lligence:
The names that come up are fairly consistent and tend to fall into pre- dictable categories: major religious figures, great political leaders, peace activists or freedom fight- ers, prominent cultural figures and television personalities, fictional characters, and various relatives, local or current religious or spiritual teachers, guidance counselors or school teachers, friends or some- times even a boss, who inspire us in our day-to-day lives.
More importantly, when people are asked to describe the particular traits that cause them to admire these people, the words that come back are strikingly similar. Some traits of spiritual lead- ers include:
• Calm and centered • Compassionate • Courageous, passionately committed
• Forgiving • Authentic, walks-the-talk • Humble • Wise • Peaceful, nonviolent • Service-oriented
What the consistency of the responses tells me is that beyond religious and cultural differences, we already have a general perception of what makes someone worthy of our admiration and possibly our emulation. We recognize a fuller, higher expression of humanity when we see one. We have a natural “spiritual compass.” We know what nobility looks like, and are drawn towards to the full expression of our own hu- man potential.
The question remains: How do we get there? How do we become more like Gandhi, Jesus, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, or the wise teacher who inspired us as a child? While we have an innate sense of where we need to go, most of us have not been taught the specific skills and abilities we are trying to attain. Nor have we had any means of measuring where we are on the journey toward developing these skills.
What we need, I believe, is not to find a new spiritual path, or to figure out which path is better than all the others. We need an approach that can be applied to whatever particular path you are on, and make that path more effective, more deliberate, and more clearly transformative. This approach is the cultivation of what I call “Spiritual Intelligence.” Spiritual Intelligence or “SQ” is a set of skills we develop over time,
aspiremag.net
with practice, either within or independent of a religious belief or tradition. Developing our SQ, in conjunction with the other “intelligences” that may be more familiar to us—IQ (cognitive intelligence), EQ (emotional intelligence), and PQ (physi- cal intelligence)—is the key to becoming fully human.
I define spiritual intelligence as: The ability to behave with wisdom and compassion, while maintaining inner and outer peace, regardless of the situa- tion. I believe this definition distills the essence of what we find so inspiring and exemplary in our spiritual heroes. And it is a pow- erful definition, because it can be broken down into 21 specific “skills” that we can measure, thereby empowering us to take our development into our own hands.
Cindy Wigglesworth is the author of SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence (www.
SQ21book.com) and the creator of the SQ21 spiritual intelli- gence self-assessment. She is the President of Deep Change (www.
deepchange.com).
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