The Science Behind High Spiritual Intelligence in Leadership with Yosi Amram

Opening the conversation about spiritual intelligence

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:32Bill Gallagher: You've heard of emotional intelligence. You've heard of IQ. Lots of different kinds of intelligence. We're talking about spiritual intelligence and why it matters to leaders and in business. I know for many of you, spirituality has a set meaning already. For me, it's somewhat trouble. My family's of mixed religious background, and it was a source of argument. My parents were obsessed with spirituality. I think, in some sense, I'm a deeply spiritual person. For some of you, that sounds like it evokes religion. For some of you, it's anti. I don't know. Whatever it is, tune in. Stay with us because I think it'll be an interesting conversation.

01:21Bill Gallagher: Hey, everybody. Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of this super groovy Scaling Up Business Podcast. I don't know. I'm entertained by it myself. Hopefully, you join me in that journey. Our show, 650 plus of them now, wherever you're getting this right now. Like, subscribe, notifications, share it, give us a review, all that kind of stuff helps us out. Do us a solid. Help us out. Much appreciated. And if you wanna know more or join one of our cohorts or do a growth assessment with me, lots of stuff like that we can do to help you out, scalingcoach.com. Check us out. We also have a newsletter every couple weeks. So we've got that. We've got our monthly workshops, and we'll do a growth assessment on possible paths for your growth of your business.

02:13Bill Gallagher: Alright. Listen. I'm joined now. If you're watching on screen, you can already see him here. Yosi Amram. So Yosi. There you go. There you go. Echo in the world. Yosi is a licensed psychologist. He's a leadership coach. He's an author. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. He's got a PhD in clinical and transpersonal psychology. He grew up overseas. He was exposed to a lot of things and had to confront spirituality and what that meant for him. He developed this whole thing, this work, spiritually intelligent leadership. How to inspire by being inspired. It's awful hard to inspire people if you're not already inspired yourself. Right? So that's the subject of our conversation. Welcome to the show, Yosi.

03:02Yosi Amram: Thank you, Bill. I'm having fun already. I appreciate your energy and the music and your framing the conversation around spirituality, leadership. Yeah. It's so packed and so loaded for so many of us. So, hopefully, we'll shed some light and clarifying misconceptions and associations that people may have.

03:29Bill Gallagher: Well, in the opening of the show, I mentioned that for me, spirituality is one of those loaded, ambiguous terms that I think it means whatever you want it to mean, like an inkblot for people. In some regards, there's not necessarily rigor around it. It also then brings up arguments as it moves into religion and good or bad or right or wrong. But you led tech companies. You have been a business leader, gone through growth through stock price ups and downs and all kinds of things like that. And then you had a psycho-spiritual breakdown of your own. Talk about the shaping moments that led you. I don't know. You can go back to your childhood if you want, but what are the things that led you to be in this work?

What spiritual intelligence actually means beyond belief

04:20Yosi Amram: Yeah. I will tell my story. Hopefully, I'll try and do that in more than a second and a half, but less than an hour and a half. It's a long story, but as many of us. But I do wanna highlight some of the things you said because of all the loading that has to do with that, which seems to there's a dichotomy. It seems like spirituality is nonrational, is mystical, etcetera. I wanna say that everything I'm talking about is scientifically validated and consistent with logic and science. So the results have been demonstrated scientifically. What I'm talking about, that it contributes to the bottom line, to productivity, to profitability, and to well-being individually and collectively. So I just wanna get that right out of the box so people don't get confused because there is all this stuff that spirituality is divorced from practicality. And we used to have a similar dichotomy between being emotional and being reasonable. And then we came up with emotional intelligence that said, no, being emotional is not the same as being emotionally intelligent. So being spiritual is also not the same as being spiritually intelligent. So spiritual is you can have a spiritual belief. You can believe in God, the immortality of the soul. You can believe in reincarnation. You can believe in angels. Whatever. All that woo woo stuff. Right? But spiritual intelligence is not that. It's about the ability to embody these qualities and virtues that have been celebrated for thousands of years across all the world's wisdom traditions. Things like purpose, service, gratitude, humility, presence, compassion, forgiveness, and so on. I can rattle off all these qualities that emerged as universal across all the world's traditions for thousands of years which now the fields of positive psychology and leadership development validate that people with greater purpose or servant orientation or people who express gratitude or embody trust or compassion or presence are more effective and happier as leaders and as human beings. Okay. That's my quick commercial, to try and at least say the basics. But your question was, how did I get here? Right? Yeah. So I'm gonna try and tell my story.

