• More Than "Book Learning"
• Calm In The Storm
• Notes From The ab
• On The Job

To learn more on this subject, click through the links above.

Practice Makes Perfect

Do you have a coworker who seems to have a better perspective about the job than others? A person to whom others naturally turn for advice?

Most of us appreciate the virtue of "wisdom" and recognize it when we come across it at work, even if we can't quite put our finger on what it is that makes a person "wise." Whatever it is, we know we want it. And we want our bosses and co-workers and employees to have it,too.

From a scientific standpoint, wisdom has three aspects:

• cognitive (the accumulation of knowledge)
• reflective (an ability to analyze that knowledge), and
• affective (the influence of emotion).

It's easy to see how the three are connected: accumulating knowledge via experience provides a basis for reflecting on choices in a way that is informed, but not controlled, by emotion.

Psychologist Paul Baltes defined wisdom as "expertise in the fundamental pragmatics of life." (ref-8) Baltes looked at wisdom as a kind of peak performance, the "pinnacle of insight into the human condition."

Despite adages like "older and wiser," wisdom is not merely the province of older people. More important than age, it seems, is psychological resilience, the ability to bounce back after adversity, learning lessons in the process. Studies have found that people generally considered wise tend to have experienced hard times such as a great loss or repeated failures.