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.
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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.