06:53Bill Gallagher: Pause the story for a minute. If I pull the through line out from the notes before and from what you just said, there's a whole lot of qualities or expressions of something that are fairly universal beyond specific faith and traditions and practices and things like that. But they come down to something greater than oneself, something bigger, more enduring, more eternal than the individual.

07:25Yosi Amram: Well, yes and no. Not necessarily. So, yeah, if you connect to something bigger than yourself, more than your separate egoic self, then these qualities come out naturally. So when we connect to our essence with our life force, I mean, there's a lot going around the word spirituality, but when you think about what is the root of spirituality comes from Latin, the root word is spiritus, which is the animating breath of life. So, basically, when we connect to ourselves spiritually, you might say we're connected to our life force energy. What animates us? And then as leaders, what is our role? I mean, one of my first Harvard Business School cases was managers and leaders. Are they the same or different? Managers manage resources, make decisions. Important. What do leaders do? They inspire. Well, what is the root of the word inspire? It's spirit. So leaders breathe life. They breathe aliveness into their teams, into their organizations by instilling a sense of purpose, why are we here, having a vision, having a mission, and that enlivens the organization, brings people together in a shared community around a shared goal. And that is the life force of the organization. And if the organization is toxic or sick, you might say, and different people are pulling in different directions like organs in our body fighting each other, and we have a toxic body with an autoimmune disease attacking its own cells. And that can happen in an organization when you think about it as an organism. So I'm just trying to motivate how this actually makes sense when you think about the etymology of the word spirit and what our roles as leaders are. And as you said, we can't inspire until we are inspired. Leadership, first and foremost, is an inside job. I can't lead anybody until I lead myself. I can't inspire anybody until I inspire myself.

Why we need both individuality and connection

09:36Bill Gallagher: So am I making sense so far? So I hear a connection to life force, breathing life into things, bringing aliveness to ourself, the quality of aliveness, life. And then you could take that into not a separate, unique, individualistic nature, but life more broadly connected. I think about actually two experiences, both of them somewhat hallucinogenic-aided. But one of them, I was looking out at the surf as a young boy, and I saw myself and God and everything connected. And I'm like, this is like life, God, it's all connected. And then another time, sitting in a park and watching the air move through the trees and the grass and feeling my own breath. In this case, I was on mushrooms. And I was just like, we're all alive together, and maybe there's not really separation between us, but we're all connected in life.

10:40Yosi Amram: Yeah, well, that's very spiritual experiences. But I mean, actually, it sounds spiritual as you said. It sounds mystical. You were on mushrooms. Some people have these experiences on LSD or acid trips or whatever it is. But when you think about it, right now I'm here, you're there, there's a plant on my desk here, there's trees outside. But am I really existing independently? Every inhale I take, I like to joke around, I get high on plant medicine. And what I'm talking about is just the inhalation of the oxygen, which is the exhale of the plant, the green plant on my desk. And when I exhale, I exhale carbon dioxide, which the plant and the trees inhale. So we are part of a web of life. You can't, I give, you take, you take, I give. And that's how nature works. You go into the forest and the tree leaf falls and disintegrates and becomes compost for the next thing to sprout. So we are part of a web of life. Now, from the egoic point of view, it feels like I'm here and you're there and we're separate. But this is kind of what you might call a Copernican revolution of consciousness that, you know, up until Copernicus and Galileo, we thought, oh, the Earth is at the center of the universe and then the sun rotates around it. And it was kind of an optical illusion until we understood, no, Earth is actually coming out of the sun and is sustained by the sun. And so the whole perception shifted. But from an egoic standpoint, it could look or feel like we're separate. But in actuality, we're part of a web of life, and we don't have a separate independent existence.

