Welcome to Destiny.

Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning.

You ever wonder what makes a company success popular that produces products or services that you're always wanting to purchase or be a part of, or use.

Our discussion today on Destiny has to do with spiritually intelligent leadership.

This is a new topic that's to come up and it follows what we think.

What my guest today thinks is how our ancestors acted when they were in harmony with nature, with the cosmos and so on.

And we're able to treat their workers, their labor for with a level of care and consciousness that not only improved the work environment but made the work more satisfactory to the employee.

Hey, this is Cliff, your host of Destiny, and today we're talking about tools for transformation.

But on a business side, we're speaking to a former CEO of a Silicon Valley company.

And here in California, the Silicon Valley is thought of to be the incubator for revolutionary ideas, products, services, and the production of companies like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Computer and so on.

And I actually worked for PayPal for many years, which used to be owned by Elon Musk and others.

And I worked for Microsoft, and I worked for Apple Computer and during the dot com craze, who could write a proposal on a napkin and literally get funded the next day.

It was so incredibly nutty.

But things have changed since then.

But there's still are companies, tech companies that are incubated and then funded by venture capitalists companies.

And what we're going to learn about today is when you launch a tech company, you have to have a lot in place otherwise known as spiritually intelligent leadership.

And when we say spiritual, we're talking about some of the fundamentals of human decency, work, environment, productivity, and care when you're in an office now.

I although I worked in many various companies for years, I was never one to work for big corporations.

In fact, when I worked with PayPal, there were a couple of thousand employees and what they used to call what they still call campuses.

These are large multi story buildings and each of them had their own cafeteria, recreational room.

In some cases they had places where you can get your get a massage, you can get your shoes, or you're excuse me, your clothing pressed, dry cleaned.

I guess you could call it, but those days are not the same.

People companies don't spend that kind of money anymore.

Although I have a friend that still works with Google.

He's been there now, Oh it's going on fifteen years, and they still have meals for free, and they still have lounge areas and sleeping areas and all kinds of really cool giveaways, all kinds of really cool benefits that are just make the job much more creative, I guess, but the payoffs so that they expect a lot more out of it.

You need to spend longer hours there.

But what we're going to learn today is that as more of the future CEOs and business administrators are trained in these spirit spiritually intelligent leadership roles, they are looking at a holistic type of company where again the employees are treated with a great deal work respect, they are inspired to do more creative work.

And what's happening is we're going to see a whole different level of manufacturing and product development and services here in the United States that are the future.

And you'll hear a little bit about what we can expect in the coming decades using spiritual intelligent leadership.

So today's program is spiritually intelligent leadership, and my guest is Yosi amram Hey.

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I have worked in the Silicon Valley, but we've never had a guest talk about corporate America before and the spiritual nature of a company, and if this is even possible.

My guest is Yo c Amram.

He is a former CEO.

He's now a clinical psychologist who specializes in CEO leadership and his story is fascinating.

The book we're talking about is Spiritually Intelligent Leadership, How to Inspire by being Inspired, and this is a good one.

I think it's a good fit for Destiny, and we're going to learn all about building a company in Silicon Valley and some of the spiritual aspects that can go along with it.

So, Hey, Yoshi, welcome to Destiny.

Great to see you.

Thank you, Cliff, Cliff, thank you.

I'm delighted.

Then, thanks for your kind introductory words.

And let's see if we can get inspired today and inspire each other.

Talk about your your upbringing.

You open the book with your not only your childhood, but also the migration to America.

What was the inspiration and you don't really This is interesting because in the book you don't really say why you wanted to come to America other than and my thinking after reading part of the book, you wanted to have the American dream.

You wanted to be able to launch yourself in a more spectacular method than perhaps staying in Israel.

Yeah, okay, great, I'll try and answer that.

So.

Yeah, I was born and raised in Israel, and like all young men, I was drafted into the military in this crazy war torn part of the world.

Luckily it was peaceful time and I was a math and science nerd kid.

So now it's kind of pacifist in my leanings.

But to my surprise, I had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment and got all these leadership awards.

But despite excelling it, this command and control model, it really chafed it my soul.

The pressure of the military.

The command and control is necessary in battle.

You don't have time to get into a conference room and do some whiteboarding and brainstorming.

Someone has to call the shots and move in a coordinated fashion, just like you do on the football field.

If you will so so and then.

But the pressure creates a cohesive environment where people really care about each other and will give their lives because you have shared destiny to use your word.

As a community, as a group of people, you're bonded together, but the individual is kind of suppressed.

And I had the crazy idea of like, how do we build an organization that facilitates and supports the growth of the individual, letting them express their unique talents and gifts and grow and actualize and do that within a community in organizational settings.

So that became my overarching dream.

And so how was I going to do that?

I was going to someday build a company, start a company.

And these days Israel is known as startup nation, and there's all the ventures, et cetera.

But in my days, which was just you know, a couple of years ago, No, it's been a lot more than that.

You know that, none of that existed in Israel.

So I came to the US.

I went to MIT.

I wanted to study engineering, develop the technology, and then maybe someday developed an idea to launch a startup.

And that's kind of what happened.

What was your emphasis at MIT?

Was it engineering or something else?

Yeah?

I was electrical engineering, computer social engineering, right, Yeah, But quickly I realized that I didn't really enjoy I want to be in front of computer all the time, and so I went and got my MBA pretty quickly thereafter.

And then I was interested in combining technology and business and understanding market needs and then what technology enabled you to do, and and that led to the formation of my first company called Properly Individual, Inc.

It was all about the individual actualizing the individual, but within a team spirit, community environment.

An Individual was the first company to do personalized newspapers interactive media.

This is before the Internet, so you and some of the listeners may not remember the days of fax machine.

