Spiritual Intelligence & Insight | spirit of EQ

The Last One to Know

November 11, 2026/0 Comments/in Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

I was looking at my own blog archive last week. Six titles in a column, going back about six weeks.

Back to the Log. Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways. The Pitcher We Are Becoming. The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With. The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else. The Problem Was Never Being Right.

Six subjects. Six weeks. And reading them in a row, I realized I had written the same post six times without noticing.

A partly carved wooden head on a workbench, seen from behind so its face is turned away, with chisels beside it and sunrise over hills through the studio window.

He would set it down, walk out of the studio, and come back the next morning to look at it the way a stranger would.

What surprised me was that there was a thread emerging for me where I had not seen one before. Six separate things I thought I was writing about, and one thing I was actually writing about.

The same shape underneath

Every one of them has the same shape.

Something was going on in me. I had an explanation for what was going on in me. The two were not the same thing — and I was the only person in the room who couldn’t tell.

In The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With, the line was failure is not an option. I experienced that as discipline. The people working for me experienced it as pressure they couldn’t put down. Most of them went on to successful lives in spite of me. A few are still bitter, and they have a right to be.

In The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else, a client went quiet on me and my first thought was what did I do. I thought I was being accountable. I was being cruel in a way I would never have been to a stranger.

In The Problem Was Never Being Right, I watched someone early in their coaching and thought, that person should not be a coach. I thought I was exercising discernment. I was protecting a position.

And Back to the Log is the one about the log itself — my dad bringing a piece of wood out of the forest and starting there, taking it back when the slope of a cheek wasn’t right. That post was supposed to be about writing. It wasn’t.

The reasonable person in the story

Here is the part worth sitting with.

In none of those was I confused about myself. I wasn’t walking around wondering what my problem was. I had an answer ready. Discipline. Accountability. Discernment. High standards.

The answers were wrong, and they were wrong in one consistent direction: every single explanation made me the reasonable person in the story.

That is not a character flaw. That is how the equipment works.

There is a piece of research I keep coming back to. In 1988 two researchers named Harris and Schaubroeck pooled every study they could find comparing how people rate their own job performance against how their peers and their supervisors rate them.

Peers and supervisors agreed with each other at .62 — strong agreement, two independent groups of people seeing roughly the same person.

Your own rating agreed with your supervisor’s at .35. With your peers’, at .36.

Read that again. The people around you agree with each other about you nearly twice as much as either of them agrees with you.

You are not in the conversation about who you are. You are the subject of it.

Why emotional intelligence doesn’t reach this

Emotional intelligence, as most people learn it, teaches you to name what you feel. That is real work, and most of us genuinely cannot do it. Naming the feeling is worth every hour it takes.

But look back at those four failures. Not one of them was a failure of naming.

I could have told you I was frustrated with that coach. I could have told you exactly what the anxiety felt like when the client went quiet. The feeling was available to me the whole time. The feeling was never the problem.

The problem was the story I had built on top of the feeling — and the story was invisible precisely because I was standing inside it.

That is the gap. And that gap is the first domain of what Lynette and I call spiritual emotional intelligence: Awareness.

Self-awareness asks: what am I feeling?

Awareness asks: what is this feeling pointing at, and what is it protecting?

The second question is harder, because it assumes something uncomfortable — that you are not a reliable narrator of yourself. Not because you are dishonest. Because nobody is. The instrument you would use to check is the same instrument that generated the story.

So what do you actually do

A weathered wooden signpost reading Forward with an arrow, beside a dirt path winding away through golden hills at sunrise.

Three things you can do. None of them is thinking harder about yourself.

Three things.

Use the Enneagram as a prediction, not a label. Most people treat their number as a description of who they are. It is more useful as advance warning about which story you will reach for when you are squeezed. Mine always reaches for the competent one. Knowing that does not stop it. It does mean I can catch it about forty seconds sooner than I used to.

Ask a narrower question than you want to ask. “How am I doing?” gets you nothing, because nobody answers it honestly. The question worth asking is: what is it like to be on the other side of me when I am under pressure? It is specific enough that people can answer, and uncomfortable enough that the answer is usually real. If you want to find your own gap, that question will get there faster than a year of journaling.

Turn the examen sideways. End of the day, two questions instead of the usual ones. Where today did I feel most like myself? Where today was I performing? You do not have to do anything with the answers for a while. Just notice that there is a gap, and that the gap is always in the same place.

Back to the log

A partly carved wooden head seen from the side on a workbench, carving chisels and wood shavings in the foreground, bare winter trees through the window behind.

Not with the piece — he didn’t have the piece yet. With the log.

My dad would carry a log out of the woods and start there. Not with the piece — he did not have the piece yet. With the log. He would work the slope of a cheek for days and then take the whole thing back and begin again.

I used to think that was perfectionism. I do not think that anymore.

I think he knew he could not trust his own eye at close range. So he would set it down, walk out of the studio, come back the next morning and look at it the way a stranger would. That is not perfectionism. That is a man building a workaround for a limitation he had the sense to admit.

You cannot see your own face. You can only see what it does to the room.

Six posts in six weeks, and I was the last one to know what I was writing about.

Take this further

Finding the Story You Are Standing Inside is a free four-part workbook built on this post — an inventory of four incidents, the direction your explanations bend, the narrow question to put to two people, and the examen turned sideways. Download the workbook (PDF).

Post 1 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Next: Belonging — ninety identical trucks and ninety different lives. Then: Insight — what is actually mine to do.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Harris, M. M., & Schaubroeck, J. (1988). A meta-analysis of self-supervisor, self-peer, and peer-supervisor ratings. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 43–62. doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1988.tb00631.x — self–supervisor ρ = .35, self–peer .36, peer–supervisor .62.

Fleenor, J., Smither, J., Atwater, L., Braddy, P., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self-other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 1005–1034 — the standard review of this literature, for readers who want more.

Are You Thirsty?

November 9, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

This is the last of three from Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, a program of The Upper Room. Our faculty presenter for session five of eight was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment. Part one was about the word just. Part two was about the body. This one is about standing up when the ground will not hold still.

Friday was the last morning, and she opened by telling us the ground was shaking.

“The very ground we stand on is shaking.” Then she said it again, the way she did with the lines that mattered.

She told us about a friend caught in an earthquake in another country, running out of a building. “We’d put our foot down, and then the ground would shift, and we’d put it down and be at another spot than where we aimed.” The most disorienting thing she had ever been through — and notice that the disorienting part was not the shaking. It was arriving somewhere you had not aimed.

I know that feeling. When I had my heart attack twelve years ago, there was a violent earthquake in what I thought was true, and putting my foot down did not change that.

Twelve years later, in a three-minute prayer on a Wednesday morning in that same room, the same body said the same thing to me much more quietly.

Then she had us do the simplest exercise of the week.

A blessing of the senses

Five things you can see. Take your time with them. Then touch your eyes, and let the Spirit tend your sight.

Four things you can touch. Open your hands, and let the Spirit tend your touch.

Three things you can hear. Touch your ears.

Two things you can smell. Touch your nostrils.

One thing you can taste — she had put things out on the tables beforehand so that everyone would have something. Touch your mouth.

Amen.