12:41Yosi Amram: But this is a little bit of a paradox, if I can get a little philosophical here. In physics, there is this thing called the particle-wave duality. So when you look at an electron or a photon, in some ways it behaves like a particle, a distinct entity with a particular space and time, location and velocity. And then sometimes it's like a probability distribution. In quantum physics, it's the field. And when you look at it, in some ways it behaves like a particle, and in some ways it behaves like a wave, which is spread out throughout space. And I think, obviously, we exist as individuals because you have your own will, you have your own experience right now in this moment while we're connecting, and I have my experience. And my experience is mine, and your experience is yours. So we are individuals. We're distinct entities, but that doesn't mean we're separate. So the trees in the forest are distinct trees, but when you look at it under the surface, their root systems are all connected, they're constantly sending signals. And if one of them is attacked by some kind of moss or whatever, they send signals, all the other trees respond, kind of like their immune system. So they're distinct, but they're not separate. We're distinct. We're unique. We're individuals. This is not to take away our individuality.

14:15Yosi Amram: So in spiritually intelligent leadership, we have to do both, which is we have to stand our ground, know who we are, follow our own inner compass, our North Star, and be clear to live and express our truth. But on the other hand, we have to stay open to the input from other people, and that's how collaboration and co-creation happens. So again, this speaks to both our individuality and our uniqueness as well as our interconnectedness, interdependence, and mutuality, which creates this one plus one equals three. When you bring a team of people with a shared intention and a shared mission and vision, there's a multiplicative effect of their energy, and we can achieve things that none of us could do individually. And that's the art and science of leadership, if you will.

15:09Bill Gallagher: Mhmm. It's funny, there's power in the individual. There's agency. There's a choice. There's something to be expressed for the ego and our distinction. And yet there's also unbelievable power in the connection. And when you see it and feel it, whether I'm looking out at the waves and thinking about just having surfed, or sitting in the park and feeling connected to nature, breathing in what's breathed out from the trees, or when I think about it more viscerally, when I look at my team and they just did something together and I realized we worked together towards something that I couldn't solve on my own, all of those are very powerful connected moments. And I think about, there's a moment, so I served in the US military. And in the initial training of almost any military anywhere in the world, one of the things you learn to do is march. You march around, you work at it. And you give up your individuality, you wear a uniform, you cut your hair off, you do things like that most of the time. And there's a moment that I remember where I felt the connection. And it is when we're marching and the first time all of our heels struck at the same time, and you could hear it and feel it, oh, we're together, we're more powerful together. And it's moving and empowering. Oh, we're a unit now. And you could see it and feel it in your business. Maybe you didn't serve in the military. You could be in a marching band. You could be other kinds of things like that, or even a small group, but where you get in sync with other human beings and you realize you're working together, it's powerful.

16:53Yosi Amram: And I'm part of something bigger. And one of the issues we're dealing with in our culture today is a loneliness epidemic. And particularly post-COVID, people working from home and so on. And anxiety, depression rates, substance abuse, suicide rates have skyrocketed over the years, and there's a sense of isolation and loneliness. And we are social beings, social animals, you can call it. So we need to feel like we belong, and without it, we feel depressed. And evolutionarily, we didn't survive as individuals in the jungle. We had to be part of a tribe. So this is wired into our biology, into our psyche, this notion that I need to belong. I can't survive on my own. And so we have abandonment fears. We have all these things. But yet, as you said, we're also individuals, and we want to assert our agency and our free will and so on. But it's a little bit like in a symphony. In a symphony, you have these different instruments. You have the drums and you have the pianos and you have the violin and whatever, and they all have their individual…

18:08Yosi Amram: Music that they play, but when they come together in harmony, you have something that none of them on their own can do. You can have a beautiful virtuoso of a drummer, but there's a whole different symphony when all these instruments come together in harmony and there's coherence and some greater beauty emerges. And you could see that on a basketball court or on a football field or on a soccer team, and you see how the group, and there's beauty to it. People who love to watch that, it's like how the coordination of some great basketball players and how they pass the ball to each other. That's beauty.

From tech CEO to psycho-spiritual breakdown

19:03Bill Gallagher: We're deep into some beautiful connected ideas here, right? It's a great, enjoyable conversation for me. But we were about to talk about how you come to it, because I don't think that all of us grow up and start thinking and talking this way and thinking about these things. What was your experience? You were in business. You went through your own challenges. Tell a little bit of your story.

