Spiritual Wisdom

 My good friend, Bill Hendricks, MD, and I were discussing the blog on emotional intelligence. Bill said, “That was good stuff when it came out twenty years ago, but have you thought about spiritual intelligence? What characterizes spiritual intelligence?”

I immediately suggested the key to spiritual wisdom began with humility. One has to humble oneself to God. Bill suggested that before humility came surrendering oneself to God. I suggested that in this case humility and surrender were synonyms. He didn’t agree.

I proposed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as essential. Bill agreed.

Bill then suggested listening to God was the third criteria for spiritual wisdom.

He then provocatively suggested three types of grace. Classical grace is the unmerited favor of God. According to Bill another grace that God grants is awareness that we have made a spiritual error. He gave this example:

This morning when I was shaving I began thinking about my retirement party in eighteen months. Everybody would come and patients would discuss their experiences and I would discuss my thoughts about them. Suddenly God’s grace intervened and told me I was selfishly patting myself on the back. Instead I should be focusing on being in the present, my tasks for the day, and how I could grow closer to God today. This experience could be called a revealing grace.

According to Bill spiritual grace occurs after God exposes our selfishness and invites us to have a closer relationship with Him.

I felt that Bill’s evocative words were well worth sharing. Now, of course, Bill and I are no more theologians than the Pope is a hall of fame baseball player, but perhaps these ideas will stimulate your thoughts about spiritual wisdom.

Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, a former brain sciences editor of The New York Times, has written a follow-up book to his enormously popular, Emotional Intelligence. The sequel, Working with Emotional Intelligence, is based on studies done by dozens of experts in 500 corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations worldwide. An examination of these studies asserts that they can be cultivated:

SELF-AWARENESS

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand our moods, emotions, and motivations and their effect on others.

Knowing our emotional strengths and weaknesses can help us develop our talents while minimizing our defects. We can fully use our talents while working on improving our weakness. 

Here are some suggestions: 

• Make a list of five strengths and develop them; make a list of five weaknesses and change them. Don't use the excuse, "Well, that's just the way I am."
• Because we don't know what we don't know, we would do well to ask our best and most trusted friend to analyze our strengths and weaknesses.

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

Those with high emotional intelligence have the ability to control or redirect disturbing impulses and unproductive moods and to suspend judgment by thinking before acting. Self-regulation is marked by the following characteristics:

• Trustworthiness and integrity. Trustworthy individuals follow the Golden Rule---they do unto others as they would have others do unto them.
• Doing the right thing the right way.
• Emotional flexibility and open mindedness.
• Being comfortable with ambiguity. We must be able to make decisions based on the best evidence and understand that the only constant if life is change. 
• Life-long learning.
• The ability to manage disruptive emotions. We can  improve our frustration tolerance and control our impulses.

We have control over one factor—our minds. We are unable to control other people or events, but we can change our belief about people and events.

Events in our lives are not as important as our beliefs about events.

When storms flood our homes we can believe that we will never recover or we can choose to believe that we can overcome. 

Motivation

Motivation is a passion to work and to pursue goals with energy and persistence for reasons that go beyond money or status. Motivation comes from the following traits:

• A strong drive to achieve that comes from the desire to do our best with the talents and skills we have been given.
• Optimism comes from the ability to view failure as a learning experience. Viewing failure as an opportunity to learn what doesn't work enables optimists to persist despite adversity.
• The most successful individuals are able to subordinate their ego to the overall good of the entire team.

Many talented people waste their abilities because they remain inactive. If we keep the bat on our shoulders we will never hit a home run. 

EMPATHY

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people and skill in treating people according to their emotional reactions. Those with empathy possess the following skills:

• The ability to help others feel important by listening carefully to what they say and by praising desired behavior. 
• The ability to relate to all races and nationalities and to understand cultural differences.
• Giving respect and affection to others.  

WINNING WITH PEOPLE

Rapport comes from proficiency in building relationships by finding common ground marked by the following:

• Inspiring others to do what they don't want to do so they will become what they always wanted to be.
• Encouraging others by catching people doing something right.
• Finding what others want and then helping them achieve their goals.
• Believing that just about everyone has something to teach each of us.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie first published in 1936 remains the absolute best book for developing social skills. 

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Some people can jump higher and run faster than others. Some have better minds than others. Some have more musical talent than others. Not everyone will win. We will not receive equal prizes. Doing our best with our emotional intelligence is the best we can expect of ourselves. 

Living Smart

We all know someone who scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT and flunked out of college by the second semester. That’s because success in college, and in life, has little to do with raw intelligence. 

IQ predicts success about 20% of the time. Behavioral scientists have discovered that 80% of success depends on emotional factors.

Harvard students from the 1940s—a time when there was a wider range of IQ at that school—were tracked into middle age. The high IQ men were not anymore successful than the lower in intelligence. 

Similarly, 450 boys from Boston slums were followed into middle age. Success in this social group was not dependent on intelligence. Ten years after 81 valedictorians and salutatorians graduated from their high school, only four were at the highest level of young people of comparable age in their chosen profession. 

Academic intelligence fails to predict how one will react to the vicissitudes of life. Psychologists gave col­lege freshmen tests to measure optimism. Four years later, the psychologists found that optimism predicted grades better than SAT scores or high-school grades.

In a Met-Life Insurance Company study, insurance executives hired a special group of applicants who failed the normal screening tests, but scored high on optimism. The first year on the job, the "dumb" optimists sold 21% more insurance than the "smart" pessimists. The second year, the optimists sold 57% more insurance than the pessimists. " Dumb" opti­mists sell more insurance than "smart" pessimists.

Please comment to enhance learning and inspire interaction. We don't know what you are thinking until we read what you write. Did the blog entry bring to mind a personal story you would like to share? Any ideas you would like to contribute? Any disagreements?