On spiritual maturity and how it’s actually not just your own goddamn business.
One of the many things I adore in my native country Finland’s rising enthusiasm towards entrepreneurship is the way it shifts how we view learning in a fundamental and good way. Although I don’t necessarily believe the world will be saved by a bunch of eager kids pitching business ideas to each other in a sweaty hall, it sure as hell is a step in the right direction. We no longer encourage the most talented young people graduating from universities to expect the fulfillment of their potential to emerge on its own from some magical place separate from themselves. Today’s kids are taking charge; with zeal, motivation and a hunger for learning.
This goes also for some other areas of life: as a society, we are no longer stuck on an illusion of permanent capabilities weighing us down. We have started to believe we can learn and thus create, develop, grow – be it companies, technologies, or our skills. As Prof. Carol Dweck would say it: we have embraced the growth mindset (see her excellent work in her book Mindset if you haven’t already).
There is one area of life, however, which does not enjoy the sweet touch of the growth mindset quite yet. And this area is everything but minor – it affects our lives in monumental, but often hidden, ways. It is a real bitch since it’s hard to measure, record or even identify. That’s why in many realms – for example politics, business and academia – we think we’re better off without it. That complicated bastard.
That creature is a set of skills which I, being the provoker that I am, call spiritual maturity. With that vague-sounding concept I mean a group of concrete abilities: e.g., the ability to really listen without a hidden agenda, genuinely practice empathy, identify and control your ego, and think independently to be able to make wise decisions regardless of which one is the easiest way out for you personally. The essence here is: I believe they are skills. But that’s not at all the way we’re used to seeing them.
This goes also for some other areas of life: as a society, we are no longer stuck on an illusion of permanent capabilities weighing us down. We have started to believe we can learn and thus create, develop, grow – be it companies, technologies, or our skills. As Prof. Carol Dweck would say it: we have embraced the growth mindset (see her excellent work in her book Mindset if you haven’t already).
There is one area of life, however, which does not enjoy the sweet touch of the growth mindset quite yet. And this area is everything but minor – it affects our lives in monumental, but often hidden, ways. It is a real bitch since it’s hard to measure, record or even identify. That’s why in many realms – for example politics, business and academia – we think we’re better off without it. That complicated bastard.
That creature is a set of skills which I, being the provoker that I am, call spiritual maturity. With that vague-sounding concept I mean a group of concrete abilities: e.g., the ability to really listen without a hidden agenda, genuinely practice empathy, identify and control your ego, and think independently to be able to make wise decisions regardless of which one is the easiest way out for you personally. The essence here is: I believe they are skills. But that’s not at all the way we’re used to seeing them.
Implicitly hidden in our basic view of the world is an illusion that spiritual maturity is something you’re born with – or not. Even if we don't explicitly state that assumption, it often lays behind our argumentation: "John just isn't, you know, a people person" or "Mary just isn't the kind of person who can see things from someone else's perspective. She just does things her own way." That is problematic mainly because if we don't know that spiritual growth is something to be learned, we don't cultivate it. Nor expect ourselves and others to practice it. And I think that is a big shame.
As a result, many adults in our society, regardless of age, level of education and profession, actually lack basic knowledge of how to grow in the spiritual arena. Many may notice a trait in themselves they don't like and are ashamed of it - e.g., that they weren't a "big enough person" to make a real intervention when an unjust decision was made in their work place - and spend their entire lives trying to hide these weaknesses. The problem is that they regard this "trait" as something permanent, while it is everything but. We all have egos and have to work with them day-to-day. In fact, those little voices about where we are lacking at the moment are actually invitations to steer your energy towards developing those very skills - which could well even become your strengths.
As a result, many adults in our society, regardless of age, level of education and profession, actually lack basic knowledge of how to grow in the spiritual arena. Many may notice a trait in themselves they don't like and are ashamed of it - e.g., that they weren't a "big enough person" to make a real intervention when an unjust decision was made in their work place - and spend their entire lives trying to hide these weaknesses. The problem is that they regard this "trait" as something permanent, while it is everything but. We all have egos and have to work with them day-to-day. In fact, those little voices about where we are lacking at the moment are actually invitations to steer your energy towards developing those very skills - which could well even become your strengths.
This is a matter of prioritization in our society. It has its roots in some basic values and manifests itself already in early education of children. In a society highly appreciative of sciences of all kinds, I find it odd that we don’t demand knowledge of even the very basics of psychology in our basic schooling. And this goes even for the so-called best education systems in the world, for the most privileged people living in our little Scandinavian welfare states.
