After an award-winning Israeli Air Force career and years as a startup CEO, Yosi Amram became a clinical psychologist to help leaders develop “spiritual intelligence."
Amram Draws on Lessons from Business and Therapy to Help Others Achieve Success Through “Spiritual Intelligence”
Yosi Amram’s personal life, education, and varied career have equipped him to become a therapist and coach to more than 100 CEOs, including leaders of companies with billions in revenue, as well as other executives and community leaders.
In his new book, "Spiritually Intelligent Leadership: How to Inspire By Being Inspired,” he explains that spirituality does not necessarily have anything to do with religion or belief in God. Atheists and agnostics, he argues, can also be “spiritually intelligent,” applying their values and drawing on wisdom traditions to enhance well-being and performance in pursuit of success.
This is more than a book: It takes the discussion to deeper and broader dimensions of how great companies and their leaders achieve success, measured both by Wall Street and long-term employee and customer retention.
The lessons apply to any organization, from a struggling startup or nonprofit to a long-established family business or a global company, as well as individuals who feel they have done everything “right” but still feel out of balance and unhappy.
Amram speaks from experience. In 1974, having just graduated from an Israeli high school at 18, he was drafted into three years of mandatory service in the Air Force, starting as a private. Supervisors saw leadership potential, and he rose rapidly into senior leadership roles and earned awards.
After his service, his aptitude for math and science brought him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied electrical engineering and computer science.
"I soon realized I didn't enjoy sitting in front of a computer all day, so I decided to enroll at the Harvard Business School the following year to focus on business innovation," he told Startup Savant. "In one of my classes, the assignment was to read an article by Professor Abraham Zaleznik on the difference between managers, who oversee the use of resources and make decisions, and leaders, who also inspire the people around them to do more and do better. I looked up ‘inspire' and found it had the same Latin root as ‘spirit,' which means the ‘animating breath of life.' I figured that leaders must be full of life, passion, and purpose, breathing vitality into those they lead."
He began studying examples of people who perform heroic acts or serve others at great personal cost — from someone running into a burning building to save others to Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight for social justice.
"I realized that we are all intrinsically connected and interdependent with all life and that sense of belonging feels life-affirming," he said. "I would later recognize this as the foundation of spiritual intelligence."
Continuous and Flexible Innovation Drive Success
After a few years as a manager and leader at a tech startup in Silicon Valley (later acquired by IBM), he decided to join others to pursue real innovation as a venture capitalist.
In 1989, he became CEO and chairman of Individual Inc., which — long before the internet — saw the need to address the avalanche of information leaders were receiving. The company developed software that personalized everything from newswire stories to trade journals, delivering results via fax machines and, later, email.
"But my venture capital partners decided not to fund the idea and none of the 50 other VC firms I pitched were interested," he wrote. "My savings evaporated for the next two years, but with my wife's encouragement, I managed to recruit three talented co-founders to join me without pay and we convinced an angel investor to take the first risk. Then more prestigious VC firms followed suit and even my original partners joined."
However, by the end of 1994, the internet had begun its ascent, and his subscription service was threatened by access to free information. Then he realized that Individual had a gold mine of information about its customers for advertisers and he launched the first "Dutch auction" (starting at a high price and descending) for selling ad inventory on the internet. It would later become the standard.
He also conceived new products that would enable people to connect with others and create their own content, rudimentary offerings similar to what social media would eventually provide.
Delegate to Avoid Burnout and Survive Crises
For six years, he usually worked 80 hours a week. He skipped exercise, avoided recreational breaks, and neglected his family, which led to a deep depression.
"I was not ready to address the root causes of my work compulsion, tying my self-worth to my net worth, so I saw a psychiatrist who gave me Prozac, a Band-Aid over a bullet hole."
Then, one day in what he calls a "new state of manic intoxication," he was lying face down on a table for a massage. As he relaxed, he experienced a consciousness of himself, the massage, and everything else as one thing, "a non-dual realization popularly called awakening, a state of oneness in which all subject and object distinction disappear."
Long interested in the mind-body relationship, he spent the following weeks in a state of euphoria. His life also became full of synchronicities (a term popularized by psychologist Carl Jung). These are highly improbable "coincidences" that are reported to occur for many devoted practitioners of meditation, prayer, and visualization (the latter is also well-known as part of training for athletes who are at the top of their game).
But at Individual, his vision of the company that could connect everyone made him impatient with his colleagues. While his initiatives would have eventually thrived on the net, in 1996 his board thought he had lost his mind and fired him.
