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It Isn’t Confusion. It’s Exhaustion.

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In October of 2024 I set up a jeweller’s bench.

Not as a hobby. As a business — Jim’s Jewelry by Design. I made pieces people could hold while they were thinking: beads, knots, things with a weight to them. I bought the tools, learned the techniques, took the orders, did the books.

In May of this year I closed it.

I closed it because I did not have the time to do everything I needed to do. The writing and the coaching mattered more. They had to take center stage, and something had to go.

That is the tidy version. The honest one is less flattering. I am an Eight on the Enneagram, and here is what an Eight does: if I see something shiny lying in the sand, I rush over, pick it up, and turn it into a business. I have done it my whole life. A pest control company. A bread store. A jewellery bench. Each time the thing itself was real and worth doing. Each time the picking-up was automatic.

My focus is narrowing now, the way it does as you get older. And by the spring I was exhausted from keeping all the balls in the air.

That last word is what this post is about.

The thing we call confusion usually isn’t

I came across a piece recently by Cameron Trimble, a pastor and author, in Richard Rohr’s daily meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation. She makes a distinction I have not stopped thinking about.

When people say they do not know what to do, they describe it as confusion. But confusion means you are missing information. Most of the time, she argues, what people are carrying is exhaustion — holding more than any one person should be holding.

Those two feel identical from the inside. They are not the same problem.

If it is confusion, more information helps. Get the numbers. Talk to someone who has done it.

If it is exhaustion, more information makes it worse. You are not short of input. You are overloaded, and every new consideration is one more thing to carry while you try to think.

I spent most of 2025 treating an exhaustion problem as a confusion problem. I read more, asked more people, made more lists about the bench — margins, time per piece, what it would take to make it work. I was very busy being thorough. None of it touched the actual thing, because the actual thing was that I had too much in my hands and no way to put any of it down.

The question was never is this a good business. It was how many things can one man in his seventies actually carry. No amount of research answers that one.

William James saw this in 1902

A brass compass resting on a rock in a field of tall grass at night, beneath a star-filled sky.

There is a passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience that I keep returning to, and it is not the one people usually quote.

James describes what he calls the field of consciousness — everything present to you at a given moment. It has a centre of interest, and around that centre the rest fades out to a margin “so faint that its limits are unassignable.” He compares it to a magnetic field, “inside of which our centre of energy turns like a compass-needle.”

Then he says this: “At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow almost to a point.”

Fatigue narrows the field. Not age, not weakness of character — fatigue. A tired person is not seeing less because they have become less; they are seeing less because the field itself has contracted, and from inside a contracted field there is no way to tell that anything is missing.

That is the whole trap. The exhausted person experiences their exhaustion as a failure of clarity, and reaches for more information — which requires more field, which they do not have.

Deciding and discerning are different jobs

Trimble’s second distinction is the one I had been circling for years without naming cleanly.

Deciding operates on a set of options. Someone has put three things on the table and your job is to pick the best one. Business is very good at this. There are frameworks, matrices, and people who will charge you a great deal to improve your hit rate.

Discerning happens before any of that. It asks whether the table is yours.

Here is why the difference costs money. A person who decides well clears options off the table quickly and confidently. That is a real strength. It is also exactly how you end up two years into something you never chose — because nobody asked whether they were the right options, and the speed of the deciding disguised the absence of the asking.

An Eight picking up something shiny from the sand is deciding, and deciding well. The business will probably work. The question nobody asks at that moment is whether it was his to pick up.

Trimble’s word for what people are actually after is attunement rather than certainty. Flatter version: most people chasing certainty want a guarantee about the outcome. What is available is a better read on what the situation is asking of you. Different purchases, and only one of them is for sale.

The in-between is not wasted time

One more thing from her piece — a reframe of a very old story.

A people leave one place and spend a long stretch in the desert before arriving anywhere. The usual reading of that stretch is dead time: a gap between the real chapters, to be endured.

