Strong Leaders Serve with Teri Schmidt

164. The Business Benefits of Spiritual Intelligence with Yosi Amram

• Teri Schmidt

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Skeptical about how spiritual intelligence can really benefit business? 

In this episode of Strong Leaders Serve, Teri Schmidt chats with Yosi Amram about the power of spiritual intelligence—an ability to embody virtues like gratitude, trust, and purpose—in leadership. 

Discover how higher spiritual intelligence in leaders correlates with better team morale, lower turnover, and improved financial results. 

Yosi shares his transformational journey from high-stress corporate life to becoming a leader in spiritual intelligence, offering insights that can elevate your personal and professional life. 

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Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teri-m-schmidt/

Get 1-on-1 leadership support from Teri here: https://www.strongertoserve.com/coaching

Set up an intro call with Teri: https://calendly.com/terischmidt/discoverycall

When you saw the title of this episode, were you a little bit skeptical about how spiritual intelligence can really benefit business? Well, in this episode I talked to Yossi Amron about the actual power of spiritual intelligence, which doesn't have to do with any particular religion, but is an ability to embody virtues like gratitude, trust, and purpose. Both in leadership and in community well being through our conversation, you can discover how higher spiritual intelligence in leaders correlates with better team morale, lower turnover and improved financial results. Yossi shares his transformational journey from high stress corporate life offering insights that can elevate your personal and professional life. Yossi is a licensed clinical psychologist, a CEO leadership coach, and an award winning author. He's previously the founder and CEO of two companies that he has led through successful IPOs. Yossi has coached over 100 CEOs, many of whom have built companies with thousands of employees and revenues in the billions. With engineering degrees from MIT, an MBA from Harvard, and a PhD in psychology from Sophia University, he is a pioneering researcher in the field of spiritual intelligence. And his research has received over 1, 000 citations. As the author of Spiritually Intelligent Leadership, How to Inspire by Being Inspired, Yossi is committed to awakening greater spiritual intelligence. And himself, And in the world. Now, before we get into it, just a quick note about my audio. The quality is a little bit less than is desirable, but I felt this conversation was important enough to get it out to regardless. So let's get into it and explore how spiritual intelligence transcends specific religions and delivers improved business results. I'm Terry Schmidt, executive and leadership coach at Strong Leaders Serve, partnering with leaders and teams to turn potential into performance for positive change. And this is the Strong Leaders Serve podcast.

Teri Schmidt:

Welcome to the strong leader serve podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Yosi Amram:

Thank you, Terry. So am I. I'm enjoying being here with you and looking forward to what unfolds. See the adventure of this conversation.

Teri Schmidt:

When you reached out about being on the podcast, it really piqued my interest because I have a love of spirituality and obviously a love of leadership and. Combining those two, um, with what you talk about with regards to spiritual intelligence was really intriguing to me. So I wonder if we could just start with you telling us a little of your story and the experiences that inspired you to focus on spiritual intelligence.

Yosi Amram:

I was born and raised in Israel. And like all young men, I was drafted into the military despite my pacifistic leanings. I mean, it's terrible, heartbreaking what's going on in that part of the world now. Fortunately, I served in a time that was peaceful. And, uh, so I didn't have to deal with, with this kind of horror. But, um, I was a shy, introverted kid, and I came into the military, and to my surprise, um, I rose through the ranks, I had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment, I won all these leadership awards, and, but despite being successful in that. That's context of command and control. It chafed at my soul, and I resolve to someday want to build and lead an organization based on different values. And while command and control may be necessary in battle in the military, but it's not how we want to build organizations and lead people, particularly in the modern economy and world where more of us are creative and knowledge workers and our productivity and effectiveness requires initiative and. And, uh, discernment and those kinds of things. You can't mechanize everything and tell everybody what to do. So, you know, that was kind of my inspiration. I came to the U. S. I studied engineering at MIT and then went to business school at Harvard. And my goal was to somehow combine technology and business. And that led to the formation of my first company. And then I had a second company, unfortunately, but those were business ideas, but they were also sort of experiments in organizational culture and philosophy. And, uh, so I was very motivated and a lot of my identity was tied to the business. I was fortunate enough that both companies went public, but I overworked myself and I was working 70, 80 hours a week. And a lot of myself was. Steam and identity was tied to it. And when the Internet was coming online, Our business model had to change. It was very threatening and I got depressed and somehow I persisted and pulled myself out and we turned the business around. The company went public eventually, but you know, uh, through it all, I, out of my dark night of the soul, as it's referred to in the spiritual tradition, I had a spiritual awakening that, um, Dissolved my, my concept of separate self. And I felt into our oneness and our interconnectedness. But that sort of blew the circuits of my mind, my ic mind, the way I perceived and understood reality. And, uh, that threw me into a manic episode. It was a euphoric experience, but it was very disorienting. And, uh, my mind was racing. I was getting all these downloads of where the internet was going and the future and, and, uh. It inspired me to do lots of things, which I saw where the Internet was going, and I wanted the company to go really, uh, be the leader in all of that. This is before companies like Facebook and Google, and this was all coming to me, and I was so impatient. I wanted to get it all done yesterday, and my board and team couldn't keep up. So eventually they was like, saw that I was a bit. Unstable and so on. And they said, Okay, you see, we my board put me on a quote unquote voluntary leave of absence, which was involuntary at all. So I was basically pushed out of my company. Our stock price collapse got cut in half and it was devastating because the company was my baby was my sort My purpose and what I saw, um, my life's mission about,