To give this somewhat funny prioritization some concreteness, let me give you non-Scandinavians an example. When we were 11 years old, my classmates and I needed to learn and memorize all the different types of swamps there are, and specific lists of flora, fauna and other attributes typical to them. (Gotta love the Finnish school system!) Now, I am not saying swamps are not important – they are indeed, and a great feature of the Finnish nature. I’m saying: We teach our children all sorts of things in school, which is great, because any education is a privilege. What I wonder, though, is how little of those great education resources we put into teaching things which most dramatically affect our capability to sail through life without damaging ourselves and others around us significantly and unnecessarily. Like, say, spiritual growth.
I would love to see this change, and as an eternal optimist, I believe it will. If I have kids one day, I would love to see them graduate from high school knowing not only how to differentiate and integrate, enumerate the phases of 2nd world war, and list all the different types of sand there is - but also how to spot when it's their ego that’s talking and how to help themselves heal their childhood wounds that we all to some degree carry from our pasts.
(An important clarification: This is not a criticism towards Finnish teachers - vice versa, I believe this particular highly vocation-based profession is one of the key actors holding our society together, teaching us "do not hit each other on the playground" types of basics. However, I believe the good intentions of our teachers are not supported on a system-level: for example, making courses on psychology / spiritual maturity mandatory in elementary school, high school, trade school and university. Whether we're studying to be a car mechanic, a hairdresser, or a doctor, the one challenge we all have to master is: living with ourselves and others. This is a broad, society-wide topic, and requires a system-level solution.)
However, the misunderstandings regarding spiritual development don't end there. In today’s Western society, spirituality is quite a taboo and has a reputation of being something extremely private. It has been outsourced from our societal and professional lives to our free time – a generally safe place to dump stuff that doesn’t quite fit the prevailing norms and rules. Along with spirituality we can push out of sight other inconvenient topics that we can’t find easy answers to – like meaningfulness. No wonder so many people have externalized the whole bucket of these huffy-fluffy things into their personal lives that happen at home behind closed doors. “Yeah well, I don’t really believe in this “finding your passion” and “meaningfulness” BS at work. This is just a place where I get things done. What’s really meaningful and important to me is my family / my cat / my hobby / the 4 weeks of the year that I’m not working - and that's really no one else's business.”
That way of dealing with the huffy-fluffy is very human: it’s safe, and we don’t have to expose our shaky DIY definitions to the public eye. We don’t really have to engage in societal discussion about it.
Except that we do. The time has come to realize that spiritual maturity is, in fact, not just a private issue. It affects our collective wellbeing much more than many other capabilities which don't enjoy the protection of being "strictly private matters" but are rather a bit of everyone's business: your education, how much taxes you pay, whether you smoke or not, your choice of number of children (if any), how you sort your garbage, whether you pick up your dog’s poo after he’s done or leave it lying there – and many other little things we are used to criticizing in each other with the valid excuse of them having a collective impact on our society.
To give this somewhat funny prioritization some concreteness, let me give you non-Scandinavians an example. When we were 11 years old, my classmates and I needed to learn and memorize all the different types of swamps there are, and specific lists of flora, fauna and other attributes typical to them. (Gotta love the Finnish school system!) Now, I am not saying swamps are not important – they are indeed, and a great feature of the Finnish nature. I’m saying: We teach our children all sorts of things in school, which is great, because any education is a privilege. What I wonder, though, is how little of those great education resources we put into teaching things which most dramatically affect our capability to sail through life without damaging ourselves and others around us significantly and unnecessarily. Like, say, spiritual growth.
I would love to see this change, and as an eternal optimist, I believe it will. If I have kids one day, I would love to see them graduate from high school knowing not only how to differentiate and integrate, enumerate the phases of 2nd world war, and list all the different types of sand there is - but also how to spot when it's their ego that’s talking and how to help themselves heal their childhood wounds that we all to some degree carry from our pasts.
(An important clarification: This is not a criticism towards Finnish teachers - vice versa, I believe this particular highly vocation-based profession is one of the key actors holding our society together, teaching us "do not hit each other on the playground" types of basics. However, I believe the good intentions of our teachers are not supported on a system-level: for example, making courses on psychology / spiritual maturity mandatory in elementary school, high school, trade school and university. Whether we're studying to be a car mechanic, a hairdresser, or a doctor, the one challenge we all have to master is: living with ourselves and others. This is a broad, society-wide topic, and requires a system-level solution.)
However, the misunderstandings regarding spiritual development don't end there. In today’s Western society, spirituality is quite a taboo and has a reputation of being something extremely private. It has been outsourced from our societal and professional lives to our free time – a generally safe place to dump stuff that doesn’t quite fit the prevailing norms and rules. Along with spirituality we can push out of sight other inconvenient topics that we can’t find easy answers to – like meaningfulness. No wonder so many people have externalized the whole bucket of these huffy-fluffy things into their personal lives that happen at home behind closed doors. “Yeah well, I don’t really believe in this “finding your passion” and “meaningfulness” BS at work. This is just a place where I get things done. What’s really meaningful and important to me is my family / my cat / my hobby / the 4 weeks of the year that I’m not working - and that's really no one else's business.”