If you have done trauma work, or sat in a counselor’s office, you have met 5-4-3-2-1 before. What she had done was marry it to something much older: the blessing of the senses given to catechumens as they begin, formalized in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults after Vatican II. She called that kind of borrowing “a migration of meaning,” and her point was that all of us are catechumens — still being taught toward something, over and over.

“When nothing makes sense, grounding our discernment back into our senses helps. It also helps prevent longer trauma.”

Then she walked us through how much of the gospel runs on the senses. Jesus making spittle out of mud. Thomas, touch my side. Cooking fish over a fire for the disciples after the resurrection — and she noted that it was by a fire that Peter denied him, and by a fire that Jesus came back for him. The woman with the alabaster jar down at his feet, and the whole room filling with that perfume.

Soil kin

Then she gave us the wordplay I wrote down twice.

Adamah is the Hebrew word for soil. Adam is human. Same root. Humus. Human.

“We are soil kin,” she said. “Earthlings.”

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust comes straight out of that passage — which means it is not first a sentence about death. It is a sentence about where we are from.

And the day before, she had made the point that has stayed with me longest. When God creates in Genesis 2, God’s posture is down in the dirt. The serpent’s posture is up in a tree, looking down. One of those is a God who has made himself available to be wounded.

She looked up the etymology of vulnerable while she was preparing. It means the capacity to be wounded. “I fought that,” she admitted. “I just kept going — it’s got to be the vastness of God. Got to be. And I kept looking at it and it was like: that is not the God being presented here.”

Nephesh is a verb

Then she turned it into an obligation, which I did not see coming.

Nephesh — life, breath, fullness of being — is not only a noun. In Exodus it is a verb. God rested on the seventh day and was re-nefeshed.

And look at how the commandment extends it. Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh you shall rest — so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed. Re-nefeshed.

Rest is not a personal wellness item. In that text, rest is something you owe your neighbor, your worker, the stranger in your house, and your animals.

Which produces her question, and it is the one I carried home from the whole week: who is not allowed to rest in our culture?

She pointed at Isaiah confronting people who sat in worship while the people they had hired worked straight through with no re-nefeshing at all. “See — that jug of being just? It’s not for the other person. We’re not getting a just pour.”

And then she described, with uncomfortable accuracy, what every organization does when things get hard. “Just work harder. Staff gets cut in half. Now you do all the rest of the jobs the staff had before, on half the people, and do it all the same. More should, ought, must, quicker, more efficient. So we buy more planners that are kind of nice and pretty. And we work with them for three weeks and it doesn’t work. And we wonder what’s wrong with us — if I was only better.”

I ran a company with ninety trucks. The crews took them home overnight, which meant ninety driveways across central Ohio with a black-and-gold truck parked in them, which meant the work sat outside ninety houses every night. I called that efficiency. I built it. I am the one who decided who got to rest.

I have said things close to this in other pieces, so I will not pretend it is a new discovery. What started to change my perspective was learning what it means to be human. Yes, we have to work. Yes, we have to be productive. But pushing and pushing and pushing to get a ten or twelve percent growth, at the expense of health and happiness — I don’t know. I am still not sure I have the answer.

The prayer he got wrong

She told us about a large congregation in Harrisonburg, and a very seasoned leader near retirement who stood up in front of everyone and said: I used to pray that God would keep us from what threatens us around us.

She was careful here. Prayers of protection are real and good — traveling mercies, the breastplate prayers. But when protection becomes the primal prayer of a church, proximity turns into something to be defended against rather than entered.

And this man said, in front of that whole congregation: I got the prayer wrong.

The prayer he had come to instead was: God, what are you doing in this neighborhood that we need to join?

She gave us the other half of it from James Baldwin, whom she came back to more than once across the week — that for white people racism is “a corrosive spiritual bondage,” and that avoiding another person’s humanity erases neither the kinship nor the guilt of having violated it. Her own extension of it was blunt: no amount of claiming that someone else is not human makes the rest of us more human. “I too am an it that is expendable.”

Armor protects. That is what it is for. And then the question becomes the one she asked next: what happens when we become the armor?

Many to one

So what do you do, when the ground is moving and the warning lights are on everywhere at once and your brain wants to go in every direction? Her own impulse, she said, is either to curl up in sackcloth and ashes or go screaming through the streets like a prophet. “You really get a sense for prophets.”

Her practice for it is moving from the many to the one.

Notice the many. She will sometimes have people write the crowding things on slips of paper and set them all around themselves on the floor, because the body understands a pile better than it understands a list. What is crowding me?
Go to a window, or outside, and do a wide-lens scan of the horizon. Slowly. Distance, sky, trees. Wait, and notice the shift in your body.
Choose one gift. A leaf. A blade of grass. An ant crossing a stone. One. Wait with it — “it tells you a different story.”
Go back to the many, and ask to see it with a new lens.

She tied this to the woman with the hemorrhage, who came up behind Jesus in a crowd that was pressing on him from every side, and touched the edge of his cloak. Peter’s line is essentially that everyone is touching you. And in all that noise, Jesus stopped and asked: who touched me? Not who is shouting. Who touched me.

“It’s like the crowd’s there, and all of a sudden — something touched me here that I’m to pick up.”

Then honor the one.

Are you thirsty?

An older man wrapped in a wool shawl drinks from a clay cup on a stone wall above the hills at sunrise, a large two-handled jug beside him. — Just, as we learned on the first morning of the week, is a pitcher. The measure of the pour.

She closed the week with a small story, and I am closing with it too, because it is the whole week in a single question.

A librarian came through two years of spiritual direction training. Part of that training was about being a director in your own neighborhood — the informal version, a way of being rather than an appointment. She said that a lot of the people who come into her library are unhoused, and she was beginning to see them differently. She also volunteered at a farmers market, handing out water.

“I used to just say: do you want some water?”

After two years, she said, I ask a different question.

Are you thirsty?

That is it. One word different, and a transaction becomes a person.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has the line for it, and Dr. Heidi left it up on her last slide. What I do is me: for that I came. And then: the just man justices.

Just, as we learned on the first morning of the week, is a pitcher. The measure of the pour.

And by Friday it was a verb.

Take this further

Many to One is a free reflection sheet carrying the blessing of the senses and the many-to-one practice, with eight questions and an invitation for the week. Download the reflection sheet (PDF).

Part 3 of 3. Part 1: Just — the word, the pitcher, and where the story starts. Part 2: presence, the body, and why you cannot achieve it.

Peace and every good.

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The blessing of the senses and its adaptation from the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, the adamah and adam wordplay, the reading of nephesh as a verb and of rest as something owed to a neighbor, the question of who is not allowed to rest, the story of the leader who said he got the prayer wrong, the many-to-one practice, the Hopkins poem, and the librarian’s question — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” (public domain). Dr. Miller noted that she had taken a small liberty with inclusive language in the closing lines as she read them.

James Baldwin — quoted by Dr. Miller across several sessions on racism as a corrosive spiritual bondage and on what dehumanizing does to the one who does it.

Jonathan Sacks on mishpat and tzedakah — retributive and distributive justice — referenced in her session on nuancing what justice means.

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017), and Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? — both recommended from the front of the room.