The rabbinic reading she points to is the opposite. The time in between is not the delay before the thing happens. It is where they stopped being one kind of people and became another. They walked in carrying the habits of the place they had left — fear, scarcity, waiting to be told. Changing their location was the easy part. Changing that is what the years were for.

Out of the desert and into an ordinary working life: a transition is not the empty bit between two chapters. It is where you get re-made. Spend it entirely on getting out of it and you arrive as the same person who went in, which is generally how people make the same mistake in a new setting.

I have done that. Twice, at least.

And in that story nobody gets a map. They get a day’s food at a time — enough for today, nothing banked, no visibility past tomorrow. Her point, and mine: that is not a failure of provision. It is a description of how this works. You get enough for the next step, and the next step is enough.

For anyone who plans for a living that is uncomfortable. I ran a company for thirty-eight years on five-year horizons. But look at what the alternative demands: before you can act, you need a picture of an outcome several years out that nobody can honestly give you — and while you wait for it you do nothing, and call the nothing prudence.

What Insight actually is

This is the third domain of spiritual emotional intelligence, and the first two did the groundwork.

Awareness established that your own account of yourself is unreliable. Belonging asked who you are actually among, and whether a person can be among you with nothing to offer.

Insight is what becomes possible once those are in place. Not choose better between the things in front of me. Something narrower: work out which of them is mine.

Three questions, in order. Ten minutes.

One. Is this confusion or exhaustion? If you cannot name three specific facts you are missing, it is exhaustion. Stop researching. Your field has narrowed and no amount of reading will widen it.

Two. Who put these options on the table? If it is anyone but you, you are deciding rather than discerning, and the real work is upstream of the choice you think you are making.

Three. What is the next step, as against the plan? Not the strategy. The one thing you could do this week that you would not regret however the rest turns out.

That third question is most of it. Most people can answer it immediately and then refuse to act on it, because it feels too small to be the answer.

It is the answer. It is just small.

The bench

I still have it.

I have not decided what it is yet — whether it becomes a practice without being a business, or goes to someone who will use it better than I did. And for the first time in my life, not knowing by the end of the month does not feel like a failure of planning.

Enough for the next step turns out to be enough.

Post 3 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Part 1: The Last One to Know — Awareness. Part 2: What Do You Need First? — Belonging.

Peace and every good.

A companion workbook for this post: Is This Mine to Carry? (PDF).

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are 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 and credits

The distinctions between confusion and exhaustion, deciding and discerning, and the reading of the wilderness years are drawn from a piece by Cameron Trimble, pastor and author, published in the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Daily Meditations (Richard Rohr). The applications to business and to my own decisions are mine, not hers.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture X. The passage on the field of consciousness and its narrowing “at other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue” is quoted from that lecture.

What Do You Need First?

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In September of 2016 we landed in Florence with everything we owned for the next ten days in the back of a rental car.

We were there for a Six Seconds Master Class — emotional intelligence practitioners from around the world, at a castle in Tuscany about ninety minutes out of the city. At the airport we picked up a woman we had never met, a Six Seconds colleague working out of Dubai who needed a ride. Canadian originally. Talkative in a way I was in no condition for after six hours of time difference.

We stopped in a village to eat. Busy square, cars everywhere, a small restaurant up a flight of stairs where the owner greeted us in English and talked us into the local red.

A restaurant table set for dinner in warm lamplight, with a carafe of red wine, two glasses, white flowers and a lit candle.

When we came back, every other car in that square was gone, and Lynette’s jacket was hanging out of a broken rear window.

They had used it to cover the hole. Suitcases, backpacks, computers, iPads — all of it. We stood on opposite sides of the car, looked at each other over the roof, and started laughing.

And my passport

It took a while for that one to land.

The clothes were an inconvenience. The computers were expensive. The passport was something else, and I did not have words for it that afternoon.

