Importance of spirituality quotient
Spiritual quotient (SQ) is a measure that looks at a person’s spiritual acumen; it is as important as intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ). While IQ looks at cognitive intelligence, EQ looks at emotional power of a person and spiritual quotient (SQ) looks at spiritual power of a person. Spirituality increases the ability of a person to be creative and to be aware and insightful. The power of intuition and awareness can be increased with help of spirituality. Why SQ is even more important in today’s time? It helps tremendously coping up and do away with modern problems of terrorism, inconsiderateness, lack of humanness. The concept of Spiritual Quotient (SQ) is fast emerging as the next big aspect of scientific study as it directly correlates to a person’s awareness and consciousness.
Human beings have five senses: sight (eyes), hearing (ears), taste (tongue), smell (nose), and touch (sensatory). Spirituality is the ability to recognize that there is intelligence beyond our five senses. There is universal power that creates and governs everything within and beyond the worlds we know, and that power is omnipresent. We can surrender to this supreme intelligence through our awareness. We call this universal power by different names as per our religious faith. Spirituality makes things easier for us to go through the life’s journey with all its ups and downs. It makes our lives happier.
Spirituality exists within us: it does not require great efforts from our side to search it. Spiritual wisdom doesn’t need to involve fables and mysticism. It does not require to be linked to organized religion, although people with strong religious faith often experience high levels of well-being. Living happily depends on how much we are at peace with our inner self, our core – our thoughts, emotions, beliefs and desires. Our spiritual dimension gives us strength to find a sense of inner peace of both peace of mind and peace in the heart. It allows our inner values to steer through peaceful interactions with the world around us. It develops our concern for others, our concern for Mother Nature, and other living beings and it improves our conscious effort to make a positive contribution to society.
The importance of spirituality has been historically neglected in education. Even educational branches such as medicine, nursing, psychiatry, and psychotherapy lack spirituality aspect. The importance of Emotional Intelligence or EQ has been established; spirituality needs have not been systematically researched, examined and studied.
SQ makes us more responsible of ourselves, family, society, our surrounding, our country and then our universe too. It helps us to interconnect our personal vision with the larger good of humanity. It makes us more humble in our perspective. To a great extent it reduces our selfish intentions. We, human beings, carry big egos, and want to feel all important. We tend to get swayed with our power, status and money. We never realize if we are that important in this world. Our arrogance or our humility spoils our relations with so many people. Human race has progressed on innumerable innovations made. With each innovation, the level of comfort enjoyed is higher. But, are we really happier? Though we have made materialistic progress, though we have too many comforts compared to previous generations are we really happier? Here is where spirituality helps us to find our inner peace of mind. A long and healthy life is important for any individual. Ill-health can either halt one’s progress or, even if one succeeds, result in the ‘gifts’ of a heart disease, blood pressure or diabetes. A happy individual also builds a happy family and society.
Spiritual Quotient therefore is the ability of an individual to see his personal vision and the consequent endeavor to achieve the same through the understanding of the larger good to the society, bringing good health and happiness to him and the world at large. An in-depth review that compared spirituality and religiousness to other health interventions found that people with a strong spiritual life had an 18% reduction in mortality. Giancarlo Lucchetti, lead author of the study, calculates that the life-lengthening benefits of spirituality can be compared to eating a high amount of fruits and vegetables or taking blood pressure medication, https://nygoodhealth.com.
The question that might come to mind after reading the above is – why do we need to be spiritual to realize these fairly straightforward implications? The answer is simple – unless we set apart time in our daily busy schedule to make steady progress in our spiritual journey, we will not get time to even think about these issues. Spirituality brings depth to an individual’s approach and perspective towards leading a more meaningful life.
As humans we get wrong ideas about so many aspects; each of us is busy trying to prove our worth. Each one of us is trying to be better than somebody, how many of us have destroyed ourselves in the rat race….. How many of us have wasted our time, efforts, energy and almost everything on this planet just trying to look a little better than somebody else. It is such a horrible waste of life, because you will never blossom into your full potential if you keep thinking how to be better than somebody. SQ helps us in fixing our priorities of life; it helps us in understanding do the best that you can – what has to happen will happen.
Today, in the corporate world also most of the organizations and institutions have realized and acknowledged that their human element, what is called ‘human resource’ is not simply intellectual property consisting of human knowledge and skills, but is human spirit as well. Corporate have realized that they need to nurture and value the human spirit which is an integral part of leadership. Spirituality is not a mere element which needs reference and regular discussions on it; its practice and application will reduce commotion and misconduct to a greater extent. Lot of awareness is growing in applying spirituality in the workplace.
Abraham Maslow had suggested in his ‘Need Hierarchy’ model that as nations and their populations became more affluent, so would their spiritual hunger become stronger. Perhaps the changing world and its markets which are strongly characterized through globalization, we see volatile environments and shorter product life cycles. We also see organizations breaking rules and law of lands. Ethical practices remain only in books never to be practiced. The way that companies treat their employees is another important consideration.
How many firms are socially responsible by providing a reasonable working environment while paying adequate wages and benefits? How many firms follow the human rights? Even if it doesn’t directly commit abuses, a company may work with suppliers or subcontractors who are responsible for human rights violations, such as using child labor. The health and safety of both the workforce and the surrounding community can be a major issue
Organizations such as Reckit and Coleman, Wipro, Dabur, Tata Tea and many others are among a growing number of organizations that have embraced spirituality at workplace. And, it is observed that these organizations have realized that spiritual growth is like learning math: once you master Algebra and are able to solve any equation in Algebra you also get fascinated to solve Geometrical equations, thus increasing mind capacity to think in multiple areas. Spirituality makes us ethically strong and an increased capacity to be compassionate.
