fast field of consciousness that I was just part of.

6:30 And the floor that I looked up through the phase cradle, looked like it was in me, and it kind of blew the circuits of my mind. I experienced what people would call a spiritual awakening, but it was so disorienting an experience that it threw me into a manic episode. I was having all these downloads about the future of the Internet as the network of networks that connects everything across time and space, and I wanted my company to be the leader in bringing that future about. And I was initiating several projects because it was like such an open field opportunity. But it was just I was ungrounded and I wanted everything done yesterday, and my team couldn't keep up, and the board thought I was crazy, told you I was crazy, people, and so they put me on a voluntary leave of absence quote unquote, pushed out of the company I started, and our stock price guy collapsed and it was headline stories in the Wall Street Journal New York Times. It was a lot of shame and embarrassment because the people that used to seek my company stop returning my calls and my emails, and I was kind of relegated to being this weirdo that lost it.

7:50 But you know, slowly I kind of picked myself up and I went into therapy, and ultimately that experience changed the direction of my life. I went and got a PhD, became trained as a psychologist. By then, I was also had the good fortune of being an angel investor, helping other entrepreneurs as their first investor and going on their board and helping mentor and coach them and building their company. And I wanted to work with them deeper, and I wanted to understand myself, and I wanted to know whether this experience of oneness and spiritual awakening was real or was it delusional? And that all led me to kind of discover this concept of spiritual intelligence was not coined by me. It was coined by Dana Zohar a number of years earlier. But I wanted to study it scientifically.

8:41 I knew about emotional intelligence and all the research that was done to show how it helps our well being and improves leadership and so on, and I thought, wow, that would be a beautiful parallel if there was such a thing as spiritual intelligence. But if you're going to study something academically, you have to know defind it precisely, and measure it so you could see what effect it was. But that didn't exist. So I set on a path to define it. And so that started me by interviewing seventy one teachers across all the world spiritual tradition, whether they were Buddhists or Daoist or Muslim, or Christian or Jewish or Hindu, and discovered that there are common virtues across all the world's traditions. Service, purpose, compassion, integrity, trust, humility, forgiveness are common virtues. And this was very exciting because it says, regardless of our theology of or cosmology, there's something fundamentally similar. And then from there I worked with a colleague and we developed the first academically validated measure of spiritual intelligence. And once I had that, I could go study. My original question is does a contribute to leadership?

9:56 So I did a study with forty two CEOs and two hundred and ten members of their staff and showed that spiritually intelligent leaders lead team with higher morale, greater commitment, and lower turnover. And I was controlling for emotional intelligence to see how the two compliment or relate to each other. So emotional intelligence contributed and spiritual intelligence contributed. If I'm going to get nerdy, I'll say emotional intelligence explained forty one percent of the variant, spiritual intelligence explained forty six percent of the variants, but combined they explain sixty seven percent of the variant, so that says that they each have a unique contribution, but they have a synergistic multiplicative effect together and that was kind of what started this whole journey. And since then, this measure of spiritual intelligence has been used by other researchers and validated in other contexts and translated into over a half dozen languages, and it's been shown that it contributes to satisfaction of life, quality of life, mental health, resilience, productivity at the individual and the group level. And it's even been shown that leaders with higher spiritual intelligence produce financial better financial results for their business units. And so anyway, I'll pause. This brings me to hear now.

11:24 In view all right, Well that was incredible, you see, and I want to just go back to a couple of things because I really want to listeners and viewers to understand that they given what you just shared, which is incredibly powerful and incredibly alluring and clearly demonstrates your prowess in this field and your impact in this field, I do want to take you back to just you know, this spot where you were you described it when you're on the massage table, but I want to situate it and that you really say you say in your book. I felt an ache in my heart for greater and deeper fulfillment. I didn't know what that was, but I knew it could only be found through exploring my inner sect. And I want to bring that home because what I know you see is that when I'm speaking to audiences, when they feel that sort of emptiness, that's what they're reaching for.

