Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Cindy’s groundbreaking book is SQ21: The Twnety-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence. It’s available in paperback at https://amzn.to/4yLi3hW. The audiobook version is at https://amzn.to/3Tgqphw.

You can also learn more at her website: https://deepchange.com/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here. 

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8 . The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

• How Inner Work Transforms Your Leadership: Tools for Growth with Jonathan Reams
• Leading from Within: A Former Navy SEAL on Transforming Yourself to Lead Others with Diego Ugalde
• Working & Living in Joy with Pamela Larde

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Cindy Wigglesworth, MA, is the Founder and President of Deep Change, Inc. and a recognized pioneer in the field of Spiritual Intelligence (SQ). She developed the SQ21® Spiritual Intelligence Assessment, a research-based, skills-focused framework that helps individuals and organizations cultivate greater wisdom, compassion, and leadership effectiveness. Her practical, faith-neutral approach has made Spiritual Intelligence accessible for executive leadership development, organizational transformation, diversity initiatives, and personal growth.

Cindy created SQ21® in collaboration with researchers and psychometric experts to provide a measurable pathway for developing Spiritual Intelligence. She is the author of the bestselling SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence and co-author (as Cynthia S. Graves) of Grown-Up Children Who Won’t Grow Up.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] My name’s Maureen Metcalf, and today we’ll be talking to Cindy Wigglesworth, the author of “SQ21: The 21 Skills of Spiritual Intelligence,” which is now a best-selling book.  

Cindy: Thank you for inviting me, Maureen. My interest in the field of multiple intelligences, began when I was expatriated with my family as a child. I was six years old, and we were assigned to live in India. And I was, at that time, first really confronted with: the world’s a very diverse place. There is a tremendous amount of religious diversity, ethnic and racial and cultural diversity, and tremendous diversity in terms of how people live. 

I was very confronted by the poverty that I saw and the suffering that I saw. And in a way, that set me off on a quest to figure out what is a good human life? What does virtue mean in the face of all this complexity? 

And I really started wondering, [00:01:00] where’s the roadmap to help me become the noblest person I could imagine being? 

Surely somebody has written it down, like how do you grow up to be a virtuous, noble, highly contributing person in the world? And I realized that pieces of it resided all over the place, but there was not a cohesive framework for how to become the person I wanted to be. When I got exposed to the field of multiple intelligences, I felt like something went “aha,” and it clicked in my brain: Here is a way that we could talk about this topic. 

And so I quit Exxon to do this work back in 2000 and create a skills-based, faith-neutral, diversity-appropriate approach, something that could be used in your personal life as a framework and something that could be used inside of a corporate setting without creating a lot of diversity issues.  

Maureen: In the space of [00:02:00] spirituality, it easily moves into subjective some would say even woo-woo. 

And yet you’ve built on emotional intelligence and created hardcore competencies and a framework that we can measure. 

And you were looking for something that was practical and applicable, especially in a business construct coming out of ExxonMobil. I can’t imagine they would be delighted about woo-woo kind of stuff.  

Cindy: No. And you know, I fit well in the ExxonMobil culture because I’m a thinking-style person from a Myers-Briggs standpoint. 

I’m highly logical, I’m pragmatic, and yet at the same time, I’m a human being. I have a soul. I have aspirations. I have a desire to be the best that I can be. And the word soul has many synonyms. It doesn’t have to have a religious connotation, but that sense that there’s a larger, higher, nobler self wanting to express itself. 

I was wanting my life to be more than about my job or my [00:03:00] paycheck. It’s about making a difference and being the best person that I could be. So I was very sensitive to the fact that this couldn’t be woo-woo because of its immediate connotation. As soon as you use the word spiritual, people are assuming that you’re either gonna start preaching to them about religion or that you’re gonna go all, sort of wafting New Age, tree-hugging weird on them, and either way, they’re gonna run away. 

So- Yeah … it’s like, how do I tackle this topic? So many people said, “Don’t call it spiritual intelligence. That’s like the worst label ever. Don’t put that on there.” But I could not find a better adjective that didn’t feel like I really wasn’t being honest about this hunger that is in the human heart for this larger something, whatever it is, this innate human need to be connected to something larger than ourselves, something that we consider to be noble, sacred, and some people might use the word divine, other people [00:04:00] wouldn’t. 

I finally decided it needed to be called spiritual because there is that aspect of humanity, and we just need to find a pragmatic way to deal with it.  

