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Intelligence Is Not Wisdom

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Intelligence Is Not Wisdom

And confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a leader can make

There was a problem at Varment Guard that the numbers made perfectly clear. The accounting was sound — the logic was right, the figures said what figures are supposed to say. What I missed entirely was what those numbers were doing to the people responsible for producing them. My employees were living inside a reality the spreadsheet had no column for: the pressure, the confusion, the quiet erosion of something that doesn’t show up on a P&L until it’s already gone. I had intelligence about the problem. I did not have wisdom about it. And by the time I understood the difference, the cost had already been paid by people who deserved better from me.

The desert fathers had a name for what I was missing. They called it nepsis — watchfulness, or sobriety of attention — the practice of seeing what is actually happening rather than what the available framework suggests should be happening. The Apophthegmata Patrum, the collected sayings of the desert elders, return to this again and again: the danger is not ignorance but the confident wrongness that comes from a trained mind that has stopped questioning its own frame. Abba Moses said it plainly: “A man who does not know himself cannot know his neighbor.” Knowing the numbers is not the same thing as knowing yourself. And a leader who has not done the second will regularly mistake the first for sufficient.

This is the distinction that philosophy has been circling for centuries and that psychology has finally found empirical language for. David Egan, philosopher and teacher at the World Community for Christian Meditation, puts it this way: intelligence involves a sharpness and quickness, working from problems toward solutions. Wisdom works in the opposite direction — not finding answers but calling the questions themselves into question, stepping back to see how a situation has been framed and asking whether there might be some other way of framing it altogether. (David Egan, “The Difference Between Wisdom and Intelligence,” WCCM, February 2024.) Intelligence is convergent. Wisdom is expansive. And everything in the attention economy — every dashboard, every metric, every well-formatted report — is working directly against the patient, expansive, slow thing that wisdom actually demands.

Psychologist Robert Sternberg, whose triarchic theory of intelligence remains one of the most careful treatments of the subject, has argued for years that wisdom may matter more than intelligence in leadership — and that our failure to cultivate it is a central problem of the age. He writes that when citizens and leaders fail in the pursuit of their duties, it is more likely for lack of wisdom than for lack of analytical intelligence. (Robert Sternberg, “Why Schools Should Teach for Wisdom,” Educational Psychologist, 2001.) We have no shortage of analytical intelligence. What we have a shortage of is the willingness to do the slow, patient, unglamorous interior work that wisdom actually requires.

This is precisely where Emotional Intelligence enters as something more than a skill set. Researchers have noted that the ancient Stoics anticipated what EQ research has spent decades documenting: that sound judgment requires emotional self-knowledge, and that practical wisdom is experience-dependent in ways that raw intelligence is not. (Neurolaunch, “Intelligence vs. Wisdom: Unraveling the Distinctions and Connections,” May 2026.) EQ brings a person closer to wisdom than IQ does because it asks not just what but who — who is in the room, what are they actually experiencing, what does this moment cost them that the data doesn’t capture. Standing in that Varment Guard office, reading a report that said one true thing about the situation, I had enough IQ to understand the numbers and not yet enough EQ to see the people behind them.

The next layer — Spiritual Intelligence, or SQ — goes further still. Cindy Wigglesworth, one of the primary researchers on the subject, defines it as the ability to act with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the circumstances. (Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, 2012.) It is the capacity to orient yourself inside the largest possible frame — not just the frame of the immediate problem, the current quarter, or the next decision, but the frame of what this moment means, what it costs, and what it calls for. Where EQ asks what am I feeling and what do I do with that, SQ asks why does this matter and to whom am I ultimately accountable. The desert fathers understood SQ not as a category but as a way of being: the fruit of long interior practice, of years spent unlearning the confident wrong answers.

Neuroscientist Tara Swart, writing on this distinction, describes wisdom as the life lessons a person stores through experience — in the body, in the gut, in the accumulated residue of what it has cost to live and lead. Intelligence, she notes, is more about data and knowing. Wisdom is more of a felt sense that something is right or wrong. (Tara Swart, interviewed in Mindbodygreen, “Wisdom vs. Intelligence,” 2021.) What I was missing in that Varment Guard moment was precisely that felt sense — the capacity to stand in a room full of correct data and still ask: what is happening to the people in this? What is the human cost of the logic that makes perfect sense on paper? That question is not answerable by analysis. It requires a different kind of attention — slower, less efficient, more willing to be uncertain — the kind the desert elders spent their whole lives cultivating and the kind every good leader eventually discovers they cannot borrow from a report.

Intelligence is Not Wisdom Reflection Sheet

The word Aristotle used for the integrated thing was phronesis — practical wisdom, the capacity to see rightly and act well in the particular moment, all the way down to the ground of who you are and what you are for. IQ can help you read the room. EQ can help you feel it. SQ can help you understand why the room exists and what it is asking of you. Wisdom, the integration of all three seasoned by experience and honest self-examination, is what tells you that the numbers are correct and something is still wrong — and that the something still wrong is the thing that actually needs your attention.

There’s more of this conversation at The Mystical Seeker — and the SEQ framework at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive (Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher) and Lynette Vaive (Doctor of Ministry, Certified SEQ Practitioner) are co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker on Substack. Together they help individuals, teams, and organizations grow from the inside out — at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

 

AI, Alignment, and the Examined Life

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What artificial intelligence can’t do, and why that matters more than what it can

There is a question the ancient world already knew how to ask, and we keep pretending is new: who is actually making this decision?

The Socratic tradition called it the examined life. The desert fathers called it watchfulness. The Enneagram calls it self-awareness. Every contemplative tradition in history has circled back to the same insistence — that the quality of our choices depends almost entirely on the quality of our self-knowledge, and that self-knowledge requires a kind of honest, unglamorous looking inward that most of us will do almost anything to avoid. What’s new isn’t the question. What’s new is that for the first time in human history, we have a tool sophisticated enough that we can almost convince ourselves it’s doing the looking for us.

I’ll admit I came to this with some humor intact. I noticed early on that certain AI programs had a particular habit — every interaction seemed to begin with an assessment of how intelligent my question was, how thoughtful my framing, how perceptive my instincts. It took me a few exchanges to realize what was happening: the flattery wasn’t insight, it was optimization. The program wasn’t responding to me; it was responding to what keeps people engaged. Once I saw it I didn’t need it anymore, and I stopped needing the machine to tell me how smart I was before it helped me think. That’s a small thing, but it clarified something important: AI is a mirror, but it’s a mirror that can be angled to show you only what you want to see. The examined life requires a different kind of mirror — one that shows you what’s actually there, including the parts you’d rather not see. No algorithm is going to angle itself toward your blind spots. That work is still yours.

AI is extraordinary at a great many things. It processes information at speeds no human mind can match. It surfaces patterns across datasets too large for any individual to hold. It generates options, drafts, analyses, summaries — it can do in minutes what used to take days, and it does it without fatigue, without ego, without the emotional noise that makes human decision-making so expensive. If what you need is optimization across known variables, AI is genuinely remarkable. But there is a category of question it cannot touch, and it is precisely the category that the EQ and contemplative traditions have always considered most important: not what is the best available option, but who am I when I make this choice, and why.

