One essential skill of spiritually intelligent people is having complexity of inner thought. Do you enjoy thinking about complicated concepts and working them over in your mind? Do you enjoy discussing complex issues? Are you able to manage polarities – understanding that two opposite things can be true at the same time?

Then you may already have the gift of complexity of inner thought.

Remember the definition of spiritual intelligence as coined by Cindy Wigglesworth is the ability to behave with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the situation (Wigglesworth, 2012).

We live in an age of exponential growth in information. Some information is useful – and some is – frankly – garbage. We also have stellar advances in various research disciplines. Brilliant people are developing new knowledge every minute. However, all this knowledge and all this information does not translate into wisdom.

Wisdom needs to come to us from somewhere deeper and higher. We need to spend time in discernment and deep listening to receive wisdom.

Exercising the muscles of complexity of inner thought can help us get there.

How might you exercise these complex thinking muscles? Can you think of a time when you were faced with a decision where two opposite ideas were equally true and had value or importance?

Can you embrace paradox and mystery? Or does that make you uncomfortable?

We live in a constant whitewater and our ability to consider multiple points of view and be comfortable with the questions is so essential today.

What are your guiding principles? What do you know for sure? When do you break the rules? How might you make life-and-death decisions? Once you wrestle with paradox and mystery and finally make a necessary decision, can you live with your choices?

Wrestling and Resting

I love to support people with thinking and walking through complexity. The reason it falls so well into skills of spiritual intelligence is that we can both wrestle with and be restful with complexity if we know there’s a higher power and higher purpose in what we’re doing.

Notice how these skills build on each other. When we understand our worldview from skill #1, and know our purpose in skill #2 and have explored our values in skill #3 (and ranked them in importance) then developing complexity of inner thought can be rooted in something deep.

This is a huge topic for conversation and I am only skimming the surface here today.

I’d like to challenge you to think of ways you can exercise your complexity thinking. Very few problems in the world are black and white and the more we grow in spiritual intelligence, the more we can see nuances.

Some beginning steps in developing complexity of inner thought is to let go of our voice of judgement, our voice of cynicism, and our voice of fear as described by Otto Scharmer in his book titled Theory U. We can then develop an open mind, an open heart and an open will to receive something emergent through our “generative listening”.

“Generative listening, refers to connecting to Source, listening to the Universe, and harmonizing with the collective wisdom; there is a mix of silence and added energy. It allows for assessing the social field, listening to the Universe, and constructing the best possible futures.”(Scharmer, 2009)

If you want to talk about your possibilities to grow your muscles for complexity of inner thought, reach out to me here.

Resources:

Scharmer, C. O. (2009). Theory U leading from the future as it emerges: The social technology of presencing (1st ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Wigglesworth, C. (2012). SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence. BookBaby.