So we've talked a lot about wisdom more as a series of traits and

as kind of an in-state and so forth.

And often when we talk about things like is wisdom or

creativity or leadership and so on.

We sometimes have a tendency to think, oh, these are just innate talents or

innate gifts, or just how that person was raised and so

forth, and who they were by dent of genetics or something else.

And I wonder what are your thoughts about the way in which you can setup

a learning environment or an educational environment that could foster wisdom,

that could bring wisdom forth in your case 18 to 22 year olds?

Then to the degree that you think wisdom is something that can be systematically

fostered as a deliberate, conscious practice.

Then, well, what are your thoughts about the kinds of strategies

best suited to bring forth wisdom, in terms of people who wanna go out and

become businessmen and businesswomen in a variety of professional settings?

Well, I heard two parts to your question.

The first one, you're right.

Someone might think it's innate, that somehow it's genetic, you're born with it.

I think that most of the research would say that's fundamentally wrong.

I mean, that's true of intelligence, at least that's what we know from studies and

theories of intelligence.

People can vary based on certain born with abilities.

Although we know today compared to 50 years ago that intelligence

isn't just with numbers or words, as Gardner at Harvard, and others have

shown, intelligence can relate to a lot of other aspects of life.

Artistic intelligence for example, and so forth.

Sternberg is an interesting case.

He started out his career studying intelligence.

From that he moved to studying knowledge and then came,

I think in fairness he's not here to say for sure, to correct me, but I think he

came to the realization the really critical thing was how you use those.

And that's why it's wisdom because wisdom is about how you apply that.

We all know there have been many very smart and

successful people who have done some really foolish things.

We can think of leaders in government,

where they've gotten involved in shifty details of various kinds and

have lost their reputations because they put them at risk,

by just doing things they should've known better not to be doing.

And this has happened in businesses too,

where people have been caught being fraudulent, let's say.

On any intelligence or even a knowledge test, these people would score very high.

But when it came to making a wiser decision or

recognizing that they were facing something that was morally, thorny and

difficult and maybe they should not be putting themselves into that situation.

They obviously could not get out of it and they did poorly.

So it is not innate.

It is something that can be fostered and encouraged.

Now how do you do that and if we're talking about college students?

Well at the end I think we need to be humble here.

We can't take 18 or 20 or 22 year olds in one course, or

even a four year degree and suddenly lead them to the levels of

wisdom that we might think in someone like Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi or

an Abraham Lincoln or some of the other luminaries in history.

Who have been suggested to have been among the wise people that have lived,

at least in some context of their lives they were.

But I think it begins to go back to some things I've talked about,

is that I think we have to encourage them to ask complex, difficult questions, and

to not be afraid of that.

We have to expose them to some of the richer writings and

insight about what it means to lead a wise life.

Whether they're reading Aristotle or a contemporary poet like Wendell Berry.

Or whether they're being exposed to well known historic religions,

like Christianity, or Buddhism, or any other,

where is the wisdom that has come out of these incredible Religious traditions.

I think we have to be able to expose them to those ideas, let them think about it,

and enter a discussion.

We have to also be able to create exercises where they face situations.

It could be business scenarios.

It could be personal life scenarios, or whatever.

And say how can you approach this?

How can you apply ideas like compassion, gratitude, humility?

Asking difficult questions.

How can we balance what we know with what we don't know here?

How can you dive deeper and yet

fly higher to be able to understand what is going on here,

when you finally have to open your mouth to render a judgment or a piece of advice?

Or a decision going forward.

So I think by laying those things on the table, and exposing students to those

things, and encouraging them, inspiring them up to think about those things.

We come a little bit closer to knowing that maybe they will go on that path

of wanting to continue to grow in their wisdom.

We talk about resilience as an example.

If they can come to realize that learning from mistakes, not being afraid to admit

mistakes, to realizing that even when they face a difficult time in their life.

Which could be an illness, the death of someone close to them, working

at a job early on and having the business basically close, or something like that.

To realize that you have a choice.

You can be crushed.

Your heart can turn to stone.

You can be revengeful.

Or, you can say, life is going to go on and I have lessons to learn here.

And what lessons do I take from this that I can go forward that will help me later

when I face other situations within my life or within business?

And again, this my sound like kind of a cheerleading thing, or

just kind of platitudes of very fuzzy sort of things but it's not.