The spirit of EQ podcast episode that prompted this post walked through four domains where AI intersects with how we lead and decide: awareness, alignment, responsibility, and decision-making. What struck me sitting with those four was how precisely they map onto what every serious inner-work tradition has always asked of us — and how differently AI and contemplative practice approach each one. AI can measure certain kinds of awareness: it can tell you what your calendar says, what your emails reveal, what patterns your behavior traces over time. But awareness in the EQ and contemplative sense isn’t data collection. It’s the capacity to be present to your own interior state right now, in this moment, with honesty — to notice what you’re feeling before you decide what to do with it. No algorithm can do that. The most sophisticated AI in the world cannot tell you that you’re about to send that email from a place of unprocessed anger rather than clear judgment. Only you can catch that, and only if you’ve developed the habit of looking.

Alignment is where it gets even more interesting. AI can align your choices with your stated goals. What it cannot do is ask whether your stated goals are actually yours — whether they came from genuine discernment or from fear, from external pressure, from a story about who you’re supposed to be that you’ve never examined closely. The Enneagram’s great gift is precisely this: it shows you the ways your type has organized its desires and fears in patterns so automatic they feel like personality rather than strategy. Becoming aware of that structure is alignment work of a kind no AI can perform, because it requires you to sit with discomfort long enough to see what’s actually driving you, and that sitting is irreducibly yours to do.

Responsibility is the domain where the limitations of AI become most consequential at a leadership level. AI can model the probable outcomes of a decision. It can weight options against criteria you’ve given it. What it cannot do is feel the weight of the choice — the actual moral gravity of deciding something that affects real people, real lives, real futures. There is something that happens in a human being who stays present to that weight rather than delegating it to a tool. Something gets asked of you. Something gets formed or deformed in the asking. Leaders who outsource the responsibility of decision-making — even partially, even to very good tools — are outsourcing a piece of what the examined life is supposed to develop in them.

AI Reflection Sheet

None of this is an argument against using AI. It is an argument for knowing what you’re using it for, and being honest about what it cannot do. The examined life has never been efficient. Socrates was notoriously slow. The desert fathers sat for years in cells working on single questions. The Enneagram will show you the same pattern in yourself thirty times before you fully see it. The examined life is slow, unglamorous, and frequently uncomfortable — and it is the only source of the kind of self-knowledge that produces trustworthy judgment, genuine compassion, and decisions you can actually stand behind.

The question AI raises, handled well, is not whether the machine is dangerous. It’s whether we’ll use its remarkable speed and capacity as an excuse to stop doing the harder, slower, more important work of looking inward — or whether we’ll use the time it saves us to go deeper into exactly the kind of examination no algorithm can perform. That’s not a technology question. It’s a spiritual one. And it’s one the ancient world already knew how to ask.

There’s more conversation on this at The Mystical Seeker — we’d love to have you there.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ and author of The Mystical Seeker, writing at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. He and his wife Lynette help individuals and organizations grow from the inside out.

 

When Pushing Through Is the Wrong Answer

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Why Canceling Plans Might Be the Healthiest Thing You Do

On self-awareness, honest limits, and why pushing through isn’t always the right answer

There is a particular kind of guilt that arrives about forty-five minutes before you’re supposed to be somewhere you no longer have the capacity to go. You made the commitment in good faith, probably a week ago, probably on a day when your energy was different and the calendar looked manageable and you genuinely meant it. Now the evening is here, and so is the truth: you are empty. Not tired exactly — empty. The kind of empty that has nothing left to offer a dinner table, a meeting, a gathering of people who deserve more than whatever hollowed-out version of you is going to walk through the door and perform presence for two hours.

Why Cancelling Plans is Healthy Workbook

Most of us, at that moment, go anyway.

We go because we said we would. We go because canceling feels like a character flaw, a social infraction, evidence of something soft or unreliable at the center of us. We go because the voice that says push through has been rehearsed so many times it arrives before we’ve even finished asking the question. And sometimes pushing through is exactly right — commitment matters, and showing up when it costs you something is part of what it means to be a person others can count on. But sometimes, not always, the most honest and emotionally intelligent thing you can do is pick up the phone and say: I can’t tonight.

That sentence is harder than it sounds. Not logistically — the text takes thirty seconds. Hard because it requires you to know something true about yourself in real time, and then to act on it, which is a two-step sequence that a surprising number of otherwise capable people never complete. The knowing is one skill. The acting on the knowing is another, and it’s the one that tends to get crowded out by obligation, by fear of disappointing someone, by the story we tell ourselves about what a cancellation says about who we are.

I had a Wednesday not long ago that had been stacked from morning — back to back appointments, the kind of day that requires you to be fully present in every room, hour after hour after hour. I was still recovering from pancreatitis. Not the dramatic early days of it, but the long, grinding middle part of recovery where you look functional from the outside and feel like a fraying rope on the inside. By late afternoon I had nothing left. Not a little less than usual — nothing. And there was one more appointment on the calendar, a person who mattered, a conversation I had committed to. I sat with it for a few minutes, which is its own kind of discipline — not the reflexive push-through, not the reflexive escape, but sitting with the honest question of what was true. What was true was that I could not do one more hour. Not because the person wasn’t worth it. Because I genuinely, physically, could not. So I told the truth. I said we would need to reschedule. It was hard to say, and it was the right call, and those two things were both true at the same time.

Emotional intelligence is often described in terms of what you bring to other people — your empathy, your listening, your regulation in a hard conversation. And it is those things. But underneath all of them is something more foundational: an accurate read on your own internal state, in real time, without flinching from what it tells you. That’s the beginning of the whole enterprise. Without it, empathy becomes performance. Regulation becomes suppression. You show up, you do the thing, you say the right words, and none of it is connected to anything happening inside you because you stopped checking a long time ago.

The EQ literature calls this self-awareness, and it’s technically the first domain, the thing everything else is built on. But the clinical language undersells what it asks of you: the willingness to be honest about your own condition even when honesty is inconvenient, even when the people around you would prefer a different answer. It’s easy to know your own state when the news is good — when you’re rested and clear and ready. It’s considerably harder when the news is that you’ve hit a wall, that you’re running on empty, that tonight you are genuinely not the person you want to show up as. That knowledge asks something of you. It asks you to say it out loud, to yourself first, and then sometimes to someone else.

What makes canceling feel like failure is that we’ve absorbed a set of assumptions about what it means to be dependable, productive, fully-functioning members of whatever worlds we inhabit — and those assumptions tend not to include “sometimes knows when to stop.” The cultures most of us work and live inside reward output, presence, availability. Canceling reads as a withdrawal from all of that, a small defection, proof that you couldn’t keep up. What it is, when done from honest self-knowledge rather than chronic avoidance, is an act of accurate self-management. You assessed your actual capacity, matched it against the demand, and made a call. That’s not weakness. That’s the whole skill set applied to yourself.

There’s a difference worth naming between canceling from honest self-knowledge and canceling from avoidance, because they can look identical from the outside but feel completely different from the inside. Avoidance is the slow accumulation of exits — the pattern of escape dressed up as self-care. Honest self-knowledge is a specific, present-tense read: not I don’t feel like it but I genuinely don’t have what this requires tonight, and showing up hollow serves no one. The question worth sitting with, before you send the text, is which one is true. Not as a trap or a guilt mechanism — as a genuine inquiry. You usually know the difference. The body knows before the mind finishes the sentence.

