This is a guest post from Eduard Ezeanu, a communication coach.
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A while back, a professional personality assessment was describing me as wise. This was consistent with the results of other tests and with feedback I got from people who knew me. Yet it still surprised me..
Because I thought that wisdom was a quality only old people can have, while I’m in my late 20’s. Wisdom was in my mind, that ability to understand certain life things with clarity and depth, as the result of countless years of experience. Now, I believe I was right about the first part, but not about the second.
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Wisdom is something you can acquire relatively early in life, provided you follow the right track, you do the right things. You don’t need to have white hair and no more real teeth in your mouth to be wise.
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Quality of experience instead of quantity. It’s not how much experience you have that makes you wise, it’s which kind of experience you have. Which is why plenty of old people are in fact not wise. A friend of mine who is a trainer says that most people don’t live 70 years; they live 1 year repeated 70 times.
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If your life is repetitive and shallow, chances are you’ll never be wise. But if you live a rich life, with various and powerful experiences, the kind that truly shape a man’s personality, than you acquire wisdom fast. This is one of the main reason why I encourage people to do all sort of things and to get out of their comfort zone.
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Asking yourself powerful questions. As a coach, one of the essential things I do is to ask my clients questions which really get them thinking and help them have important revelations. About themselves, about others, about life. I discovered that answering this kind of questions is one of the best ways to get wise.
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The good news is that you can also ask yourself powerful questions and you can make a lot of progress on your own. Ask yourself stuff like:
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What is important to me?
What can I bring to this world that no one else can?
What kind of life would I live if I had no fears?
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It’s weird, unusual questions like these, which you hesitate to tell some of your friends about, that create the most powerful effect in getting wise. Put them to good use.
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Having wise mentors. Looking back on my growth as a professional and as a person, the first thing that comes into my mind is all the wise people in my life, who have seen and done much more than I did, which helped me develop. I owe a great part of what I am now to great mentors.
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So the first thing I encourage you is to find mentors. The second thing is to make sure they have something of real value to offer in terms of wisdom. Actively seek to discover, meet and interact with people you consider wise. Surround yourself with great mentors and you will see your degree of wisdom increase big time.
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I think one of the most important lessons you can learn is that age is not wisdom. Wisdom is something which derives from the quality of your life, your thinking and your environment. And the best thing is that you can consciously shape all of these, so you can consciously make yourself a wise person.
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It’s a funny and interesting feeling, to see yourself and to be seen as wise before you reach 30 or at any age when you are not labeled as old. In a way, you are then living proof of the power conscious, effective human learning has.
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Eduard Ezeanu is a communication coach with an attitude-based approach. He helps others to improve people skills they find relevant and get top notch results. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.
10 Comments
This is a great post! I have always found the concept of wisdom interesting. Wisdom comes with age through experiencing major milestones and learning from these experiences. Though, I think wisdom can also come from knowledge and seeking new information to help us grow and develop our self-understanding. One major part where I see adolescents having trouble is maturity it takes to begin seeking wisdom. Do you think teenagers can develop wisdom without having vast experience?
Hey Joe, I think wisdom does correlate with experience, but rather in quality than in quantity. I personally know some teenagers who are pretty wise for their ages. Some of theme have their own small businesses at 15 or stuff like that, which can really help you grow.
Hi Joe,
I would agree with Eduard. Though wisdom can and does come through age and experience, the key is how much time is dedicated in investing in the learning that will make you wise. As Eduard said, I too know teenagers that are very wise for their age and others that really are far from it.
Hello Eduard,
I like how you mentioned the story about wisdom coming from quality of experience in ones life. I think being aware of ones environment and experiences brings that wisdom out. Nice post!
Thanks Baker
Awareness is definitely somewhere in the recipe for wisdom. You can have or make great stuff happen to you and not learn a single from it without awareness.
This a very good guest post Jonny! If a person’s life is shallow,which that person will never! Age does not matter, that a thing that society have defined as young people who are wise! A person who is wise don’t have to be very up in age neither! It depends on a person’s experiences and their surroundings with other wise people! Very awesome post
Hey Eduard,
Getting outside of my comfort zone (or expanding it !) is one of my favorite methods of leading an incredible life.
Back in the days, I always used to play it safe, and my experience suffered from it. Everything was dull and boring, and I was the only one to blame.
Then one year ago, I completely changed my mindset and starting taking decisions I would have never taken before.
That changed EVERYTHING !
Finding mentors sounds interesting too, but I have never met a worthy person in my area that could actually teach me something.
But I’ll make a serious effort to look for that person.
thanx for sharing the message !
Hi Mars,
On the quest for a mentor I have this to add. A mentor does not always have to be an authority in your given field, a mentor needs only to be someone (usually) older that has more experience than you and whom you respect. It is amazing what you can learn if you are open to it.
- Jonny
Wisdom is the freedom and the ability to make the kinds of choices that move your life forward and contribute to the planet.
Wisdom is a thinking process our brain uses to make our best decisions. It is more like math than mystery.
When we are born our brain aready knows how to make these decisions. Look at your successful habits and you will see that process in action, thousands of times daily.
Learning to do it consciously is a matter of practice, actually of remembering how we learned when we were children.
Totally agree Doug