So you would get on your fax machine every morning Cliff's Morning news, and then you told our software which articles were relevant or not.

And based on that we had self learning and it would adapt itself, so it was personalized news.

The name Individual stood for the idea of individualizing the news for the unique needs of each individual, but also in organizational philosophy that supported the growth and actualization of each individual employee.

And it started on facts, then went to email, then went to the Internet when that happened.

But I'll pause there because there's a whole ramatic chapter in that transition from facts to Internet and all of what that meant for me, because it was a huge threat to the business.

And you know, part of the issue with Silicon Valley is you always ride the next wave, and then you get the new technology wave and it just disrupts and threatens your business.

So that's kind of what happened.

Facts became.

You have an IPO, it for the individual LLC.

Did you get funded so that you could begin growing it?

I can't remember that.

Yeah I got.

I went an IPO, which is a public offering, but that was later.

I funded it venture capital, And that was a whole journey to get venture capital because my idea at the time was pretty radical and I had no background in publishing and so on.

But yeah, I got.

I got it started with some angel industors and then institutional venture capitalists, the top vses in Silicon Valley, corporate partners like Microsoft, and major newspaper chains that were interested in the future of publishing.

But then I had to.

Let people know that you were working roughly eighty hours a week and you're write about this in your book and you had no life.

Just spill it out, come on, give us.

Yeah, and then I got kind of burned out and depressed, especially when the Internet came in and it was clear that on the information we were selling on a premium subscription basis on Facts was going to become free on the Internet.

So, you know, we had a lot of revenue from the fax business and we knew it was going to die, and so we had to move to the Internet.

But to do that, we had to make the information free and add supported, and that was going to cannibalize our facts business, and that was really scary.

How to make that transition.

I had a lot of pressure, tens of millions of dollars raised from the VC in my employees, so I got frozen with fear and I couldn't.

My employees were like, Okay, what's our Internet strategy?

How we're gonna move?

This is the new world?

And I was like, I don't know exactly.

So I just wanted to hide and I took off.

Oh god, I took off for two weeks to kind of take care of myself.

And my employees are where did yes you go?

So a little they know I was basically kind of depressed and shared and frozen.

But you know, to my credit, I persisted and I had the resilience, and eventually we figured out a strategy and moved to the Internet and we became a high flying internet stock.

And that's when I took my company public, and you know, our stock was rising very quickly.

It was the early days of the Internet, before Google, before Facebook, and it was wide open feet and I was trying to capitalize on it.

And it was one day I was trying to relax and I was getting a massage.

I was lying on the massage table and getting deep to shoe massage, and I went into this deep relaxation, deep state where my ego kind of dissolved, and all of a sudden, I experienced this thing of oneness where I realized that normally we think there's the me, whatever me is.

Then I have my awareness, that which I'm aware of, Like I'm right now seeing you on my screen, I'm aware of you.

And then so there's the me, there's the awareness, and then there's the object of the awareness.

But when I kind of relaxed and really tuned in, I realized it's all made in one thing.

It's one field, one one thing.

There's no separation between the self and the awareness.

And the object of awareness.

So that really kind of blew my mind.

I opened my eyes, I was looking through the face cradle, and it looked like the floor that was under the massage table was It felt like it was inside of me.

And so that just really short circuited my mind and actually threw me into a manic episode.

And here I was running a public company and trying to capitalize on the Internet, and I went into this hyperactive, manic state.

I was getting all these brilliant ideas about the future of the Internet, and a lot of that came true, but I was pushing my team so hard to execute on it.

Everything had to be done yesterday.

And my board was like, hey, you got to go chill out.

We're going to put you on a ninety day voluntary leave of absence.

Well there was nothing voluntary about it.

They just passed the board resolution.

And here I was on a leave of absence.

And when that was announced, our stock price got cut in half, and there were headline stories in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and.

They thought you had gotten nuts and you were You were not a an on board CEO anymore.

You were more of a distant memory is that why the stock tank?

Well, basically, the wallstreem was like, hey, this guy is the prime mover in the visionary and the driver of this company, and all of a sudden, abruptly, he's you know, on a leave of absence.

What the heck?

What happened?

You know?

Did So they're like, you know, we're investing in much in the idea, but we're investing in the person.

And when you would get this kind of surprise news, Wallstream does not look upon it favorably.

So that's basically it.

I mean, it was nice for my ego.

I was like, okay, I was the important guy and without me, the stock is worth a lot less.

But it didn't really help my pocket book, you know, my bank account.

So when you were on this fourth ninety day retreat or time out, whatever you want to call it, did that help or hinder you?

Well?

I didn't accept it.

I mean I was like, no way, you guys can't tell me to take ninety days off.

If you don't reinstate, institute me back and let me do the strategy I want to do.

I'm going to resign.

So they were like coming and hiring.

I submitted a resignation letter, and I called the special meeting of the of the shareholders to kind of take control of the company to vote a new board.

So it became a big drama and then they they issued a press release that they fired me after I resigned.

So it was a big, big s show, as they say so.

But because I was determined to, uh, you know, to fight for my baby.

This was my baby.

I conceived it, I built it, I was the founder of the CEO, chairman and so but then you know, it really hit me and then I lost it because I couldn't.

I could not.

I mean, these are people that put on the board, but you know they were they were like, hey, you know, you can't run a company in this state the way they were right, you know.

I mean I'm just going to ask you if you if you were to look back, would you say now that you were acting erratic and on businesslike uh to be running the company and this is why they are freaking out?

Yeah totally okay.

Well, but I mean by my insights, my insights were if I maybe humble say, they were brilliant.

I mean the insights I had were were right on, and time only prove proven it.

And the people pushed me out years later, told me, if we executed the vision and strategy would have been the next Facebook or Google.

But I was erratic and I didn't know how to manage my team and the board to see it.

