Reflections on Spirituality in Leadership: Presence, Purpose and Fulfillment, with Andrew Cohn
In this reflective solo episode of Spirituality in Leadership, host Andrew Cohn steps away from interviews to share some of the deepest insights he has gained from nine months of podcast conversations and nearly three decades in the leadership development space.
Andrew revisits the heart of why this podcast exists: the belief that long-term effectiveness in leadership is impossible without fulfillment. While stress, overwork, and dissatisfaction may be survivable in the short term, Andrew explains why they are unsustainable over time. He reflects on how spirituality in leadership is less about religion and more about presence, values, purpose, and the ability to listen deeply in a distracted world.
Through stories from his work with executives, his years of Aikido practice, and his experiential leadership work with Equus in Santa Fe, Andrew unpacks the power of presence as a practical leadership skill. He explains how awareness creates choice, how values shape behavior, and why inner work is not optional for leaders who want to serve well.
This episode is an honest and grounding reminder that leadership is not just about performance. It is about how we show up, how we listen, and how we stay human along the way.
Key Takeaways
The "Why" Behind the Podcast: Created to host essential workplace conversations that connect effectiveness and fulfillment for long-term sustainability.
Fulfillment is a Strategic Imperative: Short-term stress is manageable, but lasting leadership requires deep personal and professional fulfillment.
Broadening the Definition of "Spiritual": Spirituality is framed as purpose, values in action, and higher motivation open to all beliefs.
Presence as the Core Practice: Being fully attentive, undistracted, and available is the key bridge between spirituality and leadership.
We Have 1924 Brains in a 2024 World: Our nervous systems lag behind modern demands, requiring new tools and practices.
From Awareness to Embodied Change: Growth comes through awareness, choice, action, and reflection.
Leadership as Responsibility: Leaders are accountable for the safety, growth, and development of others.
The Goal is Inclusion: Spiritual language is used to invite, not exclude.
In This Episode:
[00:00] Introduction and episode intention
[01:28] Solo episode and feedback reflections
[02:32] Foundations of the podcast
[04:42] Professional background and experience
[05:59] Inviting meaningful conversations
[07:11] Defining spirituality in leadership
[08:13] Individual and organizational dimensions
[09:18] The practice of presence
[10:24] Managing modern pressures and distractions
[11:29] Presence in leadership practice
[12:37] Making presence actionable
[13:39] Aikido, experiential learning, and leadership
[15:44] Values in action and leadership responsibility
[16:41] Bringing spiritual qualities to work
[17:44] Inclusivity and broad definitions
[18:21] Closing thoughts and invitation
Resources and Links
Spirituality in Leadership Podcast
Andrew Cohn
Music:
Listen to the Podcast here
Watch the podcast here
Transcript
Andrew Cohn: The intention of this episode is to share a bit about my learnings in conducting this podcast. Share a few examples of things that I think are absolutely right on topic. I think that in order to be effective in the workplace long term, we need to be fulfilled. We need to be satisfied. Short term, we can burn the candle at both ends. We can be stressed out. We can possibly have mistrust with our colleagues. We can be dissatisfied, unhappy, but long term, I think we need to find places where we are fulfilled enough to keep us going. How much is enough? That's, I can buy you a glass of wine and we can talk about how much is enough.
Intro: Welcome to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm Andrew Cohn. Spirituality and Leadership is a platform for conversations with leaders at all levels about bringing our spiritual dimensions to our leadership, our teams, our workplaces, and all areas of our lives in order to achieve greater success and fulfillment and build and sustain healthier organizations. If you'd like to connect with me to talk further about these topics and or about individual or team coaching leadership workshops or team alignment, please go to my website, lighthouseteams.com. Enjoy the podcast.
Andrew Cohn: Welcome back to the Spirituality in Leadership podcast. I'm Andrew Cohn, and on this episode, it's just me. Some of the responses I've received to the podcast in the last nine months, which has been generally super positive and even the critical feedback, has been very positive in terms of how we can do things better. Thank you so much for that feedback. Honestly, I felt that I was the last person on planet Earth to have a podcast. I'm learning everything so much of finding out what I don't know, but that's the kind of feedback that sometimes is the hardest to receive, but the most important to process, so I appreciate that.
