Abstract:
This thesis is based on the mystical and humanizing experience of Teresa de Ávila, a Carmelite nun who lived in Spain in the 16th century. Starting from a real experience, lived by a woman, leader, mystic and entrepreneur of the Middle Ages, we find aspects of mystical life that serve as inspiration and reference for the construction of a skills matrix. In this matrix, we list an initial set of skills, through which we believe it is possible, through Coaching processes, to develop spiritualization or spiritual intelligence, of leaders in the context of work, with a view to achieving what we call
high performance. For this, we divided our thesis into three parts. In each of them, we study and highlight points that we consider relevant, in view of our professional experience and also in view of our research objective. Among them: 1) passages from Teresa's life and her Theology taken, mainly, from the works that she herself wrote to her confessors. In this stage, we highlight Teresa's mystical life, the sufferings and challenges she faced and, also, what path she took towards what we point out as the construction of her own leadership. We also deal with the influences that Teresa suffered in her time and how they impacted her journey. We also highlight experience and the human subject as a center in Teresa's theology; 2) aspects that we consider most relevant to the understanding of the human being and
the cultural web in which it is made and in which it makes itself. For that, we study the human in its aspects: of spirit or living soul, of possessing a physical body, of being symbolic, of being emotional full of values and beliefs, of having language,being imaginative and accumulating. At this stage, we also look at culture and religion with a paradigmatic look and, at the end, dwelling on the peculiar case of atheism; 3) in the final and longest stage, we present the spiritualization and the twelve competencies proposed for the development of high performance leaders, aiming at building a scientifically valid path. We present Coaching as a leadership development process. We deal with the subject of human competencies, defining competencies and how to develop human competencies with a focus on the development of spiritual intelligence, in the context of high performance leadership.At the end of this last stage, we present considerations xtracted from the research as a whole, about each one of the twelve competencies proposed for the development of spiritual intelligence in the context of high performance leadership and define, then, what turns out to be high performance in terms of this Thesis.