So yeah, I mean they did the right thing.

I mean, of course, it's painful.

And let me just ask you this, would you say now as a clinical psychologist, that you were in a manic state?

I think so, yeah, that was that.

Was Yeah, I think, you know, and that's known in the literature that sometimes when you have a Kundolini awakening or what's called the spiritual emergency, that it can you know, destabilize you.

So you can have these brilliant spiritual insights.

But if you're psyche and the container is not strong enough, the vehicle, the vessel, then the vessel fracture.

So you know, that's what happened.

Now.

Fortunately, you know, that was almost thirty years ago, twenty nine years ago, and I've worked a lot on myself and i haven't had another episode.

And then I've been able to get off all the medications, all the drugs.

I've been off of any meds for you know, twenty seven, twenty eight years.

Sure, but you know, it takes a lot of skill and self awareness to know how to ground and cultivate this energy, but build the vessel that can contain it without it exploding.

Right, But this was not only a shift for you, but also an opening to what you would call spiritual intelligence and understanding of spiritual intelligence.

And this is the theme of the book.

I think it's also insightful because the book is based on forty two interviews or I guess you could call interviews with CEOs that you populate the book with, and their own journeys and their own trials and tribulations and helping them become aware.

So this panic attack that you had served you, but at the time nobody was prepared to deal with your issues, and you were the head of a company.

So it was just I mean, as you look back, you must think of it as a turning point.

Obviously.

Yeah, it was a big turning point.

It was as tragic and it was a blessing in disguise, as you said.

So.

Yeah, So these forty two CEOs were in my doctoral research study, and I developed this measure of spiritual intelligence and then looked at how that compared to emotional intelligence, compared to personality, explained who were better more effective leaders than engendered teens with higher morale, higher commitment, and lower turnover.

And indeed, even when you account for emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence had more of an effect.

And since then, other researchers have taken this measure of spiritual intelligence that I developed and have shown that leaders that have a higher level of spiritual intelligence produce better financial results for their business units.

So this is this is kind of triple quadruple bottom line, it's good for the financial results of the business.

It's good for the mental health and well being and fulfillment of the CEO, the leader.

It's good for the team, their morale, their their fulfillment, their self actualization.

So you know this isn't just wooh.

There's science behind this, and not just me.

There's you know, many researchers around the world that have taken this work and carried it and validated and shown that spiritual intelligence increases satisfaction with life, quality of life, resilience, mental health.

Now I'm doing a study with couples and looking at how spiritual intelligence helps relational satisfaction your primary romantic partnership.

And it's so far from the early sample.

Even though it's a it's a relatively small sample.

I have so far twenty six couples that completed.

My goal is to get to one hundred.

But the results are already amazingly statistically significant.

That spiritual intelligence by far has the biggest effect on relational satisfaction, more than attachment theory, more than emotional intelligence.

Is what is spiritual intelligence?

You see, give us the definition?

And also did you come up with your own version of the of spiritual intelligence during or after your corporate life?

Okay, that's a great question.

So yeah, what is spiritual intelligence?

So let's just by analogy, if you I'm going to compare to emotional intelligence.

So what is emotional intelligence?

More people have heard about it.

So emotional intelligence the ability to draw on emotional resources to help manage emotions in ourselves and others.

You know, up until that concept came, we thought there was a dichotomy between being emotional and being rational.

If I said, hey, Cliff, do you know people in your life that are emotional?

You know, that might not be the greatest compliment.

You know, they might need the kind of people that prone to a lot of drama.

They get theory and a puppy commercial.

But emotional intelligence is a whole different thing, right, It's the ability to draw on these resources, use that information to help you make better decisions, show up in a better way.

So what is spiritual intelligence.

So spiritual intelligence is the ability to draw on spiritual resources and embody spiritual qualities that have been celebrated throughout all the world's wisdom traditions and spiritual traditions from millennia.

So what are these qualities?

These are qualities like purpose and service, and gratitude and trust, and humility and compassion and forgiveness.

These qualities have been talked about for thousands of years, from the ancient Greeks to the Buddhists, to the hindu the Christians, the Muslims, the Jews, the Shamans.

So I interviewed seventy one teachers across all the world's traditions and asked them how spirituality informs their life and how does it help them function better.

And these were people that were nominated by their peers as people who walk the talk, and so these were the qualities they talked about.

So the point is, and this is an important distinction, there's a difference between being spiritual and being spiritually intelligent, just like there's a difference between being emotional and being emotionally intelligent.

So you know, you normally think, okay, you have spiritual beliefs.

I believe in a higher power.

I believe in God, I believe in reincarnation of the soul.

I believe in destiny.

Whatever you believe in.

Okay, those are your beliefs.

Important, they can inform your life.

But that's a belief.

And then you have experiences.

I can be meditating, i can be praying.

All of a sudden, I'm feeling connected to a sense of oneness.

I'm walking in the forest, I'm feeling one with nature whatever, I'm channeling information.

This would be spiritual experiences, but spiritual in telling us how do I embody these qualities in daily lives?

So I could, you know, have the greatest spiritual experience or the greatest belief.

But then I show up to work in a team meeting and everybody is fighting about who's right, and instead of focusing on what's right, I'm trying to prove myself right because it's my ego.

It's trying to show itself up and prove that I'm smarter, better than other people around me, or I could be have the greatest spiritual belief system, but then I get on the road and I drive like a maniac and I have o own rage.

So you know, spiritual intellience is not about your belief about your experience.

It's about how you live and embody these qualities in daily life.

And the qualities have been talked about for thousands of years, regardless of the theology, whether you believe Jesus was the Messiah or muhammads with the final Prophet, or the Buddha was enlightened, whatever tradition you come from, you have your own belief system, but the qualities you want to cultivate are universal.