In a foreign country, that document is not a travel convenience. It is the only thing you carry that says who you are. Without it I could not prove my name, my nationality, my right to be standing where I was standing, or my ability to go home. Every other claim I had on the world — the company I had built, the work I did, the people who knew me — was eleven hundred miles away and completely unavailable.

I had my wife and the clothes I was wearing. That was the whole of my identity for the rest of that week.

We were in a liminal space from that point on, and I do not use that phrase loosely. There was the navigation of the loss itself, in another language. And underneath it, something I had not had to think about in decades: we had to work out how to fit in, where to fit in, and how to do it without any of the usual equipment.

That is a different experience from going to Italy on holiday. On holiday you are a visitor with a return ticket, and the question of whether you fit never comes up, because you are not trying to.

We were trying to.

Three things happened, and only one of them was kind

A policeman. I tried to explain to a local officer, in sign language, that our car had been emptied. He understood enough to send us back to Florence to file a report. Procedural. No warmth required, and none given.

A document we could not read. At the station the shared language turned out to be bad French, between our friend from Dubai and the officer. Lynette signed a theft report in Italian with no idea what it said. Her words for it, in her chapter of our book, are that she was entirely at the mercy of two people she had met only that day.

Then I got lost looking for parking and had to text and ask where they were, which was my contribution to the afternoon.

And whoever broke the window. That square was full of people. Someone put the glass through on a parked car in daylight and nobody stopped them.

I want that third one in here, because the comfortable version of this story is people are good. People are various. Belonging is not a claim about human nature. It is about what particular people do when you can do nothing for them.

The question

Two colleagues from the Six Seconds community in Italy — Tomasso and Ilaria — heard what had happened and texted to find out where we were. We asked them to meet us at the rental place, where we were swapping a car with a hole in it and paying for the hole.

They arrived. And their first question was not how are you, and it was not let us know if you need anything.

It was: what do you need first?

And I cried.

I will leave that where it is rather than dress it up. I was in my sixties. I had built a company with several hundred people in it and the words failure is not an option painted above the door. I had spent the whole day being competent at a robbery — sign language with police, a report I could not read, a rental counter, a wife to get to a castle. I had not come close to losing it once.

Then two people I barely knew asked me a question I could answer, and I could not hold it.

I have had nine years to think about why, and the best I can do is this: for most of that day I had been a problem being processed. A case number, a damaged vehicle, a man gesturing at a policeman. What do you need first was the first moment anyone had treated me as a person who still had needs rather than a situation requiring management. It arrived about four hours after I had stopped being able to prove who I was.

Then they drove us to an electronics shop and spoke Italian while we stood and watched, and we came out with phone chargers and a hair dryer with the right voltage for Lynette. Then they took us to a restaurant, got us a table in a sheltered corner, and ordered for us — because they had worked out we did not have another round of language in us that day.

Why that question and not the other one

Let me know if you need anything sounds generous and does almost nothing, because it hands the work back to the person who is already carrying too much. They have to work out what they need, decide whether it is fair to ask, find the words, and risk the no. Most people, at their lowest, will simply say they are fine.

What do you need first does the opposite. It assumes there is a list. It assumes the list is long. It asks for one item. And it can be answered in four seconds by somebody standing in a car park with nothing.

That is not a warmer way of saying the same thing. It is a different thing, and the difference is who does the work.

If you lead people, this is the single most portable thing in this post. The next time someone on your team is underwater, do not offer to help. Ask them what they need first.

Gentle while we got it wrong

Here is what I remember most clearly, and it took me years to understand it.

We messed up the language. We messed up the customs. We turned up at the wrong hours, mispronounced everything, misread how things were done — and the Italians we met were gentle with us the entire time.

Not patient the way people are patient with a nuisance. Gentle. The restaurant owner who switched to English unasked. Tomasso and Ilaria ordering our dinner. The people at the training who told us where the shops were and then took us — three separate trips before we were dressed again. A waitress at the end of that week who kept her restaurant open past closing for our first wedding anniversary, put American music on, and made us a meal we still talk about. We ran into her in the square afterwards and met her son.