Teri Schmidt:

Right.

Yosi Amram:

somehow out of that terrible back news, um, I had to reinvent my life and it got me to reflect on what was I so attached to and building the company? What was this all about? experience of oneness and the solution of the ego. Was that real? Was that delusion? And that all led me to go back to school and, uh, study to become a therapist. Along the way, I started coaching and mentoring other entrepreneurs and leaders and I wanted also tools to work with them at a deeper level. So I went and got a PhD as a clinical psychologist and, uh, was interested in spirituality and wanted to understand what happened to me. Now, along the way I was very aware of all the research and the work done around emotional intelligence and its contribution to, um, leadership and well being and so on. And I heard the term spiritual intelligence and I was like, wow, that's very interesting and be very parallel to emotional intelligence, but what is it? And can it be measured? And so on. It was a concept that put forth by this woman called Dana Zohar that wrote this book called Rewiring the Corporate Brain. But there wasn't really a measure, and if you want to study something scientifically, you have to know how to measure it to see how it contributes to a variety of outcomes. So that was the research path I set myself on. So I started out by first interviewing 71 teachers across all the world's traditions. Whether it's Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam, Christianity, Judaism, shamanism, to see are there common qualities and virtues, uh, that regardless of our cosmology and theology, whether we believe in a deity like God or the afterlife or Buddha nature or whatever it might be. We could say, and fortunately, that was very exciting, that purpose and service and compassion and integrity and trust and humility and, uh, were all common qualities that were being cultivated and hailed as virtues across all these traditions. So that set up a certain framework, and from that, I worked with a statistician, someone had helped me on the psychometric side, and we developed The first academically validated measure of spiritual intelligence, and with that I was able to study its contribution on leadership. So I did a study with 42 CEOs and 210 members of their staff to see whether leaders that had greater spiritual intelligence were more effective leaders. And we also controlled for emotional intelligence and personality. I wanted to see if it adds anything beyond those other. academically validated and measured construct. And so what I found is that leaders that had greater spiritual intelligence led teams that had greater morale, greater commitment, uh, and lower turnover. And that was so, uh, I'm going to get a little nerdy a little bit and talk statistic. Uh, so in terms of the outcome of the quality of leadership, as rated by their employees, spiritual intelligence explained 46 percent of the variance and emotional intelligence expressed, explained 41 percent of the variance. So they each had their unique contribution, but combined they explained 67 percent of the variance. So it shows that their Complimentary and multiplicative, synergistic, uh, and so that was very heartening. And then since then, the measure of spiritual intelligence I developed has been used in a variety of other application and shown to contribute to, uh, quality of life, satisfaction with life, personal productivity, individual, uh, group productivity, resilience, experiences of awe, and so on. And in fact, one study showed that, um, leaders that have higher spiritual intelligence actually produce better financial results for their business units than those that don't. And that was not found for emotional intelligence. Not that emotional intelligence is not important, but I'm just saying that now there's a growing body of research that says spiritual intelligence is real, is measurable, and, uh, is positively impactful. So I'll pause there. I could say a lot more about it, but that's kind of my, what my life's work is about now.