I think in the classroom when we present these things through cases and videos, and

readings, and

sometimes field trips, letting them see interviews with executives who are wise,

things such as this and ask them to think and discuss this.

Hopefully it sticks with them a little bit, that later they can go on and

to give them more reading lists and videos and exercise that they can take with them

past, past the classroom to go on.

One thing we've not talked about, and maybe it's time to put it on the table,

is that in Hall's book about wisdom, and in many other traditions.

And what I have come to believe myself, is one of the absolute

necessary conditions for wisdom it's not sufficient, it cannot be the only thing.

But what is necessary, is what we think is the quality of your awareness.

What you do with your attentional energy.

As we know, in today's world, sometimes that's called mindfulness.

It's pretty clear that you cannot make

wiser decisions as opposed to less wise decisions, if you cannot be present.

If you cannot be aware, if you cannot take all that is in front of you,

the people saying things, the facts in a report,

the situation that all is it may be about in business or in life.

If you cannot be attentive and absorb as much, and

to be able to take it in and to ask what's going on here?

And how can I see this?

And what are the stakeholders?

What is the short and the longterm of this?

Who are likely to be affected?

Does it need to be decided now?

These kinds of things that I've talked about.

You cannot come, and

keep that in your mind, you cannot use these ideas if you cannot be mindful.

If you are being quick, if you're being only in your way, if you're letting biases

of myopia, overconfidence and things like that take hold of you, riding you.

In that moment you are likely to make less wise decisions.

So we need to be able to encourage students,

coming back to that point of our discussion, to be more mindful.

They have to come to realize that they must be,

to use the academic term, they have to be metacognitive.

They have to not just think, they have to build a rise above their thinking.

They have not just be thinking, they have to be aware that they're thinking.

They have to be aware that they're feeling.

They have to be aware that they may be under stress.

So this notion of meta, means of course to rise above, as you know, and

so, one of the keys to wisdom is not that you can bring all this stuff to bear, and

to think and to make good decisions and judgments or advice or whatever.

But the way that you get there is to be able to rise above it, and

to be aware of how you're thinking, how you're feeling, how you're seeing

what your own tendencies are, and the way that approach a situation, so

that you can Manage all of that by being, in a way, above it.

So, to use the old cliché, I think that we grow wisdom and

I think these wise executives I was talking about,

were particularly good at seeing the forest before they dove into the trees.

Or had the ability to go back and forth.

Many people will dive into the facts.

They are taken up by the sensations, the stimuli, the speed of the situation, and

they can extricate themself,

they can't back off, they can't see the bigger picture.

At the same time you can't just look at the bigger picture.

You have to be able to go the other way.

But a really wise person can toggle back and forth between it, but

they have to be very good at being aware of their awareness, aware of

their thinking, aware of their feeling, and not seeing the forest for the trees.

And so, how do we do this?

Well we do it through, there is a variety, as we know, of contemplative practices,

and among the most talked about these days are things such as yoga and

forms of meditation.

But there's prayer, there's retreat, there's visualization,

there's a variety of other exercises that people can go on in order to build,

to grow their mental capacities.

To be meta-able, to be able to rise above and

therefore to foster their ability to be wiser in any given situation.

So I think those are the things that we need to do.

And I would say that this does cohere, quite a bit, with ethical teaching.

But it's not exactly the same, because a lot of ethics classes are so

good at teaching different theories and models of ethics and how to apply them.

But, wisdom is not just about ethics; it's broader in many respects,

and that perspective that Robert Sternberg takes, with which I would agree.

It's actually knowing when you're facing an ethical situation, or not.

It's that meta-awareness.

It's the rising above.

And that's a large part of what wisdom is about.

And I believe in mindfulness or this skill of more

expanded and deeper awareness as a mental capacity.

I think is absolutely essential to being wiser.

And so in the course that I teach,

we do spends some time doing contemplative exercises.

Including my exposing them to the value of meditation,

giving them links online that they can go and

be guided through meditations that I know that you are both also aware of.

So that maybe if they're curious,

they can now, even through their computer, close their eyes and be guided for five or

ten minutes into a meditation that will make them more aware of

their own tendencies, and aware of their own bodies and

their own minds so that they can bring greater discipline.

That will lead to that wisdom, and

that's really a big part of what therefore that's about.

“Fostering Wisdom in Others,” David Mick

Tibetan Buddhist Meditation and the Modern World: Lesser Vehicle

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