None of them were buying anything from us. We had nothing to trade, no standing, and in my case no document proving I was anyone at all — and we were welcomed anyway.

That is belonging, and it is worth being exact about why. Identity is what you can prove. Belonging is what happens when you cannot prove anything and are received regardless.

Most organizations never find out which one they are running on, because almost nobody in them is ever that exposed. What gets measured is contribution — so people quietly conclude that their standing is their usefulness. That holds up fine until the week they have nothing. Then they find out what they actually had.

The part I did not know at the time

Near the end of the week we asked Josh Freedman, who runs Six Seconds, about getting more involved. He told us he had been watching how we handled it.

That conversation is why the SEQ assessment exists. The framework this series is about came out of a week in which I had no passport, no luggage and no language, and was carried by people who owed me nothing.

I did not know I was being watched. Nobody does. Worth sitting with, if you lead anything: people are deciding whether you belong with them based on what you are like when it has gone wrong — and no one is going to tell you they are deciding.

Post 2 of 3 on the domains of spiritual emotional intelligence. Part 1: The Last One to Know — Awareness. Next: It Isn’t Confusion, It’s Exhaustion — Insight.

Peace and every good.

A companion workbook for this post: Who Gets to Arrive With Nothing (PDF).

About Jim & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are 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 and credits

The events of September 2016 are told more fully in Dr. Lynette Vaive’s Chapter 1 of our forthcoming book on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence. Her account is the source for the sequence of that afternoon and for her own words about signing the theft report.

Tomasso and Ilaria are named with thanks, and with permission.

The Last One to Know

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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 & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of Spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are 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.

I Show Up

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Authenticity

In my world that has incessant demands, what do I need?
Does it matter, as long as I am authentic?
That’s most important, right?
I don’t often let others see the doubt, fatigue, and frustration.
I show up
Yes, I show up…

Serenity

I challenge my negative thought patterns and redirect to meaningful connections
I see the needy world and know only some is mine to do
I pause to breathe and invite my higher self to be in charge.
It doesn’t always work quickly
I show up anyway
I show up…

Stability

I am tired of this constant juggling.
So tired—where did my peace go?
My life feels out of balance—what happened to my joy?
Must I keep showing up?
I offer myself an invitation: Come home, rest, and simply be.
Clearer, stronger, balanced boundaries restored
I show up again
I show up…

Spirit of EQ

“I Show Up” is a poem written about the SEQ Tiles in the Belonging Domain in the Spiritual Emotional Intelligence model copyrighted by Spirit of EQ.

Copyright © Spirit of EQ 2021 | www.spiritofeq.com

Summary of SEQ for Life and Peace

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First written 29 January 2025.

Spiritual Emotional Intelligence is all about connection. Connection with ourselves as individuals in becoming all that each of us were created to be in this world and perhaps in the next. Connection with our close communities, those more vulnerable relationships where we may be invited to let our guard down and let those closest to us really see us—our hurts, our concerns, our mistakes, our gifts, our talents, and our joys. And lastly, connection with the world at large—people we may not even know or something larger than ourselves—our shared humanity, regardless of our country or culture of origin or station in life.

The SEQ model: a triangle with Insight at the top, Awareness at the lower left and Belonging at the lower right, and Direction, Service and Balance along its three sides, with SEQ at the center.
The three domains — Awareness, Belonging, Insight — with Direction, Service and Balance. Image: Spirit of EQ.

Considering connection as this three-fold model depicted above, each of these domains of connecting in our human lives play a key part in realizing the worth and dignity of each individual person and our shared humanity.

Awareness helps us make connection with ourselves, pay attention to our human physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs and desires and make them harmonious with the whole of our lives.