19:35Yosi Amram: Okay. Yeah. So you mentioned you served in the military. I'm going to reluctantly share some of my military stories. So I was born and raised in Israel, a war-torn part of the world. And the last few years have been horrific, what's going on there, and it's very disturbing on many levels. Fortunately, I was there in a time that was more peaceful. But like all Israeli young men at the age of 18, despite being a pacifist in my leaning, I was drafted into three years of mandatory service. And I was a math and science nerd and shy, introverted. But to my surprise, I had the fastest promotion record in the history of my regiment and won all these leadership awards. So I excelled in that command and control environment of the military, which is necessary in battle, but really doesn't help actualize and activate the human potential. But it's great for creating camaraderie and shared destiny. But even though I excelled, it chafed at my soul, and I resolved to someday want to build an organization based on more humanistic principles that inspire and bring out the best in people. And that became kind of my lifelong aspiration and dream, which brought me to the U.S. to study engineering and business and ultimately led me to be a founder of my own company.

21:03Yosi Amram: And my first company was called Individual Inc., and the name Individual stood for two things. One is supporting the growth of each individual. We're talking about the individual, but in a team and a community context, which the military did a great job of uniting people because your existence and your life depended on your comrades. And so I was like, how do we bring out the best in each individual but give them a sense of belonging in a community? And that became kind of my overarching desire.

21:38Yosi Amram: So the company was called, as I mentioned, Individual, and it was the first company to do personalized interactive newspapers before the Internet. So you'd get Bill's Morning News on your fax machine where we would scan all the wire services and databases, et cetera. And then you told us which articles were relevant or not, and the software had self-learning and would adjust to you. And I raised money from the top Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the corporate partners, Microsoft, the major newspaper publishers that were interested in the future of media. And all of that was going great, but there was a lot of pressure to perform with all the investors and shareholders and employees. And then the Internet came. It was clear that everything we were selling on a premium subscription basis was going to be free and ad-supported on the Internet. So that was a big threat on how we change our business model and not eat our own children and cannibalize our revenue, because there was pressure to keep growing. And frankly, I didn't know how to deal with that. And I had been working seventy hours a week, eighty hours a week, and I was burnt out. So I kind of froze in fear, and I just couldn't face my employees and tell them how we're going to survive in this new world of the Internet. So I just disappeared for a week. But I gathered myself up, I came back, and I persisted. And together with my management team, we figured out a strategy, turned the company into an Internet company, ultimately took it public. We were a fast-rising hot Internet stock, and I was running around trying to capitalize on the Internet.

23:24Yosi Amram: But I was interested in mind-body connection, consciousness, matter, all these things. And one day, I was just trying to relax and getting a deep tissue massage, and I was relaxing, relax, relax. And then, you might say, my ego dissolved, and then I saw through the illusion of separation and duality. Normally, we think there's an I, whatever the I is that nobody can define, and then there's my awareness, and then there's the object of my awareness. So right now, I'm aware of my feet on the ground and the breath in my belly and my chest. So there's I, there's awareness, then the object. But reality, when I dove into that experience in a relaxed state, it's really all one field. One field, seamless field of awareness consciousness. And it kind of blew my mind. I opened my eyes. I was looking through the face cradle on the massage table, and the floor felt like it was inside me. There was no separation. And that really blew the fuse and threw me, you might say, into a manic episode.

24:33Yosi Amram: So here I was, the CEO of a public company with a rising stock price, having all these downloads about where the Internet was going. I wanted to really capitalize on it. This was before Facebook and Google, and a lot of the things they did, I saw where it was going. I wanted my company to do it today, yesterday. And my team couldn't keep up, and my board couldn't keep up. And they were like, you need to go chill out, Yosi. Take some weeks off. You're just, we can't do it at this pace. And I was like, no fucking way. And so eventually, they, because we have to do this yesterday, and there's a market window and all of that thing. And so they ultimately said, okay, well, you won't agree. We're going to vote to put you on a voluntary leave of absence. So there was nothing voluntary about it, and the board passed the resolution to put me on a voluntary leave of absence that was announced to Wall Street. And there were headline stories. Wall Street Journal, Amram Takes Leave, Stock Drops 37%. New York Times, Amram forced to take leave by his board, et cetera. And then insinuating I was emotionally unstable, and then I got canceled, basically. I was moved from being the top echelon of people who were sought after in Silicon Valley to someone that nobody would return calls or emails. So it was very embarrassing, very traumatic, very shame-inducing.