"Years later, I would read about the dark night of the soul that many mystics experience for months or years, which often precede spiritual awakenings," he wrote. "The professor who inspired me at business school observed that powerful leaders are often ‘twice born,' encountering major crises only to emerge with a new, stronger sense of self and courage to express their authentic individuality."
In his later coaching practice, he reports that "three of my four clients who have become billionaires, all, like the phoenix, have risen from the ashes of failure." He adds that "we can find a way out of wallowing in our guilt and suffering and see them as opportunities to learn better ways to live in alignment with our values."
Amram got off psychoactive medication and entered psychotherapy. In 1997, he became co-founder and CEO of Valicert, which provided infrastructure for secure transactions and communication on the internet. By delegating responsibilities to a senior team, he reduced his workload to 50 hours a week.
"Nelson Mandela equated a leader with a shepherd who tends to his flock from behind, so I alternated between that and leading from the front as the situation demanded, prioritizing self-care and keeping my ego in check."
He handed the CEO baton to his successor in 2002, two years after Valicert's IPO.
Applying Spiritually Intelligent Leadership (SILeadership)
Amram has coached leaders since 1996. He deepened his work in 2009, when he earned a Ph.D. in clinical transpersonal psychology. The approach addresses individual and relationship issues treated in mainstream psychotherapy, including how IQ and emotional intelligence (EQ) affect people, while drawing on spiritual and mind-body traditions for additional insight and support.
He cites author Stephen Covey that "spiritual intelligence is the central and most fundamental of all the intelligences, because it is the source of guidance for the others."
In 2012, Amram earned a California license as a clinical psychologist specializing in executive counseling and couples therapy.
Each section of the book focuses on one part of what he refers to as "Spiritually Intelligent Leadership Dimensions" and the related competencies to bring them about in a leader's work and life:
- Meaning: articulate a vision.
- Grace: lead with dignity, joy, trust, and gratitude.
- Be Inner-directed: align with and inspire others from an inner core of authenticity.
- Community: foster cohesion and connectedness.
- Presence: bring full attention, focus, and clarity to every moment.
- Truth: motivate yourself and others based on truthfulness.
- Wisdom: tap into intuition.
An example of how a competency for gratitude under Grace could be practiced: appreciate yourself, the people you work with, the learning process, your customers, and other gifts.
"If you feel daunted about developing all seven dimensions and their competencies, don't worry," he wrote. It is a career-long process of continuous betterment that will give you confidence, no matter any temporary setbacks.
In his therapy practice, Amram has found that even a single session can help someone who arrives upset leave with effective coping tools. One example involved Victoria, the CEO of a rapidly growing wellness app. She valued a board member’s input, but he could be domineering and bullying. Some board members advised asking him to leave. As she described the situation, she felt a ball of tension in her belly and pain in her heart.
Amram had her put her feet on the ground and include that in her feelings, imagining a pyramid connecting all these parts of her body, then he told her to breathe deeply. Remarkably, that enabled her to feel confident that she could deal with the board member. Soon after, during a hike together, he revealed he was suffering from PTSD, which sometimes led him to react in ways he later regretted. They then agreed on ways to work around those reactions.
Amram cites studies suggesting that leaders who cultivate SILeadership practices become more effective. For example, Bain & Company identified 33 characteristics of inspirational leaders and found that "inspired" employees were twice as productive as those who were merely "satisfied."
Implementing The Lessons
Amram advises readers to keep a journal of notes and drawings to help remember and visualize insights drawn from the book, which blends his clients’ experiences with his own.
Each chapter ends by taking the reader through "Your Turn," so the book does not become something merely skimmed for highlights, but a handbook as if it were instructions to play on a sports team that had to be demonstrated.
For example, a chapter titled “Showing Up With Authentic Presence” asks, “What Makes You Come Alive?” Readers are instructed to list five to 10 variations of the phrase “I feel alive when …” Amram then asks, “What difference would it make if you brought the same quality of energy you feel doing this exercise to each actual experience?”
The book also includes physical exercises to support the psychological and behavioral approaches to SILeadership, called the INSPIRED protocol:
- Inward gazing
- Nostril breathing
- Spinal supporting, spirit soaring
- Posture aligning
- Inhaling, exhaling
- Relaxing, receiving, resting feet flat on the ground, connected to the core of Mother Earth
- Expanding awareness: pelvis, belly, diaphragm, heart, chest, shoulders, arms, legs, entire body, and the space all around
- Deepening into essence
Of course, this is only a brief look at the approach Yosi Amram has developed. The real work comes in applying the book’s ideas consistently in daily life and leadership.