Belonging helps us realize that our close relationships require that we go beyond ourselves for those we love or befriend most closely. There is a necessary reciprocity in these relationships—we do not have them in any significant depth if we are unwilling to make ourselves vulnerable to the important others in our lives.

Insight is about connecting with something greater than ourselves—and this can include something larger than ourselves, whatever that means to each of us in our particular faith structure. It is Insight that allows us to go beyond ourselves, beyond our close communities, beyond what we believe or have come to understand to realize there may be something even greater in that space of shared humanity.

From this space of shared humanity, the themes of Life and Peace come through as a star that lights the way for each of us to move forward, individually and collectively. What is the higher vibration that each of us may emit when we are connected with something larger than ourselves? When we have cared for our own needs so that they are not clamoring for attention? When we support and are supported by those people we hold most dear in relationship? What is out beyond our small view of the world that may be possible through our collective connection with more than we may understand, more than we can see, and more than we can know with our logical minds?

While we are breathing on this planet, what is the most important work that we will do? What is life when we consider that we are only a part of the larger community? What is peace when we consider that we are only a part of the larger community?

Life and peace…What is the fullest and most meaningful life that you can imagine? How might you move closer to that ideal for our world together?

Direction helps us move toward our desired future, individually and all as one shared humanity. Service is the ultimate gift to another as we each share this life together—even with those we may never meet in person. Balance helps us not forget to tend our own needs and the needs of those we most love in this world and beyond, so that we never forget there is something larger than ourselves.

Rumi says it better than I can. His lines beginning “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” describe a field where the categories we argue over stop making sense. You can read the passage in full at the Poetry Society, in Coleman Barks’s translation.

In our shared humanity as the guiding light, there is life and peace. Spiritual Emotional Intelligence can be the lamp holder to illuminate our shared humanity.

Spiritual Direction or Coaching Which Is Right?

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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 & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are 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 Difference Between Spiritual Direction and Coaching

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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 & Dr. Lynette Vaive

Jim and Dr. Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. Jim is a Master Certified Coach and Lynette a Professional Certified Coach; both are 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 Culture That Can’t Hear No, Part Three.

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What the data is telling us — and what the contemplative tradition knew all along

Before this becomes a conversation about individuals, it needs to be a conversation about culture. Because the question underneath “no means no” is not primarily about any single man who failed to stop or any single woman who found herself explaining a no she didn’t owe anyone. It is about the culture that produced them both — the set of assumptions, scripts, and trained patterns that has been shaping how men hear and how women speak for so long that most people mistake it for nature rather than inheritance.

And the data on where we are is not encouraging.

A February 2026 Gallup study found a persistent global gender gap in perceptions of respect for women: women worldwide lag significantly behind men in the belief that women are treated with respect and dignity. This pattern holds even in high-income countries like the United States, where women not only feel less respected but also report feeling considerably less safe in their communities. (Gallup, “World’s Respect for Women Continues to Climb,” February 2026.) A study published in Frontiers in Psychology, analyzing data across 166 countries between 2019 and 2024, found a 6% decline in global emotional intelligence during that period — driven in part by what researchers call a culture of convenience that chooses “comfort and efficiency over collective responsibility” and has “optimised away the inconveniences that create interdependence.” (Frontiers in Psychology, as cited in The Week, “Is Convenience Culture Killing Community?” January 2026.) And a May 2026 analysis of the decade’s social trends described what it called an “age of emotional detachment” — a civilization with more communication, less trust, weaker attachment, and a declining capacity for durable human connection. (John Neff, “The Age of Emotional Detachment,” May 2026.)

This is the world in which women are learning to say no, and men are learning — or failing — to hear it.