Teri Schmidt:

Yeah. No, you know, my, my 1st question to you was going to be, you know, why, why should we care? You know, a lot of our listeners are working in corporate. They might hear or see the title spiritual intelligence and say, oh, that's great for someone else. Or that's great for me outside of work. Um, but you just answered that question. About, you know, why, why should leaders care? Because it has positive results on your team and and positive business results. And you have verified that through your research.

Yosi Amram:

Yeah, and now it's it's other research of others in one study actually was done by again other researcher. They found that banks where the average level of spiritual intelligence was higher compared to other banks team. The organization's productivity was higher, and they had higher ROI return on assets compared to other banks. This is kind of the key measure off of profitability and effectiveness of banks. So Uh, yeah, it pays off, uh, in terms of bottom line results and, you know, in this environment, uh, there's a epidemic of loneliness. People spend the bulk of their waking hours at work and work is people's primary community. So, you know, people are craving and wanting a shared purpose, a shared vision, something everybody's excited about, shared values. in mutuality of care so that we sense that our belonging and alignment and then people are rowing in the same direction and it's much more rewarding and and the productivity goes up. There was a study by Bain and Company. That's one of the top management consulting companies in the world, and they did a study with like 1500 or 2000 companies, and they found that employees that were inspired were twice as productive as those that are just doing their job. And then when they looked at what leadership qualities produced inspired employees, what they found is that it was servant leadership, people that were not selfish, that were present, that were centered, that were good listeners. And their list of 33 qualities maps about half of it directly to the spiritual intelligence qualities that came out of my research. And this is just a management consulting company trying to, working with global 2000 companies about their profitability. So,

Teri Schmidt:

that that's amazing to have that match and and I'd love to then dig into. You know what it did match to so we can kind of get a grounding and what spiritual intelligence is and how that is different from and similar to emotional intelligence.

Yosi Amram:

Yeah, great. So what is emotional intelligence? I mean, first of all, it's a concept that was introduced by two academicians, Salovey and Myers, in 1990, in an essay article that developed a measure, and then it was popularized by Daniel Goldman, and now there's many measures of it, and there's a lot of studies of how it contributes. But essentially what it is, the ability to be aware of and draw on emotional resources to help people. manage our own and others emotions. Now spiritual intelligence by analogy would be awareness of and the ability to draw on and embody spiritual qualities and, and virtues that have been hailed by all the world's traditions. So what are those? These are things like purpose, passionate purpose, compassionate service, trust, gratitude, uh, humility, integrity, higher self. and and so on. So these are the qualities. So again, spiritual intelligence is not a belief. Like you might have a belief in God or a deity or Buddha nature or whatever it might be, the afterlife. Those would be spiritual beliefs. Or you can have spiritual experiences. You meditate and your ego dissolves, you experience oneness or you go in the forest and you feel one with nature. These are spiritual experiences. They're not spiritual intelligence. They are important. They could be important, but spiritual intelligence is about how you then embody these qualities in your life, at your work, in your work team meetings, in the supermarket, when you're in the checkout line, when you're driving on the freeway, when you're relating with your family and your friends and your And so it's about these qualities that now also in the field of positive psychology has been shown, uh, to contribute to, to quality of life and success and so on. Things like hope and beauty and curiosity and openness. I mean, you know, Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology developed this, uh, strengths based, character strengths based inventory of 24. strength and called values in action. So again, it's about in action. It's not what you believe in an idea. It's like how you bring it into expression in your daily life. And again, there's a lot of overlap between the spiritual intelligence qualities and these values in action and character strengths that have been researched in the field of positive psychology.

Teri Schmidt:

that's so interesting, you know, and and talking about putting it into action. I'm curious if someone if this is the first time someone has heard of spiritual intelligence, obviously, they should first go get your book. But beyond that, you know, how would you suggest a leader get started with spiritual intelligence?