What you owe the people you’re canceling on is honesty, reasonable notice, and the genuine intention to reschedule. What you don’t owe them is a performance of yourself at a cost you can’t afford. The relationships worth having are sturdy enough to absorb an occasional cancellation made in good faith. The ones that can’t tolerate it are telling you something worth knowing.

And here is the thing that tends not to get said in conversations about self-care or any of the other words that have been handled so much they’ve gone a little soft: protecting your capacity isn’t only about you. The version of you that shows up rested, present, and genuinely available is a gift to everyone in the room. The version that pushed through out of obligation and is now moving through the evening on fumes — that person is there in body only, and everyone can feel it, including you. Honoring your actual limits isn’t withdrawal from community. It’s how you stay in it, over time, without burning down.

There will be commitments you keep even when it costs you, and you should — some things are worth the cost, and following through on hard promises is part of what integrity looks like in practice. But there will also be days like that Wednesday, when the honest answer is that you need to stop, and the most emotionally intelligent thing you can do is say so. Not every week. Not as a pattern. But when it’s true, said plainly, as an act of care — for yourself, and for the person on the other end of the call who deserves your real presence, not what’s left of it.

The guilt that arrives before you’re supposed to be somewhere you can’t reach — that’s worth paying attention to. It’s usually telling you something real. The question is whether you’re willing to hear it, and then willing to act on what you heard.

There’s more conversation happening over at The Mystical Seeker — we’d love to have you there.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ and author of The Mystical Seeker, writing at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. He and his wife Lynette help individuals and organizations grow from the inside out.

 

I Damaged Someone & The Truth It Taught Me

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There is a picture my mother drew of my father in his studio. He is standing at the canvas with a brush in his hand, but he is not painting. He is looking. Just looking. My mother told me once that the hardest thing about being an artist is not the making — it is the seeing. Seeing what is there, not what you hoped would be there. Seeing clearly enough to know when something is wrong, even when the wrong thing is something you made.

I have thought about that picture a lot over the years. Especially in relation to leadership. Because leadership, at its most honest, requires the same thing my father was doing in that studio: the willingness to stand before what is real and see it — not manage it, not spin it, not quietly maneuver around it — but see it. And the hardest version of that seeing is always the one that turns inward.

When Lynette and I were building the spirit of EQ framework, we kept returning to a question that came up repeatedly in our coaching and spiritual direction work: why do so many gifted leaders struggle with self-awareness? Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they are unkind or unserious. But because the very qualities that made them effective — decisiveness, energy, forward momentum, the ability to hold a vision and drive toward it — can become the walls of a room they eventually cannot see out of.

The Enneagram has a word for this. It calls them fixations — the grooved, automatic patterns we operate from when we are running on autopilot rather than on presence. Each type has its own shape of forgetting. And the forgetting is not dramatic. It is quiet. It accumulates. It happens in the ordinary press of days, under the ordinary pressure of responsibility, until one morning you look up and realize the wake you have been leaving behind is wider and more damaging than you ever intended.

I know this from my own life. When I co-founded Varment Guard, my business partners were good people — steady, quiet, deeply competent in their domains. But one stands out for me, he did not move fast. He did not think fast. He processed carefully, methodically, and he was almost always right. I am a classic Enneagram Eight. I move fast. I decide fast. I push hard. I burned through rooms in those early years the way a locomotive burns through a tunnel — arriving on the other side with energy to spare, rarely pausing to consider what the air felt like for everyone else inside.

In the beginning, this particular partner and I worked well together. His steadiness balanced my fire. My drive opened doors his caution would have approached more slowly. But as the business grew and the pressure intensified, I lost access to that balance. I stopped seeing my partner clearly. I started seeing only the pace I needed us to keep, and I began — unconsciously, relentlessly — forcing this gentle soul into a shape that was not his. I pushed him beyond the edges of who he was. I did not mean to damage him. But I did. And eventually, he left. Not loudly. Not in conflict. He simply found a way out, and the relationship went with him. It was a wound I have carried for a long time.

What I could not see then — and what took years of coaching, spiritual direction, and a lot of sitting still to begin to understand — was that the truth I needed to face was not about the business. It was about me. The Eight’s deep gift is strength. The Eight’s deep shadow is the refusal to acknowledge the harm that strength can do. I had confused impact with intention. I believed that because I did not mean harm, I had not caused it. That is not how it works. That is not how it has ever worked.

The contemplative tradition is clear about this. Howard Thurman wrote that we are responsible not only for our intentions but for the world we create around us — the quality of the field we generate for those in our care. Julian of Norwich, writing from her anchorite cell in fourteenth-century Norwich, described the interior life as a dwelling place — something that requires tending, requires honest inspection, requires the willingness to see what is there rather than what we prefer to believe is there. “All shall be well,” she wrote — but the path to that wellbeing runs directly through the truth, not around it (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love).

The research on emotional intelligence affirms what the mystics knew intuitively. Six Seconds, the global EQ nonprofit where Lynette and I served for many years, identifies self-awareness as foundational to every other capacity in the emotional intelligence model. You cannot regulate what you cannot see. You cannot choose your response when you are unconscious of your pattern. You cannot lead others toward wholeness from a place of unexamined wounding. The data bears this out across industries, cultures, and leadership contexts. Self-awareness is not a soft skill. It is the load-bearing wall.

But here is the thing about truth: it requires courage, not just curiosity. Many leaders are curious about themselves in a managed way — they take the assessments, they read the books, they sit in the leadership retreats. What is rarer is the willingness to let the truth land. To let it cost something. To sit with it long enough that it changes not just your language but your behavior, your relationships, the shape of the wake you leave. The contemplative teacher Thomas Keating called this the dismantling of the false self — the slow, sometimes painful process of releasing the persona we have constructed to protect ourselves and facing what is underneath (Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart). Most of us will do almost anything to avoid that process. Leaders perhaps most of all, because the stakes feel so high and the exposure feels so total.

John O’Donohue, the Irish poet and philosopher, wrote that “the longest journey you will ever make is from your head to your heart” (John O’Donohue, Anam Cara). I think of that line often when I am sitting with a leader in a coaching session, watching them circle a truth they cannot quite bring themselves to name. The truth is right there. They can feel it. But the distance between knowing it in the mind and letting it descend into the heart — into lived acknowledgment, into genuine accountability — can feel enormous. That journey is the work. And no amount of strategy, no quarterly planning cycle, no leadership competency framework can do it for you.

What helps? In our experience at spirit of EQ, several things. The practice of silence — not productivity, not journaling as output, but genuine quiet that creates the interior space for truth to surface. The practice of honest relationship — at least one person in your life who is not dependent on you, not intimidated by you, and will tell you what they see. The Enneagram, used not as a typology to explain yourself but as a mirror to face yourself. And prayer — whatever form that takes for you — as an act of opening, of consenting to be seen more fully than you can see yourself.

I did not get a chance to repair things with my partner. That is a grief I live with. But what his departure gave me — painfully, slowly, over years — was the beginning of something more honest in myself. A willingness to slow down long enough to feel the field I was generating. A willingness to ask not just “Did we hit the goal?” but “What did it cost the people in the room?” That shift did not diminish my leadership. It deepened it. It made me someone I am still, imperfectly, trying to become.