26:08Yosi Amram: But, you know, ultimately, it was a blessing in disguise because it got me to ask these questions. Why was I so identified with my business? Why did I burn out like this? And was this spiritual awakening real or was it delusional? And that got me to then go back to school and get a PhD in psychology and uncover this term spiritual intelligence and research it and to try and put some science behind it so it's less woo-woo, and then discover that there are these universal qualities like you alluded to earlier.

The board forced him out as stock dropped 37 percent

26:43Yosi Amram: Regardless of the tradition, whether it's coming from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, all of these, they spoke of the same qualities of a good life, a life of purpose and service and trust and gratitude and presence and compassion and forgiveness and humility and integrity. So humanity has known that these are the qualities of a good life that's good for the individual and prosocial.

27:14Yosi Amram: And now modern science, putting aside my research and other research in spiritual intelligence, there's this field called positive psychology that Marty Seligman started and others, and they have this thing called Values in Action Character Strengths Inventory. They identify 24 qualities of a good human life and the same things: purpose and gratitude and joy and humility and transcendence and so on. So you've got these ancient traditions speaking about these qualities, and then now you have positive psychology speaking about the same qualities.

27:54Yosi Amram: And now you have another field called leadership development. So there was a study by Bain and Company, one of the top management consulting companies in the world. And they studied 2,000 companies and thousands of employees, and what they found is that employees that are inspired are twice as productive as people that are just going about doing their job. And what were the qualities of the leaders that got those people inspired? And that was service orientation, servant leadership, purpose, presence, care, compassion, listening, integrity, centeredness, those same qualities that are showing up in my research on spiritual intelligence and spiritually intelligent leadership are also showing up on what it takes to make a good effective leader in the business literature.

Convergence of ancient wisdom and modern science

28:50Yosi Amram: Through Bain and Company, they identified 33 qualities. Again, half of them map directly to the same qualities that came through my research. So there's a convergence of evidence from the spiritual traditions, the field of positive psychology, and the field of leadership that are saying these are the human virtues and qualities that lead to a good fulfilling life and make us more effective, more productive as leaders, as human beings.

29:19Yosi Amram: So I think to me, that's very exciting because when you have lines of evidence coming from completely different directions pointing at the same thing, it increases your confidence that this is real. This is not just some thing that some crazy guy who was on an LSD trip dreamed up.

29:45Bill Gallagher: It's interesting. The hallucinogens are, I mean, I'm not recommending to anyone, they've certainly been helpful for me, but you have to make your own choices. And for some people, it's maybe a bad idea. But I think they can help us unlock a more flexible way of thinking, looking, perceiving the world, and then the memory of it. Like, I don't have to be on LSD anymore to remember the insight and feeling. I carry it with me my whole life. I remember a particular thing at, I don't know, 16 or something, and it's still like a deep personal effect. There are a few things that are more enduring. And then from time to time, you might do something because it was helpful to access something and you have a new set of concerns. But there is something that can be useful in starting to grapple. You had your moment where you started to tap into something and then you got fired up and then a little bit like flying too close to the sun and getting a little too wrapped up, your board kicked you out because you didn't know how to grapple with this thing that you were touching.

30:55Yosi Amram: Yeah. Grounded. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not knocking down the LSD and whatever, but the point is that gives you, opens the door of perception as it's been said. But then you want to go and do the science and see is this real? And look at people and what happens. And then there's research that shows that leaders with greater spiritual intelligence, like in my doctoral research, lead teams with greater morale, higher productivity, lower turnover, greater commitment. And then other studies by other researchers, banks with higher level of employee spiritual intelligence produce better return on assets compared to their peers. Or leaders in another study, leaders with greater spiritual intelligence produce better financial results for their business units.

Productivity does not require sacrificing soul

31:44Yosi Amram: So those studies were not done under the influence of LSD, but that opened up the doorway to explore. And then you go and study it more scientifically and with logic and standard things. And like it or not, that's the currency in our culture. That's how emotional intelligence gained traction in our zeitgeist because there are several models of what it is and measures. And then it was shown that people with greater emotional intelligence are better leaders or have more successful careers or better relationships. And so we're looking at a similar type of thing here. So yeah, those momentary experiences are powerful. They awaken. They open the door, and then you've got to ground it. And you've got to look at it to see that it makes sense.

32:42Bill Gallagher: Yeah. So I think there are people that are inherently more or less spiritual, and then there are people that develop a capacity for it. And then you talk about the intelligence or the awareness, and you compared it to emotional. You could be emotional, but not be emotionally intelligent. Right? Like, there are times when I've been deeply emotional in my life and then other times where I developed emotional intelligence.