I Would Have Cleaned the Window

November 9, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

This is part two of three from Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, a program of The Upper Room. Our faculty presenter for session five of eight was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment. Part one was about the word just. This one is about the body.

Wednesday morning, Dr. Heidi told us to find a spot.

Stand if you want. Sit on the floor. Lie down on the floor if that is what works. If you need to turn away from me so it does not feel like anyone is looking at you, turn away — there is a spot behind the piano that is perfect.

Then she gave us three minutes and this:

Acknowledge the gift of your body. Our body is our friend. Notice where you are carrying tension, or pain. What does your body want you to know? And in time, if it feels comfortable, take your hand and touch that part. Remind that part of your body of belovedness. Then find the rhythm of your breath right there. Breathe in belovedness. Pause. Breathe out the tension.

When I sank down into the center of my body, I found that I loved it, and that I knew what was best for it, and I felt it telling me that I was not hearing it.

This may sound like a strange thing to come out of a three-minute prayer, but I stopped eating gluten and sugar. I am slowly feeling different. The brain fog is lifting.

She called it a body awareness prayer, and she was explicit about why she kept starting us there. “The locus of discernment is here,” she said — not in the head. “Our bodies are a locale of discernment.” We make sense of our lives through our bodies and through stories, “and mostly, it’s embodied stories when you put that together.”

Then she told us about her grandmother’s window.

The imprint of presence

Her mother was an English child of the Second World War, evacuated out of London, raised under Victorian rules in a house with an anxious mother who had reason to be anxious. What she learned was that you tidy up. Whatever you touch, you leave no trace of having touched it.

She married an American, and his parents sponsored her, and they called her daughter. Not daughter-in-law. Daughter. And they put their own son in his place when they saw him startle her once as a joke: You don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me? You don’t do that to my daughter.

The grandmother’s name was Myrtle. Eighth-grade education, Southern Baptist, and when the Spirit moved her she would just go whoop.

One day the family was packing up to leave after a week, and there was a plate glass window the kids had been pressing their hands against all week, watching to see who was coming up the road. Heidi’s mother said: Mama Myrtle, let me wipe that down before we go.

And Myrtle said: Now, Wendy, don’t you clean that window. I’m going to get so much joy looking at all those fingerprints for weeks and weeks and weeks.

“The imprint of presence,” Heidi said, “can be everywhere.”

Her mother learned it from Myrtle and passed it down. When Heidi was three or four and wanted to be in the kitchen, her mother started her on thumbprint cookies — press your thumb in, again and again, then fill the dent with jam. Heidi complained that her mother was faster at it. Her mother said: someday, when you teach someone how to make cookies, you will go faster too.

And when her brother tore his teddy bear doing something he knew he should not have, and brought it to their mother teary, braced to be scolded — she cleared off the kitchen table, carried a lamp over, laid out a handkerchief, set the bear down on it and said, It’s okay. We’re going to take care of this bear. She built an operating room in the kitchen, with the light, and stitched it up while he watched.

At her celebration of life, his words for it were: she tilted the whole universe in love toward me.

I would have cleaned the window

A galvanized bucket and a folded cloth on a wooden table in front of a spotless window, with two children running across a sunlit lawn outside. — The glass is clean, the cloth is folded, and the children are outside. This was the part I was always good at.

I sat there doing the arithmetic on myself.

I would have cleaned the window. Not out of cruelty — out of the thing I called responsibility. For thirty-eight years I ran a company with failure is not an option painted above the door. I worked constantly. I very seldom took a break, and when I did, I was already thinking about the next job and the next idea. There were no fingerprints left anywhere, because I wiped them, and the people around me learned to wipe theirs too.

If I can be totally honest in this moment: I do not know if I could, or would, do the same things in business that I did before. Sometimes I feel the cost was too high for the outcome — and the outcome, of course, was not money.

Why you cannot achieve it

Here is the part that got me, and it got me because she said it about herself first.

“I’m a three on the Enneagram,” she told the room. The achiever. Checklists, tasks, the completion of tasks. “But this approach does not work with being present.” And then: “Presence is not something to be achieved. Presence is a way of being.” And then, dryly: “That’s super hard for a three.”

I am an Eight, not a Three, but the machinery is close enough. Hand me presence as a goal and I will go at it the way I went at everything, and the going at it is exactly what forecloses it.

She had two names for what gets in the way.

The first she borrowed and renamed. Jacques Ellul wrote about the technological bluff — the premise that we are all intimate now, all accessible, all reachable at once. She calls it presence bluffing. “The more accessible we are to everybody else all the time, the less present we can really even be.” Her example was counting televisions in a restaurant. She got to twenty without turning her head.

The second was an Armani suit jacket.

A friend of hers was going through a mediated divorce — one day to settle everything, a warm Virginia day, both of them working hard at it, real credit to both. She had dressed in layers and was peeling them off as the hours went on. He wore an Armani jacket, and he wanted her to know it, and he wanted the mediator to know it. The room got hotter. He rolled his trouser legs inside out all the way up to his hips rather than take off that jacket.

When the group was telling the story afterward, Heidi said: “I wonder what the headlines in the heavens read. Man thinks he has Armani, but Armani has man.”

And then, immediately, on herself: “As soon as I say that, I can’t escape it either. I think I have that — but that has me.”

That, she said, is as old as Genesis 3. The strangest thing in that story is that the serpent lures them into wanting to possess what they already have. Everything is given. Blessed, abundant, playful, full, theirs. And the lure is: if you have it, you will be like God. So they ate a different story, in their own bodies, over food. And the moment they had it, it had them.

Possession is what keeps us from presence. It keeps us chasing. But the body already knows. Before Adam and Eve could say a word, their bodies knew they were naked.

The question underneath

She asked one more thing I have not been able to put down.

Why is presence so hard? Because being present means being present to your pain. And because being present means admitting you are mortal.

“If I don’t have to be present, I don’t have to grieve,” she said. “Or I can pretend I don’t have to grieve. If I keep busy, if I do more, if I go get more, I don’t have to grieve the hefty losses I’ve encountered. I don’t have to grieve that I too am mortal.”

I am seventy-four years old. I have been busy my whole adult life. I would rather not look too hard at the overlap between those two sentences.

The counterweight she offered is a word. Nephesh — life, breath, fullness of being. And it is not only a noun. In Exodus, God rested on the seventh day and was re-nefeshed. Rest is built into the rhythm before anything else happens — and there was evening, and there was morning, the first day. It starts with the rest.

She told us her mother confronted her about this once. Heidi said, I can’t, I’ve got too much to do.

Her mother said: well, then, you are better than God.

What? I don’t think I’m better than God.

Well, clearly you do. Because God rested, and you think you don’t have to.

Who told you

In Genesis 3, God comes walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hide in the very creation they were meant to commune with. And when God finds them, Heidi pointed out, God does not condemn them. God asks a question.

Who told you you were naked?

“God could well have asked,” she said, “who told you you were not beloved and free already?”

Then she had someone act out Psalm 23. One volunteer, playing God, no lines — just walk around the room and set a table beside each person. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Watch her do it. Watch the divine table setter set it.

And then she gave us a permission I did not expect. You may need to watch from across the room. You can say: not closer, not right now — I will be over here, you go ahead. You can say, I would like to be in the next room. And she will say: all right. I will set the table. It’s okay.