The conversation has two sides, and both of them matter. We have written about each one separately. Part One of this series was addressed to men, man to man, because a man who has never had to reckon with the times he failed to hear a no has no business telling other men how to behave. What genuine emotional intelligence asks of a man when he hears a no is not complicated: it asks him to stop. Not recalibrate, not try a different angle, not decide that persistence is a form of flattery. Stop. The Enneagram maps the particular way different types resist this — the Three who hears rejection as performance failure, the Eight who experiences a woman’s no as a challenge to his authority, the Two who cannot distinguish between her declining his advance and her negating his worth. None of these are excuses. They are starting points for the kind of self-examination emotional maturity actually demands. (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 1995.)

Part Two was addressed to women, because the story is not complete without the other side of it. Women are not struggling to say no because they don’t know the word. They are struggling because they were raised in a world that praised them for saying yes — where being needed came to feel like being loved, where the nervous system learned early that self-assertion is dangerous. (Kim Strobel, “Why Women Say ‘Yes’ When They Mean ‘No,’” kimstrobel.com, January 2026.) Research identifies four distinct failure modes for women’s voices in professional settings: not physically heard, heard but not listened to, listened to but not understood, or — most exhausting of all — fully heard, understood, and then simply ignored. (Workplace Insight, “Are Men and Women Heard Differently in the Workplace?” November 2024.) Stanford’s Angelica Puzio Ferrara has named what women routinely carry as “mankeeping” — the invisible emotional and social labor of regulating feelings, smoothing conflicts, and carrying the relational weight of every room, whether or not it is in the job description. (Allwork.Space, “Mankeeping Is the 2026 Workplace Inequality Crisis Women Can’t Ignore,” 2026.)

But Part Three — this one — is about what both sides of this conversation point toward together. Because the failure to hear a woman’s no is not merely an individual moral failure, though it is that. It is a symptom of a culture that has not yet developed the collective emotional intelligence to organize itself around the dignity of persons rather than the desires of the powerful. And building that culture — which is the only real solution to the problem that the data is describing — requires something from everyone in it.

It requires that men do more than learn new techniques. Emotional intelligence without interior examination is just better-managed ego. The Enneagram’s invitation is not to perform self-awareness but to submit to the long, slow, uncomfortable process of actually knowing yourself — your triggers, your wounds, your rationalizations — so that when a woman says no, what you hear is her, not the story your type has been telling you about what her no means. The desert father Abba Poemen said the first act of love is to leave the other person free. Not to decide that your desire is a sufficient reason to override their stated wishes. To leave them free. This is the most demanding form of respect — and it is the form that creates culture rather than just compliance. (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward, trans., 1975.)

It requires that women reclaim the interior ground that a lifetime of training in accommodation has slowly given away. The desert mother Amma Syncletica taught that the greatest danger is not external pressure but interior capitulation — the erosion of self-trust that happens before we even reach the moment of choice. (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Benedicta Ward, trans., 1975.) Spiritual intelligence, what Cindy Wigglesworth defines as the capacity to act with wisdom and compassion regardless of the circumstances (Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, 2012), asks a woman not just what are you feeling and what is your pattern, but what do you actually believe about yourself — about whether your no requires someone else’s understanding before it counts. It does not. Your no is a complete sentence. The external no is only possible when the interior life has not already given way.

And it requires that we build institutions — workplaces, churches, families, communities — organized around the assumption that when someone says no, they mean it. Safe Passage, a domestic violence resource organization, describes consent culture this way: it is “when we value the feelings of people we are interacting with either casually or professionally. It is a myth that consent is only important when it comes to sex. Consent culture goes beyond sex and applies to everyday interactions.” (Safe Passage, “How Do We Create a Culture of Consent?” November 2025.) That is not a therapeutic framework. It is a theological claim — the same one Abba Poemen was making in the fourth century: that the dignity of another person is not yours to negotiate, regardless of the room, regardless of the relationship, regardless of what you want.

No Means No Part 3 Reflection Sheet

The contemplative tradition has always known what the Gallup data and the emotional intelligence research are now confirming: a civilization that cannot hear the word no from its most consistently silenced members is a civilization that has not yet learned to see those members as fully real. That is not a small problem. It is, in the end, the whole one.

