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Are older people wiser?
No, not necessarily.
I think older people are experienced and I think there’s a difference.
So if you’ve experienced something, then you’ve had some learning from it.
I think wisdom sometimes comes from even small children.
Okay, this is my Nana.
She’s the wisest person I know, so I want to share with you some life lessons from an
85-year-old.
After all, as one psychologist put it, “Wisdom is expertise in the fundamental pragmatics
of life.”
You’ve had lots of difficult things happen throughout your life, do you think those experiences
have made you wiser?
I don’t know if wiser is the word for it.
You know, I’ve experienced losing people though death and I wouldn’t say that I got
wiser because of that, but learned a lot from it.
I’ve had hard times in my life where I’ve learned – well in a way it’s wiser because
you don’t want to do things the way you did, you learn from your mistakes.
And then, that’s maybe where wisdom comes from.
I guess, what is wisdom?
That’s something we need to start with.
That’s right, yes.
This feels like a good spot to jump back in: how do we define wisdom?
A dictionary definition says it’s “good judgment and advice in difficult and uncertain
matters of life”
And psychological research on wisdom has really taken off in the last 30 years – but what’s
meant by wisdom and how we can develop or practice it… isn’t entirely clear.
Experts agree on a few things: that wisdom is distinct from both intelligence and spirituality,
it’s experience driven and increases with age, it’s a personal quality, and it can
be learned.
You’re the matriarch of a big family, but you were also a teacher and a counsellor,
so everyone turns to you for advice.
But the advice, the people have it, they just have to be led to it.
So everybody has the capacity to make a good decision, almost.
I think with the right encouragement they can, because nobody knows you better than
you do.
And as a counsellor if I start telling you how you should do things, I’m not really
helping you.
But if I can lead you through a process where you can examine the way you are doing things,
and if there are different ways you can come up with doing them, then there’s a learning
for you in that.
And I think that’s where you can be helpful to someone.
It’s also helpful to understand that there’s different types of wisdom: practical wisdom,
that’s about improving our well being, philosophical wisdom it’s more questioning and metaphysical
and benevolent wisdom, that’s more moral and compassionate.
While all wisdom is highly valued highly across cultures – in research in North America,
practical wisdom resonates the most with people.
More than anything, we want to apply good judgement to help us make the best decisions
in our everyday lives.
Do you apply any experiences that you learned as a teacher or a counsellor in your own life?
Oh yes.
Like what?
I think as a teacher one of the things that I have learned is the importance of listening.
And as a counsellor one of the things I have learned is the importance of being a listener.
And it’s not something we do really well, necessarily, all the time.
But it’s probably one of the things that’s most helpful to other people.
And I think that, as a parent too, you learn a lot through trial and error and making mistakes.
And at the end of the day you think, I would have done that differently.
And you do it in everything you do.
There’s always times when you look back over and think, in retrospect, I would do
something different.
So you learn from it.
So I think there are wise people and wise teenagers, I don’t think it’s something
that comes with age.
And while we’ve seen that reasoning about social dilemmas improves with age, many studies
have found that young adults show similar ratings of perspective and wisdom as older
adults.
Research suggests you’re more likely to be a wise person if … You have self-knowledge,
so a good awareness of your competencies, emotions, and goals.
If you’re self-wise, so you know how to express and regulate these emotions and to
develop and maintain relationships.
If you have self-relativism, an ability to objectively evaluate yourself as well as others.
And a tolerance of ambiguity – the ability to recognize and manage uncertainties in life.
Developing these abilities is the first step in learning to be wise.
And we can all be a little bit wiser.
Is there any life advice that you have for me?
For other people?
Yeah, I think there is.
One thing is love a lot.
And the other thing is to be grateful a lot.
Yeah, I feel like we’re not grateful enough for what we have.
We have so much to be grateful for.
And I think people mostly are if they focus on it.
Well thank
you Nana.