The Truth Leaders Don’t Want to Face

My father’s picture still lives in my mind. The brush in his hand. The stillness of his looking. The courage required to see clearly enough to know what is true and what is wish. That is the invitation for every leader who is willing — not to be perfect, not to have it all resolved, but to stand before the canvas of your own life and look.

The truth will not destroy you. It will, in time, free you.

If this reflection stirred something in you, we’d love to have you join us at mysticalseeker.substack.com — where we explore the inner journey of leadership, EQ, and spiritual formation.

Peace and every good.

mystical seeker.substack.com

The Most Intelligent Thing You Can Do Is Slow Down

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When You Know Why You React, You Can Choose How You Respond

What the Enneagram and emotional intelligence reveal about the space between trigger and response

There is a photograph I keep coming back to in my mind — not an actual photograph, but the kind that forms over years of sitting across from people in coaching conversations. It is the image of a person mid-sentence, eyes slightly wide, voice pitched a half-step higher than usual, saying something they will probably wish they hadn’t. And in the moment before the words arrive, there is this invisible space — a fraction of a second, maybe less — where everything that matters is happening.

Viktor Frankl called it the space between stimulus and response. He wrote about it from inside a concentration camp, which means he earned the right to talk about it. That space, he said, is where our freedom lives. It is also, I’ve come to believe, where emotional intelligence and the Enneagram converge into something genuinely transformative.

The Intelligence Beneath the Surface

Emotional intelligence, as Daniel Goleman mapped it, begins with self-awareness — the capacity to notice what’s happening inside you before it moves through you and into the world. Josh Freedman of Six Seconds distills it differently, into a sequence I return to often: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. The knowing comes first. Without it, we are largely reactive — moved by currents we can’t name.

Most of us have experienced this. A colleague’s offhand comment lands wrong and we feel our jaw tighten before we understand why. A family member raises a familiar complaint and we hear ourselves responding in the old way again — the way we promised ourselves we wouldn’t. The reaction isn’t irrational exactly. It’s just faster than our awareness.

This is where the Enneagram enters the room.

A Map of the Interior

The Enneagram is a nine-type system of personality that goes deeper than behavior into motivation — into the core fears and longings that drive us. It is not a label to be worn comfortably. At its best, it is an unsettling mirror, one that shows you not only what you do but why, and what you are protecting when you do it.

A Type Eight (the Challenger) doesn’t lead aggressively because they are cruel. They lead that way because somewhere underneath the forcefulness is a terror of being controlled or betrayed — and strength feels like the only reliable protection. A Type Two (the Helper) doesn’t overextend themselves because they are foolish. They do it because their worth, in some deep and often unconscious way, feels contingent on being needed.

When you understand this about yourself — really understand it, not just intellectually but in the body — something shifts. The reaction doesn’t disappear. But there is more space around it.

The Place Where They Meet

I’ve seen this play out in workshops and in one-on-one coaching more times than I can count. A leadership team I worked with had a Type Eight and a Type Nine in constant friction. The Eight moved fast, spoke bluntly, made decisions before the Nine felt heard. The Nine withdrew, agreed on the surface, and then quietly undermined the direction — not out of malice but out of a desperate need for harmony they didn’t know how to ask for. What made it harder was that both of them were genuinely trying. The Eight believed clarity and decisiveness were acts of respect — waste no one’s time, say what’s true, move forward. The Nine believed keeping the peace was its own form of care — absorb the friction, hold the group together, avoid the rupture. Neither of them was wrong exactly. They were just operating from entirely different interior maps, and no one had ever handed them the other person’s.

When we named what was happening through the lens of both the Enneagram and emotional intelligence, something loosened. The Eight didn’t need to become soft. The Nine didn’t need to become confrontational. They needed to understand each other’s interior logic — and then, from that understanding, choose something different than their default. What I watched happen in that room was not a personality makeover. It was something quieter and more durable: two people recognizing that the other person’s behavior had a reason, and that the reason wasn’t contempt or weakness. That recognition created enough safety for genuine conversation — maybe for the first time in years of working together.

That’s the intersection. The Enneagram names what’s underneath. Emotional intelligence gives you tools to work with it. Together, they create the conditions for what I’d call non-reactive presence — the ability to be fully in a difficult moment without being fully hijacked by it.

Some Places to Begin

If this is new territory for you, here are a few entry points worth sitting with:

  1. Get curious before you get defensive. The next time you feel a strong reaction — irritation, anxiety, the urge to withdraw or escalate — ask yourself what it’s protecting. Not in a clinical way, but genuinely. What’s at stake for me right now?
  2. Learn your Enneagram type as a spiritual practice, not a personality quiz. The Narrative Enneagram tradition invites you into the type through lived experience and community, not just a test score. There’s a difference.
  3. Practice the pause. Frankl’s space between stimulus and response can be cultivated. Centering Prayer, mindful breathing, simple body awareness — any practice that builds your capacity to notice before acting will serve you here.
  4. Make it relational. Understanding your own type is valuable. Understanding the types of the people you love and work with alongside yours is where transformation tends to happen. The framework becomes a bridge rather than a mirror.

I don’t think any of us become non-reactive all the way down. That would require not being human. But I do believe we can cultivate the capacity to meet our reactions with a little more light and a little less automatic machinery. The Enneagram helps us see ourselves clearly. Emotional intelligence gives us something to do with what we see.

That space between stimulus and response — Frankl was right. Something important lives there. And with practice, we can learn to inhabit it.

If you’re curious about exploring the Enneagram and EQ together — for yourself, your team, or your community — visit spiritofeq.com to learn more about our workshops and coaching.

Peace and every good.

— — —

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The Chairman Thought I Wasn’t Paying Attention

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Picture a waiting room. You’ve been there five minutes, and without meaning to, you’ve already written a story about everyone in it — the man with the expensive watch who checks his phone every thirty seconds, the woman with paint on her jeans who hasn’t looked up from her book, the teenager in the corner with earbuds in like armor. You haven’t spoken to any of them. You may never speak to any of them. But somewhere in the architecture of your brain, a file has opened on each one, and it is filling itself in without your permission.

This is what we do. It is fast, it is mostly unconscious, and — here is the part that costs us — we tend to trust it.

Confirmation bias is the cognitive shortcut that turns a glance into a verdict. Once we’ve formed an impression, we filter everything through it, collecting evidence that confirms what we already believe and quietly discarding what doesn’t fit. The psychologist Leon Festinger spent decades helping us understand how fiercely the mind protects its working assumptions — not because it is lazy, but because uncertainty is expensive. The brain is a prediction machine, and prediction requires categories. The trouble is that people are not categories. They are houses you have never been inside, and the front door tells you almost nothing about what’s in the rooms.

It causes me to think about the ways I’ve been filed.

I was asked to lead a financial committee for an international organization. In the first meeting, I was the quietest person in the room. I tend to listen before I speak, to let the space fill before I take up any of it. I was watching. I was also reading — the numbers that weren’t adding up, the relationships between people that were bent in ways that take time to see, the kind of bent that looks like warmth from a distance but reads differently when you’re close and paying attention. Embezzlement. Alliances that were costing the organization more than they were protecting it. I could see it, and I called it out.

The room exploded.