So that's very exciting.

It is, And they don't teach you this in NBA courses at all, I would think, so this is something that you have to pick up on your own, the spiritual intelligence you're defining, or pick it up in a core work or someone who is a mentor, I would think would be the best way to get it.

We're gonna take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves and will return shortly with my guest today Josie Amrim discussing his new book, Spiritually Intelligent Leadership, will be right back.

My guess today is Josie Amram.

He has written a new book called Spiritually Intelligent Leadership.

This is a look on how corporations can empower their workers to be more productive and to be more innovative.

I wanted to ask you when you were interviewing these CEOs, you talk about some of them having a natural understanding or an innate understanding of spiritual intelligence.

To talk about that for a minute, was that a surprise for you.

Someone.

Yeah.

I mean the thing is they may not have used that language, so you know, but they had a sense of purpose, or they had a sense of of a calling, or they had a sense of trust in life, or they had a vision, or they expressed and acted a lot of uh, gratitude and appreciation for their employees, or they were very centered and they followed their north star.

So the exciting thing is you said, they don't teach it in your MBA program.

But you know, I've talked about these qualities as you know, being talked about for thousands of years throughout the ages.

But now we have modern research in the field of leadership development.

So Bain and Company one of the top management consulting companies in the world that works with Fortune one hundred global two thousand companies.

They did a study of two thousand companies and they looked at employees and what they found and leaders, and what they found is that employees that were inspired were twice as productive as employees that were just going about doing their job to earn a paycheck.

And then they looked at what were the qualities of the leaders that got employees inspired and get what they identified thirty three qualities, and over half of the spiritual intelligence qualities in my model overlapped when theirs.

So these were leaders that were service oriented, they were compassionate, they were good listeners, they were centered and so on.

So you have a convergence.

I mean, they may not be thinking about it in a spiritual intelligence, but you know, you need you need a leader that has hope and optimism and trust in the future to mobilize people to believe that what we're doing is not feudal, that it's going to bear good results.

And that comes from a fundamental trust.

And then you need the leader that when you encounter difficulty or challenge you can reframe it into an opportunity for growth.

And now there's this buzzword the obstacle is the way you know and and there are books like that and so on.

So this is this is coming into the mainstream and it's going to take another ten years or more.

It took thirty years for emotional intelligence to go from academia to the mainstream of the zeit geist because there was all this research and more understanding about how emotional intelligence helps us.

Are you suggesting that this spiritual intelligence and business is eventually going to be part of corporate life, that this is the model for the future.

I think so.

I hope.

So.

I think that's our home.

That's pretty ambitious.

I think it's great because what you're saying is you get CEOs that are empowering their workers, and that's really important, and that there's a lot of people that become CEOs or presidents of company that don't understand how to empower and trust their employees.

Yeah, and they feel more empowered because to be spiritual intelligence, you have to connect with your spirit, which is your spark of life, the animating life force.

Spirit comes from Latin spirit is the animating breath of life.

So all these qualities, Actually, why do I call it spiritual intelligence?

Two reasons.

One is these are qualities that are common to all the spiritual traditions for thousands of years.

And two, these qualities naturally emerge when you're rooted in your essence, in your life force.

So when you're in touch with and you ignite that spark of life within you and then you fan that flame, then it empowers you and you start to be radiating this energy, and then people that resonate with your vision and your values style to be drawn to you.

And then you have a community of people that's aligned with the shared mission, vision and values, and then everybody has a sense of belonging and there's less toxic politics and everybody's growing in the same direction.

So that's exciting both for the leader who's now more fulfilled.

They feel more connected and they don't have to work eighty hours a week feeling like everything rests on their shoulders.

They can delegate to other people, other people help, everybody's helping each other, and people are feeling actualized and connected.

So, yeah, what's the what's the future look of a company that has spiritually intelligent administrators?

I mean, what kind of work, what kind of of results can we expect?

Well, I mean, the research shows that when companies have multiple stakeholders in mind, they're not just thinking, oh, I'm owned by my shareholders and my jobs to maximize profit when they think, Okay, I have multiple stakeholders, I have shareholders, I have to produce profit.

Yeah, I have Wall Street.

Yeah, But I also I have employees that I have to help them grow and feel actualized.

I have customers that I have to deliver quality product.

I am part of a community, and so I have to take care of the community and the environment and so on.

The companies that take that approach more holistic to all their stakeholders, lo and behold, they produce better financial results for the shareholders.

So you take it's kind of becomes a win win.

So I think the future, this research is gonna make it and people will start recognizing, No, when I take care of my employees, they're gonna be more loyal, They're gonna work harder.

Like I said, employees that are inspired are twice as productive when I take care of my customers and deliver quality products as opposed to just cutting costs, cutting corners and then I build a strong brand.

And you know, the companies that do the best in the long run have strong brands that have been built on quality products and great reputations.

So taking care of your customers, taking care of your employees then results in a better business.

And it sounds like you're talking about an in ubation system that is new but also has very positive results and can really foster substantial growth.

Yeah, and it's basically saying, take a holistic view on this thing and a long term view, and you know, it's basically taking a systems approach and understanding how quality employees that are happy are going to deliver better quality service.

Think of like an airline like Southwest.

You know, they created their founder was very spiritually grounded and he was like, we're going to make this airline be fun and our employees are going to have fun and joke around.

So that's how they built their brand.

And then you know, when you get on a Southwest flight, people were like, oh, this is a lot more fun to fly Southwest and to fly you know, some of that has changed, has gotten bigger and bigger, and he's out there.

But my point is that he understood that investing in his employees, creating a culture of fun, built his brand, improved the quality of service for his customers, which made his business more successful.

So it's all about thinking win win and understanding the feedback dynamics between different parts of the system.