12:08 It is something that speaks to meaning and something greater, et cetera. So I want to just have you go back a little bit there to situate that for our listeners and viewers, and then I would like you distinguish, if you would, the difference between inspirational leadership and an inspired leader. Okay, great, So yeah. I mean, you know, in some ways I was, you know, at the height of I was physically healthy, I was wealthy, my company went public, I was worth millions of dollars. But there was this crisis of meaning you're talking about and fulfillment, and there was something that was hungering. And that's why I was reading all these psychology books and spirituality books, and something clicked while I was on this massage table trying to relax that said, no, we are part of this one.

12:59 Feel there's no separation. We we kind of think we're these skin encapsulated egos walking around separated. I'm looking at the plants here on my desk, and there's trees outside, and there's you thousands of miles away. But in reality, you know, my inhale is the exhale of the plant producing the oxygen, and my exhale it's inhale. And there's no way I could have built this computer, or my clothes or my food on my own. So we're all interdependent. We're part of this web of life that we come out of and sustains us. We're like single cells in this organism. Now we have individual identity, just like any cell in my body has an individual identity, but as a role has a function, it's unique to it. Whether it's embedded in the kidney or in the liver and the thyroid or the heart, eat cell has a unique role to contribute to its organ which contributes to the organism.

14:03 So you know, you can't just take care of your individual cell if the organism is under cancer attack, Eventually you're going to die. So this understanding of our interconnectedness was a crucial shift, and it overcomes so much of a mental health challenges that we have in our world right now, with loneliness and anxiety and depression and mental health disorders, because we see, basically, we've put ourselves in a solitary confinement. It's the worst harshest punishment in prison because we think we are in these separate skin encapsulated things.

14:44 So anyway, I could talk a lot more about that, but that was kind of that lynchpin moment of spiritual awakening, which was also a crisis and as I said, led to me being pushed out of the company. So I'll pause there. I think you're other question. Yeah, to distinguish inspirational leadership from an inspired leader, because there's a crux there that I want to get to. Yeah, so this is good. So I mean we can look right now. I mean I could say, well, am I inspiring the leads? Am I inspiring the leaders the listeners? Well, I have to look out and try and read your facial language and whatever, and yeah, you said some nice things, et cetera. But you know, too a sense, if I'm an inspirational leader or an inspiring leader, I have to look outside. I'm not empowered. I mean, that's not determined by me. It's determined by how you respond to me.

15:39 Inspired leader is like I look inward and I feel am I inspired in this moment? I am because I'm talking about spiritual intelligence, which is my life's passion and my calling and my purpose to awaken greater spiritual intelligence and myself. And the world. And I'm helping do that right now. So I'm feeling inspired. Now are you inspired by it or not? But I don't know, because it depends if it resonates for you. It sounds like it does, but you know, maybe maybe the things that inspire you are are watching football on Sunday night. I don't know. So if I was talking, if I was trying to be inspiring to you, I'd have to figure out, well, would this at last really care about un Does she care about, you know, football on Sunday nights or does she care about spiritual intelligence and meaning and purpose? So, you know, if I'm inspired, I'm on fire, I'm on passionate with you know, my sacred spark of life is ignited, my flame is fanned, and then people that resonate are drawn to me and then they find me inspiring. But that's the effect, you know, Otherwise, if I'm trying to be inspiring. I'm more like a politician.

16:52 What do they want? What do they want to hear? That's not and I could fake it for a while, but ultimately and not really being authentic, and I'm going to burn out because there's going to be this I'm telling a story to try and win people over, but it's not really coming from the depth of my soul, and that's going to burn me out. So in my answering, you you did, and then. Let's take it one step for then they're going to take reverse recu. Let's now stitch together. You say, the root of inspiration is what, well, the. Word inspiration comes from, which is what leaders do. In contrast to managers who managed resources, leaders inspire And that was the first lessons I heard I learned in my Harvard Business school. One of the first cases managers' leaders are the same different. It's a classical thing. But leaders inspire and the word of inspire is spirit, which is the animating breath of life.

17:49 That's what I want you to bring home. Yeah, yeah, So leaders breathe life into their organization by laying out a sense of purpose, a vision, and a mission that people that are motivated by it can get behind and then you have an aligned team of people who shared mission, values and purpose. That is a community of care. And this is so crucial when there's mutuality of care and mutuality of aim. Completely agree, and we are going to cover more off on that after the break. Let's take our first break. I'm your host, doctor Eleas Cortes, who joined Mare of doctor Josi Amram. He's a distinguished psychologist and executive coach catering to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other influential leaders, and a pioneer researcher in the field of spiritual intelligence. We've been talking a bit about where his fascination and now calling it came from. After the break, we're going to get into the dimensions of spiritual intelligent leadership.