What I learned later — from the chairman himself — was that he had watched me sit quietly when he asked me to be on “the committee” I wasn’t really present and could not tell what was going on. That my stillness read as absence. That I could be managed, even manipulated, and that bringing in someone so apparently passive had been, in his mind, a calculated move toward a controllable outcome.

He had filed me. Quickly, confidently, and very wrong.

I am not the first person this has happened to. You are not either.

Think about the moments you’ve been looked past — the job interview where someone’s eyes glazed before you finished your first sentence, the meeting where your idea was ignored until someone else said it twenty minutes later, the day you walked into a room in the wrong clothes for the assumptions people had already formed about you. Your hair too natural, your accent too layered, your stillness too unreadable, your energy too large. The label arrives before you do, and it does not ask for your input. It does not ask for your history, your interior life, your gifts, or your grief. It just lands, and it sticks, and quietly it shapes every interaction that follows.

The philosopher Martin Buber, my fav, spent much of his intellectual life writing about what he called I-Thou and I-It encounters — the difference between meeting someone as a full subject, irreducible and alive, and relating to them as an object, a role, a function, a category. Most of our daily encounters, Buber admitted honestly, are I-It. The world moves fast; we cannot hold everyone in full attention at every moment. But the cost is real. We move through life surrounded by people we have reduced to fit the size of our assumptions, and we call that knowing them.

The label is not the person. The label is a shortcut we mistake for a destination.

There is a practice I’ve come to think of as staying curious past the first sentence. Not the performance of curiosity — the enthusiastic head-tilt and the “Tell me more” — but the actual discipline of holding your impression lightly, the way you’d hold a rough draft: with interest, not authority. And this is what real coaches do. It tells you something. It does not tell you everything. The quiet person in the room is watching. The loud one is sometimes afraid. The polished one is held together with things you cannot see. The disheveled one has already solved a problem you haven’t noticed yet. Every label you apply is a door you close, and some of those doors open onto entire worlds.

What Josh Freeman of the emotional intelligence company Six Seconds has trained us to do here is not to have certainty but curiosity — not the confident read, but the open question. It asks us to notice what our brain wants to do with a stranger in the first thirty seconds and then, gently, invite it to wait. To ask a question we don’t already know the answer to. To sit with not-knowing long enough to find out who’s in the room.

The chairman’s assumption about me wasn’t malicious. It was human. But it was a choice — and choice is where practice lives.

When I left that boardroom after the explosion, I wasn’t angry. I was, in a strange way, grateful — because what had just happened was the clearest possible evidence that the quiet person had been paying the most attention. The label had failed. The person it was attached to had not. I walked out still whole, still present, still myself. And whatever the chairman thought he had managed had just become the thing that managed him.

That is always the risk when we label. The person inside the box tends to be larger than the box. And eventually — not always, not on our timeline, but eventually — they will show you.

Mystery Workbook Link Here

So the next time you sit across from someone, in a meeting, at a table, on a commute, in a waiting room, try this: let them be unknown a little longer. Let the file stay open. Notice what your brain wants to do and then invite it to wait. Ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

The person across from you is always a mystery.

That is not a problem to solve. It is an invitation to pay attention.

Come continue the conversation in the community where these ideas live — [link here].

Peace and every good.

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957)

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923; trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1970)

From the Frats to the Hippies: How Not Belonging Taught Me to See

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Good Enough for This Life

Do you ever think about whether you are good enough for this life?

I ask it that way on purpose — not “good enough at your job” or “good enough for the relationship” but for this life, the whole thing, the fact of being a particular kind of person moving through a world that was mostly built for a different kind of person. It is a question I have carried for a long time. And I want to tell you where it came from, because the origin of this story matters.

Picture a room full of people who seem to know where to stand. You are at the edge, not by design but because the middle arrived too fast and too loud, because you are already receiving the room — not just the nearest conversation but every conversation, the ambient emotional temperature, the undercurrent of music, the way the light is sitting differently on one side than the other. You are cataloging all of it without meaning to, because that is simply how your mind moves.

I know that room. I spent most of my adolescence looking for the group that would finally let me in — not merely tolerate me but receive what I was bringing. I tried the frats, with their crisp hierarchies and their belonging-by-exclusion, their handshakes and their unwritten ledgers of who counted. I tried the greasers, leather and bravado, a different code but a code all the same, enforced with the same quiet ferocity. I tried the soul brothers, drawn by the warmth and the music and the sense that community here might stretch wide enough to hold more kinds of people. And finally, tentatively, I found the hippies — loose-structured, philosophically suspicious of tight categories, practicing a kind of radical acceptance that was imperfect and sometimes chaotic but real. They were the closest thing to a fit I had found. And even there, I was only partly in.

What I didn’t understand then, standing at the edges of all those circles, was that the thing keeping me out was also the thing that made me able to see.

I have dyslexia and ADHD. Together. Which, if you’ve lived it, means the mind doesn’t run one stream of consciousness but several — simultaneous, layered, cross-referencing, sometimes chasing each other into corners before snapping back. The squirrel jokes are accurate. Mid-sentence, mid-thought, something peripheral catches your sight and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely, following a thread that no one else in the room can see.

What I couldn’t name as a teenager was the experience of receiving a conversation on six channels at once — the words someone was saying and the words they weren’t saying, the slight tension in their shoulders, the way their story didn’t quite line up with their eyes, the ambient emotional weather of the room, the connection to something said three exchanges ago that suddenly mattered now. All of it arriving at the same time. All of it real.

This was not comfortable. For years it was almost unbearable — the sensation of always arriving sideways to the conversation, unable to slow the intake down enough to meet people where they were. I tried to explain it, and it came out tangled. I tried to belong and it came out strange. Large parties still overwhelm me quickly; the signal-to-noise ratio collapses under too many inputs running at once, and I learned early to find the wall, the corner, the quieter edge where the room could be read rather than absorbed whole. And so, the question I carried — quietly, persistently, the way you carry things you cannot put down — was: Am I good enough for this?

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, developed in the early 1980s, named what many people had quietly suspected: that intelligence is not a single axis running from less to more, but a wide range of distinct capacities — linguistic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and more — that show up differently in different people, and are cultivated or suppressed depending on the environments those people move through. Ned Hallowell, who has written about ADHD from the inside for decades, describes it as a Ferrari engine with bicycle brakes: enormous processing power that simply needs a different kind of structure to channel it well. What both are pointing toward is this — the brain that struggles in one environment is often extraordinarily capable in another. Not as consolation. As fact.

The multiple streams I couldn’t turn off at parties became, in smaller rooms and deeper conversations, something closer to precision. I could hear what people meant underneath what they said. I could hold several threads at once and notice where they crossed without losing either. I could sit with someone in confusion and not rush them toward clarity, because I knew from the inside what it felt like to have the mind moving in many directions at once and not yet know which one was true. The gift and the difficulty were the same thing, running on the same hardware, expressed differently depending on context.

I think now about that teenager trying the frats and the greasers and the soul brothers and the hippies — not as someone who failed to find a home, but as someone learning, by accumulation and by refusal, what belonging required. It wasn’t a group that would tolerate him. It was a context in which his actual nature could be useful. The hippies came closest because they had, almost by philosophy, released the requirement to be one thing, to arrive in a straight line, to present a coherent and unified self at all times. They were practicing, imperfectly and sometimes chaotically, the idea that a loose structure could hold more kinds of people and more kinds of minds.