So it's actually all very rational and science based and valid.

Is opposed to think spirituality Well that's woo woo.

And you know, I don't know what you're talking about.

Now this is grounded in science and it all makes sense.

Yeah.

I mean, you use these wisdom traditions, this kind of language.

It might turn a lot of people off, but if you show them the results and just change the language so that they understand it, they'll buy in probably much better.

Yeah, well yeah, some people are turned off by the wisdom traditions.

But you know, as I said, if you said emotional intelligence forty years ago, people thought you're not, so you know, like, no, you're either emotional or you're intelligent.

But now we know that, you know, emotional intelligence is real, as measurable and positively impactful.

And same thing about spiritual intelligence, So it's not about your beliefs, and you can actually be non spiritual if you will, and be spiritually intelligent.

So I've had clients that are across the entire spectrum from devout religious practitioners of a tradition to quote unquote spiritual but not religious, to agnostic to devout atheists.

But you can be a devout atheist and still have a sense of purpose and still express gratitude and you know, be humble and ego less and you know, bring a lot of presents to what you're doing as opposed to being distracted.

So all the qualities I'm talking about, you don't have to believe in God or any anything else.

It's just like how you show up with these qualities, right, I want.

You to talk about the seven dimensions of spiritual intelligent leadership.

I'm going to read them out to you, and if you give us a little highlight on each, I think our listeners will get an idea.

The first one is meaning yeah.

So there's a couple of qualities related to that.

One is purpose, service, vision, and turning difficulties into opportunities.

So you know, you have to tell people in your team and your organization, we're here, what's our purpose, what's our vision?

You have to have a vision of paint the vision of the world that we're all working towards that draws us and invites us, and then it answers the question, you know, how do we add value to the world.

What service are we providing?

When you think about it, the word service is often associated with spirituality, but it's also a fundamental part of it.

Business.

Well, the business is there to serve its customers.

So you have to paint a picture of the world, the future, the purpose, the vision, and then you have to create meaning out of the obstacles in the way.

You know, whenever you were saying, Okay, this is our plan, is what we're going to do, it's not always going to go smoothly as you plan.

Things are going to come at you.

You're going to get curveballs.

So instead of giving up, you have to have you know, see, I was like, what is this asking of us?

We have to reinvent ourselves.

We have to you know, see it as an opportunity for growth, just like in our personal lives.

You know, tragedies happen, like what happened to me.

I was pushed out of the company.

But you know it was a difficulty, a huge difficulty, but it became a huge opportunity to reinvent my life and to do all the stuff I'm doing now, So so that that's all related to the domain of meaning.

Meaning.

And the next one was grace.

And I was curious about grace.

Uh, I can think of a graceful way of going about your business, but how do you define grace and how does it work as a spiritual intelligent aspect?

Yeah, so there are undergrad the domain of grace, there four qualities.

One is trust, the other one is beauty, joy, and gratitude.

So you're you're interacting.

So as a leader, you have to have trust in the future.

As I said, you have to believe that what you're doing is going to have positive effect.

You're somehow going to fulfill your mission in some way.

So what we're doing is not feutile.

And and like I said, turning difficulty into opportunity, it's based on trust that the obstacle is actually there's an invitation to develop new skills and uh, it's drawing us to develop our capacity.

So that's trust.

Uh.

And then beauty.

You want to see the beauty that's being uncovered in your work.

Now normally we think, oh it goes to nature and the forests, and I see beauty and flowers and trees.

But you know, why not see beauty in a spreadsheet and how elegantly.

I mean, if you're a physicist, you see beauty in a physics equation.

You know it's very elegant.

And so we all have different perceptions.

It's important to say that.

Yeah, we do have.

But the point is you can find beauty in your work and your power presentation, in your ad campaign, in a memo that someone writes very well, or an ad copy, so that motivates you and gives you satisfaction because whenever we encounter beauty, our heart opens and we're just inspired and empowered.

And then enjoy if you bring joy to your activities.

And there's all the research that shows the joy and humor fosters creativity and better problem solving.

So if you go to these creative design agents, sees, et cetera, you see they have these, you know, rooms for relaxing and playing foodsball and ping pong, because when people are having fun, their creativity starts.

So bringing joy into your meetings, into your interaction, joking around helps the business.

And then gratitude if you show appreciation first, noticing things that we appreciate improves our mood.

It's not that happy people are grateful, it's that grateful people become happy.

So when we express gratitude, you know, there's all the research that shows that improves our mood and improves our immune system, et cetera.

And then when you express that gratitude to others through appreciation, they're motivated and then they work harder to to you know, continue to get that positive feedback.

The next one is inner direction, and it's almost obvious, but perhaps there's a spiritual intelligence aspect of that one as well.

Yeah, well, if you're going to be a leader, you got to follow your north star and you got to follow your your thing.

Otherwise you're following them.

You're a leader, not a follower.

So you know, that's the difference between a leader that has a vision, that has a passion, that has a direction and that says, Okay, you know this, this is the vision and I'm confident in it and calling me and I'm following that that inner compass my my north star, as opposed to I'm a politician and I'm looking around like okay, what what what are the what do they think I should do?

And I'm trying to figure out from my employees what do they what do they want me to do, or what do they think?

And that's not to say we shouldn't get their input.

And so this is the paradox.

You have to be strong and hold your ground and have your inner compass and at the same time be open to others' ideas.

Yes, but ultimately you know, you have to discern the truth and trust your your your judgment and and then you live in integrity and alignment.

And that's the discernment that you you have to to follow the truth.

And so that's the inter directedness.

Yeah, I I you use the word that I was thinking it was just vision being a critical component of inner direction.

The next one is community.

Well, you know, you work for many people as the primary community, and we're living in a loneliness epidemic pandemic.

