The roadmap to nobility | Cindy Wigglesworth | TEDxLowerEastSide

Cindy Wigglesworth is the author of "SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence" and the president of Deep Change, Inc. Previously, Cindy worked at ExxonMobil in human resources management for 20 years. Seeing both the strengths and limitations of traditional leadership approaches, she left ExxonMobil to start her own business dedicated to developing the multiple intelligences of leaders and organizations.

Cindy is ambassador for Conscious Capitalism. Her passionate commitment is to help birth a new way of talking about spirituality that gets us beyond the barrier of "religion versus science" and lands us squarely in the "this stuff works!" category of applied wisdom.

Her corporate clients have included The Methodist Healthcare System (now a Fortune 100 best employer), BHP Billiton Petroleum and M D Anderson Cancer Center.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

Okay. Good afternoon.

It's wonderful to be here today.

I'm going to be talking to you

about an intelligence you probably
haven't heard much about yet

called spiritual intelligence.

And I would argue
that spiritual intelligence

is a crucial set of skills
for the hero's journey.

In fact, I would argue

that it is for all of us,
and certainly has been for me,

a road map in the direction of nobility.

How I got interested in this
is a little bit of an odd story.

I came out of college hyper-educated,

a big believer in IQ.

I went to work for a major oil company.

And after about a year of working there,

I started getting
some performance feedback.

It basically went like this:

"Cindy, we get it
that you're really smart.

We get it that you're really hardworking.

However, you are somewhat annoying.

(Laughter)

You might want to consider
developing some interpersonal skills."

(Laughter)

Now, when engineers tell you

that you need to develop
some interpersonal skills,

(Laughter)

you probably should do that.

So I started on the work

which we would now call
emotional intelligence skill building.

That work was not available yet,
which was too bad -

it would have helped me a lot.

But I sort of stumbled my way
through this process

of learning how to have
better interpersonal skills.

And then I came
into a leadership position

that was the most challenging
leadership position I had ever had.

It coincided with a life crisis,

but fortunately, I had been doing a lot

of what I would now call
spiritual intelligence work

outside of the business.

Those skills got me
through that period of history

in a way that I was able
to lead with more grace

than I had ever led before.

And this puzzled me

because it wasn't brain power
that got me through.

In a sense,

it was getting out of my own way
that made me successful.

It was humility.

So I became curious about this

because I worked in human resources
and we did leadership development,

and this particular type of intelligence

did not seem to be described
in the leadership literature

and it didn't even seem
to be something we could talk about,

because it had this word
"spiritual" attached to it,

which was just kind of creepy.

Right? You don't talk about that
in the workplace.

So I got very interested in,

what if there was a legitimate way
that we could describe this set of skills

that I had been learning
outside of a business setting

but which clearly had relevance
inside of a business setting?

So eventually, I left my job

and dedicated myself to the research
I'm going to summarize for you today.

To begin with a new intelligence,

the first thing you need to do
is to have exemplars in that field

that you can point to and look at
and consider what makes them different.

So I would ask you to think about,

who are the people that you know of
from history who you most admire?

Who are the noblest human beings?

Who are your personal heroes?

You might call them spiritual leaders
or wisdom teachers or saints or sages.

But think about at least
one person that you admire.

Now, think about
what makes that person different.

What is beyond IQ and what is beyond EQ
that makes them different?

I've asked this question now
to thousands of people,

and I get fairly consistent
characteristics that people will list.

And this is a partial list

of the kinds of words that people will say
they admire about these heroes.

They admire them
because they are courageous,

they are visionary,

they are inspiring.

They are selfless,
humble, loving and wise.

Do any of these words sound
like the people you had in your mind?

Do any of these words
sound dangerous for a business?

(Laughter)

Actually, I've asked a lot
of business leaders that question,

and most business leaders say

that they would love to have
more of this inside their business.

So what if there was a way
that we could describe this?

How would we summarize?

What would be the highest level?

Now, the definition
you heard Todd read earlier

that I had for spiritual intelligence

is the ability to behave
with wisdom and compassion

while maintaining inner and outer peace
regardless of the situation.

That is made possible
by a very important, singular shift,

and it is described in these two slides.

We are moving away
from being immature egos,

where we're all about our small "S" self

and all about personal self-interest,

and instead, moving
to a larger, wiser ego,

an ego that has developed through
the stages of adult development maturity

and is now guided by our higher nature,

our internal hero, if you will.

What I am telling you

is I believe there is
a legitimate additional intelligence

and that it matters a great deal.

Beyond IQ and beyond EQ,

I believe there is another
describable intelligence

called spiritual intelligence.

You might wonder,

how could this possibly be
a legitimate field of research?

And I will tell you I had the exact same
kind of Vulcan mindset approaching this -

I'm a Star Trek fan -

and I thought if I'm ever
going to take this back

into an environment where people
are appropriately skeptical,

this has to meet PhD level of rigor
from the beginning.

So we have hired PhD's

to create an assessment
of spiritual intelligence -

psychometrically sound,

carefully validated

and cross-correlated
with an assessment of adult maturity,

which has been proven to be related
to leadership effectiveness.