Maureen: What I hear you saying is that we all have it-  

Cindy: Yes, it’s innate. And I kind of go back to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where he talks about our survival needs being the bottom of the pyramid, and then relationship needs and self-actualization came at the top of his original pyramid. But what he found as he continued his research is there was a stage of adult development, and what he was looking at were the healthiest people, not people with problems, the people who were really, like, being full and rich and admirable and exemplary as human beings. 

There was a level beyond self-actualization, which he called the self-transcenders. And these people, in a sense, had gone beyond the small ego, the sense of being all about me, to being of service to something larger than [00:05:00] themselves. He believed these levels of development were innate to all of us, but that we would have to satisfy our lower level needs for some of these higher level needs to be allowed to develop. 

Since Maslow, we’ve developed a more sophisticated methodology of charting the adult development process. But nonetheless, he was really onto something, and that innate word really stuck with me, and so that’s why I use that in my definition of spirituality. It’s an innate human need to be connected to something larger than ourselves  

Maureen: It’s so easy in our very charged environment to think of my religion or your religion being above others. Yet we all have that capacity to respond to our highest potential.  

Cindy: Yes, and so in the world that I work in, when I talk about spiritual intelligence, you can think about people having sort of three ways of looking at this topic. 

You have people who would call themselves religious [00:06:00] and spiritual. There’s people who would call themselves secular, atheist, agnostic, and then you have another group of people who call themselves spiritual but not religious. My effort is to speak to the healthy aspects of those three different groupings of people. 

Now, there are unhealthy or closed or mean-spirited aspects of each of those three categories, but there are open-hearted and loving aspects of people in those three categories, and I am interested in speaking to those people who want to develop the skills of love. That’s essentially what SQ is about.  

Maureen: What are the four intelligences and how do they build on one another? 

Cindy: There are many intelligences in the field of multiple intelligence, but I focus on the four core intelligences that are essential for leaders and that means leaders both of organizations and groups, and each of us as we are leaders in our own life. We are leaders to the extent that we are a role model to all of those we touch. 

So leadership demands, first, physical [00:07:00] intelligence. If I don’t take care of my body, I will undermine all of my other intelligences. If you don’t get enough sleep, if you don’t eat well, if you don’t take care of your health, you will be irritated and not able to think clearly. If you don’t take care of just at least enough of your physical intelligence, you’re not gonna show up with the best IQ, you’re not gonna show up with your best emotional intelligence, which is your interpersonal skills, and you’re certainly not going to show up with the highest level intelligence, which is spiritual intelligence. 

So these build and I think of them as having a developmental component to them with physical intelligence being the thing we work on first after we’re born because we have to learn how to focus our eyes and roll over, crawl, walk, run. There’s physical mastery of our body involved. But as we go through life, it remains [00:08:00] foundational, the bottom of the pyramid, if you think of it that way, because of all those things I said. 

If we neglect our sleep, if we neglect exercise, if we don’t take care of our body, our body is the vehicle for the other intelligences. We then go to school, and school focuses primarily on IQ development. That’s usually not an issue for people who have access to good educational systems. We will work the heck out of our IQ development. 

But we don’t often get trained in interpersonal skills, and relationships are often where people derail when they first start working. It can derail marriages. It can make it hard to be a parent. And then you need some EQ to develop your SQ, and we can talk about what that is.  

Maureen: Can we move through those?  

Cindy: Sure. So emotional intelligence, the shorthand for that is it’s what we need to have good interpersonal skills. We’ve probably all met people who are super, super bright, high IQ, lousy interpersonal skills, and often they are [00:09:00] mystified by why people don’t take them up on their recommendations, why they get negative performance feedback, that sort of thing. 

EQ is a very important skill set, and it’s foundational for spiritual intelligence. It has three crucial pieces. The first is empathy, the second is emotional self-awareness, and the third is emotional self-control. So I’m gonna start with emotional self-awareness. Emotional self-awareness means I can name my emotions. 

I am aware of them, I feel them, and I can name them, and I can understand what triggers them. This is a really important beginning point for empathy because if I can’t understand my own emotions, I don’t understand that I’m angry, that this thing I’m feeling in my body right now is anger, this other thing that I’m feeling is anxiety, and this other thing that I’m feeling is sadness or joy. 

If I can’t make those distinctions, I’m not going to read other [00:10:00] people well. Empathizing with other people is a crucial part of the dance of humanity and how we develop our social skills. So Emotional self-awareness is crucial for empathy. Emotional self-awareness is also crucial for emotional self-control. 