That is not a technique. That is somebody who understands that presence cannot be forced — including by you, on yourself.

I keep coming back to Myrtle at that window, deciding that fingerprints were not a mess.

For a man who spent four decades wiping glass, that is an entire theology in one sentence.

Take this further

The Imprint of Presence is a free reflection sheet built around the body awareness prayer Dr. Miller gave us, with eight questions and an invitation for the week. Download the reflection sheet (PDF).

Part 2 of 3. Part 1: Just — the word, the pitcher, and where the story starts. Part 3: being grounded when the ground is moving.

Peace and every good.

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The body awareness prayer, the story of her grandmother’s window and the thumbprint cookies and the teddy bear, the naming of presence bluffing, the Armani observation, the reading of Genesis 2 and 3, the enacted Psalm 23 and the permission to watch from a distance — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Eerdmans, 1990) — the source of the phrase Dr. Miller adapts into “presence bluffing.”

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014) — referenced in her sessions on the body as a place of knowing.

The Pitcher We Are Becoming

November 6, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

THE ACADEMY SERIES · PART 1 OF 3

The Pitcher We Are Becoming

I had been on both sides of that word my whole life and never once noticed it had two.

The Academy for Spiritual Formation is a program of The Upper Room. I am part of Academy #43, and this past week was session five of eight. One of our faculty presenters for the week was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment.

I walked into the room not knowing what to expect, and Dr. Heidi was standing there.

Here was this woman with a wonderfully big smile, going around introducing herself to everyone in the room. No pretense. No guile. Just pure personhood — approachable and loving.

By the end of the week she had taken a word I have said ten thousand times without once hearing it, turned it over, and handed it back to me as something I am supposed to become.

The word is just.

She started with an electrician

He had been working for weeks in her brother and sister-in-law’s house, redoing all the wiring after a move. He was from the Czech Republic. At some point they started asking him about himself — who he was, how he was, what he liked to cook. It turned out he loved cooking, and he told them about the spices he put together, the ones he had brought over with him, the aromas of them. Then he started bringing them food.

And he told them: you’re different, because you treat me like I’m human. I’m somebody.

Most of our exchanges are transactions. I know this from thirty years of running a company. I needed the plumbing done, so I heard the plumber. Heidi was careful to say that plumbers and electricians are real gifts, true gifts — the problem isn’t the trade, it’s that the whole of a person gets compressed into what I can get from them. “Rather than the transaction,” she said, “we begin to be seen as human.”

What struck me was that it cost her family nothing. They asked him what he liked to cook. That was the whole intervention. And a man who had been in their house for weeks as a function suddenly became a person with a country and a kitchen and something to give.

A word we use to diminish

That is where she turned to the word.

Just is a word we use to diminish. It’s just me calling. It’s just a passing phase. It’s just in your head — the doctor said to the mother who knew something was wrong with her child. Merely. Only. Barely worth the breath it took. She said it the way you say a word you have been on the receiving end of.

And then she gave us where it comes from. Just traces back through old English and Latin to a juste — a pitcher. There are records of it in the British Isles journals of weights and measures: a vessel of about a gallon and a half, two handles, the thing people carried to be filled with ale or wine. It mattered because merchants kept quietly changing the size of their just so they could shortchange the villagers, and the fines for it were recorded almost daily. So the just became the measure. That’s just enough. That is so just. My just is full.

A pitcher that tells you whether the pour was honest.

“But what about us becoming the just?” she asked. “Us being the vessel. Us being the pitcher who learns to listen differently and pour out what is true.”

My first thought was: crap

Because I have always thought of myself as a just man. That is the word I would have used. In business, in my dealings with people, I was fair. I paid what I said I would pay. I did what I said I would do. The second definition — fair, equitable, guided by justice — I thought I had earned that one.

And then she told us about the merchants. How they quietly changed the size of their just so the pour came up short, and how the fines for it were being recorded almost every day.

Did I shortchange people?

Thirty years. Hundreds of employees. A thousand conversations where I was the one holding the pitcher and deciding what a fair pour looked like. I would like to believe the measure was honest every time. I am not sure I can.

And the other sense of the word came for me in the same breath. Did I ever say just let it be? Did I use that word to wave someone off — to close a conversation I did not want to have, to make a thing smaller than it was so I would not have to carry it?

I know the answer to that one.

I had been on both sides of that word my whole life and never once noticed it had two.

Where the story starts

Then she said the part I keep returning to. She asked where the story starts.

Most of us, she said, live from Genesis 3 forward. The fall, and then everything after.

“Notice where the story starts,” she said. “And notice what the hope of the story is — that I won’t go to hell.”

She brought in Brian McLaren’s observation that the hook which draws a person into Christianity is often the hook that has to keep bringing them back. Which means somebody has to keep making you feel worse about yourself in order to get you further in.

“That’s not where God begins,” she said. “The divine begins with creating. Again, and again, and again. And it’s rooted and dwells in belovedness.”

Original blessing. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning. A rhythm, she said — a rhythm of rooting ourselves in belovedness again and again and again, because we do not stay rooted, and the going back is the practice.

She asked the room what the word belovedness evokes. People called it out. Unconditional. Embraced by Christ. Belonging. A gift. Mattering. Cherished. Acceptance.

And then she asked the harder one, which is the question I came home with: what keeps us from dwelling there?

Because something does. I have sat in rooms where every person could have given the right answer about being beloved and not one of us was living out of it on a Tuesday afternoon in traffic.

Longing at the back of the line

She got at it by having people act it out. One person in a chair — that’s you, the self. Someone standing behind, driving — that’s what’s driving you. Someone behind that, the spirit of it. And behind that, farther back than you would think to look, longing.

Lynette was called up to stand as longing.

I watched my wife take her place at the back of that line, farther from the chair than anything else in it, and something in me went quiet. It is one thing to hear that longing sits underneath everything driving us. It is another to see it acted out with someone you love standing in the part.

Then she layered in the God images, the negative ones people have carried — what are you doing, I’m coming to get you — and had them stand in front, between the person and everything else. Her point was plain enough once you saw it standing up in a room: how a person functions in the world is bound to their image of God, and most of us are working off images we never chose and never examined.

Becoming The Just Reflection Sheet

Spiritual, not religious

That is where something came loose for me.

I have been conflicted most of my adult life about what the right way is to lead a spiritual life. Spiritual — not religious. Those are not the same thing, and I have never been able to say cleanly why they aren’t.

The religious version always came with the starting point already handed to me. You are a sinner, here is the gap, here is the bridge, now pray after me. It worked on me when I was young, the way it works on everybody. But it never settled, and for fifty years I could not name what was unsettled about it.

This talk cleared it up. The problem was never that the religious version asked too much of me. The problem was where it starts the story. If I begin at Genesis 3, every practice I take up afterward is remedial — I am working my way back toward something I am told I lost. If I begin where she says God begins, in creating and in belovedness, then the practice is not a repair job. It is a return to what was already true.

That is the difference I could never articulate. Religion handed me a deficit to close. The spiritual life she was describing hands you a given to dwell in.

I am seventy-four years old. I would have liked to have that forty years ago. I will take it now.

