The Currency of Wisdom

How do you actively develop your wisdom?

How often do you seek your wisdom of hindsight? That is, your inner-eye that helps you reference your future decisions with your past.

On the one hand, we experience self-talk like 'once beaten, twice shy', 'I should have listened to my gut feeling' and 'rash decisions'. On the other, you may have appreciated moments like 'Eureka!', 'my intuition talked to me' and 'I was fortunate/lucky'. We can attribute our success and failures to being acutely attuned to both our senses (sensitive, sensible) and our intuition (sixth sense, gut feel, instinct).

Learn From Your Failures
There is a truism that we can learn from our mistakes and failures. How exactly does one learn from disappointing results? Unguided, we may wallow in self-pity and become depressed. With the right internal lenses, we can filter out the emotions to attain the filtrate of 'good stuff'. These include lessons that we may apply at the next decision. What to avoid, be mindful of, cognisant about - we can apply this to our next business venture, relationship, and commitment. Sports-coaches remind us to write our thoughts and feelings while they are freshly-imprinted in our minds. We can review our results, and make adjustments in our planning and preparation for future attempts.

Learn From Your Successes
When you achieve a new milestone in your life, reflect over what you enjoyed about it. Ponder over how you would achieve your results and performance differently next time. Which values did you learn from your success? Humility, patience, consideration, respect, trust, care, and many more. What did you add to your character in your success? How can you build on your abilities, and expand and extend into your capabilities? Wisdom from our success can help us become confident to 'dream bigger for longer'. We can enter the realm of personal excellence and mastery, as such.

Leadership Lessons: How do you draw on your wisdom? How often do you convert to your currency of wisdom? How do you apply it to your decisions in business, socially, as well as in your personal relationships? Add to your wisdom. Observe, reflect, extract, from your experiences and use it for your learning and application.

How Do You Fail? Gracefully, Or Disgracefully?

‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall.’

How much of this is true? If you consider it as a test of physicality, size does matter when you multiply it by the physical laws (force, acceleration, magnitude, direction). Size times gravity = OUCH!

The OUCH Factor. How painful is it? From ‘I can live with it’ to ‘bearable’ to ‘excruciating pain’. When we make mistakes, how do we recover? How can we learn from our mistakes? How will we really know if we have learnt from our transgressions? How do you make amends? How do you seek forgiveness when you have betrayed somebody’s trust?

Somewhere down the relationship chain – us and another person – are a collection of values and beliefs. When we violate a value, whether it is a shared or unique one, we may create friction, doubt, and distrust. Values have value. Honesty may not be the best policy for single-minded, prejudicial and discriminating people. No amount of facts or affectations can easily shift a person to another perspective or paradigm unless he/she makes a deliberate choice and decision to step aside of themselves. To put it in grandiose terms, ‘time to get your head out of your backside!’

Love him, or hate him, triathlon professional and champion Macca articulates his approach to failure with distinction.

How do we stop ourselves form falling or failing? Perhaps, a better question would be: How do you bounce back when you fail and fall?

The Will to Succeed

The dreaded F Word: failure. Who wants failure? Despite what many self-help gurus write about bouncing back from failure, it is a painful experience. When your results do not match your expectations, it is natural to feel lousy and disappointed.

My triathlon buddy, Hui Koon reported on his recent Challenge Cairns 2011. Like I (at IM Lanzarote) he, too, had a tough day at the office. He gives a blow-by-blow account of his racing experience and disappointment at not meeting his target. You did very well, Bro! Live to recover and race another day!

Being resilient is about landing softly and not hard. You create a cushion to your fall, so that you recover quickly to achieve your goals later. Patience is part of the equation, so bask in the entire process. Sometimes, we have to take two steps back so that we can advance three steps. We rarely need to start from scratch. That is where base training, an analogy for experience and wisdom comes in. What happens between discovering failure and attaining that much appreciated sense of success matter! Refine after you define. Define who you are in different ways.

When there’s a will, there’s another way to your success. Forward and onwards!

*****

Am now overseas; my second trip in a fortnight. I will teach for the next two days, and face professional salespeople who are very familiar about their industry and discipline. What I will offer will be insights to the total experience of selling, a more exquisite process and assisting models for engineering a pleasant experience for both seller and buyer. The hotel I am staying in has the best audio-visual assistance: a flat-screen television which you can plug-and-play your notebook, with accompanying DVD player and speakers for a great presentation experience.

Bloody luxury, I say, and I am learning to savour it; more trips to follow and more hotels to review…