18:48 Stay with us, We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise alisee at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

19:57 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortes, as I too, am dedicated to help them create a world where if people realize their potential at work, especially, are led by inspirational leaders that help them find and contribute their greatness and do business that betters the world. I continue to research and write my own books, so the last one came out in March of twenty twenty three. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically in liven your business. I wrote it to help leaders understand the layout of today's land, what does the workforce need and want from them? And then I offer twenty two best practices to provide that culture build for them. And curiously you'll see the last part of the book I separate those practices into ones that are based in IQ and EQ and SQ spiritual intelligence. And that's why I got so excited when I read your book. So what I would love to do next year is I would love to talk about as many of your dimensions as we possibly can. And so first starting off with the notion here when you talk about your book here, the first one.

20:59 The seven dimend there. Well, if you could you rattle the seven dimensions and then I'll go into the other pieces as well. If you can't remember all them, I've got a cheat cheat for us. Okay, great, Well, the first one is around meaning mobilizing a sense of purpose and a call for service. Why we hear, what's the vision of what we're trying to build, et cetera. The other one is interacting with grace, which is bringing trust and hope for the future we're trying to build, bringing joy, finding the beauty in what we're doing, and expressing gratitude and appreciation for everyone. The next one, if I'm remembering, is being inner directed, yes, which is, you know, being centered, interconnected with the courage to be our unique, authentic self and the freedom that's associated with that.

21:48 There's a certain sense of confidence and then the other one is community building, fostering community of collaboration and connectedness where there's a mutuality of care and compassion among everyone. And you can synthesize different opposing points of view. It's marketing and sales and engineering versus one versus the other. Are we trying to build a low cost product or the highest quality product? No, both of those. It's kind of a yes and type of thing that that values each perspective, each department, and from that you create this greater synthesis higher truths. There's the presence, which is showing up with authentic presence, so we're clear in our intention, we're paying attention. I'm not here with you right now, thinking about my text messages, what I'm doing next, et cetera.

22:42 And that's one of the problems today is we're so bombarded and people have a hard time managing our attention and so being in presence, being clear in our attention intention, you know, having our attention on the task at head and feeling empowered and grounded. And then back to that centered thing. And then there's the domain of truth, so we're motivated and devoted to truth, which means we're open to learning and listening and doing the right thing as opposed to proving ourself right, which comes from a place of insecure ego. So it's about truth, doing the right thing as opposed to being right. And the last dimension has to do with wisdom, which is the ability to tune into our intuition, our higher self, and learn and tap into that wisdom and be wholeheartedly devoted to our purpose, our mission, our cause, and that you know, gives us all this energy, all this alignment. We're undivided and all our life force is behind what we're doing. So we're most powerful and empowered.

23:57 M beautifully explained and with just a slight bit of exuberance described disguised as passion. And I just want to invite you, listeners and viewers, just imagine if you could be living and leading your organization from those distinguished qualities that you'll see just described. Imagine if you could what you could do with that. So I just want to give you the opportunity to step into that and imagine what that could do for your business and for yourself. Next you'll see what I want to do is I just want to talk a little bit. You've already mentioned this before, about some of the business impact of what happens when we are led by a spiritually intelligent leader. You mentioned that, you know, the higher morale, morality, the higher engagement, et cetera. But I do want to take us back to the same Bain study that I founded and mentioned as well. You've done a lot of research, but you also mentioned that Bain found these thirty three characteristics, but they also discovered that inspired employees are about twice as productive as merely satisfied employees, if you could just speak a little bit to that.

