Practical Wisdom and Self Leadership

Practical Wisdom and Self Leadership

By Mike W Bell

Before we can lead others successfully we have to be able to lead ourselves. Accessing our practical wisdom can be thought of as the pinnacle of self leadership.

What is Wisdom?

Wisdom has been described in many different ways over the centuries. Here Joseph W. Meeker sums it up in a profound paragraph from his article "Wisdom and Wilderness":

"Wisdom is a state of the human mind characterized by profound understanding and deep insight. It is often, but not necessarily, accompanied by extensive formal knowledge. Unschooled people can acquire wisdom, and wise people can be found among carpenters, fishermen, or housewives.

"Wherever it exists, wisdom shows itself as a perception of the relativity and relationships among things. It is an awareness of wholeness that does not lose sight of particularity or concreteness, or of the intricacies of interrelationships. It is where left and right brain come together in a union of logic and poetry and sensation, and where self-awareness is no longer at odds with awareness of the otherness of the world.

"Wisdom cannot be confined to a specialized field, nor is it an academic discipline; it is the consciousness of wholeness and integrity that transcends both. Wisdom is complexity understood and relationships accepted."

Practical Wisdom

Aristotle identified two types of wisdom - the esoteric/metaphysical and the practical wisdom - what Coleridge referred to as "Common sense in an uncommon degree." I suspect both are linked and that a journey into practical wisdom and self leadership would eventually take you to a metaphysical level.

Leading the Self Wisely

It seems that the journey starts with the self; with what goes on within the self; all the thoughts, feelings, values, meaning etc and the extent to which we are conscious of them. For many of us, for much of the time, the thoughts in our heads are random; they come and go seemingly dependent upon the range of stimuli we are exposed to moment by moment. For example, I am out for a walk and see a dog, it reminds me of a good friends dog that died recently and how upset she was, and I remember that I have not been in contact for a while and I feel guilty and my mood changes and the rest of my walk is clouded by this guilt that takes me a while to shake off.

It is unlikely that this type of randomness will lead to wisdom. It is more likely that wise people have developed or learned a way to bring to structure or form to their thinking. They may meditate to quiet these thoughts and begin to let the real self emerge.

They pay attention to what they are sensing and use this information to learn from and guide their actions. If I am in a meeting and am not totally present; my mind is following the random paths it often follows then I am not truly present. In fact I am not fully conscious. And in this condition there is a lot of information that my senses pick up that stays in my unconscious.

Not only might I miss some of the content of the meeting, I will miss valuable information about how I am feeling about what's going on and how others are behaving. If I don't notice that I am getting angry or frustrated then there is every chance that I will react from these feelings without choosing. If I am not sufficiently present to pick up the cues about how others are feeling from the tone of their voice, their body posture etc, then I will not fully understand what is going on and perhaps behave inappropriately.

So a wise person is likely to be more fully present; connected to and aware of the information that is coming from their senses and using this information to learn about themselves in the moment and act in alignment with what is needed to achieve the desired outcome.

I think Otto Scharmer puts the topic of practical wisdom and self leadership very well in this comment from "Illuminating the Blind Spot of Leadership":

"What counts is not only what leaders do and how they do it, but the inner place from which they operate"

Mike W Bell has been a senior executive, leadership coach and organizational development consultant for over 30 years. For the last 15 or more of these I have been weaving an old wisdom tradition with the latest science and research to find more whole and balanced approaches to leadership and organization. My latest ebook, a modern fable entitled Leadership Intelligences in Action can be previewed at http://mutualinspiration.co.uk/leadershipintelligences/liaebook/

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