Yosi Amram:

Well, let's, let's first of all think about what is the term spiritual intelligence, spiritual intelligence. What's the root word is spiritual, right? And what's the, what's the core root of that word is spirit. What is spirit? It's the animating breath of life. Now, when you think about your role as a leader, what's the, I remember one of my first Harvard business school classes was managers and leaders, same or different. And So what that was about was managers make decisions, allocate scarce resources, but leaders inspire. So what is to inspire? It's basically to breathe life into the organization to, to, you know, that's kind of your life force over the organization. So spirit is really are basically our life force, our animating life force. So how do we start? And so. You know, it sounds mystical spirit, but you know, we all feel our life force. So how do we feel our life force right now? We can connect biologically. We could start there and we experience our aliveness biologically through our breath. So we could take a couple of breaths right now and feel our breath, you know, inhaling through the nose, exhaling, and then the other place we feel our life force is through our heartbeat. And the pulse, so we can also, if we can, tune inward and connect to our heartbeat while also following our breath and feeling our feet and legs grounded, centered on the earth, and our spine as kind of a channel of energy. So as we include our breath, our heartbeat, our feet, legs, connection, and resting on Mother Earth and our, our spine. What, what happens now? Do you, can you feel your aliveness? Can you feel some kind of an alive presence that's including the body and the biology, but there's an expanded awareness. We feel more centered, more expanded. I mean, you tell me, what do you, I don't know if you were able to follow any of this.

Teri Schmidt:

yeah, no, I mean, exactly what you said. I think, I mean, obviously. Doing a podcast interview, I'm going to be a lot in my head, you know, and, uh, you know, just taking those, those couple minutes to feel that grounding. Um, it, it does connect me with it's bigger than just what I'm thinking.

Yosi Amram:

Yeah, so you are bigger than your head, your thoughts. You are something much bigger and more mysterious. You have emotions. You have a heart. You have life force pulsating through you and, and, you know, this is what we, we want to connect to that life force and channel its power. And uh, that's just kind of a, uh, one way to, to start. So it's not so woo woo, you know. I mean, you don't have to believe in anything. You just tune in and sense your aliveness and your presence and your awareness in this moment.

Teri Schmidt:

Yeah. And then how do you carry that forward? Then? How does that flow into the, the elements of spiritual intelligence that you were talking about that? You did the research on that that ties to improve wellbeing and team results and business results. How do you use that as almost a jumping off point? Um,

Yosi Amram:

Yeah, so first we understand that that we feel our aliveness, our life force, and we understand that first of all, life is a gift. We've all been gifted with life. I mean, it's not something I did or worked for or earn, you know, life's a gift. And we each of us are unique. There's 8 billion of us on this planet. And each of us are unique. There's never was and never be someone like Terry. Exactly. And life endowed you and me and each of us with unique gifts, talents and superpowers. So that's another gift. We have the gift of life and then we have the gift of all our talents, capacities and superpowers. Now when someone gives you a gift or you give someone a gift, do you want them to use it? Do you or don't you want them to use it? Otherwise, it's like if you know, oh, he gives us a gift and they left it wrapped, they never even opened it, and maybe they opened it but they barely tried using it or anything, then you're kind of disappointed. What's the point? So, life gave us a gift. Life wants us to use our gift. And when we use our gifts, we express our talents. And we use it to contribute to others, then we're actualizing our potential, which is really fulfilling. And then we know we're contributing, so we, our life has meaning, has purpose, and we have a role to play in the greater web of life. So we just connect ourselves into the greater web of life as a cell in this broader organism of the organization that we're a part of. So. You know, every person in every organization has a role to play, whether we're an accountant and or finance and producing the metrics that enable people to make decisions or when software engineering or in engineering, we're designing the product or in marketing. We're getting to our customer. We have a role to play, and we have different skills and talents, and we want to bring those to bear. To contribute to the totality. And then we then we feel like we are a member in this bigger organ or organism, our department, our team and the overall organization. And, uh, And so that gives us fulfillment. It makes us feel alive. We have a sense of purpose. So they're just, but you know, you can work down these different things on service or gratitude or beauty or joy. Uh, and you have to cultivate them. It's not something you read once about spiritual intelligence, a lifelong journey. You have to create new neural pathways and develop these muscles. You don't just go to the gym once and you're in good shape. You, you, you practice and you exercise to develop the muscles, so, um, I think, yeah, I'll

Teri Schmidt:

yeah, I was going to say, I loved in your book that you, you stated that, you know, you're, you're not going to become more spiritually intelligent by reading this book. Necessarily. It is. It is about experiencing and practicing and building that up. Um, and I had to laugh when you were, when you were talking about, you know, when someone gives you a gift, you want them to use it because I actually have a post it note here that says, how did you use your privilege today?