Andrew Cohn: And I think some of the most positive feedback I received was suggestions to periodically do a solo podcast. Just me talking about what I've learned, what I see, and what's my point of view on this topic of spirituality in leadership as I've defined it. What have I learned from my guests just to help provide the listeners with some summaries and aggregates and key points and key takeaways.
Andrew Cohn: So the intention of this episode is to share a bit about my learnings in conducting this podcast, share a few examples of things that I think are absolutely right on topic, but may not have been brought out by some of the podcast guests, at least thus far. So I'm grateful that you're with me and I would first wanna share a little bit about the foundation of the podcast, and this came about as I began to think what kinds of conversations do I believe need to be happening in the workplace in order to increase effectiveness as well as fulfillment.
Andrew Cohn: So in order to help people do better, get more, and have their organizations do better and get more while being fulfilled in the workplace, because in the 27 years since I've been in the leadership development space. And that's how long it's been since I left my law practice. Unbelievably, I think that in order to be effective in the workplace long term, we need to be fulfilled. We need to be satisfied. Short term, we can burn the candle at both ends. We can be stressed out, we can possibly have mistrust with our colleagues. We can be dissatisfied, unhappy, but long term, I think we need to find places where we are fulfilled enough to keep us going. How much is enough? That's I can buy you a glass of wine and we can talk about how much is enough, but fulfillment and effectiveness.
Andrew Cohn: My partner a few years ago challenged me and said, given my consulting experience over the years and given my personal mission and values and what's important to me, what would I want to put out into the world to invite these key conversations, these most important conversations. And I told her I'd want to create this podcast, and that's how it came about.
Andrew Cohn: So I appreciate her prompting. And the invitation to clearly express what conversations do I believe would be useful. And that's based on my 27 years of work supporting leadership teams, coaching individual leaders, designing and conducting leadership training and workshops on a variety of topics. Doing team retreats, new leader assimilation and orientation activities, just working with leaders on a variety of levels, and in my case, that work includes both working in the corporate space in conference rooms and offsites really all over the world. Also working with emerging leaders, younger leaders in a training setting, and also MBA students at the Wharton School in Philadelphia, executive MBA students at Wharton who live all over the US and actually around the world. As well as executives who participate in programs at Wharton. It's been a very important partnership for me over the years, both in terms of the clients I'm meeting, but also in terms of the colleagues, academic and otherwise from whom I'm learning. So I'm super grateful for that affiliation.
Andrew Cohn: So as this podcast has unfolded in the previous, should we call it approximately nine months, I'm really grateful at the range of expertise and experiences that have been shared, the actionable ideas for deepening our own learning, and also how do we invite others into meaningful conversations, very importantly, without judgment or expectations or pressure.
Andrew Cohn: So how do we invite healthy conversations? Conversations about what's really most important to people and short term profits is almost always not what's most important to people. And it actually, if I were to ask someone, what's most important to you? And they said, reaching our quarterly profit target. And I'd say, and why is that the most important thing for you? There's probably something along the line of virtual, of individual personal values underneath that. So safe and practical conversations about what matters most to us, and that's what this podcast is really about. For some people, when we talk about spirituality in leadership, there are a wide range of definitions of spirituality that has come up a lot on the podcast and in my work with the focus of the podcast, it's typically how people approach that and bridge these two dimensions of their lives. Things that might be called spiritual dimensions of us that might be called spiritual. On the one hand and. Our involvement and applying our precious energy at work in the corporate space. And there's so few examples of these healthy conversations in the workplace. In my experience, that's why I'm so committed to this podcast and promoting these conversations.
Andrew Cohn: In terms of definitions of spirituality, that means different things to different people, especially in the context of the workplace. For some people, it's about engagement. What engages me is what touches my values, what touches my values, gets close to what could be called spiritual for me.
Andrew Cohn: For other people, it's not about engagement. It's about connecting people with their higher motivations. It's about what lights people up. It's about what's the highest form of service? What are our aspirations? What's most important to me about who I wanna show up in the world? How do I wanna, wanna bring my values into action? All of that comes under that definition of what does spirituality mean in the context of how might we bring it to work.
