Educators role as spiritually intelligent leaders in educational institutions

Abstract

In today’s highly competitive world many subjects that are contrary to each other are continuously spoken over as if they are in competition such as; wealth-poverty, peace-war, love-hate, materialism-spiritualism…etc. This list is endless but one, especially one term plays a single leading role, and that is spiritualism. Since many people have lost or gave up their unique personal characteristics in favor to gain success, power or control in uniformed individualistic cultures, many on the other hand are trying hard to achieve self full filling, happy lives. The hard working ones are trying to obtain inner peace by focusing on their spiritual intelligences and trying to find ways to improve them.Spiritual intelligence (SQ) means much more than spirituality. Spiritual intelligence is a way of thinking. It is what we use to cover our longing and capacity for meaning, vision and value. Also it establishes a dialogue between reason and emotion, between mind and body. SQ allows the integration between intrapersonal and interpersonal in order to surpass the gap between self and other. And all these aspects in a broader sense cover the need to understand and know the others’ “hearts.”Spiritually intelligent people can be seen performing different jobs, but especially spiritually intelligent educators are the most valued and preferred ones since the future of the world is shaping in their hands. Educators who want to gain a broader perspective on this issue can take a journey into their inner-selves by the help of integrating the skills of emotional intelligence with specific spiritual qualities. After gaining enough insight to the topic, educators then, they themselves can be the illuminators of tolerance, unity, understanding, love and peace. Since sharing knowledge is seen as the main purpose of educators, teaching how to be “happy in life” is also a job to be performed by educators. From this perspective in this paper the main aim is to discuss SQ, the ways to improve SQ levels of educators and its positive results on educator-student relationship, and its reflections in the educational environment.