What is Wisdom?

00:00:00-0# Yes, hello, and welcome again to a podcast episode. I, unfortunately, didn't get to post in the last couple of days, but I will do all the more now, so I will catch up on the last couple of days and then upload to you daily, maybe one or more like an episode or extend it a little bit more so that we get to the 21 episodes total. So, I will keep that promise. But now to the topic of today's podcast: Today there is an interview about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. And the whole thing I discuss, or rather the coach tells us, is that my coach, a former coach, you can say, is a mediator, a systemic coach, and yes, he's been working as a leader for over 25 years. He is, yes, I must say, a person who can express even complex things very simply. And when I was editing, I was already thinking, "Hey, this is so pleasant to listen to," and this is none other than Bernd. I can link you to his page below and yes, start into the topic right now. So, Bernd tells us something about wisdom, knowledge, and what that is. Have a good time with that.

Coach Bernd

00:01:52-9# To gain knowledge, add something every day. To gain wisdom, take something away every day. Imagine you want to cook a stew. What do you do? Gather an incredible amount of ingredients together: a lot of fresh vegetables, maybe bacon, and so on; many beautiful ingredients are all good and essential in their own right. That would be, for example, the knowledge that you collect. And then you start cooking that and then boiling it, almost condensing it. Then something completely new emerges from it, and it even becomes less in the result and it becomes incredibly tasty, and that is then perhaps the wisdom, to describe it in this image. Wisdom, in my eyes, means reducing complexity to the essentials. It's one possible definition of wisdom. There are so many other official definitions of wisdom, or things that, say, mean something, that I've also thought about how to express it. First of all, yes, we want to know a lot. We want to know as much as possible. We soak up knowledge like a sponge and absorb all that first. This is very, very important to collect everything that happens and to open our antennas. We collect it either cognitively, via the mind or the head, or emotionally. That is also important. We have not only cognitive knowledge, as you know, but also emotional knowledge. That is often reduced to: "Only what I have practiced here in my consciousness and mentally is knowledge." No, no. We have tremendous experiential knowledge, which is then also somatized. Some talk about the subconscious, and some talk about somatic markers. Ultimately, it's all that we take in and feel through all the senses. And if we take all of this together as knowledge, which then continues to grow in the course of life, if we are interested in what is happening around us, then this is a vast treasure, which is also great. Knowledge then becomes wisdom when I reduce again from this growing and recognize its essentials by naturally recognizing connections. You've just started: "Ah, I know that with the roles and so on," by bringing that into connection with each other. There is probably no knowledge that is the same for everyone or no wisdom that is the same for everyone, but I think it is essential to know what is wise for me. When am I wise or living wisely? And that also has a lot to do with individual things and, of course, individual experiences. But in the end, it's always a matter of reducing, of finding out the essentials from what I know. And that, I would say, is wisdom.

I would still have a point, which is important, and perhaps also again describe the practical application of wisdom in these times in which we live that also goes very deep.

If wisdom reduces complexity, so to speak, then that also means that we give up knowing and give up what has always been important for us. That means that we also give up things that maybe always so it is, so it is conclusive and logical and free ourselves again for something new and when we give up something we know.

So imagine there are people who are incredibly knowledgeable, so they've studied all kinds of things, they've got doctorates, they're recognized That's also a little loss experience, especially when we think in terms of roles It just makes me what I am—the executive with the title "blah blah blah." It makes me something—that I'm the professor—when it does this.

He goes so far and says We are all in roles on the road. That is also known in terms of roles on the road, and these roles are imposed on us from childhood, say, and on the job anyway. We define ourselves through these roles, but these are not us; these are only the roles, and I have to free ourselves from these roles and always look at what there is for a person behind when I introduce myself. I put myself as a code for a leader.

But that's just the role, that's not the person, and if you free yourself from that and say Here I am with all that I, what I can, on itself can't, what I have and we can meet like that, if we are able much, much more together.

than we are able to do today. We don't entrench ourselves, we are really worth as we are as we are, that's how we are, that's how valuable we are and we don't even have to measure that somehow. That is a completely different attitude. With that comes all the training schools for schools and so on.

And perhaps, and this is the great art in these times, which are so complex and so unpredictable, precisely this is a great wisdom, to give up something and make room for something new, that is always also a piece. As I said, loss of personal identity I think that's a really big key in the times that we're living because these just aren't anymore. They're always so predictable or so yes-or-no that I don't have to explain that to you.

I mean, we are in such incredibly open, exciting, also crisis times, That is very, very important, is then always sure to ask again, and that is then also wisdom again to say That, what was right yesterday, it is no longer today. I have learned that it is also a kind of wisdom to be able to do that, and you know, certainly many people who hold on to what has always been right for them or has always been right will always remain right because they have learned it that way, and they are proud of the fact that they have mastered this knowledge. That would be another point that is perhaps quite interesting, especially in these times.