Wisdom Analysis The five step process for making better decisions: Maintain a feeling of control over your situation. Emotional preparation. Consider how things could be worse. Monitor your breathing. Controlled empathy. Ask “What advice would I give my best friend in this situation?” Can this style of decision making, over time, lead us to being not just smarter but wiser? Actually, it may be the only system that can. We usually associate wisdom with knowledge, experience or smarts. But what does the research say? Yeah, those things are all important — but we underestimate how much wisdom is about understanding feelings: In his valedictory work on wisdom, Baltes attributed the acquisition of wisdom to a variety of factors—general intelligence and education, early exposure to meaningful mentors, cultural influences, and the lifelong accumulation of experience, which is the centerpiece of developmental psychology. But he, too, acknowledged the central importance of emotional intelligence, noting that “there is good reason to assume that people capable of effectively regulating emotional states associated with dilemmas of life by cognitive rather than affective-dysfunctional modes might have a better chance of being considered wise or scoring high on wisdom tasks.”
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:16:52 +0000
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