Andrew Cohn: I've been super grateful for the range of beliefs and expressions that people have shared, and I look forward to learning more about this in the coming months and years. I personally believe it's important for me to invite as many responses to this question as I can, and these conversations have evolved into broader conversations about what engages people, what matters most. Why am I here? Personally, as well as other areas of organizational health, team formation, organizational culture and values. So it's both individual and broader. It's the I, but it's also the we and the it of organizational life. And again, I've been really pleased at the breadth and depth of these conversations.
Andrew Cohn: One thing I wanted to share a little bit about is, for me, one of the most important areas of connection between what might be called spiritual dimensions and leading in the working world is the experience and practice of presence. And sometimes this notion of presence can be kind of slippery and elusive, and I love to try to clarify things and make them actionable and understandable as much as possible. I'm not talking about the idea of presence, I'm talking about the experience and practice of presence. I learned a lot about presence in my practice of Aikido over the years, and I've been practicing Aikido for about 20 years. I'll come back to this in a minute, and I'm learning more about presence in new ways in my recent years as part of my work with EQUUS here in beautiful Santa Fe. And this work is experiential, nature-based learning. That is facilitated by or fostered by the environment and sometimes the horses with which we work very often.
Andrew Cohn: So presence means different things to different people at different times. For me, I think what may be most important is the ability to be present and focused and available. So how can I really be listening. attuned. Be thinking clearly, be undistracted, be available for the person in front of me, or the issue in front of me, or the problem in front of me. And there may not be a human being there. And this sounds like something really simple, but I don't believe it is given the level of distraction and demands on our attention coming from both outside of us as well as inside of us.
Andrew Cohn: I remember once hearing Jean Houston talk about, Hey, consider life a hundred years ago versus now. The level of stimulation, the level of tension, the level of stress, the demanding nature of the world around us in 1924 versus 2024. And then now think about how much our own individual systems have evolved, how much our capacity to think more deeply and clearly our capacity to our senses for example, the speed of our thinking, the just our physical, emotional, neurological evolution in a hundred years has, if it has evolved at all. It's been very, very minimal, I would say. And of course I'm not a scientist and I don't pretend to be one, but we're dealing with much, much more with the same tools as we were a hundred years ago.
Andrew Cohn: Jean Houston told me when I spoke with her about that, she said, we need to cook on more burners, which I think is a beautiful expression, but the point is we need to use different tools if we're going to be effectively managing the exponentially higher levels of pressure and tension and stress and distraction around us in our world that leads to not just what's around us, demanding upon us, but also what's within us demanding upon us, these judgments and saboteurs and limiting beliefs and other voices inside us that we all deal with on a pretty regular basis.
Andrew Cohn: So presence is about listening with a clear and open and caring mind. In my experience, if a leader is present, then she can truly hear and understand, for example, when a team member is in distress or when a customer has important feedback that isn't being shared, and that feedback may be particularly difficult for that leader to receive and for her team to receive and to take action on.
Andrew Cohn: Presence is grounded in parts of us that, again, we might call spiritual and it's precious and it's needed in leadership. For example, I had a conversation with a coaching client recently, a senior lawyer in a leading asset management firm. Because in my experience as a lawyer, I often am called upon by, for coaching other lawyers.
Andrew Cohn: So she was presenting this to me and said, I really wanna be, I have a stronger sense of executive presence. I want to be more present, especially with my senior stakeholders. She was talking about being fully available to serve key business partners to manage the pressures of her role, the pressures of certain key meetings, for example, those pressures, as she called it, inside and out.
Andrew Cohn: This was very, very practical in terms of getting better results in her job, and also very personal in terms of feeling more fulfilled and satisfied and successful and ready at work. And that involved increasing her own awareness, which we talked about really intentionally and deliberately choosing what works better.
Andrew Cohn: And honestly, what I'd say about her work, as with many other clients of mine, it takes courage to really take a look at what's keeping us from being present. What's showing up. Like we say we want to, what's getting in the way of that? That really is at the heart of the presence conversation, which I think is so powerful and can be measured and looked at in specific ways.