The pitcher I would like to be becoming

What I came away with is not a technique. Heidi was careful about that all week — a spiritual practice is not the thing itself, it is what distills the thing. The purpose, she said, is that we become it. “I can become God’s prayer in the world. I can be a breath bearer instead of a breath taker.”

A breath bearer instead of a breath taker. A vessel instead of a word that means barely.

I wrote down my first impression of her before I knew any of this. I said she was just pure personhood. I meant it the way we all mean it — merely, simply, nothing more than that. But that isn’t what the word does. A just is a vessel, and the measure of it is whether the pour is honest.

She had been exactly that, standing in the doorway, before she said a word about it.

Just enough. My just is full.

That is the pitcher I would like to be becoming.

Part 1 of 3. Part 2: presence, the body, and why we cannot achieve it. Part 3: being grounded when the ground is moving.

Peace and every good.

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The teaching on just, the etymology of the pitcher, the Genesis 1 and 2 framing, the exercise that put longing at the back of the line, the phrase breath bearer instead of breath taker — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Brian D. McLaren on the entry point of Christian formation — a recurring theme across his work.

The Problem Was Never Being Right

November 6, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

The Problem Was Never Being Right

Believing your values are right is not the problem. The problem is when that belief buys you a higher place in the room.

My friend Ajené sent me a research paper last week with four words attached: Just sharing. Saddens me.

I should say plainly that my brain is not wired to absorb this kind of information the way it was intended. I read the methods section twice and understood it the second time about as well as the first. It took me a good while to sift through, and what I came away with is a surface reading at best.

But the surface was enough to stop me.

Five studies. Over a thousand people. The same finding every time.

When a group believes itself morally superior to another group, it begins to perceive the people in that other group as less than fully human. And that perception predicts aggression.

Hmmmmm.

It is not a study about bad actors

Here is what makes it land so hard.

This is not research about extremists, or ideologues, or people with something wrong with them. The researchers ran it on American conservatives and liberals and got the effect on both sides, independent of political orientation. They ran it in China on people who supported and opposed euthanasia. And then — this is the part I keep returning to — they ran it on groups that did not exist.

They gave people a meaningless picture test and told them they had a cognitive style called “Dusek” or “Tausig.” Invented words. Assigned at random, minutes earlier, on the basis of nothing at all. Then they told some of them their invented group was the more virtuous one.

It still happened. People began rating the other invented group as less human. And it predicted aggression toward them.

So this is not about history, or grievance, or the genuine wrongs that real groups have done to one another. Those make it worse, certainly. But the mechanism runs without them. All it needs is a sense that we are the good ones.

It is about ordinary people holding ordinary convictions about what is right.

Where the hope is hiding

I almost stopped reading there. Then I got to the fifth study, and that is where something turned.

The researchers had been tracking two things that usually travel together: the sense that your group is morally superior, and the sense that your group therefore stands higher. In the fifth study they pulled those apart and manipulated them separately.

Neither one alone produced dehumanization.

Not moral superiority on its own. Not a sense of higher standing on its own. Only the two together did it.

Hmmmmm.

Sit with that, because it changes the assignment entirely. Believing your values are right is not the problem. You are allowed to think some things are better than other things. You are allowed to have convictions, and the contemplative traditions have never asked anyone to give them up.

The problem comes when that belief converts into a sense of standing above. About being better than.

That middle step is where the damage enters. It is also the step nobody notices themselves taking.

And the researchers found something practical: when they emphasized equal standing between the groups, the whole effect weakened — even among people whose sense of moral superiority was running high. The work is not to hold our convictions more loosely. It is to stop letting them purchase us a higher place in the room.

Now the uncomfortable part

I have been sitting with this for several days, and here is where it finally caught me.

I have a wall of certificates that say I am self-aware. Master Certified Coach. Certified spiritual director. Narrative Enneagram teacher. I had never once thought to put that wall next to a study about moral superiority, and I am not enjoying the view now that I have.

Because inner work is a credential. And a credential confers standing.

Early in my coaching, before I understood the depth of what it actually means to be a coach, I watched someone else trying to do it. And I thought: that person should not be a coach.

I was looking at the outside of them from the outside of me. I had no idea what was happening in that room, or in them, or what they were carrying into it.

I see it differently now. Though I want to be honest about why. What changed me was going further into the ICF mentor coach work — more training, more assessment, another credential. So the thing that corrected my judgment was the same kind of thing that produced it in the first place. I am not sure what to do with that. I am suspicious of any version of this story where I come out clean.

There is a sentence I have heard in good rooms full of serious people, and I have said it myself more than once. They’re just not very self-aware.

Look at what that sentence does. It is a moral claim — awareness is a virtue in our world, maybe the central one. And it is a status claim in the same breath: I have the thing, they lack it, and that places us. Moral superiority plus perceived standing. Exactly the combination the fifth study isolated, delivered in a warm tone of voice.

We have a particularly refined version, too, because ours comes with humility built into the vocabulary. We can say bless them, they’re doing their best with the awareness they have and mean something quite unkind by it. The language of formation is unusually good at carrying contempt without leaving fingerprints.

I teach the Enneagram, which means I help people discover that there are nine distinct ways of being better than everyone else, and that theirs has a number. I say that as a joke. I am about forty percent sure it is one.

Why the tradition built the fences it did

This is where the old practices stop looking quaint to me.

The desert fathers and mothers had an almost absolute prohibition on judging another monk — not as etiquette, but as something closer to a safety rule. There are stories about a brother caught in open sin and the elders refusing to say a word against him. That always struck me as excessive. I am less sure now.

Consider the examen. It is turned inward, always, on yourself. There is no version of the practice where you examine the day’s conduct of other people. That is not an accident of design. It is a discipline built by people who had watched what happens when a sincere person starts keeping accounts on somebody else’s behavior, and who built the instrument so it could only point one direction.

The traditions were not naïve about human goodness. They were worried about exactly this — and worried enough to build fences that look, from the outside, like they go much too far.

Catching The Conversation Workbook

What I think we actually do

I do not think the answer is to stop having convictions. I hold mine. Some things are better than other things and I am not going to pretend otherwise at seventy-four.

What I think we do is watch for the conversion.

Notice the moment a conviction turns into a position. There is a specific feeling to it, and once you know the feeling you can catch it: a small lift, a settling, a sense of having been placed correctly in relation to someone. It is pleasant. That is what makes it so hard to see. It arrives disguised as clarity.

And then do the thing the fifth study says actually works, which is harder than it sounds. Put yourself back on level ground with the person you have just placed below you. Not by pretending you agree with them. By remembering that being right about a thing does not raise you one inch above anybody.

Ajené wrote that this saddens him, and it does. But I came away with something else as well, which I did not expect from a psychology paper.

The invitation is not to be less certain.

It is to stop standing on it.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Source

Zhang et al. (2026). When virtues are weaponized: Moral superiority aggravates outgroup dehumanization. Political Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.70140

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Which Is Right?

October 29, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

SPIRITUAL DIRECTION SERIES · POST 4 OF 6

The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Which One Fits Where You Are Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else

October 29, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else

Whatever you say to yourself when you fail is the voice you will use on another person when you are tired, behind schedule, and out of patience.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a client that I thought went well. A real conversation. I came away from it satisfied.