24:54 Yeah, So it's interesting you uncovered the same study I believe that did that with thousands of employees across many companies to identify what are the qualities of inspiring leaders, and they uncovered qualities like centeredness and presence and servanthood and service and humility. Which so if you look at the twenty two qualities of spiritual intelligence, over half of them map into the Bain study. So those a nice overlap. By the way, I didn't say this, but those qualities of spiritual intelligence also map into character strengths as identified in the field of positive psychology. So you have this convergence from ancient traditions thousands of years on these spiritual traditions, and then now positive psychology studying what are the character strengths that make us be more productive, more effective, happier human beings. And then you have leadership development studies like Baine and elsewhere talking about qualities like integrity, servantthood, presence centeredness.

26:02 So you've got this convergence across these three different things all pointing to these same qualities. Now you might say, okay, great, but why aren't we just saying this is a collection of qualities, maybe they're random. Well, and why are you calling them spiritual intelligence? Yes? See, I think that would be the obvious question if I was kind of sitting over there or listening to this. And the simple answer is, first of all, that these were originally identified in all the spiritual traditions. And it's kind of curious that regardless of whether you believe in God or Buddha, nature, father, Sky, mother Earth, the Tao, all these traditions are basically saying, hey, let's connect into our depth. Whatever name you want to call it, whether you call it call it Buddha, nature, true nature, the Tao, the spirit, and the ground of being, there are many names you know that we can give them.

27:00 But when we connect to our essence, our spirit, I might say, our life force energy, these qualities naturally emerged. So what unifies all these qualities is that what naturally emerges when we are connected to our spirit, to our essence, to our life force energy, and these qualities are the highest and deepest expression of all of that. So that's why I think they're not just a random collection of qualities that happened to have been surfaced in positive psychology and leadership and so on. There is a unifying theme behind them. Your second part of your questions.

27:42 I don't remember, but I don't think it matters because that was that was so where I wanted you to take us, and so compelling and it's excluisitely explained. Yo. See. So now what I think makes a ton of sense because you have really helped to understand what do you mean by spiritual intelligence and that last bit that you shared, and now we cover before why it's so important effective in organizations in the leadership. Now I think it makes a lot of sense to talk about the spiritual intelligence scale that you developed and using your practice. How did you develop it and how does it work? Well, developing a psychometrically validated scale is not a small project. No, it is not, sir, I commend you. Yeah, well, I didn't develop it on my own. I brought in some of my interviews from Spiritual Intelligence, but I brought in someone who was on the faculty at By University. You had expertise and statistics and psychometris psychometrics.

28:36 So you come up with hundreds of potential items that have what's called face validity that they seem to relate to these themes I identified through the interviews, and then you administer that to thousands of people or many people, and then you see what factors clusters statistically, and then you see what differentiates And we had these seventy one spiritual teachers that were nominated and were interviewed, and then they also took the assessment, and then you look at which which items helped differentiate most between these these spiritual teachers that were nominated by their peers as those that embody spiritual intelligence and walk the talk in daily life.

29:25 And so from all of that, you do all these statistical tests Cronbak alpha test, retest, reliability, construct validity. I mean, I some of the statistics was behind me, but we got the right person and then it was validated by other researchers. As I mentioned, So it's a very involved process to come up with something that is statistically validated, scientifically validated, and I think that's crucial if you want to develop a field. What made emotional intellig diligence catch on, you know, zeitgeist in our culture. It's a concept that was first developed by two academicians, so Lov and Meyer in a paper in nineteen ninety. Up until then, we thought that emotion and reasons are in diconomy. If I said to you, do you know people in your life who you consider emotional? You think for money and say yes, And then I say do you know people in your life that are emotionally intelligent? They might be different sets of people. Usually when we think of somewhat emotional, it's not necessarily the most positive thing. They might be out of control, this regulated, et cetera. But emotional intelligence is a different thing. Now we have a similar diconomy between spiritual and practical. We think as someone who's spiritual their wu wu. Maybe they wear malas and you abulates and maybe they, you know, talk to angels, or I don't know what, which is all beautiful if. But you know,