We're so isolated, but we're social beings, and so you want to be part of a group of people that has a shared vision, a shared purpose, shared set of values, where people care about each other and that that makes us happier, more fulfilled, and we care about each other, and in that environment, people help each other and support each other as as opposed to working across purposes and so it results in better outcome and for the business and uh more loyalty to the organization because you've built this web of trust and relationship where people care about each other and then they don't want to leave.

They want to help their call their friends, their colleagues.

Yeah.

I like the convincing the employees to carry the the vision and become a community of one of one thought the next one.

The fifth spiritual intelligence leadership idea is a presence and that to me would be the you know, the CEO showing up once in a while and being available and so on.

But how do you define that?

Well, I mean you're talking to CEO.

It's a all level.

I mean, right now, you know you and I hopefully we're present.

I see your present.

You're attentively listening to me.

If if you started like looking at your phone and checking your text messages and thinking about your your next appointment or I don't know what you're going to do this afternoon, I would feel like you're you're not there, and I'm gonna I'm gonna start I'm gonna start drifting off and the quality of our interaction and creativity and collaboration is going to suffer.

So I get it's at any interaction, whether it's with two team members, it's it's a manager, it's a it's a one on one.

You know, we're gonna get the quality of the output based on the presence.

And this is something we're all dealing with, is like everything's competing for our attention with all the social media and text messages and emails and ads, et cetera.

So you know, managing our attention and being clear of our intention because otherwise you go into something and before you know it, you're on some tangent, you forget your intention, you're not paying attention, and you've wasted an hour and the hour's gone by.

And so if you're in sales, let's just say, you know, I have to have an intention, like, Okay, I'm trying to build rapport with my prospect.

I want to understand their problems so then I can come back with a proposal that fits them.

So you know, it's it's crucial that I know what my intention for this interaction is.

I'm trying to connect emotionally, I'm trying to create some rapport.

I'm trying to understand the problem space so that we can collaborate on building a solution.

So this is in business, this is the CEO everyone.

It's in your family with your children.

You know, you want to be present with your and you want to be present with your spouse.

You know.

You see people, you go to the restaurant and people are having dinner together and everybody's on their phone.

I'm like, okay, now what are you doing with each other?

This is your weekly date or whatever.

So it's a good analogy.

We're going to take a short commercial break to allow our sponsors to identify themselves and will return shortly with my guest today, you'll see Amram discussing his new book, Spiritually Intelligent Leadership.

Will be right back.

My guest today is you'll see Amram.

He he is the author of Spiritually Intelligent Leadership.

This is a look at corporate America from the lens of spiritual leadership.

Uh.

The sixth of the seven is truth, which I find interesting.

Talk about that.

Well, truth is like your openness, interest, curiosity, devotion to truth.

I'm really interested in truth.

I want to know what's true here.

And as opposed to you know, proving myself right, I want to do what's right.

So in a business, I want to know the truth.

What does the market really want?

What did the customers really want as opposed to my idea.

I may come into the market with some sense of arrogance, like you know, Henry Ford said, people just I'll make color cars, any color as long as it's black.

Well, okay, for a while you're the dominant player, you could do that, but at some point and your competitor is going to say, hey, customers want multiple colors.

And so you know, you have to know what is the truth of what the market, the employees, the people you're dealing with.

They have to be open and curious and interested in what's real, what's true, as opposed to just your ideas of what it is and trying to prove yourself right there trying to do what is right.

It's so fun to listen to you because you're you're now a therapist, but your CEO hat is on and you're moving forward in a lecture.

It's wonderful.

The final topic here is wisdom, which is number seven of the seven dimensions of spiritual intelligent leadership.

So how does wisdom fit into this?

Well, wisdom says that you know there is our analytic mind, and we do our spreadsheets, and we do all the analysis and the models, and when you make a decision, and you got to do all your homework.

But you also there are these things that are beyond the linear thinking.

So you have your intuition.

When you're hiring someone, you trust your intuition beyond just what their resume says and what have you.

But you kind of tap into your sense.

You have your your higher self.

So for example, you have a problem, you don't know how to deal with it, but you have some internalized wise figure.

It could be a grandparent, it could be a spiritual teacher, it could be your future self, and you ask that.

So you ask yourself, Okay, fifteen years from now, ten years from that, when I've been successful, I've achieved all my things, I've made all the money I want whatever, I'm going to ask that future self of mine, how should I deal with today's problem and how did I get there?

So it's ways to tap into things that go beyond the normal analytical mind that we have to do.

I'm not dismissing that you got to do all the spreadsheets.

You got to do all of that, but then you let go of that, like you know, Einstein or Steve Jobs or all these great creative minds, or Thomas Edison have said they did all the hard work, but their insight, their brilliance came to them, you know, in in intuitive hits, taking a shower, taking a walk, waking up from a dream, et cetera.

So how do you cultivate that you know soil so that these ideas can sprout through your intuition in ways that are not explained mechanically through linear logical frames.

Yeah, you gotta do the logical analysis, so then your subconscious can work in the background you get these flashes of insights and wisdom.

Can you choose a couple of people that you feature in your I don't know if you are using their real names.

I don't think you legally allowed to do that.

But give us a case, steady one or two people who were helped when they understood that their spiritual, intelligent focus was the best way to go as a as a company leader.

Well, I mean, you know, I can tell talk about many, many stories, many cases.

One of the ones I discussed in the book is the case of Ted who raised tens of millions of dollars from top venture capitalists in the valley, but his company wasn't doing so well and he had to do a bunch of layoffs and he started to feel down on himself and getting depressed, et cetera.

So the first thing was to get him out of the depression.

And you know, we did that by just getting him into a gratitude practice.

And you know, so every night he thought about three things that happened today in the business that he was grateful for.