If I know that when I feel this thing in my body that’s coming on, it’s like I’m angry, I can feel it, I have a chance to breathe and calm myself down and manage my anger more appropriately. If I’m in unconscious reaction to my emotional triggers, I’m going to be acting out and reacting, and I will have an very poor result in terms of my interpersonal skills. 

In terms of interpersonal skills, it’s a crucial piece of being a good leader, a good team member, a good spouse, a good parent, but it’s also a foundational piece for spiritual intelligence. And I guess at this point, should I just jump in and define what I mean by spiritual intelligence?  

Maureen: Yeah, I think that would be helpful. 

Cindy: [00:11:00] Okay. When you ask, like large groups of people, which I’ve been doing for years, “Who do you admire as a spiritual leader? Who do you think of as a spiritual exemplar?” The same kinds of people would come up: Buddha, Jesus, the Dalai Lama. 

You know, a whole variety of people might get listed. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa. And then I ask, “Well, what are the characteristics?” ‘Cause I’m really less interested in the names than I’m interested in the characteristics. 

And the characteristics that come up that people are pointing toward are things like humble, courageous, compassionate, wise, non-violent, peaceful, able to stay the course even when things are incredibly difficult. Now, as I’m naming those characteristics, you’re probably hearing a strong overlap with your leadership framework, aren’t you? 

At the beginning of my research, I had to first point towards the people who [00:12:00] exemplify this intelligence. I then had to say, what is different from IQ and EQ? 

Because if it’s already been described, I don’t wanna re-describe it. And then I want to have a summary statement, what is spiritual intelligence? And then I wanna describe the skills. The summary statement I ended up initially landing on was that these people embody love. But the word love in English is a problematic word. 

It’s very sloppy how we use it. We say, “I love pizza, and I love ice cream, and I love my children,” and, just used for too many things. It doesn’t have a specific enough meaning. So I found a proverb from the Eastern traditions and it says that love is a bird with two wings. One wing is compassion, the other wing is wisdom. 

If either wing is broken, the bird cannot fly. And I got goosebumps when I read that definition. I thought that’s concrete and specific [00:13:00] enough without being too hard to understand. So compassion (the best of the heart), wisdom (the best of the mind), come together in loving action. If you put that together, then it can then define spiritual intelligence. 

So what I now say is that spiritual intelligence is the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace, regardless of the circumstances. Now, the word “behave” is crucial because this is not about loving people in theory. This is about showing up with the skills of compassion and wisdom and maintaining our peace in everyday life. 

The more difficult it is, the more saintly you are for being able to maintain your inner peace and to stay in that loving place. So that was the definition I came to. And then I went about describing what ended up being twenty-one skills that characterize these exemplary people. [00:14:00] And each of these twenty-one skills is then further broken down into novice level to intermediate level to expert level of skill attainment. 

The high-level summary, ’cause we’re not gonna go through all twenty-one of these skills today, is it’s the ability to shift from being focused on my ego self, the small me, to living from my highest, noblest self. Some people might call that their soul or their spirit. Other people might not like that language and just wanna stick with higher self. 

We use synonyms very generously. We let people bring the words they’re comfortable with to it. But the goal is: what does it take to grow up, to mature in the adult development framework, and to demonstrate the ability to behave with wisdom, compassion, while maintaining inner and outer peace? 

Maureen: So looking at concrete behaviors and using the [00:15:00] synthesis of heart and mind to propel me forward to right action. 

Cindy: It’s a complex balancing act, requires a lot of ability to be self-aware and self-reflective, to look at my own motivations. Am I intervening to, quote unquote, “help you” because your life situation is actually causing me distress? So I’m actually not helping you, I’m helping me, because you’re not living your life in a way that’s making me comfortable. 

So I’m gonna jump in and intervene in your life so that you will look more like me so that I will feel comfortable. You have to have a lot of self-honesty and humility about the fact that our motives are always complex. There are lower levels of ourself, and I don’t wanna destroy those voices, but there’s aspects inside of me that are taking care of lower level needs. 

And then there are aspects or voices or parts of myself, my higher nature, that can truly see with a wiser [00:16:00] perspective, and is much likely to do things that will be sustainably successful, whether you talk about sustainable success in the workplace or success in terms of social change.  

Maureen: Yeah, I like that you talk about each of those parts, and I would say each is important, right? 