30:55 what spiritual intelligence cares about is not the momentary experience you have and not whether you believe in God or not. It's like, how do you behave on your work team? How do you relate to your colleagues, how do you relate to family members and friends? How do you drive on the freeway, how do you shop in the supermarket? How do you relate to the cashier that's helping you. So it's really bringing into daily life is what matters with spiritual intelligence. So the scale, I'm kind of going a little bit on on tangent, but the scale asks how do these things show up in your daily life and how do you behave? And you could do a self assessment of it and it's normalized against you. So it's not trying to get your ego hooked about am I higher than others? But like, what are my strengths relative to myself? So you know, some people, mindfulness is a real strength. They're very aware, they pay attention, they're in their body, their present in the moment. For other people it's a strong sense of purpose. For other people it's compassion. So each of us has, you know, some level of capacity on all of these qualities, and for each of us there's a different set of strengths. Now, the other thing that we've done that's unique is that there's a three sixty component to this, so that you can ask people, colleagues, people around you to give you feedback and then you could see how your self perception relates to how others rank you, and you might find

32:27 some pleasant surprises. I didn't think I am bringing so much joy into my interactions, but other people think, oh, you know, he's joyful, or maybe I think I'm the funniest guy, and everyone was like, oh my god, you know he's like so boring and whatever. So it's helpful to get calibrated and see how our self awareness matches or our self concept matches with those we actually work with. So all of that is available on this intelligency website people that are interested as a free assessment that people could take of spiritual intelligence, and we. Will send them after the break. But just so you know, ladies and gentlemen, you can find that at ocmron dot net. That's E y O s I A M r A m dot net. Let us scrab our last break. I'm your host, doctor Elie Cortes.

33:18 We are on the air with doctor Yo C. M ron, an distinguished psychologist and executive coach catering to CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other influential leaders, and a pioneer researcher in the field of spiritual intelligence. He has been helping us understand how he and his team have developed the Spiritual Intelligence Scale, and a bit more about what went into it and what it tells us about ourselves and our behavior. After the break, we want to dive more deeply into those dimensions that he described earlier. We'll be right back.

34:01 Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise A Lisee at Elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

34:52 Thanks for sting with us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If you are just now joining us, my guest is you see I'm run. He is the author of Spiritually Intelligence Leadership, How to Inspire by Being Inspired, which is what we're talking about today. So for this last bit of time we have together here, we say I just really wanted to treat our listeners and viewers to a little bit of a deeper dive into the seven dimensions that you gave us before. What I find interesting is that for each of those. Seven dimensions listeners and viewers, he then goes in and gives us a further set of aspects related to each of those. So we don't need to go into all the aspects of each of the seven dimensions, but if you could just color for us a little bit more about the dimensions, starting with mobilizing meaning. And I love that that you call it mobilizing meaning, because I call it activating meaning. But I really like the idea of mobilizing.

35:41 Meaning yeah, I like mobilizing, I like activating, but they're both active. Yeah. So in the meaning domain, there are four capacities. One is purpose and I think that starts with finding our purpose as leaders as individuals, which starts with finding our unique gifts, talents and superpowers and the desire to share and use them to contribute. And it unleashes so much energy where our personal purpose then lines up with the organizational purpose and so there's an alignment within our purpose, our personal purpose and the team organizational purpose.

36:23 And when we do that, there's a lot of energy, a lot of passion, and a lot of alignment, and then we feel called to serve both. As an individual, I serve by contributing my talents and superpowers and actualizing them, which is a great gift to be able to actualize things and use them to contribute. And all the research shows that the deepest satisfaction and fulfillment comes from when we contribute to others, and so it's both at the individual level service and then also how we as a team or organization adding value to the world to our stakeholders will be the external customers or internal customers, et cetera.

37:07 So you know, we're answering the question of service. The other component is visioning. I think you are using that in some of what you're talking about, the visionaring or forget how you who're saying yoneering, So so you know, it's like a key part of leadership is the future we're building and having a vision of what it is. We paint a beautiful painting or picture or and then we're called to fulfill it. It's like it's asking us. It's like a piece of art that the sculptor sees and then they're like removing all the the junk around it so that the beautiful I forget, I think it was Yeah, David was kind of like that, you see it, but there's got all the stuff and then but once you see it and it's kind of like I want I want to see it become real. And that's a technique used in sports psychology and elsewhere where you visualize where you're going to serve your tennis ball or your golf swing, or martial artists visualizes their hand going through a brick and it just it just cuts like knife through butter. So it's like laying the mental pathways the neural pathways in our brain, and then it's like we've lined up the universe to let us get there. And the last piece of that is reframing all difficulties into opportunities,