Andrew Cohn: So it doesn't need to be this slippery term that's being thrown about over everybody's heads, but rather is specifically measurable in terms of what are the dimensions of presence that are most important? Are they physical? Are they emotional? Are they intellectual and mental presence? And for example, focus somatic.
Andrew Cohn: So there's different ways that this can be looked at and different tools for that purpose. So I appreciate the attention that she paid to what was working for her in response to some of the pressures that she felt that were keeping her from being as present as she would like. So circling back to what I mentioned earlier about my Aikido practice and what it's taught me about leadership, frankly, and about my own spirituality in action. It's a place of experiential learning like we often talk about here at EQUUS in Santa Fe, but it's not talking about how I respond to pressure or how I may be feeling uncertain or unprepared, but it's about experiencing these things.
Andrew Cohn: Talk is cheap when it comes to addressing things we wanna improve in ourselves, but I'm talking about experiencing these things and training myself to respond in ways that work better. So on the mat, as we call it, this means breathing in a certain way, moving in certain ways. Focusing my attention in certain ways and practicing, practicing, practicing so that I can embody some of these changes. I can feel my body moving. I could develop the muscle memory to do things differently. And the same holds true for my corporate clients, who are so often challenged is an understatement, but challenged by tough work issues, challenging people, challenging circumstances. So the work is to increase awareness, what's happening both outside and inside, what's happening within me, and with that awareness, generate options what could I do differently? What do I wanna pay attention to? What do I wanna listen to? What do I wanna capture and practice? And then what steps would I take? What actions would I take to deliberately behave in particular ways that my hope will get me better results? And then paying attention to those results to see if I want to keep going in the same plan or refine things or do something a little bit differently.
Andrew Cohn: So increased awareness generates more options, which then would be the basis of some of the behavior choices that I would make. And then reflecting on what works for me. This also includes operating from my own values. And so in the martial arts world, for example, what does operating from my values mean?
Andrew Cohn: It could mean I'm gonna focus on developing this practice, but one of my overarching values is I am not going to hurt my partner. My partner could be, for example, is I have two black belts. If I'm working with a white belt or a yellow belt, or somebody who's new, I'm gonna be very gentle in handling that person. So even though I want to be practicing and I maybe want to get something outta my practice, my overarching value is I'm not gonna injure this person, in part because I as a black belt, I'm responsible for that person on the mat. That's how I see it for myself. And frankly, I think that good leaders see themselves as responsible for the people on their teams the same way.
Andrew Cohn: So it's this process of using experience to grow and to be more successful and more fulfilled. That I think is really core to the theme of this podcast. So we talk about what's most important to us as people and as leaders in a particular setting, and then we focus on bringing it to life. And that could mean demonstrating our values or practicing the qualities I wanna bring into the world, or I wanna bring to work some of the things I've been developing outside of work. That for me, I might call spiritual things, things that help me be more balanced. They help me be more caring, accepting, forgiving, patience, really be more human, and I wanna bring that into my work, and I wanna encourage other people to do that too. So if you're a listener to this podcast, you understand that I walk the line between referring to some things as possibly spiritual, but also wanting to keep the conversation as open as possible is, the last thing I would want to do is exclude someone. Because either my beliefs or one of my guests beliefs would somehow be alienating or exclusive or would make someone feel uncomfortable. So I'm just calling that out as it's just the reality of talking about a topic like this. There's times when I need to take a step back and broaden a definition so as to invite more into the conversation.
Andrew Cohn: I think there's an important opportunity to keep the definition broad, continue to invite and include in the conversation so that we can continue to learn and grow, be more effective. And dare I say, happier too. And I think that that's what we get to on this podcast. So those are some of my thoughts at this point in time. I welcome your feedback. As always, I continue to have more of these conversations with leadership teams, whether it's in keynotes that I may deliver, or offsite meetings as well as in my individual coaching and working with groups and leadership teams. I invite you to contact me if you're open to talking about it. Thanks for listening.
Outro: Thank you for listening to Spirituality in Leadership. If you want to access this wealth of knowledge and insight on a regular basis, please subscribe to the show. Join the network of leaders who want to do and be better. You can go to the site, spiritualityinleadership.com or your preferred podcast platform to catch all the episodes and learn more. Until next time, take good care of yourself.