Become A Supporting Member To Unlock The Full Episode
Get access to easy-to-use resources that help you learn big ideas quickly. You don’t need a lot of time to start changing your perspective and growing. Here’s what’s included:
- Full Videos & Podcasts: Experience enriching discussion that will expand your perspective
- Key Questions to Reflect Upon: We prepared some thought-provoking questions designed for your personal reflection
- Polarity Maps: Identify and understand this episode’s crucial tensions and polarities
- Full Written Transcript: Get all the key information you need, available in PDF or EPUB formats for learning on the go
- Illustrated Insight Map: Easily navigate through the core insights and takeaways
- Guided Polarity Practices: Designed to help you integrate polarity thinking into your life
Perspective Shift:
- We are all born spiritual, but not spiritually intelligent. Spirituality is an innate human need to connect with something larger than ourselves. But intelligence means skill, cultivated through practice. Just as musical genius requires an instrument and training, spiritual potential requires disciplined development to become spiritual intelligence.
- Love isn’t a passive feeling; it’s an active practice of wisdom and compassion. Spiritual intelligence is “love in action.” But love alone can be sentimental or naïve. True spiritual maturity requires both wings: wisdom (clear seeing, discernment) and compassion (care, empathy). Only when both wings work together can love fly.
- Ego is not the enemy — it’s the navigator. Spiritual growth isn’t about destroying the ego, but maturing it, making it more transparent, and placing it in service to the higher self. Ego understands the terrain of human interaction, but higher self must drive. The shift is from ego in charge to higher self in charge, with ego assisting.
- Higher consciousness is not only about “states” but about “traits” that are cultivated through regular practice and skill development. Mystical or peak states can inspire, but they don’t guarantee mature or moral behavior. What matters is whether wisdom and compassion show up in daily choices. Spiritual intelligence grounds transcendence into practical, repeatable skills — from self-awareness to leadership presence.
- Organizations secretly want spiritual intelligence. When leaders are asked which admired spiritual qualities they don’t want in their workplace — compassion, integrity, courage, presence — silence falls. Everyone wants them. SQ reframes spiritual maturity not as esoteric, but as profoundly relevant to business, leadership, and collective flourishing.
A groundbreaking introduction to the 21 skills of spiritual intelligence with author and researcher Cindy Wigglesworth.
What does it mean to be spiritually intelligent in a world overwhelmed by fear, fragmentation, and a compounding meta-crisis? In this powerful talk, Cindy Wigglesworth argues that spiritual intelligence (SQ) is not a luxury — it’s an essential survival skill for the future human.
Building on Ken Wilber’s integral framework and her own groundbreaking SQ21 assessment, Wigglesworth maps out four interdependent lines of human development: PQ (physical intelligence), IQ (cognitive intelligence), EQ (emotional intelligence), and SQ (spiritual intelligence). Each one matters, but SQ — the ability to act with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace — is essential for humanity’s next leap.
Cindy challenges us to rethink common assumptions: spirituality is innate, but spiritual intelligence must be cultivated. Peak mystical states can inspire, but without practice they do not guarantee wise action. The ego is not an enemy to be destroyed, but a navigator that must be matured and placed in service of the higher self.
Through vivid stories, practical models, and research data, Wigglesworth shows how SQ is not abstract mysticism but a set of 21 concrete skills that you can cultivate in your own life — from awareness of one’s values and purpose, to skillful ego management, to embodying a calming presence in the world. These skills can be developed like emotional intelligence, and they are just as relevant in corporate boardrooms as they are on the meditation cushion.
Her research reveals an important truth: you don’t need to drag the whole world into “second-tier consciousness” to reduce dysfunction. Even at earlier, more conventional stages of development, raising EQ and SQ creates less fearful, less reactive, and more compassionate people — what she jokingly calls “less annoying achievers.”
At its core, this talk is a call to action: if we want a more functional culture, wiser leaders, and a humane response to our global crises, we must learn to cultivate love in action — wisdom and compassion, the two wings of spiritual maturity.
—Recorded at the 2024 ICON Conference in Denver, Colorado
Key Questions
Here are some questions you can contemplate while listening to this discussion. We suggest you take some time to use these as journaling prompts.
- Am I living from my ego or my higher self? In moments of stress or conflict, who’s driving the car of my life — the reactive ego, or the wiser part of me that sees with compassion?
- Do I practice love with both wings? When I express love, is it balanced with both compassion and wisdom? Do I tend to overemphasize one wing and neglect the other?
- Am I developing spiritual skills, not just chasing states? Do I confuse peak experiences with spiritual maturity? How am I bringing transcendent insights into daily behaviors and choices?
- How do I respond to difference? Do I seek to understand worldviews that differ from my own? Can I hold compassion for people who even oppose or harm me?
- How do I show up in groups and organizations? When I’m in a collective, do I help raise the level of wisdom and compassion — or do I let fear, conformity, or ego pull the group downward?
- What kind of presence do I bring into the world? Am I a calming, healing presence for others, or do I spread anxiety, judgment, or reactivity?
About Cindy Wigglesworth
Cindy Wigglesworth, MA is the author of SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence (SelectBooks, Oct.2012) and is the creator of the SQ21™ Spiritual Intelligence self-assessment. Cindy founded her business, now called Deep Change, in 2000 after working at ExxonMobil for 20 years in Human Resources management. She teaches leadership development and focuses on the multiple intelligences required for success in our personal and professional lives. She trains executive and life coaches, therapists and spiritual directors to use her SQ21 tool in their practices.