That way of dealing with the huffy-fluffy is very human: it’s safe, and we don’t have to expose our shaky DIY definitions to the public eye. We don’t really have to engage in societal discussion about it.
Except that we do. The time has come to realize that spiritual maturity is, in fact, not just a private issue. It affects our collective wellbeing much more than many other capabilities which don't enjoy the protection of being "strictly private matters" but are rather a bit of everyone's business: your education, how much taxes you pay, whether you smoke or not, your choice of number of children (if any), how you sort your garbage, whether you pick up your dog’s poo after he’s done or leave it lying there – and many other little things we are used to criticizing in each other with the valid excuse of them having a collective impact on our society.
Whether we can control our ego when making decisions, really listen to another human being without a hidden agenda, and genuinely practice empathy when choosing a course of action, have an enormous impact on our societal, collective, shared life. (And, interestingly enough, these skills are in a key role, powerful enough to even make many of our sets of rules designed to control the negative externalities caused by the absence of them, unnecessary). That’s why it’s time to acknowledge and collectively understand that spiritual growth is a matter of skills – something we can and should teach, support, encourage, demand and expect. If we don’t, we are leaving a huge portion of the human potential untapped and unutilized.
A little bit of grace and mercy is in place at this point: It is very understandable that many people get anxious just when hearing the word “spirituality”. That is very human indeed: it is a big topic to approach on our own. That’s why we need collective actions to support sneaking a closer peek at the monster. At the moment, when lacking it, many don’t even try – and some, at the other end of the continuum, resort to the most creative and sometimes even destructive means - e.g., drugs, to gain a valid and commonly known channel to explore what’s on the other side of the shallow peel of our existence.
But that's enough lecturing. Why does all this matter, really, and what on earth does it have to do with leadership?
I have spent a good part of the past year thinking what really drives the impact of our actions as human beings. For a long time, I couldn’t quite crack the problem and summarize the solution into a clear format. Until one morning last spring, when I was sitting at a dark breakfast table early on a February morning. I listed all the attributes that we, in this society of excessive doing, know how to measure, demand and appreciate. I came up with a huge list. And a common denominator for all of the items on it: getting things done.
Now, that is great. Without getting things done, we wouldn’t, well, get anything done. So it’s extremely important we have developed to master this: from running away from predators, to catching and gathering stuff to eat, to making a factory run with minimum input and maximum output.
However, it’s obviously not enough. If optimising "getting things done" would also optimise our wellbeing, we would already be quite a happy bunch of people on this planet. Something fundamental is missing in terms of what we expect from our society, and thus especially from its leaders - anyone who's in charge of something bigger than himself. It must be something really complex, abstract, intangible, and scarce.
Except that it isn't. The conclusion of my thought process is everything but rocket science: In order to start making more sense, we need simply combine two dimensions of human action into what we do. These dimensions, sets of skills, are: 1) The ability to get things done, and 2) The ability to determine what should be done. The first one can be summarized as “performance and drive”; and the latter I choose to call “spiritual maturity” – meaning the holistic ability to determine the right thing to do regardless of and independent from any dogma, external sets of rules, or what your ego may want.
As I hinted in my little introduction, I think we are starting to be good at adopting a growth mindset in dimension 1. On dimension 2, however, we are pretty lost - on a collective level at least. While many individuals have the urge to develop themselves also in these very subtle, internal abilities, we are lacking commonly accepted, widely used methods for developing them as a society.
In my view a major part of unnecessary and unproductive human suffering is caused by that shortcoming. When almost solely understanding and appreciating the “getting things done” dimension, we let speed dominate over direction. If you ask me, that is quite dangerous and outright stupid.
I am on a venture to not just talk about this, but also actually try to do something about it. I am working on a marathon mission to introduce spiritual maturity as concrete skills into the everyday life of everyman – not just as a topic for an academic niche, a curiosity for a few hippie-natured explorers at your lunch table, and definitely not something we dump on the overloaded, authority-deprived and partly lost institution of the church. (Faith in a particular religion, and skills in living responsibly and lovingly as a human being, are two different topics – and there is no get-out-of-jail-i.e.-spiritual-development card available by declaring that the church is not your cup of tea.)