33:09Bill Gallagher: And I think about, like, we should have her on at some point, Susan David talk about emotional agility. But, like, so I could be, well, one, I could have repressed, suppressed emotion, and then I could let it out. And I think in particular in my life, there was a, like, an early childhood time where I was super emotional and everything was good. And then a time where I had business and I repressed the emotion. And then it uncorked and I was, like, a little out of control like you in your manic episode and that kind of thing. And I just, a couple of emotional notes were always being expressed. And then I developed awareness, and then I could have the emotion and move through it and use it but not be used by it and have facility with it, be able to tap into it, enjoy it, like—

34:01Bill Gallagher: And regulate it and yeah, all of it. And I think the same thing when I think about spirituality, especially getting older. I was a certain kind of a kid and my parents took me to learn meditation when I was like six years old, right? Mostly to learn some focus and some control. And then I leaned into other kinds of practices. The religious thing became uncomfortable, but I began to develop more awarenesses. And then certain books or things had an influence on me. Like, I read this Castaneda book when I was very young about dream states and shamans and things like that. And I love that, but then also a philosophy book, and things like that that opened up a change of awareness. Maybe now, I don't know, post 50, maybe, I start to be able to integrate all of that thinking and probably have, I haven't done your assessment or that kind of thing, but I feel like there's a different ability to lean into something that has often been unsettling for me. Right? So there's a maturation—

35:08Yosi Amram: And a ripening and an integration. And so yeah. And I'm, so you revealed you're over 50. I'm surprised.

35:17Bill Gallagher: I'm 61, and I'm a grandpa.

35:20Yosi Amram: All right. No. Congratulations. I can't wait to be a grandpa, hopefully soon. Do you have children?

35:27Yosi Amram: I do. I have two children. My daughter is 35 and my son's 31, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed with my daughter. She's getting in that stage. So—

35:38Bill Gallagher: Well, I thought it was going to be like that for me. But a little over two, three years ago now, our son called us on my birthday and revealed that he and his girlfriend—

35:50Bill Gallagher: We thought they were actually married, were pregnant, were expecting a child. So he, like, just jumped ten years ahead of plan for me. My mind. It was good. So I'm ahead of schedule there. But yeah, that's awesome. Hopefully, it's

36:05Yosi Amram: joy-filled being.

36:08Bill Gallagher: Oh my God. Right? Like, when I think about you and I, we've had business successes. We've had client, personal and client, and we've accomplished things. That's all great. Then when I look at my son, he's like, he's already in many ways more successful than me in his business. But what I'm really proud of is the way I see him holding his daughter.

36:39Yosi Amram: Yeah. And your voice quivers, and there's an emotion coming up that this is touching you at something deep, and that tenderness and that love that he expresses. And then when you see daughter and that purity of being and that innocence and the purity of that life force, that's what mesmerized. And that's why so many people are taken when they hold the baby, and it just calms immediately our nervous system. And that purity and that life force that you see it, you know, without distortion and all the defenses that we develop because we're wounded, because we're hurt. And so this is the journey. We start out with that purity, that, in a sense, that life force, that aliveness, that openness to life. And then we shut down because we're hurt, we're traumatised, and we have to do all this therapy and trauma work and meditation and mushroom journeys and acid journeys or whatever it is we do to go back to open ourselves to the fullness of life, and then life becomes richer. And then you look at your son holding his daughter and the tenderness that comes through this man, you know, that's strong and powerful. But somehow when he's holding his daughter, yeah, it's a different frequency, different vibration comes through, and it's touching when you see that.

38:08Bill Gallagher: Yeah. So let me ask you about this. I, one of the most impactful and important exercises, lessons for me was thinking about what happens after my life. Right? Like, the end of my life. So I spent a lot of years trying to build things, and I have certain accomplishments. And every year, I think about what do I want to accomplish this year and how does that map in the long, and I imagine I'll live, you know, into my nineties. Who knows what really will happen? But I imagine that, and I imagine the next year. And I set goals, and I create plans, and I schedule things, and I do stuff. Right? And

Spiritual and emotional maturation over time

38:50Yosi Amram: So you're leading a life with vision. You have a vision around the future, which is a core part of leadership. We have a vision of the future, and we set the intention. And, you know, you do that in sports. The golfer envisions the golf ball landing in the key, in the hole, or the tennis player

39:09Bill Gallagher: and you work on it. Okay. But but all that aside, I think that if my life ends today

39:18Yosi Amram: Yeah.