38:38 because life is full of challenges and disappointments, and we can get discouraged. But I think the best leaders and as individuals we see every obstacle as an opportunity to learn what is it asking of me this disappointment? What qualities do I need to bring to bear in order to overcome this challenge? So every every challenge becomes an opportunity, and that reframe is so important. So all of that relates to meaning, I hope I said enough, that was gorgeous, brought it home. What I appreciate so much about that explanation is so many people find that'd be such a nebulous, abstract term, and you just totally brought that home. And so if we do the same thing with one of the early dimensions, which is interacting with grace, I think that you. I love that you add in that with dignity, beauty, and joy, and I appreciate so much that joy is fun of getting its place in the sun. Just seeing that show up more important so if you could also distinguish that dimension interacting with joy for us, joy or grace the whole sorry, the whole, the whole dimension interacting with grace.

39:46 Yeah, so grace has you know, it's like bringing trust and hope is the first thing. So if you're gonna ask people to put their blood, sweat and tears behind the goal, that you have to trust that it's meaningful, then there's hope that we can get there. So, you know, having a certain level of basic trust that even if we don't accomplish the exact goal we set out, that will be okay. We'll adjust, will adapt, will flow. And this is also a huge personal thing, is like trusting myself to respond to life, trusting life that the universe is friendly, as Einstein call it, it's you know. That.

40:27 So having that trust gives us hope, which gives us the strength and the courage that our efforts are not futile. So that's the first thing is to imbew ourselves with trust and hope. Then, as you mentioned, joy, joy activates our sense of humor, playfulness, which brings forth the creativity. So all the research suggests that people are relaxed, enjoying themselves there's joy, there's freedom, there's psychological safety. Now everybody's using that buzzword. There's more, more creativety, more productivity. The other component is beauty. I mean, if we see the beauty in what we're doing, and beauty we think of like, Okay, I can go to nature, the forest, the flowers, the sunset, the sunrise. Yeah, that's all beautiful, piece of music, piece of art. But can we find beauty in a spreadsheet the way it's elegantly like this will find beauty in a math equation that uncovers the mystery of something. It has a certain level of elegance, and you could see beauty and how a team interacts to produce an outcome, like a basketball team, how they pass the ball. There's a grace to that interaction and collaboration that you can if you're a basketball a fan, you can see beauty in their movement and their grace. But you can uncover

41:58 that at work. It does have to be just like you know, as I said, going to nature and watching the sunset and then gratitude granted is so important for our moon and overcoming depression and and it's it's its own blessing. One is we're grateful for whatever we're grateful and then we're grateful for being able to recognize it, and that's its secondary base of blessing. And then when we share that gratitude and appreciation, that motivates the other person. So this creates a positive feedback loop. As we appreciate others, they feel seen, they feel appreciated, that motivates them to keep going, and then we see more and then they appreciate buzz back, so it creates this positive feedback loop.

42:42 So all of that kind of brings positivity and energy and to the environment. So that's kind of the the interacting with grace. Okay, I want to say just want to add two things for you just said, because it's so learning and beautiful. On the beauty front, I had Stephen Morris on my show and he wrote a book, The Beautiful Business, and what he's really putting forth is the idea that we can all create a beautiful business by the way that we choose to do it, how we are being of service, and then we can just really be bowled over by that beauty. So I just want to just celebrate his work. And then on the gratitude piece, I love the notion.

43:24 I learned some some time ago that gratitude is a psycho hygienic tool. What that means, of course, is it literally cleans our mind. And I just really appreciate the role of gratitude. It gets it's it's getting more of its grace and you know in the sun as well lately, but along with joy. But I just wanted to I wanted to echo just a couple of those things from what you what you illustrated, so many great things you'll see. Great, thank you, so welcome. Well, let's go on to the next dimension, becoming interdirected, which you know, for you that's so much of where your journey really became stoked and developed. I would say, but if you could say a bit more about what's involved with the becoming interdirected to mention.