No means no. In the bedroom and the boardroom. In the family and the friendship. In the meeting and the ministry. And building a world that actually hears it is the work of every person in it — the man who stops when she says it, the woman who says it clearly without apology, and the culture that finally decides it was the right thing to do all along.

This conversation continues at The Mystical Seeker — and the SEQ framework at spiritofeq.com is built to do exactly this work, one person and one organization at a time.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive (Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher) and Dr. Lynette Vaive (Doctor of Ministry, Professional Certified Coach, Certified SEQ Practitioner, Certified Spiritual Director, Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher) 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.

 

No Is Enough,Trust What You Know

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For the women who already know this — and are still learning to say it

A word of honesty before we begin. I am a man. I am not writing this from the inside of a woman’s experience, and I would never claim to. What I can do is write it from the inside of having watched, listened, and learned — from the women in my life, from the clients I have had the privilege of walking alongside, and from my own reckoning with what it costs a woman to say no in a world that has not always made it easy or safe to do so. If anything I write here misses the mark of your experience, I trust you to know that. And I hope that what is useful here is useful — not because a man said it, but because the truth in it belongs to you.

There is a word most women learn to say before they feel entitled to say it, and a word they spend years learning to say without apologizing for. The first word is yes. The second is no. And the gap between them — the training, the conditioning, the quiet accumulation of messages about what a good woman does and does not do — is one of the most consequential pieces of unfinished inner work a woman carries.

This post is for you.

And before we go any further, something needs to be said plainly: this post is not only about sexual advances. The no that women have to say — and that the world has to learn to hear — shows up in far more places than the obvious ones. It shows up when a woman declines an assignment she wasn’t asked about, pushes back in a meeting, sets a boundary in a friendship, or says she doesn’t want to discuss something further. It shows up when she refuses a demand made in the name of helpfulness, says she disagrees, or simply opts out of something she was assumed to be available for. Research now names the emotional and social labor women routinely absorb in professional settings as “mankeeping” — a term coined by Stanford postdoctoral fellow Angelica Puzio Ferrara to describe the invisible work women do to regulate the feelings, smooth the conflicts, and carry the relational weight of every room they enter, regardless of whether it is in their job description. (Allwork.Space, “Mankeeping Is the 2026 Workplace Inequality Crisis Women Can’t Ignore,” 2026.) In every one of these situations, the same dynamic is in play: a woman’s no carries a cost that a man’s no rarely does. The word is the same. What it asks of the woman who says it — and of the people who need to hear it — is not.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that the struggle often begins long before the moment itself. Women are frequently praised early in life for being helpful, flexible, and selfless — and for many, being needed comes to feel like being loved. Over time this pattern becomes automatic, and saying yes feels safer than saying no. (Kim Strobel, “Why Women Say ‘Yes’ When They Mean ‘No,’” kimstrobel.com, January 2026.) This is not weakness. It is the result of a coherent training — a set of messages, absorbed over years, that self-assertion is a risk not worth taking. For women who grew up in homes where expressing needs was met with anger, guilt, or withdrawal, the nervous system learned a very specific lesson: self-assertion is dangerous. (Annie Wright, LMFT, “Boundaries: A Complete Therapist’s Guide to Setting Them,” anniewright.com, March 2026.) That lesson does not disappear simply because a woman has arrived at adulthood, a career, or a relationship where she knows, intellectually, that she has the right to say no.

The workplace compounds this. Research on how women are heard in professional settings identifies four distinct failure modes: women are not physically heard due to voice characteristics; physically heard but not listened to, as they are interrupted or talked over; heard and listened to but not understood; or fully heard, listened to, and understood — and then simply ignored. (Workplace Insight, “Are Men and Women Heard Differently in the Workplace?” November 2024.) That fourth category is perhaps the most exhausting: the no that is received clearly, understood completely, and overridden anyway. The meeting that proceeds as though she never spoke. The decision that gets made the way it was already going to get made, with her objection noted and set aside. This is where the cost of being a woman who says no in a world that doesn’t always receive it shows up — not as a single dramatic moment but as a slow accumulation of being expected to keep showing up anyway, keep contributing, keep smoothing, keep making it work, often for people who don’t notice the labor because they have never had to do it themselves.