What I do now — working with people around emotional intelligence, around the interior life, around the persistent gap between who we are and who we think we should be — is built directly from those years of standing at the edges of rooms and learning to read them. The overwhelm at large gatherings is still real. The squirrels still appear. But I have learned to trust the multiple streams, to follow rather than fight them, to understand that the signal is often in the thing that looks like noise. Observation turns out to be one of the rarest things one person can offer another. And it was built, in me, precisely by not being comfortable in the middle.

So: do you ever think about whether you are good enough for this life?

Edge Of Room Workbook

Here is the reframe I want to offer — not a reassurance, not “of course you are, everyone is,” which is kind but lame and thin. Instead, the question assumes a standard that was probably never built for you. The thing you experience as a deficit — the way you process or move or think or feel that doesn’t match the room — may be exactly the mechanism by which you will eventually see most clearly.

I still sometimes find myself at the edge of a room, taking in more than I was asked to take in, following threads no one else is following. But I am no longer trying to get to the middle.

The edge, it turns out, is a very good place to observe from. And observation, it turns out, is exactly what most people are waiting for someone to offer them.

If this landed somewhere in you, the conversation continues at [Substack/Mighty Networks] — a community that keeps asking these same questions together.

Peace and every good.

Choose Your Altars: Context Before Commitment Now!

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Can I be heretical for a moment? I want to talk about worship—not as doctrine but as human behavior. When we use words like “worship,” “blessed,” or “devotion,” we often assume everyone shares the same map for those terms. But what if we treated those words as claims that require context and interrogation the way we would any major life commitment—like marriage, career choice, or a mortgage? Do we know why we are doing the deeply important things in our lives, and what it really means to be doing them?

Let’s start with a simple observation: language is slippery. “I worship God” can be a conscious, reflective claim about meaning and purpose, or it can be shorthand for a family habit, a cultural identity, or a weekly routine. The same goes for secular “objects” of devotion—money, status, sex, drugs, career. People often enact profound loyalties without pausing to ask whether those loyalties are chosen or inherited, adaptive or harmful.

I talked about context a few posts ago and I want to dive into it a little bit differently.

Examples make this more concrete.

  • The executive.

Consider Linda, a chief operations officer who describes herself as “dedicated” to her company. She works 70-hour weeks, vacations with her laptop, and measures self-worth by quarterly results. Her friends joke that she “worships the bottom line.” Is that hyperbole? For Linda it’s not; her weekends are filled with email, she’s missed births and birthdays, and financial metrics shape her identity. The question is: did she choose this life because it aligns with an examined set of values, or because the expectations and incentives around her nudged her into a default devotion? If she says she “devotes her life to work,” what does “devotion” actually mean for Linda—satisfaction, security, avoidance of other pains? What is the context that made work the main altar of her life? (I changed content of each of these examples because I was not given permission to use the people’s identities)

 

  • The influencer.

Jamal, a 23-year-old social media creator, measures success in likes, followers, and brand deals. His waking plan is content production optimized for engagement. That rhythm organizes his social circle, daily habits, and self-esteem. When his follower count stalls, he becomes anxious and makes riskier content decisions to chase virality. Is he worshipping audience approval? Again, the symbol matters: the behaviors are indistinguishable from religious devotion—rituals (posting), community reinforcement (comments), moral accounting (metrics). But does he understand why he chases those metrics? Is it autonomy, recognition, or fear of obscurity?

  • The habitual churchgoer.

Sara attends Sunday services every week, has for decades, and calls herself a person of faith. But she admits she often sits in the pew on autopilot—singing the songs, nodding at the sermon, rarely thinking about the theological claims. For her, worship is a social ritual that binds her to family and community. That’s meaningful in certain ways, but if someone asks whether she “devotes her life” to the principles taught there, she struggles to articulate specifics. Is her participation a moral compass, a habit, or a defense against loneliness? Without context, the claim “I worship” can mask a lack of considered commitment.

  • The non-believer.

Tom, an engineer, publicly states he does not believe in God or organized religion. What does that mean for him? Is he rejecting the metaphysical claims, the social practices, the institutional authority, or all of the above? For some people, atheism is an intellectual conclusion; for others it’s a cultural stance or even a reaction against abusive institutions. Context matters: a blanket “I don’t believe” can be an invitation to conversation, but it can also be shorthand for “I was hurt,” “I never saw the need,” or “I never had a framework to meaningfully engage.”

  • The addict.

Marcus struggled with substance dependence for years. He would prioritize the next fix over relationships, work, and health. In a clinical sense, addiction can look like a form of worship: consistent rituals, surrender of agency, and a value hierarchy in which the substance ranks above all else. When he entered recovery and asked why he had chased substances so relentlessly, he uncovered fears, trauma, and a hunger for acceptance. Recognizing the context changed his approach to life and meaning.

These vignettes point to a few recurring patterns.

First, devotion and habit are not the same. Something you do every week can be either a carefully chosen expression of core values or a default behavior sustained by habit and social reinforcement. We routinely confuse frequency with meaningfulness. The critical move is to ask: does repetition reflect reflective commitment or mere inertia?

Second, context transforms words into claims that can be evaluated. To say “I worship X” without specifying what X is, what X gives you, and what X costs you, is to make an ambiguous claim. Is the worship chosen freely? Is it compensatory (filling a void)? Is it communal or isolating? What happens if X is removed—does the person reorganize their life or collapse?

Third, many social institutions encourage uptake of labels without fostering critical thought. My pastor friend who worries about biblical text being used without context has a secular analogue: workplaces, subcultures, and social media ecosystems often pass down language and practices that people adopt without understanding origins or alternatives. Some call that “faith” or “loyalty”; others call it suspension of inquiry. Either way, it’s worth asking whether your assent is informed.

So, what do practical steps look like if we decide to insist on context before committing to the things that claim our lives?

  • Ask the “why” questions: Why this devotion? What needs does it serve? Whose approval or reward structures support it? Try to make a list—psychological, social, economic—that explains the attraction.
  • Consider the long-term ledger: How will this devotion look in five, ten, thirty years? What will be served, and what will be sacrificed? Try to envision the trade-offs honestly.
  • Test alternatives: Could you allocate attention differently? If your life’s axis shifted even slightly, what would change? Small experiments reveal if a devotion is truly intrinsic or simply convenient.
  • Seek external perspectives: Talk to friends, mentors, or a therapist about what they see. People immersed in a system often miss its blind spots.
  • Demand specificity from claims: When someone asserts “this is what we do” or “this is who we are,” ask follow-up questions. What do you mean by “this”? What metrics or stories support that definition?

Click Here For Free Workbook Link.

Language matters because it shapes identity. “Worship” is a provocative term because it exposes the sacrificial structure of devotion. You don’t have to use religious vocabulary to admit you are giving your life to something. You can be as devoted to a career, a relationship, a cause, or a compound as anyone kneeling in a chapel. The crucial question is whether that devotion is the result of an informed, reflective choice or an accident of context.

I can’t accept words without context. Can you? If you want to live honestly and with purpose, start asking context questions about the things that claim you. It doesn’t require rejection or conversion—only clarity. And when we have clarity, we gain power: the power to recommit intentionally, to redirect energy where it matters, and to stop pretending that habits equal meaning..