44:06 Well, it's getting centered and then learning to listen to our inner compass of truth. I mean, as leaders, we have the s paradoxical thing for true intimacy, for true connection, for we have to do two things that on the face of them, I think Martin Boeber said this our contradictory. I need to stand my ground and I need to be completely open to you. So we don't want to become stubborn, standing our ground and not being open. But we don't want to be so open that we have no flexibility, we don't learn, and so on. So being interdirected, we need to have the confidence to be ourselves, to voice our opinions, you know, with our passion, but at the same time be open, which relates to this other thing around openness and truth. But the inner directed is learning to tune in and read and follow our inner compass of truth and morality and integrity and all of those things. And you know, one of the key things I do is working with my clients is helping them tune in because so much from young age, we're so externally focused. I mean, we get fed by our parents.

45:28 We can't survive on our own. We're seeking approval. We need our parents to love us and I'll be disappointed in us. So we're kind of conditioned from very young age to be externally oriented. And this is our culture is like it's about money and fame and approval. But the whole journey is to turn inward, to start following our inner signals, and that's where our intuition can come. And that's where our north star and having the confidence than to hold our ground and follow that inner guidance. Otherwise we're just back to this inspiring versus inspired. Otherwise we're more like politicians trying to figure out what to say to win the audience. Well, that's not leadership. That's more followship. And sometimes we need to follow, but that's a different thing. We have to be conscious about am I taking a leadership role and following my north star?

46:31 Or am I following others? And sometimes maybe my north star says, oh, right now, hand the baton to someone else and follow them. But that's still requiring the discernment moment to moment. When do I lead from the front, When do I lead from behind? You know, you'll see I really appreciate how you distinguish what comprises that particular dimension the becoming interdirected, because when I'm out speaking and people are just so hungry it is to figure out, you know, how do I discover my purpose? I really think that so much of it is starting right here with what you just said. So those four components I think are just so so critical solictens of viewers. If that's where you're wanting to start in terms of purpose, I think that is a great place if you can work on those four pieces of what he put forth as becoming interdirected. So here we are, we've come already. It goes by so fast. We have just like about a ment or so left on the show.

47:23 For your part, you know that this show you I've listened by people around the world who were interested in either developing their own sense of self to a higher level. They want to become better versions of a leader, or they want to help stear their organization to do business that betters the world. What would you like to leave them with? Well, as I said that this journey is a win win, I mean, I've worked with over one hundred CEOs and they've built companies with billions of dollars in revenue, thousands of employees. But when they learned to turn inward and cultivate their spiritual intelligence, become more inspired. They felt more interconnected, interconnected with others around them and ultra connected to the web of life. And so they feel inspired, empowered, and connected, and that's super fulfilling. They're more effective at work, but it transforms their personal lives. You know, as people developed these qualities of presence and attention and intention, you know.

48:22 Then they come home to the dinner table with their family and their children, their present, and they're expressing gratitude and it just has a ripple effect throughout the life. So it's it's much more fulfilling and successful in the business dimension, but it's really rewarding at the personal dimension. And yeah, completely agree, you'll see. I am so grateful to know you. I'm so grateful to a cross paths with you, who have been learning from you, to be inspired by you, to learn from you. And I'm so happy to share with my listeners and viewers around the world. Thank you for being on working on purpose. Thank you, Thank you listeners and viewers.

49:03 You are going to want to learn more about this man and his amazing work. You're going to be surprised at the breadth and the depth of his work. I really encourage you to go to his website. It's Yo c Amran dot net. So it's y O s I A M R A M dot net, Yo CMN dot net. I'm rom M, I'm mom. Excuse me, that's what I have but to do? Not say that A M R A M. Yes, yes, I'm rom dot net. Last week, if you missed the live show you can always catch to be recorded podcast. We were on air with Colin O'Neill talking about his new book, Take Control By Giving Up Control, the Value Centered Fast Trek for Organizational Growth, where he offered the ever system that he created based on value creation across the organization. Next weekly on the air with Matt Schenker, the founder of matter More, we'll be talking about his creation of the Empowered Wellbeing Theory, transdisciplinary bio bio bio psychosocial spiritual model for understanding human wellbeing and the work they are doing to harness the best of AI and behavior science to empower the future of work and what they call work four point zero.

50:10 See you there, and remember that work is one of the best means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously, leadership inspires and passion performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, let's work on purpose,