Ever feel like your career and your inner life are running on two completely separate tracks?
Most executive coaches steer clear of the word spirituality. My guest this episode built an entire second career around it. Rich Strilowich spent more than forty years in IT leadership, most of it inside IBM, climbing from computer science into project and program management, HR, and eventually a director role owning a P&L. For the last thirty years, he's also walked a conscious spiritual path, and for a long time he kept the two worlds separate. Now, as a corporate sage coach, he's built his entire practice around the idea that they were never separate at all.
In this conversation, we get into what spirituality actually means inside a demanding corporate career, and why it has nothing to do with incense or ceremony. Rich walks me through his four filters for navigating hard moments, surrender, faith, patience, and acceptance, and explains why none of them can be reduced to a project plan. We talk about grace as a working concept rather than a soft one, anchored in the hardest story he shares: his three and a half year old daughter's sudden regression into severe autism, and how the exact resources he needed to get through it showed up at the exact moment he needed them. I push him on the question every skeptical executive is quietly asking, does this make you a softer leader, and his answer, backed by his own experience laying off twenty eight people with compassion, is no. We close on a question that reframed my own coaching practice: should we think of the people we advise as clients, or as partners on a journey?
If you've ever hit a goal you worked years for and felt strangely unsatisfied once you got there, this episode will give you a new way to think about why.