Hide-and-Seek of the Soul: Learning to Be Found…

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When I was a child, summer evenings meant the sweet, damp smell of grass and the soft thud of bare feet on the lawn as we played hide-and-seek until the light thinned to the color of my old side of our old house. I remember crouching behind brick walls in that ethnic area of Detroit called Hamtramck, my breath held, counting on my hands while my young friends scattered like leaves on the wind. The delight of being both pursued and hidden—of waiting in a secret pocket of the world until someone found me—stayed with me. That game was, in miniature, a schooling in the rhythms of life: the thrill of discovery, the quiet of waiting, the embarrassment and laughter when the hiding place failed. Beginning here, with that memory of hide-and-seek, helped me see how the hidden things of life are part of the same pattern we practiced as children.

One moment we are walking along, sure of our path, and the next moment something rises from below the surface—a memory, a grief, a joy so bright it takes our breath away. We jump, we scream, we wonder, we are grateful, sometimes all in the same moment. These small detonations and soft arrivals are reminders that we are alive. They are also invitations: invitations to pay attention, to name, to bear witness.

In spiritual direction, I have found that the time spent sitting with clients and listening to the story that unfolds usually brings about those hidden things that want to bubble to the surface. There is a kind of safety in the slow arc of attentive listening. As someone tells their story—staggering details together with ordinary moments, explanations scribbled in the margins—those tucked-away parts of experience begin to show themselves. A pause becomes pregnant with meaning. A stray tear draws out a knot of memory. An offhand joke reveals a wound. The directed space is not magic; it is relational and structured, and that structure matters. It offers permission to the hidden to be seen.

Why do hidden things remain hidden in the first place? Often because we have learned survival strategies that require us to ignore certain sensations or thoughts. We may have been taught that some feelings are inappropriate, unspiritual, or unwise to voice. We may fear the consequences of acknowledgement—shame, judgment, or a sense of being overwhelmed. Or we may be so immersed in the busyness of living—work, caretaking, the small daily duties—that we simply do not have the patience to notice the subtleties at work in our inner life. But life has a way of insisting. The hidden, like water, finds the path of least resistance. It leaks through in dreams, in somatic signals, in sudden irritations, in wonderings that won’t let us go.

When those pesky hidden things are asking to be seen, what do you normally do? Stuff them down, let them out, ignore them? That’s me, Ignore them! This simple question is an important litmus test for our way of managing interior life. Each of these options—suppressing, expressing, or ignoring—carries consequences.

Stuffing things down can be a short-term coping mechanism. It may allow us to function under pressure, to remain reliable for others, or to dodge the immediate pain of facing something difficult. But suppression is porous. Pain that is not metabolized finds another expression: chronic anxiety, irritability, sleep disturbances, or unexpected explosions of emotion. Over time, what we have buried can calcify, making it harder to access and integrate. Spiritually, suppression can feel like a closing off from the grace that often arrives when we name the truth of our condition. It can turn our inner landscape into a desert.

Letting things out—expressing raw emotion—can be liberating. A cry, a fierce conversation, an honest confession, a journal entry that spills secrets onto the page: these can unbind what was stuck. But unrestrained release without discernment can also cause harm. If the expression is directed at vulnerable others or enacted impulsively, it can fracture relationships and create new wounds. What helps is a tempered expression: naming what is present without launching it like a spear at someone else. Finding appropriate outlets—trusted friends, therapists, spiritual directors, creative acts—can channel release in healing ways.

Ignoring is its own form of avoidance, subtly different from stuffing. To ignore is too busy ourselves with neutral or distracting activities—scrolling, workaholism, noise—so that we do not have the space to meet whatever is asking for attention. Ignoring can feel safe because it delays the inevitable. Yet the hidden things have stamina. They may return more persistently or in altered forms. Ignoring is a passive collusion with fear.

So, what is the middle way? From the practice of spiritual direction and from the rhythms of contemplative life, a few patterns emerge that help make the hidden visible without being consumed by them.

  1. Cultivate a listening posture. Listening is not merely the absence of speaking; it is an orientation of attention. When you cultivate a listening posture toward yourself—pausing, closing the gap between stimulus and reaction—you give the hidden a chance to emerge. Practices that cultivate listening include silence, breath awareness, journaling, and prayerful attention. In a listening posture, you loosen the habit of immediate reactions and make space for discovery.
  1. Name gently. When something surfaces, name it as precisely as you can. “I am feeling afraid,” “I notice grief behind my anger,” “There is shame when I think about that conversation.” Naming is enacting a tiny liturgy of truth: you acknowledge a reality and thereby diminish its power to run you unconsciously. Naming need not be a full-blown analysis—often a brief, compassionate descriptor will do.
  1. Use trusted containers. Not every feeling needs to be told to everyone. Spiritual direction, therapy, close friendships, creative outlets, and ritual provide containers where the hidden can be explored safely. A good container holds both tenderness and truth. It helps you stay with a feeling long enough to learn from it without being overwhelmed.
  1. Practice curiosity, not judgment. Hidden things often come with a script—a voice that tells us we are broken, weak, or unworthy. Replace condemnation with curiosity. Ask, what is this wanting from me? How old is this pattern? Where did I first learn this response? Curiosity opens pathways of understanding that judgment seals shut.
  1. Attend to body and imagination. The hidden speaks not only through thought but through the body and imagination. An ache in the chest, a clenching in the jaw, a dream, an image that keeps returning—these are languages of the soul. Attend to them. They often carry the metaphorical shape of what’s needing attention. Let your imagination be a map, not a liar; test its images against gentle reality-checks. As an example, I tend to hold stress in my neck and at times becomes so painful that I cannot use one of my arms and when I check in with my body, I can usually find the reason.

When I think back to hide-and-seek on the lawn, I notice how the children’s version of the game allowed for a safe reveal. We knew, inherently, that being found wasn’t the end of the world—it was part of the play. That trust made hiding feel not like concealment but like a temporary, innocent withholding. In adult life we often forget that being found can be met with gentleness rather than punishment. Spiritual direction, friendships, and practices of presence restore that simple truth: the world, and the people we trust, can be safe places to be seen.

Reflections on life’s hiddenness inevitably led to paradox. The very things that surprise us—the sudden joy, the spontaneous grief—are both evidence of our vulnerability and of our depth. They remind us that life is not a list of accomplishments but a living relation. When we make room for these hidden things, they can become sacramental: ordinary moments that reveal deeper truth. A tear can be a doorway; an unexpected laugh can be grace.

In the end, how we respond to the hidden shapes the arc of our lives. Do we cultivate a posture of listening and curiosity, or do we keep building higher walls? Do we find companions who can sit with the messy reality of us, or do we continue a lonely performance? The invitation is simple and relentless: pay attention.

And so, I come back, as the sun sank on those summer evenings, to the hush of hiding and the laughter of being found. The child who crouched behind the hedge trusted that discovery would not be punishment but part of play; the adult who sits in a quiet room with a spiritual director or a friend can relearn that same trust. To let the hidden things surface is not to expose ourselves to harm but to return to a game we once knew well—the risky, delightful art of being seen. If we remember how play taught us that being found often brings relief, connection, and a burst of laughter, then perhaps we can meet our inner surprises with less dread and more curiosity. Hide-and-seek becomes a small theology: what is hidden will be found, and what is found can become fuel for deeper life. Trust the finding.