Then nothing. No reply to my follow-up. Days of it.

And here is what I said to myself: Oh. Oh no. What did I do?

Not I wonder if they’re busy. Not I’ll check back next week. Straight to what did I do wrong — and then back through the whole conversation hunting for the moment I had blown it.

They were busy. That was all. They were busy, they got back to me, and it was fine.

I want to talk about that voice, because I have come to think it is the single most under-examined thing in leadership, in marriage, in friendship, and in any room where you have more power than somebody else.

Here is the claim, and it is not a comfortable one.

That voice does not stay inside.

Whatever you say to yourself when you fail is the voice you will use on another person when you are tired, behind schedule, and out of patience. You have been rehearsing it for forty years. It is the most practiced speech you own. And under pressure, people do not reach for their values. They reach for what is rehearsed.

You have heard the old line about loving your neighbor as yourself. Most of us read that as a sequence — get your own house in order, and then you will be equipped to love other people. Self-care first, service second. That reading has launched a thousand wellness programs.

I think it is a misreading, and the correct reading is much less comforting.

As yourself is not a prerequisite. It is a measure. It says: here is the scale you are already using on everyone around you, whether you have ever examined it or not.

Not should. Will.

Which means the harsh interior does not stay interior. It leaks. And it leaks downhill, toward whoever in the room has the least power to object.

“If I go easy on myself I’ll go soft”

Here is where most people push back, and it is a fair objection. If I go easy on myself, I will get soft. The standard will slip. The whole reason I am any good at this is that I do not let myself off the hook.

I believed that for about fifty years.

The research does not support it. Kristin Neff has spent a career studying self-compassion, and two findings land directly on this.

The first is about standards. In a 2012 study, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen had people recall a recent personal failing. Those guided toward a self-compassionate stance came away more motivated to apologize and more committed to not repeating the behavior than the people who weren’t. In the same work, students who took a self-compassionate view of a test they had just failed went on to spend more time studying for the retest. Not less. More. And across the broader literature, self-compassion tracks positively with high performance standards and personal initiative, and negatively with the maladaptive kind of perfectionism that grinds people down.

The second finding is about who we become. Neff and Roos Vonk surveyed over three thousand people comparing self-compassion against self-esteem. Self-esteem was substantially associated with narcissism. Self-compassion’s association with narcissism was zero. Not small — zero. Neff calls it the most telling difference between the two.

So the harshness we think is keeping our standards high is doing something else. Mostly it is keeping our eyes closed, because a person who expects to be savaged for a mistake becomes very skilled at not noticing mistakes.

Self-compassion is not self-esteem, and it is not letting yourself off. It is closer to what any decent coach does with a person who has just blown it: name what happened plainly, without contempt, and get to work.

The contempt adds nothing. It never has. It just feels like rigor.

What I would not permit myself

I worked constantly. I very seldom took a break, and on the rare occasions I did, I was already thinking about the next thing — the next job, the next idea, the next problem that wanted solving.

I want to be precise about that, because workaholic is too easy a word and it lets me off.

What I would not permit myself was rest. Not the hours — the permission. I did not allow myself to be anywhere except out in front of the next thing. Sitting still with nothing to solve felt like a form of failure I could not tolerate in myself.

And here is the part I did not see for twenty years. I could not permit it in anyone else either. You cannot grant a person something you have refused yourself. The mechanism does not run that way. I could not look at a tired man at four in the afternoon and see someone who needed to stop, because I had spent two decades not seeing that in the mirror. What I saw was somebody who was not going hard enough — which is precisely what I would have said about myself.

I was not holding them to a standard I was exempt from. That would almost have been easier to see, and easier to call out. I was holding them to the standard I was living under.

And I thought that made it fair.

Which self are you loving?

What I have come to believe is that most of us are not loving the self we have. We are loving — or more often, driving — the self we built to get through something.

That constructed self is usually impressive. Mine ran a company. But it was assembled under pressure for a purpose, and the voice that keeps it running is not kind, and it is not interested in whether you are tired.

So when people say love yourself, I want to ask which one. Because loving the constructed self harder does not help. It just entrenches the thing that is doing the damage.

Each type has its own accusation

This is one of the places the Enneagram is more useful than people expect, and it is not because it tells you your personality. It is because each type runs a characteristic inner critic, with its own accent and its own favorite accusation, and once you can hear yours you can stop mistaking it for the truth.

For the Eight, it is contempt for weakness — your own first, and then everyone else’s. For the One, it is the voice that never stops correcting, that has never once said that will do. For the Two, it is the quiet terror of not being needed. For the Three, it is the scoreboard that only counts output. For the Nine, it is the assumption that your own needs are an imposition on the room.

None of these are beliefs you chose. They were installed early, they worked at the time, and they have been running ever since without a review.

And every one of them gets exported. The Eight who despises weakness in himself will not tolerate it in a direct report. The One who cannot accept good enough from herself will not accept it from her children. Whatever accusation you have been living under, somebody near you is living under it too, and they did not sign up for it.

The Voice in the Empty Room

What I should have said

Back to the client who did not answer.

What I said to myself was: what did I do? What would have been accurate is: I do not have enough information yet, and the most likely explanation is that she is busy. That is not gentler. It is just truer. The contempt was not rigor; it was a guess, and a bad one.

Underneath that voice, every time, is the same sentence: I am not enough.

And that sentence does a disservice to you and to the room you are in. To you, because it is not true and it costs you years. To the room, because you will use it on somebody else before the week is out — on the person who is late, or struggling, or tired at four in the afternoon — and they will hear it in your voice and think it came from them.

It did not come from them. It came from the thing you have been saying to yourself since long before they walked in.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.

Neff, K. D., & Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: Two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23–50.

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(1), 1–12.

The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With

October 28, 2026/0 Comments/in Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With

I was dragging for years and calling it leadership.

We spent eight months preparing before Varment Guard opened its doors. Permits, trucks, equipment, the thousand small decisions nobody tells you about. And at some point in there I had four words put above the door where every person who worked for us would walk under them.

Failure is not an option.

I believed it. I still believe some of it. That sentence built a company that eventually employed hundreds of people, and I am not going to stand here at seventy-four and pretend it was a mistake. It worked.

But I have been thinking lately about what a sentence like that cannot admit, and about who pays for the part it leaves out.

What the shadow actually is

Richard Rohr has a line that has been following me around for a couple of years now: what we do not transform, we will transmit. He is talking about pain, mostly. But I have come to think it is just as true of the parts of ourselves we have never looked at directly — and that a leader transmits those at a volume nobody else in the building can match.

That is what the shadow is. Not the evil in us. The denied part. The material we have decided is not us, which goes on operating anyway, from underneath, with all the force of something that has never been questioned.

And here is the thing about shadow in leadership specifically. It does not usually show up as the obvious vice. It shows up disguised as your greatest strength, running past the point where the strength was useful.

Drive becomes a refusal to let anyone move at their own pace.

Decisiveness becomes an allergy to being slowed down by someone else’s thinking.

Protectiveness — and this one is mine — becomes the conviction that you are the only one who can carry it, which is not actually protection. It is a failure to trust the people you hired.