39:19Bill Gallagher: It was good. I got my life done. I did it. I did my job. And that came to me because the, so, somebody said the obituary is what you did in your life, how many children in your career, and things like that. But the eulogy is the quality, the nature of who you were, like your being, your essence, that is shared and then carried forward by all the people. So whatever money you leave or that kind of thing is gone pretty quickly by the folks you leave it to most of the time. But the essence is carried with them. I think about who was my grandmother for me? I'm moved deeply because I now carry that. Whatever is precious about that to me, I carry that. It's part of me now. Then I think about who I want to be remembered as. So I think about at my funeral, my memorial, the family, the people that I love that love me gather around. They say nice things, and then they go to lunch. Right? And so what is that that I want them to say? And I think, like, for me, it was really immediately clear. I just want them to say that I was generous, that I made a difference in their lives. And and that quality of contribution, generosity, love, and caring. Like, if I have that today and every day, then I got my job done. In my life, I've already did what I needed to do. Right? Like new. And it's fulfilling. It's satisfying.

40:54Yosi Amram: Yeah. And all the research about people on their deathbed, what their wishes are, exactly those kinds of issues. Not that I made more money or I had a better house or, you know, I had more sex partners or whatever it is or I got more likes on Instagram or whatever. No. I mean, it is like the quality of human connection that I spread love and joy. And, you know, I'm just thinking about the impact that your son is having on his daughter and just holding her in that tenderness. I mean, she might never remember it specifically. Right? But her nervous system, her psyche absorbed in that love as nutrient. And, you know, he's having an amazing impact on her just through the moments of holding and tenderness, love. And so I can only imagine, you know, you've had that kind of impact on your children. And hopefully, I had that on my children, which, you know, are the greatest startup creation that I have had. You know, I think about the creativity of bringing a human being and growing them and the complexity. And I'm blessed with two wonderful kids that I'm proud of and love, and they love me. And the field of love between us is palpable. Yeah. So that is, that is the legacy that we leave that's meaningful.

42:22Bill Gallagher: There are two things there, though. There are the problems that you solve, the work that you did, and then there's the essence of it. Like, so I think of being remembered as someone who makes a difference because I want other people to be generous and, like, you know, I want us all to bring that. I want that for humanity and for the world. But there are specific things that also, like, I feel real, like, deeply about. It's not like whether I get my book done in the next six months or whatever. But they're like, I, so when I first got married, we were traveling. I stood in a holy place. And like, okay. I'm in a holy place. I should say a prayer. Like, what do I want to pray for? I'm like, okay. So what do I really want? And, you know, first got married, right, so, like, years ago. And I said, I want a nice family. I want a boy and a girl. And that's enough. Like, and I want a good, healthy, happy family. And somehow that, like, that, like, wish, and I got it. Right? Like, I, you know, many times along the way, I wasn't sure whether it would turn out. But, like, you know, I wished for that. I think about that. So I think about my quality. And if there's a few key things that, like, we really want to tackle and work on and be remembered for, and somehow those are, like, connected to all of that. Like, that's something being expressed. Right?

43:53Yosi Amram: Yeah. Well, you wanted a healthy, beautiful family. To me, I mean, when you, if I ask you and we explore what's underneath that, my guess is that you wanted to be in a field of love where you wanted to embody, express, share, and receive, be in this field of love with other people. And I think that is part of our potential as human beings, and that's what our hearts are here for. So we naturally want to actualise it. I mean, like, the acorn wants to grow and develop into a tree. It has that seed potential.

What you want to be remembered for

44:28Yosi Amram: We come into this world with a heart, and that's why we talk about your daughter. I mean, she is pure innocent love. She's there to love. I'm sure she loves her parents. Like, you know, she's just mesmerized when she looks at them because they are like her god. She reveres them. She loves them, and she feels their love. So we have this capacity for love, and we wanna feel it. I mean, what else is more important? So I know we're talking about family and feeling that love with our children. We're looking at scaling up businesses here and how is this related. But I am gonna make the radical claim that you could still bring the quality of love into your leadership. It's not gonna look like you're holding your daughter with this tenderness, but there's that benevolence.