The key differentiator here

from maybe some previous topics
that have been close to this

is that we've been very careful
with the diversity arena

to stay skills focused.

We stay out of belief territory.

Your beliefs are your beliefs.

We are interested in the behaviors,
and we are interested in skills.

This is the 21 skills
of spiritual intelligence

that we have described,

attempting to show
what is different about those heroes,

those noblest human beings
that we were mentioning earlier,

something that is different
from IQ and EQ.

Now, I know this is a little hard to read,

so we had some handouts on the chairs
to kind of help you with this,

but I'll walk you through a few of these.

Essentially, in the upper left quadrant,

you have the skills of ego-self
and Higher Self awareness -

Higher Self capital "S."

It includes being aware of your own values
and your values hierarchy,

your being aware of your life purpose

and being aware and able to hear
the voice of your Higher Self,

and I'll explain that one
in more detail in a moment.

In the second quadrant, you have
the skills of universal awareness.

It means, can you really deeply understand
the interconnectedness of all life?

Can you see the world views
of other people

with humility and wisdom?

Can you perceive time
and history in a larger way?

Are you aware of how limited
your normal human perception is?

And then, in quadrant three,

we get to skills like being able
to live from your Higher Self,

being able to sustain faith
in tough times.

Fabulous skills.

And in the fourth quadrant,

we receive the benefit
of the previous three quadrants.

The fourth quadrant
is the outcome quadrant.

It's a very important quadrant,

so it is blown up here
a little easier to see.

Social mastery and spiritual presence.

These skills include
being a wise and effective mentor,

being a wise and effective leader,

making compassionate and wise decisions,

being a calming and healing
presence in the world

and being aligned
with the ebb and flow of life.

Would you like to have some more of these?

Yes. Wouldn't we all?

In a way, I wrote this for myself, right?

I needed the road map.

So, if you're going
to get started on a journey,

you need to know how to go -

like what are the steps?

And in any intelligence,

you need to be able to describe
each intelligence

from the novice level to the expert level,

and we have done that
for all 21 of these skills,

from the white belt to the black belt.

Here's a sample skill, skill 5,
a particularly important one:

awareness of ego self and Higher Self.

At level 1, you have merely
a cognitive awareness

that an ego self exists

and has been shaped
by your experience of life.

That's all that's needed.

At level 2, you can observe
your own ego in operation.

At level 3, you have been observing
your own ego for long enough

that you're starting
to recognize its patterns.

You're recognizing which situations
tend to trigger you.

At level 4,

you have cultivated the ability

to consistently hear
the voice of your Higher Self.

The voice of our higher nature
is the quieter voice.

The ego tends to be the louder voice.

So it takes some time
and some spiritual practice

or journaling

or effort of personal growth

to be able to learn
to hear your Higher Self.

And at level 5, ego is now
in joyful service to Higher Self.

The tug-of-war
between these two is over.

Now, I like to say I experience
about five minutes of that a year,

(Laughter)

but it's the saintly level.

All right.

What about your call
to the hero's journey?

I believe that those noble people

that you thought of
when I asked you that question earlier

are actually coming
through your Higher Self as a call,

a call forward,

to live in that direction.

That is your true north;
that's your compass.

What you admire is in a way what you seek.

Does this make sense? Yes.

So your Higher Self is calling you
to your own hero's journey,

and you can be more like
those kinds of people

by virtue of having
these intelligences described for you.

I believe that the hero's journey
is ultimately not about where we go;

it is about who we become.

So how do we start?

I think this is a good place.

I love this photograph.

It represents for me
the attitude of humble curiosity

that I think if each of us
could bring to life,

we would be so much wiser.

Are we willing to turn
our perception upside down?

Are we willing to look at things
completely differently

than we have looked at them before?

And what might we learn from that?

I will tell you that I have
a very personal, powerful practice

that I've developed through this study,

and it involves asking
a couple of questions.

The first question provides
the most powerful shift for me.

And that first question is,

when you do something irritating,

what would it take for me to do
that exact same behavior?

And I will tell you,

my ego will immediately
resist the question

and go, "I would never do that."

But I have to push back at it

because the truth is

if I were in your exact life circumstances
and I had your biology and your history,

I would probably do the same thing.

I need to kind of get over myself.

So this is the "help me
get over myself" question.

What would it take for me
to do this exact same behavior?

This opens my heart and opens my mind
and prepares me for the next question,

which I would say is the hero's question:

What is the noblest thing
to do in this situation?

What is the high IQ, EQ and SQ thing
to do in this situation?

Thinking back to my true north,

my heroes,

what would that person do
in this situation?

The reason I care
so passionately about this

is that it is really, in a sense,
been my very personal journey.

I wanted to understand
how to be a better person.

Once I figured out
IQ is not the whole story,

I wanted to know what the whole story was.

And so if EQ wasn't it, then what was?

And SQ seemed, for me, to help map out
the pathway that I wanted to take.

It also brings me hope

that as we map these skills
and research these skills,

that we collectively might raise
our spiritual intelligence.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)