Tag Archives: wisdom

Wisdom in Action

Rate of Change

By Jim Selman | Bio

I came across an extraordinary six-minute YouTube video called ‘The Shift’—a presentation that blows one’s mind with factoids about the rate of change in the world. The Shift they are talking about is a ‘paradigm shift’, meaning our entire worldview, indeed our whole reality, is being turned upside down and inside out by virtue of technology, population and the exponentially accelerating rate of change. Whether we like it or not, our ‘new reality’ challenges our commonsense and conventional wisdom with ideas like “Knowledge is becoming obsolete before you learn it”.

Joel Barker sold a videotape in the 1980s called “Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms™” in which he showed that the world is always a function of our interpretation of it and that, from time to time, for a variety of reasons, the world transforms in ways that are difficult to impossible for  people to fathom when it is happening. He is generally upbeat about these periods of dramatic change and asks

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Fearless Aging

Inside the Rainbow

By Jim Selman | Bio

If we think about retirement or growing older in general, it seems to me that most of us are trying to figure out what we want for our future. Our orientation is to explore options given whatever opening we have, rather than to consider that aging is an opening and the challenge is to create new possibilities—not simply cope with our circumstances.

I used to think about life-after-retirement as a kind of blank canvas on which we could paint whatever future we choose. 

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Wisdom in Action

Too Late Smart

By Irene Noble

Admittedly my vision of my granddaughter
is somewhat impaired by my love for her, but for the life of me I fail
to understand how she became so wise so soon. We are
both an only child, both raised by a single parent (a father for her,
and a mother for me). We share a “jack of all trades” DNA. I watch her
now as she, like my younger self, slightly out of focus, tries her
wings. Like a hummingbird sampling nectars looking for the

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Wisdom in Action

Wisdom and Fear

By Jim Selman | Bio

I heard someone remark that the best thing about getting older is they don’t have to be afraid anymore. While I think that is one of life’s ‘truisms’, it falls into the same category as your mother telling you “not to worry”—it doesn’t help much to know that when you are worried! From what I can see, most people get more fearful and anxious as they age. This anxiety takes various forms: fear of not having enough money, fear of being homeless, fear of being alone, fear of becoming dependent or of losing one’s faculties. The list could go on.

I am not of the opinion that there is nothing to fear. There are lots of things to fear. A person would have to be naïve not to pay attention to what they are doing and what’s going on around them. I am reminded, for example, of getting mugged last year. Just this spring, my son was attacked by a vicious street gang while walking home; fortunately, he got through it without any lasting harm. The point is that lots of bad things can happen and most of us are not well prepared

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Health

Older IS Wiser

The idea that our brains decline as we age is in itself in decline. Studies reported in a new edition of the neurology book Progress in Brain Research suggest that for most of us as we age, our attention widens in focus. This, combined with the fact that we have more information to remember, makes it more difficult to recall small bits of information like a phone number or name. Yet it is this very accumulation of information that helps us become "wiser" as we age: by transferring

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Wisdom in Action

Polarity

By Jim Selman | Bio

Either/or.

This way of thinking about and relating to life is one of the most persistent and difficult aspects of our culture. Everything is either this or that. And if it isn’t this, it must be that.

We are either independent or dependent.

We are either the part or the whole.

We can be unified and whole or we can be fragmented and incomplete.

If something isn’t true, it must be false.

If something isn’t wrong, then it is right.

And on it goes….

This either/or mode of observing

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Fearless Aging

What Conversation Are You?

By Jim Selman | Bio

As many of you know, I view aging, and the rest of life for that matter, as a series of conversations. In my work, I try to show people that if we can observe ourselves and our world through the lens of language, we can see that everything we think and experience occurs in the context of some interpretation or another. For most people most of the time, our interpretation is that there is a ‘real world’ out there, and if we could only understand it and control it (and ourselves),

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Leadership

Hillary

I don’t know if you saw Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, but it was extraordinary. While the skeptics might say she was stumping for the vice presidency or simply doing the expected, the fact is that she is a pro and spoke with dignity and, in my judgment, was sincere and even more magnanimous that the occasion required. She recounted the Democratic values and the distinction between liberal and conservative politics today. More than I recall at any time during her campaign, she spoke

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Learning

Listening and Learning

Life happens while we are having conversations with ourselves and other people.

Not learning from others may have a lot to do with not truly ‘listening’ to what others say. Listening is the context that makes life intelligible, allows anything to have meaning, and forms the basis for all communication (both written and spoken). It is a whole lot more than just ‘hearing’ the words that are spoken. I’m always listening, always bringing a prior interpretation or understanding of my world

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News

Ethical Wisdom

My dear friend Joanne Kellert. Ph.D., and Jack Gilbert, Ed. D., have launched a one-day, in-house workshop called Ethical Wisdom: The Heart of Leadership, Influence and Power. It is designed to support health care leaders and professionals who are on a quest to improve patient safety, quality of care, patient and employee satisfaction, and the financial health of their organizations. They promise a day full of insights and ways to strengthen the ethical health of your organization and an

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