And then he moved into appreciating people in real time that did something good that he was grateful for that improved them moral.

And then we did this visioning exercise about, Okay, where do you want the company to be in twelve months, and really create that vi through visualization like they do that in sports.

Yeah, you are in in tennis, you shooting the serve, You're going to visualize it going into that corner.

Or you're a golfer, you're going to visualize your swinging and the balls landing on the on the tee in the hole, and so you want to visualize it and that lays the neural pathways in your brain.

It lays the pathways in reality and you're inviting the universe to support you.

So he did that with his future where he wanted the company to be, and he kind of programmed himself that that's going to be a reality, and then he started acting in that way.

And then he did that down the line from his vps to their teams, so that everybody started having this vision and seeing how they are fitting into it.

And that really energized everybody and motivated it.

And so a little behold a year later, they pretty much achieved that that vision.

So you know that that's a spiritual intelligence quality that's used in business, used in sports coaching, using a variety of other things.

I can see it with the CEO, But the people down the line, how are you going to get them the vision?

Is it more like a paper for this week?

We want you to be thinking about the positivity of this new product, service or whatever.

How do you how do you get the others to kind of follow you in that vision?

Well, you know, so you you take it down the line, and so you're each manager, each coach works with their team and says, okay, this is the overall vision right like, right now we have one hundred customers.

Our goal is by the end of the year, we're going to have twice as many two hundred customers.

Okay, so does that what does that mean?

You're in customers service, you're one of the customer service employees.

And right now, you know, because we have one hundred customers, this is what you're doing.

This is how many phone calls you're getting, et cetera.

Now imagine it's a year from now there it's two hundred customers and you're getting you know this stuff, and so let's think through how visualize yourself dealing with that.

How are you handling this?

Maybe maybe we hired another person to help you, so now you have a teammate.

Okay, how are the two of you working?

What are you doing to make so so you bring it down to earth.

You take this idea that we're doubling the business at the level of the company as the CEO.

But what does that mean, you know, department by department down to each person and then so if they internalize it and then they visualize how they are fitting into this new world, then they're preparing themselves so that the customer support apartment can in deal handle twice the business.

Otherwise you're going to bring all these customers, the product quality is going to suffer, and then they're all going to walk away.

Yeah, that's a good one.

As we conclude, you'll see.

Can you provide another example of somebody perhaps who's in the incubation period, is looking for funding that you as a client, and through this visioning or this intelligence work leadership work, they were able to spawn a funding.

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's like visualizing the product how it's being used, and then being nimble when you're launching it and you're not getting the feedback you want from customer and you're not getting the engagement, and then you're like I had this.

I think I talked about this case in one of the chapters.

Someone who was actually a successful entrepreneur and a previous thing he cashed out, raised, sold this company, made a lot of money, and then he started another thing and he thought, I have the Midas touch, I'm a great product designer, and he launched a new app product and he was the results from the user base was dismal, and he was like he couldn't reconcile, like I thought I was a great, smart, successful designer, and that became his egoic identity, and then he couldn't he couldn't reconcile that with the reality that it wasn't going so well.

So we had to kind of go back to this truth domain, which was to let go of this egoic identity and go back to openness.

Remember I said about the thing about truth is about being open.

But as long as you're stuck on your identity, I'm a great designer and I have the Midas touch, it couldn't compute the reality of what the market was giving him and the customers and his identity, and all of his energy was spinning around reconciling those two things that just could so but when he let go of his idea, then he opened up and then he could be more creative and adjust and we even dart his product to get to product market fits so that then it could get the traction and raise the follow on funding and so on.

So that Yeah, would you say that Silicon Valley is still kind of the epicenter for new tech environments or I mean you mentioned Israel, which I didn't know that they were a tech environment, but also there's places in Boston and other smaller places in the United States.

But what would you, how would you define Silicon Valley today.

Well, I think it's still the epicenter hub.

I mean it's like the Florence of the Renaissance.

You get all this smartest people come here, and you know, the AI startups and whatever these days, a lot of them are in Silicon Valley.

So, yeah, you have the biggest concentration of talent, but that's nobody has a monopoly on innovation.

Yeah, Route one twenty eight in Boston, I mean a lot of it also centers around universities and where innovation comes out.

So in Silicon Valley, you got Berkeley, you got Stanford, you got a lot of venture capital that provides the capital.

In Boston, you have MIT, you have Harvard.

In those places, but it tends to be more conservative than the Silicon Valley.

It's kind of the wild West.

And then there are other places in Northern Calia, North Carolina has an area.

There's a part of New York I forget what it's called the and something and yeah, Israel.

Israel has got the second largest concentration of public companies on the NAVSDAC beyond Salaca, and it has more patents filed than all of the EU.

You know, global patents, so yeah, there's a lot of innovation there.

But but it can happen anywhere.

No one has a monopoly on it, whether it's Silicic Valley or Route one twenty eight in Boston or.

Yeah.

So exciting times, you know, there's a lot of it.

They are, but our current political environment is a little repressive, I think, and we don't have as many I'm not in high tech anymore.

I was years ago.

But when I was involved in Silicon Valley, people from around the world came and got their Green cards and many of them stayed and you know, developed families here.

But right now it's not encouraged.

So yeah, you know, I don't know how that affects us in the long run.

Yeah, those are good questions.

I mean that's how I came.

I came in on a student visa and then eventually I got a Green card and stayed, and now I'm in a US citizen.

So yeah, I mean, I'd rather not go into the politics of it, but I would just say, you're right.

I said, we live in exciting times, and we also live in scary times.

But that's why actually we need spiritual intelligence, so you know, we we have human cognitive intelligence, which landed us on the moon.

We split the atom, we deciphered the genome.

We have AI that is amazingly intelligent, smarter than many of us, including myself.

We have emotional intelligence.