45:21Bill Gallagher: A little bit. Right? Like, I remember my team had a challenge some years ago, and I didn't know how to do it. And we rallied the team. And then, you know, over the next year, we broke through the challenge and set a new record. And I remember doing something to thank them. And I remember looking at them and being, like, deeply grateful and being proud of them, us, like, as connected, not as separate things, but being proud of us collectively. And that was a feeling of love. Love, gratitude, pride.

46:01Yosi Amram: Appreciation. Appreciation. Saw their beauty. We talk—you saw their beauty. Yes. And you saw their unique essence and how their contribution. And just like a parent looks at their children and is proud of them and sees their potential and can kind of encourage them and support them to actualize their potential, that is a quality of love. It's the same but it shows up a little differently. You're not gonna hug them and kiss them, you know, with your employees because whatever.

46:32Bill Gallagher: Because of laws.

46:33Yosi Amram: Because of laws and whatever, we don't touch, and you're not gonna date them, and you're not gonna go have sex with them like you would with your wife that you love or whatever. So but it's still love. Yeah. It's so—yeah. But, you know, the Eskimos have 50 words for snow, and we have one word for love. And we use it. I love my children. I love my beer. I love my job. But, you know, I love my parents. I mean, I love my romantic partners, but they're all very different qualities of love, but they're still love in essence. But so we're just poor in love, and that's why we don't have the refined taste. Like, a sommelier in wine, they can tell the nuances of different wines. I just can tell it's red or white, and that's all I could tell. I can't say it's oaky. It's fruity. It's whatever the daughter who's a sommelier can tell. So I'd rather be a connoisseur of love and tell you about all the flavors and variations and textures of love that can show up in our life, whether with our children, with our family members, our employees, our teammates. And I could be enriched by the different qualities of love that shows up in my life, the different qualities of joy, different qualities of belonging.

Love shows up differently in leadership

48:11Bill Gallagher: Well, we've talked for a while. I think the thing that I am thinking about now that we try to wrap this up and put a button on it and ribbon and tie it up and put it to bed is you may find yourself, like, feeling very spiritually connected, or you may notice on some deep level that you are in a spiritual quandary, that something's amiss, that you are in a crisis of some kind. And it's worth to look into it, to lean into that, to expand your spiritual capacity so that you have the awareness and the facility to tap into what guides you, what connects you, what empowers you in that way so that you can inspire yourself. If you aren't inspired, good luck inspiring your team. They can see right through the BS, and it's not gonna work.

49:04Yosi Amram: Yeah. That's great. That's great. I would just add to that and underscore that is that, you know, like we started in the beginning, you know, you can embody a lot and develop these spiritual intelligence capacities without, you know, that mystical experience. Right? Right. And, you know, I've coached over a hundred CEOs, and they've ranged from the devout religious to the spiritual, but not religious to the agnostic to the atheist. But regardless, when they connected to their sense of purpose and they started expressing appreciation and gratitude to their teammates and they started developing presence and authentic presence and compassion and those qualities, regardless of whether they call themselves spiritual or not, their effectiveness, their power, their interconnectedness, their empowerment expanded, and they became more effective and more fulfilled human beings.

50:09Bill Gallagher: Awesome. That's it.

50:11Yosi Amram: That's it. Okay.

50:13Bill Gallagher: So you wanna know more about Yosi and his work, the book, all that. YosiAmram.net. YosiAmram.net, YosiAmram.net. Find it there. All links to his other works and that kind of thing and lots of good stuff at .net. Yosi, thank you so much. I'm glad we connected here. I'd love to maybe meet you for a coffee or something. We should be here.

50:43Yosi Amram: Have coffee. You're in Oakland, so I'm there periodically. We can have lunch, coffee and share tips about spiritually intelligent leadership in business and our life. You know? Because we're all leaders. It could be in our work environment, but we're leaders in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our families. And so we wanna be spiritually intelligent leaders, lead our lives with greater purpose, meaning, joy, love. Why not?

51:11Bill Gallagher: Awesome. Thanks to Wanda and Anna for getting our show produced. Thanks to my friend and mentor, Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework. Find us at scalingcoach.com. Thanks again to all of you for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling. Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy is Broken. Do Less. Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.