Yosi Amram:

Uh huh,

Teri Schmidt:

you know, we are all privileged in different ways, no matter our, our circumstances and that's just a reminder of how did you use that today?

Yosi Amram:

yeah, I'd use your privilege, your gifts, and yeah, and, um, so, yeah, beautiful.

Teri Schmidt:

and, um, you know, I'm, I'm curious. Because I'm, I'm guessing maybe you might have gotten some objections to the concept, the idea of spiritual intelligence, particularly in the business world. What are, what are some of the business biggest objections or resistance that you get to your work? And how do you deal with them?

Yosi Amram:

Well, I mean, the first thing is, I think you alluded to, I mean, spirituality is like, we have this idea and it's important that we have separation of church and state. So you know, people are coming to work. They don't want to be indoctrinated into any religion or spiritual belief system. And um, and that's fair and it's important, you know. So when I'm talking about spiritual intelligence, I'm not talking about any kind of religion. Right. Jen. Or any kind of, uh, spiritual belief system specific, I'm talking about qualities that are considered virtues, uh, in, in positive psychology and in a variety of things. So we, you know, in my client base have ranged all over from people who've been devout practitioners of a religion to people that were spiritual but not religious, people that were agnostic to people that were atheists.

Teri Schmidt:

hmm,

Yosi Amram:

You know, but we all know, whether you're an atheist or not, that integrity is super important. Nobody wants to follow a leader that's out of integrity, that's not walking the talk. We all know that, uh, when we're working in a team, If people express gratitude and appreciation for our work, it energizes us and motivates us. We all know that when people are experiencing joy and fun, they're more creative. So, you don't have to believe in any kind of, um, spiritual belief or religious belief or dogma or any kind of woo woo. We're talking about you know, finding your purpose and when your purpose and you have passion, your life force has direction and clarity and and you live passionately. You have a reason to wake up in the morning and you're full with vitality and zest and then other people feel that enthusiasm and are drawn to you. So, um,

Teri Schmidt:

mm

Yosi Amram:

we have to distinguish, and that's why it's important, it's spiritual intelligence. You don't have to be quote unquote, believe in any kind of spiritual belief system to want to work on these virtues and these qualities, um.

Teri Schmidt:

Yeah, you know, 1 part of the book that I was particularly drawn to was the chapter about cultivating community, because at strong later serve, that really is kind of the end goal that connection. So, our leadership development model is ground grow and then give, and the outcome. Of the ground phase is clarity and the outcome of the grow phase is confidence and the outcome of the give phase is connection. So I, I saw some parallels there with the, the cultivating community. Because I, I feel that you could do all this for yourself, but if you're not using your gift, if you're not giving your gift, you really become quite stagnant and are not going to realize the benefits of all that self development. So I'd love to talk more about that chapter in particular and. You talked about, you know, it being a practice and that there were three related pillars to cultivating community. I wonder if you might speak to what those pillars are and why they are important for leaders, particularly in our current times.

Yosi Amram:

Yeah, well, as I said, particularly community is super important because there's more and more single adult households. There's a lot of disconnection. There's, you know, mental health issues, greater anxiety, depression among people. Uh, and all of that relates to loneliness and lack of connection. So, uh,

Teri Schmidt:

hmm.

Yosi Amram:

Yeah. So in terms of, you know, just another piece, like why it's so important to give and to contribute and serve. I mentioned the Bain study and they found that servant oriented leaders inspire people the most. But in terms of, you know, Also just our well being there. You know, they're classical studies like you. You take people on divided into two and kind of in a lottery. Some people win 20. Other people don't. And everybody, when they win 20, of course, they have a momentary happiness. But then they divide people randomly with those who won the money. And they say either you go spend it on yourself, treat yourself to something or take that 20 and yeah, spend it to help someone else, and then they look at their mood at the end of the day. And the people that won the money and spent it on themselves, they had a blip of, of well being when they won it, but there was no lasting effect at the end of the day. Well, the people that were instructed to go and spend it on others felt better about themselves and about life and about their day, uh, that, that lasted throughout the day. So when we use our gifts to contribute to others, then. Then we connect ourselves into the web of life and we feel we belong and we feel we have a contribution and our life has meaning and value. So, and that's part of this care and part of, um, mutuality of care and, and, and, um, you know, key part of it is compassion and opening our hearts to care about others in our team. So that's part of it. And then the other part of it is, is the alignment around our shared purpose. And, and, uh, mission. And then the other pillar was the synthesis. Because oftentimes you have conflicting demands in an organization. We want to develop products quickly, race to market. There's competition, but we also want quality. And you know, if you if you think in either or mindset, it's like there's a winner and loser in the team or in the organization. Some part of the engineering team is going to advocate. Oh, let's slow down. Let's develop the best product. The sales and marketing team was like we needed yesterday. Customers are clamoring. And unless you can move into a holistic, yes, beyond yes, No to both and and synthesize something. And through that creative tension between these two, there's new innovative solutions. That that come up so we we we got to care about each other and we're all on the same team. We have a shared sense of purpose and we're integrating those disparate views and, uh, find synthesizing them. I mean, as Hegel said, you know, the philosopher, the thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and that's kind of a different level of thinking, um, uh, that that helps Everybody feel like they're contributing and, and we synthesize something more intelligent out of, uh, those either or the different perspectives that different individuals and departments, uh, bring, bring together.

Teri Schmidt:

you know, There, there are 2 objections that I've, I've heard, particularly to serving as a leader or servant leadership that I'm thinking might be in some of our listeners head as they're listening to this conversation. 1, being that, you know, servant leadership is just a path to burn out because you're always giving everyone. Else's needs are more important than your own. Um, I definitely have my thoughts on that and how that's an inaccurate picture of what it means to serve as a leader. But I'd love to hear your perspective, you know, particularly as as you're considering those being some of the elements of spiritual intelligence.

Yosi Amram:

Yeah, no, I mean, I think you're touching on something important. Uh, first of all, when I talk about service and servant, I mean, I know Robert Greenleaf introduced this idea of servant leadership, and the focus is on serving the people you lean. I look at a little more holistically, which is serving, serving the people you lead, serving the customer, serving the shareholders. So in companies where they have multiple stakeholder approach, actually produce the best financial results. So, you know, serving, being a servant leader is you're serving your mission. You're serving your calling. You're serving your team. You're serving your customers. All of that has to be balanced. And you have to take care of yourself. I mean, if I am serving people, let's say by, by driving a car and volunteering to, to drive the elderly to their medical appointments when they don't have anybody, let's just take an example. Uh, far from the corporate. Well, I have to take care of my car. I mean, I can't drive them and just take them to their medical appointment. It's gonna, you know, break down on the road and then they're going to be frustrated. I'm not serving. So, you know, we have to take care of ourselves. We're not going to become doormats. We have to be centered. We have to be grounded. I mean, I think that's one of your questions. Pillars. Um, but you know, in doing the service, we feel most fulfilled and nourished and energized and and enlivened and our life has greater meaning. So if you look at it from a human body standpoint, okay, of us are a cell in the human body. The cell has its own integrity. The cell has its own immune system, and there's all these mechanisms that it takes care of itself. But it's doing it, even though it's coming from the same stem cell or DNA, it's doing it in the context of an organ. So it's, it's trying to serve the organ. It can't, a cell can't take care of itself and the organ gets sick and the whole organism gets sick. Eventually that cell is going to get sick and die too. So you have a balance between taking care of the individual self, The individual cell that each of us are and then also taking care of the organ we're embedded in which might be a department or a team and then Thinking globally about the overall organism and when all of those are aligned then We're happy. We're healthy. Our organism is healthy We're we're in a good environment which reverberates through all the cells all the individuals

Teri Schmidt:

Right. Right. Yeah, I love both of those analogies that that makes it very clear. And I, I'd love to talk about it for hours because I think it has implications. You know, I'm even thinking like, in our remote work environment, you know, I think there's a tendency to kind of want to be your own cell and kind of forget about the organ that you live in other objection that I, I'd love to get your thoughts on just quickly is people talk about what if I don't want to. Give my gift or exercise my gift in my company in my current role, because they can just, you know, not, they don't care about me. They, they, if there are layoffs, I could be gone in a 2nd, you know, how, why do I have to be a part of that whole.

Yosi Amram:

Boy, you don't have to.

