“I just knew.” It’s that feeling you instantly got when you met “the one” or clicked with a friend. Or when you instinctively knew that dog or cat that stood out from the rest of the litter was the one coming home with you, or that house or town you stepped into and just felt at home in. We’ve all experienced this kind of knowing.
While a logical set of steps for making good decisions was laid out in Decisions, decisions, what was missing was how we actually choose — whether it’s making an individual decision to buy a car, or a team decision to solve a complex problem.
Knowing
The Designing Your Life authors talk about “discernment” in decision-making, which they describe as “. . . decision making that employs more than one way of knowing. We mostly use cognitive knowing—all that good, objective, organized, informational kind of knowing—the sort of knowing that gets you all A’s in school. But we also have other ways of knowing, including the affective forms of intuitive, spiritual, and emotional knowing, . . . social knowing (with others) and kinesthetic knowing (in our bodies).” They say the key to good choosing is to “integrate all your decision-making faculties . . . In other words, listen to your knee or gut or heart, too.”
Spiritual knowing
IQ, our logical, objective problem solving intelligence, and EQ, our ability to understand ourselves and others, empathize, and regulate our emotions have long been accepted in the mainstream. SQ, or spiritual intelligence, while less well-known, has been getting more attention lately.
MIT- and Harvard-educated Danah Zohar has written extensively about SQ for three decades. She defines it in this summary piece as “...an ability to access higher meanings, values, abiding purposes, and unconscious aspects of the self and to embed these meanings, values, and purposes in living richer and more creative lives. Signs of high SQ include an ability to think out of the box, humility, and an access to energies that come from something beyond ego, beyond just me and my day-to-day concerns . . . that higher self.” She distinguishes this from religion or spiritual practices, “Rather [it is] the power an individual or organization can manifest based on their deepest meaning, values, and purposes.”
Zohar lays out 12 Principles of Spiritual Intelligence derived from how complex adaptive systems behave. The principles are synergistic with EQ, yet more foundational, including a call to service, acting from principles and deep beliefs, recognizing connection and interdependence, and being aware of what’s happening in the moment. She believes these principles can be “nurtured and developed.”
I've found a dedicated meditation practice is one of the best ways to build SQ muscle.
The joy of knowing
Marie Kondo has sold 11 million copies of her books since the first release in Japan in 2011. When The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing was translated into English in 2014, NYT reviewer Penelope Green wrote, “Ms. Kondo’s decluttering theories are unique, and can be reduced to two basic tenets: Discard everything that does not ‘spark joy,’ . . . and do not buy organizing equipment—your home already has the equipment you need.” I would suggest that Kondo has a third tenet: honoring our possessions for their service to us and deeply caring for them. Green goes on to say, “‘Does it spark joy?’ would seem to set the bar awfully high for a T-shirt or pair of jeans, but it turns out to be a more efficacious sorting mechanism than the old saws: Is it out of style? Have you worn it in the last year? Does it still fit?” In other words, that gut way of knowing makes for better decisions than a cognitive framework. Seems quite a few of us agree.
No better time to know better
As we find ourselves awash in the uncertainty of this pandemic, off-kilter, struggling, and anxious, it’s the perfect time to look inside, get more in touch with ourselves, and grow our ways of knowing. As I repeat often, baby steps can make a big difference. It just takes intention and attention to build a good mix of intuitive, emotional, spiritual, social, physical, and cognitive wits.
And, the next time someone says, “I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right,” after, say, your team or family has thought things through logically and objectively, heard each other out, and agreed on a solution, maybe it would be wise to find out just what “doesn’t feel right.” Could be there’s some “knowing” in that feeling that’s worth knowing about.
Sunday Morning Reflection
How do you know? How can you know better?
Sunday Morning: 149