The Three Intentions Practice of Heart

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You’ve probably heard the phrase “emotional intelligence” thrown around in meetings, on LinkedIn posts, and in self-help emails. It’s become one of those buzzwords that can feel both promising and slippery — promising because it suggests we can get better at being human with each other, slippery because it can stay as a concept in our minds without ever changing how we live. Lynette and I learned this the hard way.

Years ago, when EQ still lived a bit on the edges of mainstream leadership development, we fell into it in a way that felt like fate. We trained with Six Seconds — the Emotional Intelligence Network — and with Josh Freedman, who was and is leading the organization. Back in those days Josh was able to be pretty much one on one with people that were interested in EQ, and we learned a lot from him. We didn’t just take a course or two; we drank deeply. We took every training Six Seconds had at the time and offered it through our company, Spirit of EQ. By learning the tools and the models, and eventually served as Regional Network Directors for North America we found out the meaning of a deeper walk with our emotions.And that meant we were surrounded by people who had a real heart for change: coaches, educators, leaders who wanted to bring more humanity into their work and lives.

But here’s a truth we discovered: no matter how many models you memorize, how many assessments you score, or how many workshops you deliver, moving emotional intelligence from the head into the heart — truly owning it — is harder than it looks. Intellectual understanding is tidy and safe. It sits in the mind, where ideas can be argued and adjusted. The heart, by contrast, is raw and messy. Owning EQ means translating insight into felt experience and consistent action. It means living it, not just thinking about it.

What we learned made the difference between clever jargon and more about structure, practice, and values. Their approach centers around three practical intentions that are easy to understand and hard to neglect: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. These are not slogans. They’re invitations to live differently.

Know Yourself This is the foundation. If you don’t know what’s living inside you — your triggers, your default reactions, your values and fears — you can’t intentionally choose how to respond. Six Seconds and its SEI tools support accurate self-assessment, and that’s a useful starting point. But assessment without felt reflection is like reading your own weather report without stepping outside. To own EQ in your heart, you must turn awareness into felt reality.

Practice:

  • Start small with regular check-ins: pause three times a day and name what you feel (not just what you think). Use simple language: “I feel anxious,” “I feel tired,” “I feel excited.” Naming an emotion moves it from automatic reactivity to conscious awareness.
  • Use a body scan: where do you feel that emotion? A tight chest, a knot in the stomach, a quickened heartbeat? Bringing attention to bodily sensations roots intellectual understanding in bodily truth.

Choose Yourself This is the hinge. Knowing yourself gives you options; choosing yourself means you act on them intentionally instead of re-acting. It’s about the space between stimulus and response that Viktor Frankl talked about — that space is where EQ lives.

Practice:

  • Identify one pattern that doesn’t serve you (e.g., snapping when stressed, avoiding tough conversations). Define a tiny alternative action you can take in moments of stress and practice it relentlessly.
  • Anchor to values. If kindness is important to you, pre-decide what a small kind action looks like when you feel defensive. That pre-decision helps you act from choice, not from old habit.

Give Yourself This is the outward expression. EQ is not an internal hobby; it’s a way of relating. When you give from a place of presence and purpose, the heart opens. Give Yourself also means self-compassion — you must offer yourself the same patience you give others while you’re learning.

Practice:

  • Practice small acts of service or connection that align with your values. These don’t have to be grand: a sincere thank-you note, a five-minute listening session with a colleague, or arriving ten minutes early to be fully present in a meeting.\
  • Build a ritual of self-forgiveness. When you fail (and you will), practice an internal script of learning rather than self-judgment: “I’m learning. What can I try differently next time?”

Bringing these three intentions into daily life is how EQ stops being a theory and becomes a way of living. But there are still practical obstacles: busyness, skepticism, and the defense mechanisms that keep us stuck in the head. Here are concrete ways we learned to bridge that gap — ways that helped the people we worked with when we were regional directors, and that helped us in our own lives.

And here is the part where I do a shameless self-promotion: we at Spirit of EQ can help you with these trainings.

  1. Use tiny experiments to build evidence

The brain cares about results. When you run small experiments — “Today I’ll breathe for 30 seconds before responding to criticism” — you gather evidence that different responses work. Accumulated evidence rewires expectation and hence behavior.

  1. Anchor learning in relationships EQ isn’t a solo sport.

Practice with a trusted person: share your intention (“I’m practicing listening without giving advice”), ask for feedback, and debrief what happened. Real relationships provide both safety and accountability.

  1. Move from intellectual insight to sensory experience.

 We often “know” something in our mind without sensing it in our body. Use approaches that require embodiment: role-plays, expressive movement, breath work, or even walking meetings where you name feelings aloud. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

  1. Create an identity shift– Tell a new story about yourself:

not “I’m someone who gets triggered,” but “I’m someone who notices when I’m triggered and pauses.” Identity influences action. The more you act from that story, the more the heart will follow. Reframe, reframe, reframe.

  1. Practice compassion rituals Moving from head to heart requires warmth toward yourself and others.

Start each day with a two-minute compassion practice: think of someone you care about and wish them well, then extend that same wish to yourself. Science and tradition both show compassion practices open the heart.

  1. Use measurement to fuel growth (wisely).

Six Seconds’ approach includes measurement tools like the SEI assessment to track progress. Measurement is useful when it’s used for learning, not judgment. Use data to celebrate growth and to identify patterns you want to shift — not to shame yourself.

  1. Connect purpose with practice

 People consistently embody EQ when their practices are connected to a larger purpose. Ask yourself: “Why do I want to get better at emotional intelligence? What would that allow me to bring to my family, team, or community?” When the head’s motivation aligns with heart-felt purpose, change accelerates.

A story that stays with me: we were running a regional workshop and one participant, a manager of a busy nonprofit team, was skeptical. He’d been to countless trainings and felt they were mostly fluff. Halfway through, during an exercise to name emotions and bodily sensations, he blurted out that he’d always been taught to “keep his face on.” The muscles around his eyes relaxed for the first time in the workshop. He admitted that for years he’d been protecting himself by staying emotionally flat. That admission was intellectual, but the group’s non-judgmental witnessing shifted something in him — his shoulders sagged, his voice softened — and for the first time in years he felt something like relief. He later told us that he didn’t become a different person overnight, but that one small felt moment made it possible for him to experiment with being authentic. He started a weekly habit of one minute of naming before staff meetings and eventually began to model vulnerability for his team.

That’s the turning point we saw again and again: an intellectual insight met with a felt experience, supported by practice and community. That’s how EQ moves from the head to the heart.

If you want to own EQ — not just understand it — begin where you are. Choose one small practice from above and make it non-negotiable for a week. Tell someone about what you’re trying. Measure nothing more than whether you did the practice. Notice the felt changes. Then expand.

The work of those many years showed us that emotional intelligence is less a destination and more a living skill — like learning a language or playing an instrument. You won’t master it in a weekend, but you can grow it every day. And when you do, something quietly powerful happens: your choices come from a place of alignment, your relationships deepen, and your life becomes an expression of the values you claim.

We’ve carried that lesson through our careers and into our everyday lives. We still study, we still measure, and yes, we still read the research. But what matters most is the slow, steady translation of insight into action — the felt practice of showing up differently. That’s how EQ stops being a buzzword and starts being a way of living from the heart.