The ceiling I painted

Failure is not an option is a fine thing to say when you are eight months from opening and everything is uncertain. It is a different thing entirely when it becomes the air a hundred people breathe. Because what the people underneath that sentence hear is not courage. What they hear is: there is no room here to be struggling. No room to say the route is wrong, the schedule is impossible, I am in over my head, my marriage is coming apart and I cannot give you another sixty-hour week.

I thought I had painted a standard above that door. I had also painted a ceiling.

There are relationships from those years that are painful for me to think about now.

My drive was not fair to the people in the room. I harmed them. I am not going to dress that up or soften it into a lesson. I was not a monster — I was something more ordinary and more common, which is a man who mistook his own urgency for the right thing, and who ran people over while believing he was carrying them.

Most of them have gone on to successful lives in spite of me. That is the phrase that costs me. Not because of the hard training I thought I was giving them. In spite of me.

A few are still bitter. I understand why.

You cannot drag people

What I learned, far later than I should have, is the thing Jim Collins spent a book establishing: you cannot drag people along by sheer force of will. Collins went looking for what turned good companies into great ones and found that the leaders who did it were not the force-of-will personalities. They paired ferocious professional resolve with genuine personal humility — Level 5, he called it — and the magnetic, driving celebrity CEO turned up mostly in the comparison companies, the ones that did not make the leap. He put the sequence plainly too: first who, then what. The right people do not need to be dragged.

And if you are dragging, that is information about you. Not about them.

I was dragging for years and calling it leadership.

Why I keep teaching the Enneagram

This is where the Enneagram earns its keep for me, and why I keep teaching it to people who come in thinking it is a personality quiz.

The Enneagram is not fundamentally a description of how you behave. It is a description of what you are defending against, and the strategy you built so young that it stopped feeling like a strategy. Each type has a passion — the old tradition called them deadly sins, which overstates it — and the passion is precisely the engine that runs in the dark. For the Eight it is intensity, excess, too-muchness: the conviction that more force is always the answer, because force is what kept me safe once.

Nobody wakes up and decides to lead from their passion. That is the point. It is operating before you are awake.

And the instincts underneath — whether you are organized around self-preservation, around the social field, around the intensity of one-to-one connection — determine where that passion shows up first and most destructively. A self-preservation Eight hoards control over resources. A social Eight makes everything a question of loyalty to the group. These are not abstractions. They are Tuesday afternoon, in a meeting, in the thing you said that landed harder than you intended.

What the Enneagram gives a leader is not insight. Insight is cheap and most of us have plenty. It gives you a place to look before the damage, and a vocabulary for the thing you are about to do again.

Management with a title on it

Which brings me to what I actually want to say.

There is a kind of leadership that is competent, organized, well-reviewed, and entirely unexamined. The budgets balance. The people stay, mostly. The metrics are fine. And underneath it the leader is transmitting something they have never looked at — a fear, a hunger, an old wound in a good suit — and everyone in the organization is arranging themselves around it without ever being able to name what they are arranging themselves around.

That is not leadership. That is management with a title on it.

The difference is not charisma or vision or any of the words we put on the job posting. The difference is whether a person has done the work of meeting the part of themselves they would rather not meet, and keeps doing it, because it does not stay done.

Rohr’s point about transmission is the whole case for shadow work in a practical, unsentimental, bottom-line sense. You are going to transmit something. That is not optional. The only question on the table is whether you have looked at what you are sending.

The Strength That Went To Far Reflection Sheet

The door

I think about that door a lot now.

If I were painting it today, I would not take the words down. They were true about the work. We were building something that genuinely could not afford to fail, and saying so out loud was honest.

But I would want the people walking under it to know the rest of the sentence — the part I was not able to say then, because I had not met it yet. That failure was not an option for the company, and that this was never the same thing as there being no room to be human underneath it. That I was more afraid than I let anyone see. That the force I was leading with came from somewhere, and I had not yet asked where.

I would want to have known, standing there with the paint still wet, that what would cost us most was never going to be a bad quarter.

It was going to be the part of me I had decided was not worth examining, operating at full strength, for twenty years, over the heads of everyone walking through that door.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Richard Rohr on the shadow and on transformation — a recurring theme across his work, developed at length in Immortal Diamond (2013) and Falling Upward (2011).

Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001) — Level 5 Leadership and “first who, then what.”

The Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

October 12, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

Two empty chairs turned slightly toward each other in a quiet room, warm lamplight between them, a window beyond showing early morning — the shared space of coaching and spiritual direction.

Two chairs, one conversation. What changes is the question you bring to it.

Coaching helps you move toward something. Spiritual direction helps you pay attention to something.

People ask Jim and Lynette this question more than almost any other. It’s a fair one — they offer both, they’ve been trained deeply in both, and from the outside the two practices can look similar. Both involve one-on-one conversation. Both involve careful listening. Both are oriented toward growth and clarity.

So what’s actually different? The honest answer is: quite a lot. And Jim and Lynette have lived that difference from both sides — as practitioners and as people who have needed both at different points in their own lives.

What coaching is for

Coaching is fundamentally future-oriented. It begins with the question: where do you want to go, and what’s getting in the way?

Jim and Lynette spent years as Regional Network Directors for North America at Six Seconds — Josh Freedman’s global emotional intelligence nonprofit — and together co-developed the SEQ (Spiritual Emotional Intelligence) assessment now used across many countries. That work deepened their understanding of what coaching can do at its best: help people understand how their emotions inform their choices, interrupt patterns that are limiting them, and move toward what they most want with more skill and intentionality.

The Six Seconds model takes the inner life seriously. But it does so in service of forward movement. Coaching tends to work well when you have a goal you’re working toward, a decision you want to make more effectively, or a pattern you want to interrupt. It’s good for people who know roughly where they want to go and need help getting there.

What spiritual direction and spiritual formation are for

Spiritual direction and spiritual formation are fundamentally present-oriented — and in some ways, gently suspicious of the rush toward the future that coaching is designed to support.

When Lynette completed her Doctor of Ministry research at the Haden Institute and Graduate Theological Foundation, the work that eventually became the SEQ framework, she was exploring something the coaching world often moves past too quickly: the inner life not as a resource to optimize, but as a landscape to inhabit. Spiritual direction begins not with where do you want to go but with where are you, and what is already stirring in you?

A spiritual director isn’t working toward a goal with you. They’re paying attention alongside you — to what’s alive, to what’s heavy, to what keeps surfacing without resolution, to where the sacred might already be moving in ways you haven’t fully recognized yet.

The overlap — and why it matters

The two practices share more than they might seem to. Both take the inner life seriously. Both involve listening of a particular quality. Both resist the impulse to fix or advise.

Jim often says that the person who comes to him for coaching and the person who comes for spiritual direction are sometimes carrying the same question — they just haven’t recognized it yet. The executive trying to decide whether to take the promotion might actually be trying to understand what his life is for. The woman discerning a major transition might need both the practical clarity of coaching and the contemplative spaciousness of spiritual direction.

These aren’t competing practices. In Jim and Lynette’s experience, they’re part of the same one.

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Reflection Sheet

So how do you choose?

A few questions worth sitting with: Do you have a clear goal, or are you still trying to understand where you are? Are you looking for help with change, or help with understanding? Is there something specific you want to accomplish in the next year, or something you’ve been carrying that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?