If I’m not showering on a regular basis, I’m not gonna be an effective leader. So I need to attend to my daily hygiene needs as well as I need to attend to my higher conceptual spiritual pull.  

Cindy: Yes. And there’s so much beauty and complexity in the approach to all of this. 

Uh, you and I both are familiar with the tool called polarity management, where we can see that, like inhaling and exhaling, it’s not an either/or choice. It’s a pulsing between inhaling and exhaling.  

Self-care and other care is like that. Oftentimes people get lost in the spiritual impulse to totally focus on [00:17:00] others, and that is a place where you can get lost and actually undermine your goal because you wear yourself out. 

You’re physically and emotionally and psychologically and spiritually burned out at some point, and then you give up or withdraw or become mean or get sick. Caring for self, and that includes our body, is part of the spiritual journey.  

Maureen: So I wanna divert for just a minute. You mentioned earlier self-awareness, and I’m hearing the same through everything you’re saying now. 

And yet I think you and I had similar backgrounds that when someone first asked me what was I feeling, my therapist had to hand me a piece of paper with words ’cause the option to have identified a feeling- I couldn’t do it.  

Cindy: Yeah, I know. I couldn’t either, you know, and I would answer the question. 

When I first got into therapy, I’d get that question, and I’d go, “Well, I think blah, blah, blah,” and I would proceed to analyze the problem. And the therapist would just smile at me and say, “I didn’t ask you what you thought. I asked you [00:18:00] what you felt.” And I finally figured out this was a question I was gonna get every week, so if I wanted to pass the test, and I always wanna pass the test, then I better figure out what it was I was supposed to be knowing. 

I had to build my own spreadsheet. I went home and built a spreadsheet of every emotion for it I could find, and I alphabetized that thing. And before I went to my therapy sessions, I would think, “Okay, here’s the story I need to share with him this week. What am I feeling about that? I’m feeling disappointment. I’m feeling anxiety.” I would circle the words. So yeah, it can be quite a journey, and that’s the journey of emotional self-awareness, which was a precursor to me learning to have empathy with other people. Once I could understand the interior domain of my psyche, I could read other faces and body language and tone of voice much more accurately. 

And empathy is, of course, the foundation for compassion. No empathy, no compassion. [00:19:00] Compassion’s like the next step beyond empathy.  

Maureen: So the reason I bring that up for our listeners is I think many people assume that you and I and others were just born with something, and they don’t seem to have it, so they discount this whole line of emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence. 

Both of us have worked incredibly hard to build that inner awareness. And then when I started to know what was going on in there, I didn’t really like it so much, and I kinda wished I could shut that door and, and still do on occasion wish I could shut the door.  

Cindy: The noisy chorus in there: over time it becomes less distressing, but initially it can be like, “Yuck, I don’t wanna be present to all this chatter.” 

 I’m a big Star Trek fan, so I kind of idealize Mr. Spock and the Vulcans, and I thought they had the story worked out. You know, logic. Logic’s the answer. Just shut this emotional stuff down. But we’re not biologically wired for that. It doesn’t work. It backfires. [00:20:00] We need to feel our emotions, and if we wanna have a prayer of good social skills, we have to deal with this. 

Without social skills, there’s really not gonna be the ability for spiritual intelligence, so all of this works together.  

Maureen: And frankly, without the social skills, there’s not a prayer that we’re gonna be an effective leader either.  

Cindy: That’s very true , ’cause unless you figure out how to lead an army of androids and, you know, it’s basically they’re doing the work and they don’t get their feelings hurt when you boss them around, it’s just not gonna work. 

Maureen: Tell us more about SQ21.  

Cindy: Yeah. So my goal with this was to create a roadmap for myself first. I mean, I hate to sound so selfish about it, but it’s like, “How do I get to where I want to be?” 

If I could describe these skills the way emotional intelligence has done it, like from the most entry level to the expert level in each of these skills, maybe I’m not gonna become Gandhi, but maybe I could be a little more like Gandhi. Take one step in that direction. Could be a little more [00:21:00] compassionate, a little more wise, a little less easily triggered. 

One of the ways I differentiate between EQ and SQ is that EQ helps you name and sort of manage your anger. SQ helps you get at the triggers of your anger and helps you get rid of some of the triggers. Unless you are a saint, I don’t think you get rid of all your triggers, but it’s like things that used to bother me don’t bother me anymore. 

