The more complicated the world gets, the more wisdom we need. Knowledge is in your phone. Wisdom is in your gut, but we have precious few schools or practices to elevate our intuition.
While there are many ingredients in our personal wisdom stew, two stand out across cross-cultural research: Reflective Orientation and Socio-Emotional Awareness. The former is about clearly seeing oneself, drawing lessons from past experience and anticipating long-term consequences. The latter is about deep caring and a connection to something larger: community, nature, or the sacred.
Research shows that Reflective Orientation is the more important of the two, as high caring without reflective rigor can read as kind but not wise. High reflection amplified by socio-emotional awareness is seen as wisdom in action. This research also shows that people tend to see themselves as less reflective but more socio-emotionally attuned than others. This bias suggests why we overestimate our warmth and underestimate the disciplined practices that cultivate judgment. We need to change that.
If I have lost you yet (yes, I’m a geek when it comes to wisdom), I wanted you to know we’ve just put a new MEA workshop on the calendar for the new year, Chip’s Wisdom Weekend: Turn Experience into Impact January 8-11 in Santa Fe. What if this is the year when you start making an investment in developing your wisdom? This is a great way to kickstart that New Year’s resolution.
-Chip