We know how to monitor our emotions.

But the world looks like you know, you look, mental health issues, anxiety, depression, suicide, substance abuse are all hy rocketing.

You got political polarization within families, tearing people apart, families apart, and you got wars, so you know, I mean, it's it's very scary.

But we have to understand that we're all interconnected and that's part of spiritual intelligence.

And that's I think to me, that's why it's so crucial that not just for business, but for the whole culture, the whole society, the whole world, for humanity to move to the next level of survival and thriving, particularly in the age of AI, when machines are gonna, you know, take over a lot of what knowledge workers do.

I mean, you know, in eighteen fifty, ninety percent of humanity was involved in agriculture, but you know, with industrial machinery industrial farming, today two percent of humanity is involved in farming and because we produce enough food and then but these days most people are sitting behind us called knowledge workers.

And then AI is going to take over a lot of that and people are going to lose their jobs.

So what are humans going to do?

And I think it's only when we develop our spiritual intelligence, these other skills of compassion and connection and so on, that we will be able to continue to survive and thrive.

Otherwise we'll become obsolete.

The books call spiritually intelligent leadership.

My guess today has been U see Amram, What is your website?

What?

How can people get a hold of you?

Well, I have a website.

If you can remember the spelling of my name, it's not easy, it's uc Amram dot net.

So y SI A M R a m dot net.

And if you can't remember that, you can go to Awakening SI just SI for Spiritual Intelligence Awakening SI dot org.

It's a nonprofit that I started and we host monthly events each month looking at one of the spiritual intelligence qualities with exercises and community.

The next one is this Friday on intuition, and you know, last one was about presence.

We talked about presence today and before that was on trust.

So each month there's a free event and if you go to Awakening si dot org you can register for free, and even if you don't show up for the actual event, you will get a link for the recording on my YouTube channel.

That's very generous, Thank you.

Yeah, well, we're trying to help the world get more spiritually intelligent.

Yeah, you'll see.

As we conclude, who did you write the book for?

Who would you say you wrote the book for?

Well, I wrote the book for anybody who's aspiring to become a better leader.

And by that I mean, first and foremost lead themselves in a better life, because leadership is an inside job.

So someone who wants to lead a better, more meaningful life to grow and develop psychologically and spiritually and have a stronger impact on the world than people around them.

And in a sense, we're all leaders, you know, we're leaders in our communities and our neighborhoods and our families.

So it's not just people that are in corporate environments or whatever, which we talked a lot about.

Obviously that's one aspect of it, but it could be people in nonprofits, in government, or people that want to grow and develop their spiritual intelligence, which as I said, is applicable in many domains, not just business and organizations at work, but in families and relationships.

So the book has exercises and case studies with clients.

So it's not just reading the book and getting the theory.

It's about doing the exercises in the work.

It's not just you read a book about fitness and your fit.

You got to go to the gym and do the workout, but the go to the do your push ups and sit ups and squats and what you're doing, and so same with spiritual intelligence.

You'll see thank you Rick having you on the program, and I appreciate your work.

Thank you, it's been a delight and an honor.

If you can actually just punch in, you'll see emram am ra Am and do a Google searcher.

You'll see his channel on YouTube, and everything on there is free.

I don't see anything to pay for.

He's got short presentations, long presentations, and the majority I would say of the themes are the spiritually intelligent leadership focus.

That's what he's focusing on as an executive, as a former executive, and I mean that's why he has so many CEOs of that are in Silicon Valley.

They know him, and he gave up that part of his life to become a clinical psychologist, and he flowed well, his consciousness flows really well.

I mean, he probably can really help these guys that are under commit this pressure, because when you have your own company and you have somebody else's money, a venture capitalist money, you've got to produce.

It's a lot of work.

I worked during the dotcom era.

I worked for I think two or three different dot coms, and you know, they these guys don't really know how to handle money, these these president and CEOs and these smaller companies, so they'd blow it on parties and stuff.

I remember the one company I worked with in San Francisco.

It was a digital storage company, and the president had an account at a local bar and we could go down and have a martini after work.

I mean, they they the incentives were insane.

They were totally insane.

I worked for another company that was a software company that and I was a marketing manager.

I would they'd flag me all over the place, and I had a I had an expense account, which is not unheard of, but you know, I could take people out for dinner and drink stuff like that.

That's the way things are now.

Same thing, But it seems like back then there was much more money, was much more freely spent in that environment.

So fun interview.

I appreciate OC coming to visit us here on Destiny.

Hey, we're coming to the end of this year, but I gotta say that we have our seventh annual Grand Egyptian Tour coming up April twenty eighth through May tenth.

It is gonna be a great one.

It's a megalithically, it's a megalithic tour.

We're gonna see some of the oldest Egyptian cities that people don't really talk about.

And what I discovered a few years ago and through people like Ben Kirkwick and Christun is that these older sites have megalithic sculpture, megalithic sculpture, and so we're gonna look at some sculpture, We're gonna look at some from stonework, We're gonna look at some temples, We're gonna climb pyramids.

We're gonna have a blast, and I'd love for you to join me.

For all the details, all the information, go to Earthancents dot com.

Forward slash Tours sign up, check it out.

It is very reasonable.

Our tours.

Earth Ancients Tours are typically half the typical price for a normal corporate tour, and we make it inexpensive, but we peck a lot in there.

Once you get to Cairo, all your flights, all your bus, accommodation's hotel, special private visits and food and drink all covered.

So really really great price for a wonderful tour.

From more information go to Earth Agents dot com, forward slash tours right, thanks for this program.

I want to think my guest today you'll see Amron coming to us from I think he was in Palo Alto.

As always, the team of Gail, tor Mark Foster and Faya out in Pakistan.

You guys rock all right, take care of me well and we will talk to you next time.