Not everything, but some things, you know, like the crazy people on roadways and traffic and things like that. So by working on my mental assumptions and the stories I’m telling, which are interpretations of reality, I back up the story my ego is telling about, “Oh, it shouldn’t be this way, and she shouldn’t act that way, and he shouldn’t have said that,” and the should, should, should, should, should is exhausting. 

And if I realize I’ve inherited those, then I can challenge them and tell another [00:22:00] story.  

Maureen: There’s some Statistics about the five minutes of negative thinking causes six hours of physiological negative impact. So those stories really exhaust our bodies.  

Cindy: They do, and we can get into what I think is called recursive thinking or looping, where we just keep repeating the same thought and negative story again and again and again, and we can make ourselves sick, shorten our lifespan, and ruin our relationships by getting in these traps. 

So I think finding the pathway out is really important.  

Maureen: SQ, it sounds like the biggest business case for this is not only will I be a better leader, but I’m actually gonna be healthier and easier to be around.  

Cindy: Yeah. So for me, there was an ethics issue, an authenticity issue for me. It’s like I’m not going to go out and just ramble on unless I have some research to show that I, with due diligence, have figured out that there is at least something here. And I [00:23:00] hired PhDs who are trained in statistical methodologies to do the initial alpha and beta pilots that we did. 

The crucial piece of research from the beta pilot was: do we have a positive age correlation with these skills? If we did not, we would be showing that we had a character trait or an innate trait like left-handedness, right-handedness that you’re just born with, not that it’s a skill that you build over a lifetime. 

We found a very positive, strong age correlation. That was my first, “Whew, okay, good. This is a skill,” because skills can build over your lifetime. Age doesn’t guarantee that you will develop the skill, but you need years of practice to develop the skill. So that was my first big, “Whew.” We then went through what is called a construct validation. 

Too complicated to go in right now, but basically it verified that we were measuring what we thought we were measuring. And then the third big push on the research was to do the [00:24:00] cross-correlation with Suzanne Cook-Greuter’s work. My hypothesis was that SQ would be highly related to leadership effectiveness and that the MAP, the Maturity Assessment Profile, had been used in leadership settings and shown that higher stages on the Maturity Assessment Profile, higher stages of adult development, were positively correlated with the ability to deal with highly complex transformative change situations. And the world is, of course, loaded with complexity these days. So we have Susanne Cook-Greuter’s assessment already shown to have a positive correlation to leadership effectiveness . If I could correlate my assessment to hers, it would at least show that my hypothesis might be correct, that SQ appears to be related to higher stages of adult development. And we did find a strong positive relationship between higher scores on the SQ21 and higher stage assessment on the Maturity Assessment [00:25:00] Profile. My hypothesis about how these things relate is that you need emotional intelligence to get to kind of the middle stages of effective leadership. 

But to get to the higher stages of effective leadership, the strategist and beyond, for example, in her language, requires SQ. So EQ and SQ can be helpful earlier, but as you go further up, EQ becomes absolutely essential in the middle, and SQ as an additive to EQ becomes essential for the higher stages. 

Maureen: So if I’m focusing on, as a leader, moving through this, then SQ is absolutely a framework that is invaluable to my development .  

Cindy: It is. And it’s really invaluable if you even just look at the description of the skills, it becomes like, “Oh, yeah, of course I need this.” You know? 

It includes basic skills like [00:26:00] skill one is being aware of my own worldview, my own perspective, and skill seven, which is being aware of other people’s worldviews. And this builds humility, perspective-taking, and complexity of thinking. It enables us, if you’re going to trade in a global marketplace, for example, to see more clearly the perspective of all your potential stakeholders, your customers, your suppliers, and to see it not through just the filter of your own worldview, your own viewpoint, your own perspective, but to genuinely role reverse, and that is a hard thing to do. 

It requires the willingness to let go of being right. “My view is right, any other view is wrong.” You just realize my view is just my view. It’s partial, and it’s not complete, and this other person’s perspective is important for me to understand, not just cognitively, but also with my heart. And so that skill, skills one and [00:27:00] seven — understanding my perspective, my own worldview, and understanding the worldviews of others — if that was all we built, what a better planet we would have. 

Maureen: Probably one of the biggest skills I learned is to shut up when I disagree- Mm-hmm … and gather more information.  

Cindy: Shut up and listen is what I often say to myself . I have this little mantra when I feel this urge to interrupt and to speak my truth, like “I need to tell you how I feel.” But wait a minute, take a breath. There’s no harm coming from this. You can listen with your mind and your heart what’s going on here. Maybe you’ll learn something.  