Teri Schmidt:

Mm

Yosi Amram:

I mean, you don't have to, but while you're there, are you happier? Are you more fulfilled? Shutting down? I mean, does that help you in any way? Or might as well exercise your gifts, develop and grow professionally, and if at some point you're laid off, or you're recruited, or you decide to go and look for a better job, you at least Developed as a human being you can point to your growth you you can point to the success you could point to the Contribution you feel good about yourself. Otherwise you shut down and you didn't I'm like, okay I don't care and they're not they don't appreciate me and you know We become victims and I and and we're just as I was saying that I don't know if you could feel but the energy gets Sucked out and our sense of aliveness Versus like no, I'm going to give my gifts passionately and I hope they'll recognize it. But if nothing else, I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm contributing, and I'm positioning myself. for a promotion or another company to, to call on me or go elsewhere. But why would I want to stay in a job where I feel half dead?

Teri Schmidt:

Yeah, that's, you know, it's, it's a great answer. It's a, it's a choice. Um, like you said, you can choose to to dead in your spirit and, you know, maybe circumstances are that you can't go somewhere else right now for whatever reason. But, like you said, what can you do to still give your gifts and develop yourself? Um, in that situation, right?

Yosi Amram:

you and what what capacities and skills might it help you cultivate which is persistence or you know? Resilience or you know a bunch of other things or joy or beauty. Can you find beauty in what you do? regardless And then let that nourish you um So, you know, there's always an opportunity to work, to cultivate these qualities in ourselves regardless. Otherwise, we're, we're victims of the environment. It's disempowering.

Teri Schmidt:

Right. Very true. Well, we have 1 question that we ask all of our guests and I'd love to hear your perspective on it. What does strong leaders serve mean to you?

Yosi Amram:

Well, strong leaders serve, to me, first of all, let's start with the word strong. I think we feel grounded. We feel expanded. We, we feel our power and we naturally want to use that power to contribute. To contribute to ourself, to contribute to our environment, to to contribute to, to the, the greater whole and to contribute that to that which we love. I mean, uh, we naturally wanna serve that which we love. And as we love whether, you know, we, we we're, we can be leaders in our family, in our community. We love our family members. We want to naturally serve them. And then when we do that, our, our, our sense of selves enlarge. So we become stronger and bigger and we have more power and more energy. So to me, strong leader service start with the premise that we're full, that we're strong, that we're big, and we have a sense of abundance. And We we serve others get which nurtures us. We put out more kindness, more love into the world. And that enlarges our heart. And as we share kindness and gratitude and love, whether it comes back to us with a promotion or whatever, is not the is not the issue. It may and hopefully it does. But if not, we feel better. We feel more loving, more enlivened. And so, um, Yeah, it's taking responsibility and using our gifts and our privileges, you can call it, to, um, to contribute, which gives our life meaning and value.

Teri Schmidt:

said, well, thank you. You see, and of course, we'll put links to your book and your website and the show notes. But is there anywhere else that you would like to direct people if they would like to get in touch with you or learn more about your work?

Yosi Amram:

Well, as you mentioned, my website is yesiamram. net and it connects to, um, some resources. I host monthly free events on different qualities. Next one is on compassion and so critical in this environment because there's so much suffering and polarization, wars, and political self. So, uh, each month we, we work on one quality. These are free events. I have a YouTube channel that has many meditations and long meditations people can go to. There's, uh, awakening si as a domain name website, uh, that people can go to. There's free assessments of spiritual intelligence. to give people a profile of their strengths. Maybe for some people joy and beauty are strengths, other people mindfulness or purpose or something else, and then how you can leverage your strengths to work on things that are opportunities. So there are many resources, um, and I'm just honored and delighted to be able to share that and, um, yeah.

Teri Schmidt:

Yeah, that's that's excellent. I, uh, I am a data person. So, anytime someone's talking about assessments, particularly. You know, research back valid and reliable assessments. Um, definitely, uh, piques my interest. I'm going to I'm going to check those out as well. And thank you for letting us know about the other resources that are available on those monthly events. Sound wonderful as well. So thank you again for taking the time to talk with us today and for the work that you do each day.

Yosi Amram:

Thank you, Terry. It's been a delight and, uh, privilege and, uh, honor to be here with you.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I know that you are the type of leader that knows that the type of leadership that got us here will not get us where we want to go in our ever changing world. So hopefully this gave you something to think about and to try as we move forward. So as a little bit of inspiration, until next time, lead with this quote by Dante in mind. A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.