The Enneagram is useful here not as a map of pathology but as a map of patterns — the particular ways each type has organized its relationship to other people’s expectations. A Type Two, whose sense of worth is deeply tied to being wanted and to meeting the needs of others, may find that no is the single most difficult word in her vocabulary. Not because she lacks the right to say it but because every fiber of her type’s strategy is built around saying yes, and saying no feels like a betrayal of the thing that makes her feel most like herself. A Type Nine, whose peace depends on avoiding conflict and who has practiced the art of going along so long it has become invisible to her, may not fully register her own no until it has already been overridden — by someone else, or by herself. A Type One, who holds herself to exacting standards of right behavior, may be caught between what she knows she has the right to say and the internal voice that says she should be gracious, forgiving, reasonable — that a good woman finds a way to work within the constraint rather than refusing it. These are not weaknesses. They are places where the type’s strategy has been applied in a context it was never designed for, and where honest self-examination can begin to loosen the grip.

Emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness — not the performance of it, not the vocabulary of it, but the actual practice of knowing what you genuinely feel, what you genuinely want, and what you genuinely do not want. Daniel Goleman identified self-regard and emotional self-awareness as foundational — not supporting skills, but the ground on which everything else stands. (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 1995.) A woman who has done that work knows, in real time, what she is feeling and what she needs — and she has practiced, however imperfectly, the act of trusting that knowledge over the noise of what the room seems to expect from her. She knows the difference between genuine ambivalence and manufactured uncertainty she has been pressured into. She knows what no feels like in her body before her mind has finished the sentence.

The desert mother Amma Syncletica, one of the few women’s voices preserved in the contemplative tradition, taught that the greatest danger is not in external pressure but in the interior capitulation that happens before we even reach the moment of choice — the slow erosion of self-trust that happens when we spend years making ourselves smaller to make someone else comfortable. (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Benedicta Ward, trans., 1975.) The external no is only possible when the interior life has not already given way. This is the work Spiritual Intelligence — SQ — asks of a woman: not just what are you feeling and what is your pattern, but what do you actually believe about yourself? About whether your comfort matters as much as his? About whether your no requires his approval before it counts? Cindy Wigglesworth defines SQ 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.) That kind of peace is not passive. It is the hard-won capacity to stand in a room that expects something of you and say, clearly and without apology: not this. Not from me. Not today.

No Is Enough Reflection Sheet

Here is what the wisdom of the tradition — ancient and hard-won — says about this: your no is not unkind. Your no is not an explanation you owe anyone. Your no is not a negotiating position or a first bid or an invitation to try harder. It is a complete sentence, spoken from the fullness of who you are, and it does not require a man’s agreement or understanding to be true. A man who hears it and pushes past it has made a decision about your worth. A man who hears it and stops has made a different one. What he does with your no tells you something important about whether this is someone who sees you as a person.

You do not need to manage his feelings about your no. You do not need to make it easier for him to receive. You do not need to apologize for knowing yourself well enough to say it. Saying it clearly, without softening, without manufactured uncertainty, without the explanation you were taught to offer — that is not unkind. It is the most honest gift you can give him. And it is the most faithful act of care you can offer yourself.

Trust what you know. Say what is true. No is enough.

This conversation continues at The Mystical Seeker — and the work of building that interior foundation is what the SEQ framework is built for. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive (Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher) and Dr. Lynette Vaive (Doctor of Ministry, Professional Certified Coach, 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.

 

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 Dr. Lynette Vaive (Doctor of Ministry, Professional Certified Coach, 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.