Maureen: I appreciate that because I, I’m thinking of an incident recently where I was pretty angry at someone on my team, and then I had misunderstood what was happening. 

Cindy: Oh, I hate it when that happens. It’s so embarrassing. You know, Stephen Covey has that saying, “Seek first to understand,” and I think that’s a beautiful saying. 

You know, so my- I have this little four-step process. I have a nine-step process in the book, which is my spiritual weightlifting practice . But there’s a [00:28:00] four-step shortcut because nine steps is a lot to remember, and it’s spells SOUL, S-O-U-L. 

Stop whatever it is on my impulses, whether it is to talk, interrupt, get angry, whatever. Stop. Observe what’s going on. Seek to understand. U is for understanding, really deeply understanding the other per-perspective on this. Understanding your own ego, understanding that you’re activated and that’s okay, but also understanding the other person has an ego, and they’re probably activated, and what is their perspective? 

I don’t know the whole story. I learned to be much more imaginative about what might be going on in this other person’s life. It probably has nothing to do with me or little to do with me, but I’m making it all personal, so stop it. So stop the reaction. O, observe what’s going on. Just calm down. Be mindful. 

Seek to understand. That’s the U. And then L, find a loving response, [00:29:00] which is both compassionate and wise. So my shorthand spiritual practice to do this SQ thing is the S-O-U-L, stop, observe, understand deeply, and find the loving response the best you can.  

Maureen: If I had known that years ago, it would have kept me out of so much trouble. 

Cindy: Oh, thee and me. You know, that’s what I wrote the framework for, which I hope is a piece of my life legacy to make other people’s lives a little bit easier if they can look at this as a skills-based way and say, “Oh, you know, now that it’s broken down this way, it’s not creepy, it’s not weird, it’s not about my beliefs, it’s about skills. I can develop these skills.”  

Maureen: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about the book?  

Cindy: The book has a description, an overall description of what do we mean by these terms, like defining spirituality. That’s usually the first thing that has to be addressed. How is spirituality different than religion? Religion is a set of specific beliefs and practices. 

Spirituality [00:30:00] is a global term. It’s this innate human need. We’re not focusing on religion, although you can have a religion and bring your religion to this. You do not need to have a religion. So we get really clear on our terms. We talk about what spirituality is, what spiritual intelligence is, and then we start launching into what are the four intelligences, how are they related to each other, and then specifically, let’s get into the 21 skills. 

These break into four quadrants. How do I become more aware of my higher self voice, be less driven by my ego self? How do I become more in touch with other people’s perspectives, perceive more broadly the interconnectedness of all life, which is such a nourishing perspective to take? 

How can I sustain faith in something larger than myself when things get really difficult? And how can I show up in the fourth quadrant, making wise and compassionate decisions, being an [00:31:00] effective teacher, an effective change agent, being a calming and healing presence, and being more aligned with what is happening, more sort of intuitively aligned with what is already in flow, and aligning with that versus trying to fight against what is happening in the larger web of life? 

And then we go into this nine-step process, which includes some more specifics about how do you stop, how do you take long flow deep breaths, calm yourself, how do you shift from seeing the small egoic story and finding the higher self, more loving perspective, and then the S-O-U-L shortcut and then some pretty general, what I call core practices to develop your spiritual intelligence. 

So that’s the overview of the book. 

Maureen: And then the SQ assessment , can you tell us about that?  

Cindy: Yeah. The SQ assessment is a self-assessment. I like to think of it as a conversation you are having with yourself. Please don’t call it a test. It creates all kinds [00:32:00] of anxiety. It’s just a conversation you have with yourself by answering these questions. 

The natural tendency is to get obsessive about, “Oh, I didn’t score as highly as I should have,” or, “I’m a bad person,” or whatever. That’s not what this is about. It’s about, what is it that I’m saying to myself? What is my higher self calling forth in me right now? As I look at this report, what is the next thing I want to work on? 

What is the next skill I want to build?  

Maureen: And all of this is connected to the leadership maturity framework. Following the steps that Cindy has set forth, you actually do become a better leader.  

Cindy: Yes. My saying is lead yourself first with such authenticity and depth that other people will choose to follow, and it takes all four of these intelligences to become that person.  

Maureen: So let’s wrap up really quickly. Can you give us again the definition of SQ?  

Cindy: Spiritual intelligence is the ability to behave with [00:33:00] wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the situation.  

Maureen: So I think that’s a great way to end; behaving with wisdom and compassion, mind and heart in every situation.