And — do you sense that what’s happening in your life right now has a deeper dimension you haven’t been able to name yet? If so, spiritual direction and the spaciousness of spiritual formation might be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

If you’re still not sure, the best next step is a free 15-minute conversation. Jim and Lynette can talk through where you are and what kind of companionship makes the most sense for this season.

Schedule with Jim: https://calendly.com/jim-792/spiritual-direction-consultation

Schedule with Lynette: https://calendly.com/lynettespiritofeq/15min

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Series

Post 4 of 6 in the Spiritual Direction series.

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways, Ninety People

October 11, 2026/0 Comments/in Mindfulness, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Intelligence /by Jim Vaive

The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

There was a stretch of years when I would get to the Varment Guard yard before most of the crews, and what I remember is the sound more than the sight — twenty-odd trucks pulling in already running, warm from the drive, ready for the day and the hiss of a bay door going up. Most of the fleet never saw the yard in the morning. Ninety trucks and the men took them home, so at any hour of any night our trucks were scattered across Ohio in ninety driveways. Only the ones needing parts or a swap came in. But, standing there at six, what you saw was rows of black and gold, same logo, same ladder racks, same lettering on the door, men in the same uniform crossing between them with coffee.

I was proud of that lot. And, because of that pride it complicates everything I’m about to say.

We made them identical on purpose, and it cost money to keep them that way. Not for efficiency — for recognition( and maybe a little efficiency). Sending the trucks home every night was part of it. Ninety black and gold trucks sitting overnight in ninety neighborhoods is ninety people seeing us before they ever need us, so that a woman who noticed one in her neighbor’s driveway on Tuesday knew it on sight when it pulled into hers on Friday. She had already decided something about us before anyone knocked. That is how a stranger comes to trust you enough to let you into her crawlspace at ten at night. The sameness was a promise, of knowing that we had to be good enough, often enough, for the promise to be worth anything. Uniformity without a company behind it is just paint.

Which is why it took me a while to understand what bothers me about the internet now.

Because it looks like my back lot, and it shouldn’t. Scroll for ten minutes and you’ll see it — the same post, the same words, the same three-beat structure, the same gentle authority, the same closing invitation to reflect. Row after row of the same thing, parked, in the back lot. But our trucks were never supposed to be parked together. The whole design was to get them out and scattered, one to a street, each one sitting in front of a particular house belonging to particular people. What is filling the internet is the opposite: the livery piled up in one place where nobody lives, all the recognition with nothing behind it. No company. No crews. Nobody who answers the phone when it goes wrong at ten at night.

Nobody decided this, which is the strange part. At Varment Guard we chose the sameness and paid for it and could defend it in a room. What’s happening now is a lot that filled up by default, truck by truck, with no one ever choosing the colors.

I know how it happens, because I know how it almost happens to me. You sit down to write. Something comes back fluent and competent and nearly right. “Nearly right” has a gravitational pull that “wrong” never had. Wrong you fight. Nearly right you accept, because fixing it feels like fussiness, and because it already sounds like something that would do well. The median is seductive precisely because it is the shape of what has already worked for everyone else. Right?

The contemplative tradition has a name for this, and it is older than any of our tools. Thomas Merton spent his life circling what he called the false self — not a liar, not a villain, but the self we assemble out of what the room is known to approve of. It is competent. It is often admired. It is also, in his reading, not anyone. The desert monastics worried about the same thing in a different space. They were forever warning young monks against copying an elder’s practice instead of finding their own, because a borrowed discipline produces a borrowed man.

Here is the part that matters for anyone who isn’t writing anything. The parking lot is not primarily a content problem. It is an interior one, and it had a head start on the technology by several thousand years.

I sit with people for a living and what I hear, more often than anything else, is pre-owned language. Someone describes their marriage in the vocabulary of a podcast they heard. Someone names a career crisis in terms borrowed whole from an article they read. Someone tells me about their grief in the precise phrasing of the last condolence card they received. None of it is dishonest. All of it is context with nothing behind it yet. My work in that room is almost never to supply a better framework or give answers — it is to keep asking until something comes out that nobody handed them. You can hear it when it happens. The sentence gets worse. It gets halting and specific and a little embarrassing, and it is the first true thing said in forty minutes.

That is the whole discipline, as far as I can tell. The true sentence is usually the worse-sounding one.

I wrote in the last blog about my father in his studio, and how he would set aside a piece that was nearly finished because a quarter inch in the slope of a cheek had gone wrong. He could not paint over wood. He had to go back to the log and start again. It took me fifty years to understand he was describing the same thing I am describing here from the other end — that the fluent, finished, nearly right version is the most dangerous thing on the table, because it is the hardest one to see a fault in.

The Enneagram makes the same case from another direction. Each type is, among other things, a strategy for being acceptable — a reliable way of getting approval, safety, or distance that worked so well, so early, that it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like a personality. Nine types, nine very sophisticated paint schemes. The work is not to trade your type for a better one. It is to notice the moment you reach for the familiar move and ask whether this situation is asking for it, or whether you are just driving the truck because it is the one in the lot.

Which brings me back to the yard, and to the thing I had wrong for years.

I thought the fleet was the achievement. It wasn’t. I knew those crews. I knew Steve and Brad and Harry — what each of them was carrying into the truck at six in the morning, what was waiting when they got home, which of them was in a season that was going to hold and which of them was in one that wasn’t. The trucks were identical. Steve and Brad and Harry were never identical, not for one morning, and every night those ninety identical trucks went home to ninety different lives. The black and gold only ever went as deep as the paint.

That is also what made the brand mean anything. The uniformity was never the product. It was a way of pointing at ninety particular people who showed up and did the work. Take them out and you still have the trucks, and the trucks are worth nothing.

So the question the internet raises isn’t really about sameness. The lot is going to fill up; it already has. The question is whether there is anyone in the cab?

Ninety Trucks, Ninety Driveways Reflection Sheet

What I have come to is unglamorous. Before I publish, before I say the thing in the meeting, before I offer the observation in a session that I can tell will land well, I try to ask one question. Is this mine, or did I pick it up in the lot? Not “is it true” — the median is usually true. True and borrowed are not opposites. The question is whether it came up out of a life or came in off a shelf, and I find I can tell, if I am willing to be slow about it for ten seconds.

Most mornings I don’t like the answer. The borrowed version is better written. It is always better written. That is the problem.

But I think about standing in that cold lot at six in the morning, looking at what I believed was uniformity, when what was in front of me was ninety people I would have had to ask, one at a time, to learn anything true about. The sameness was real. It was also, every single morning, the least interesting fact about what I was looking at.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

AI assisted, not written.

Sources

Thomas Merton on the false self — developed across his work, most directly in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961).

The sayings of the desert fathers and mothers on not imitating another’s practice: the Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

The same shape underneath

The reasonable person in the story

Why emotional intelligence doesn’t reach this

So what do you actually do

Back to the log

Take this further

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Sources

A blessing of the senses

Soil kin

Nephesh is a verb

The prayer he got wrong

Many to one

Are you thirsty?

Take this further

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Sources

The imprint of presence

I would have cleaned the window

Why you cannot achieve it

The question underneath

Who told you

Take this further

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Sources

Resources

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