To emphasize that this is not just an individual, but also a collective matter, my choice has been to start with people who readily accept that they are impacting a scope larger than themselves: those whom we call "leaders". The definition is broad, as all of us are leaders of some sort. The humble and ambitious goal of the project is to gradually, slowly and concretely make leadership serve its original purpose – guide human action wisely with the intellectual, emotional and social human ability – in our society. If you share my curiosity towards why we let “high-performing spiritual babies” run this world – and perhaps also my will to do something about it – I welcome you to check out The Real Leadership Gap project (www.realleadershipgap.com). It is my effort to collectively put our brains to use to make this universe more loving, wise and kind.
I think accepting the S word as part of our everyday vocabulary – and more importantly, our everyday conduct – is one of the most thrilling no-regret improvements we could bring to this world. Think about the potential we could have with all these amazing brains we train and cultivate, when combined with the humble will to use them right.
And the positive externalities are endless. For example: with a humming adventure like this available, who needs drugs?
A little bit of grace and mercy is in place at this point: It is very understandable that many people get anxious just when hearing the word “spirituality”. That is very human indeed: it is a big topic to approach on our own. That’s why we need collective actions to support sneaking a closer peek at the monster. At the moment, when lacking it, many don’t even try – and some, at the other end of the continuum, resort to the most creative and sometimes even destructive means - e.g., drugs, to gain a valid and commonly known channel to explore what’s on the other side of the shallow peel of our existence.
But that's enough lecturing. Why does all this matter, really, and what on earth does it have to do with leadership?
I have spent a good part of the past year thinking what really drives the impact of our actions as human beings. For a long time, I couldn’t quite crack the problem and summarize the solution into a clear format. Until one morning last spring, when I was sitting at a dark breakfast table early on a February morning. I listed all the attributes that we, in this society of excessive doing, know how to measure, demand and appreciate. I came up with a huge list. And a common denominator for all of the items on it: getting things done.
Now, that is great. Without getting things done, we wouldn’t, well, get anything done. So it’s extremely important we have developed to master this: from running away from predators, to catching and gathering stuff to eat, to making a factory run with minimum input and maximum output.
However, it’s obviously not enough. If optimising "getting things done" would also optimise our wellbeing, we would already be quite a happy bunch of people on this planet. Something fundamental is missing in terms of what we expect from our society, and thus especially from its leaders - anyone who's in charge of something bigger than himself. It must be something really complex, abstract, intangible, and scarce.
Except that it isn't. The conclusion of my thought process is everything but rocket science: In order to start making more sense, we need simply combine two dimensions of human action into what we do. These dimensions, sets of skills, are: 1) The ability to get things done, and 2) The ability to determine what should be done. The first one can be summarized as “performance and drive”; and the latter I choose to call “spiritual maturity” – meaning the holistic ability to determine the right thing to do regardless of and independent from any dogma, external sets of rules, or what your ego may want.
As I hinted in my little introduction, I think we are starting to be good at adopting a growth mindset in dimension 1. On dimension 2, however, we are pretty lost - on a collective level at least. While many individuals have the urge to develop themselves also in these very subtle, internal abilities, we are lacking commonly accepted, widely used methods for developing them as a society.
In my view a major part of unnecessary and unproductive human suffering is caused by that shortcoming. When almost solely understanding and appreciating the “getting things done” dimension, we let speed dominate over direction. If you ask me, that is quite dangerous and outright stupid.
I am on a venture to not just talk about this, but also actually try to do something about it. I am working on a marathon mission to introduce spiritual maturity as concrete skills into the everyday life of everyman – not just as a topic for an academic niche, a curiosity for a few hippie-natured explorers at your lunch table, and definitely not something we dump on the overloaded, authority-deprived and partly lost institution of the church. (Faith in a particular religion, and skills in living responsibly and lovingly as a human being, are two different topics – and there is no get-out-of-jail-i.e.-spiritual-development card available by declaring that the church is not your cup of tea.)
To emphasize that this is not just an individual, but also a collective matter, my choice has been to start with people who readily accept that they are impacting a scope larger than themselves: those whom we call "leaders". The definition is broad, as all of us are leaders of some sort. The humble and ambitious goal of the project is to gradually, slowly and concretely make leadership serve its original purpose – guide human action wisely with the intellectual, emotional and social human ability – in our society. If you share my curiosity towards why we let “high-performing spiritual babies” run this world – and perhaps also my will to do something about it – I welcome you to check out The Real Leadership Gap project (www.realleadershipgap.com). It is my effort to collectively put our brains to use to make this universe more loving, wise and kind.
I think accepting the S word as part of our everyday vocabulary – and more importantly, our everyday conduct – is one of the most thrilling no-regret improvements we could bring to this world. Think about the potential we could have with all these amazing brains we train and cultivate, when combined with the humble will to use them right.
And the positive externalities are endless. For example: with a humming adventure like this available, who needs drugs?
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