In a society that associates intelligence with a high IQ and exceptional SAT scores, it can take a lot of work to become runner-up to someone like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. However, even the wisest of sages don’t start out knowing everything. Like all experienced thinkers would agree, wisdom is a skill that must be pursued and learned over time.
Fortunately, there are methods to aid you in expanding your wisdom and reaching new lengths in your personal life and beyond. Not only can wisdom help you become a better person, but it can make it easier to make thoughtful decisions that enhance your quality of life. It can give you perspective during times of doubt and help you maintain a sense of calm amidst a sea of chaos.
Whether you want to be like Gandhi or need a way to stay focused during exam season, anyone can be a wise sage with the proper tools and resources. Check out this article on how to become wiser and find ways to increase your intelligence and improve your overall well-being.
Key points:
Being wise isn’t just for elderly folk. You can gain wisdom and a deep mental awareness by performing intuitive daily practices. As a result, you can experience benefits like improving your ability to make insightful decisions, a stronger sense of reliability, and profound personal growth.
There are plenty of methods to help you become wiser and improve mental clarity. Some of the best ways to practice being wiser include reading intuitively, learning from mistakes, and cultivating a deeper self-awareness.
Listening to book summaries can be a great way to increase your overall intelligence. In this case, downloading the Headway app can grant you access to hundreds of 15-minute book summaries on various wisdom-boosting topics.
10 effective ways to become a wise person
Having a high level of wisdom can help you think more clearly and make better decisions in all areas of life. To begin your journey, here are ten ways to help you increase your daily wisdom.
1. Read intuitively
Intuitively reading is a sign that you have cultivated enough wisdom to understand the deeper meaning behind each sentence. Similar to how reading can teach you valuable concepts, reading between the lines can help you become more perceptive and learn different thought patterns in the book. However, sometimes it can be difficult to grasp the deeper concepts of a book without help from someone else.
Luckily, the Headway app provides a large collection of detailed audio and text summaries that help you gain a book’s core ideas, values, and meanings. In just one click, you can access insightful synopses of the world’s leading bestsellers in non-fiction. Using this app is a great way to build your wisdom and awareness on various topics like philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and much more.
Download the Headway app to explore a vast library of over 1,500 book summaries catered toward increasing your personal growth and wisdom.
Stubbornness is a common quality that can cause you to reject help from others to protect your sense of dignity. Similarly, hyper-independence can make you feel that you would be considered incapable or powerless by taking help from other people. However, overcoming these traits is essential to obtaining the wisdom taught by others’ stories and experiences.
It can be highly beneficial to listen to people with more experience than you do to gain similar expertise. Sometimes, opening yourself up to recommendations and instruction can put you in the right direction in life.
If you want to be wiser, put aside your pride and take a different approach to receive other people’s guidance. In time, you might find they were right after all — and you can thank them for their advice later.
3. Learn from your mistakes
We all make mistakes — it’s a normal part of life that everyone experiences. However, the way you handle your faults and misunderstandings can be a key indicator of your inner wisdom. Unwise people continue making the same mistakes without a second thought. Wise people, on the other hand, will learn from them and strive to do better the next time.
The first step to learning from your errors is admitting when you are wrong. The second step is taking action to prevent further misunderstandings. This can be particularly difficult to achieve for people who have gone their entire lives without ever taking responsibility for their actions. However, overcoming this hurdle will result in a more profound sense of accomplishment as you tackle areas where you have made mistakes before with a newfound sense of confidence and ease.
4. Practice mindfulness
Being mindful means taking the time to reflect on your past, current well-being, and future goals. Whether you plan to set aside time to meditate each day or would like to work mindfulness into your everyday routine, focusing on your mental state is a crucial part of expanding your wisdom. Mindfulness can be an essential tool in helping you become aware of situations that are serving you and which are not.
You can practice mindfulness in small daily segments by taking the time each morning to set an intention for the day. This can be simple, like deciding to drink more water today. Then, before bed, reflect on the day you had, focusing on what you were grateful for and anything that could have gone better. Performing these small, simple practices each day will add up to help you find something good.
5. Write down your feelings
Although the reasoning may not be initially apparent, feelings and wisdom often go hand-in-hand. Even if you’re not big on writing, journaling is a healthy way to release pent-up emotions, validate them as truth, and express things that would otherwise go unsaid. Over time, you will begin to gain wisdom about your feelings, values, and thought processes and be able to manage them better.
Writing down what you are feeling on a daily basis can help you practice healthy emotional regulation. In turn, you can begin to understand why you feel the way you do and become more in tune with your deepest emotions. This will result in fewer emotional outbursts and an ability to communicate better. As a result, you may find your wisdom improves, and your relationships with people around you improve and become stronger.
6. Balance self-care with helping others
Although being willing to care for others is an exceptional quality, focusing on others too often can cause you to pay less attention to yourself. Finding a healthy balance between meeting your needs and being selfless is important for your mental and physical health. For example, making yourself a smoothie each morning before dropping the kids off at school is a great way to take care of your health while maintaining a sense of duty and responsibility.
You can practice self-care while caring for others in little ways, such as carving out a time slot each day to do things that bring you joy. This could be anywhere from five minutes to a few hours, depending on how much time you need to refresh before returning to other responsibilities. Focusing on your self-care can make you a wiser person by ensuring that you can intuitively meet others’ emotional and physical needs while managing your own.
7. Work on personal growth
Flaws exist in almost everything — which is why it’s so important to recognize them in ourselves and work on turning them into redeemable attributes. Once you begin to view your less favorable qualities as opportunities for growth, you can figure out how to improve yourself and lessen the impact those qualities have on your well-being. Investing in your personal growth is an important way of building your inner wisdom by taking the time to understand which areas of yourself need attention.
However, before you can start fixing something, you’ll have to accept that it needs to be fixed initially. For instance, if you tend to overspend while online shopping, you might focus on your financial habits and create a budget that meets your goals and needs. However, you could also deny that you have a spending problem — which is what you will need to come to terms with to become the person you want to be.
8. Think before you speak
The wisest people always think before they say anything. Doing so can help you respond more thoughtfully and appropriately in any given situation. For instance, pausing and reflecting on a question before answering may allow you to develop a mature and insightful response. As a result, your speech will seem more coherent and appear more intelligent to others.
Thinking before you speak can also significantly benefit your career and social life. When you show people that you are articulate and thoughtful with your words, they are more likely to respect your judgment and listen to what you have to say. Not only can this help you work towards a high level of prestige in the corporate world, but it can help you cultivate healthy relationships with others that are based on mutual growth and understanding.
9. Cultivate a deeper inner awareness
Whether we realize it or not, the person we know the least about is often ourselves. Fortunately, there are ways to learn more about yourself and create a better understanding of your wants and needs. First, you’ll need to pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses. Then, work on understanding your deepest values, passions, and aspirations by coming to terms with them and bringing them to the forefront of your life.
The best way to build an awareness of your inner self is by asking yourself meaningful questions. Think of questions like, “What makes me happy?” or “What do I value the most?” You can choose to meditate on the answers in your head, or you can write them down so you can return to them later.
As you do this, take deep breaths and focus on bringing your awareness to the deeper meaning behind these questions and answers. This seemingly-simple practice will help you discover your innermost desires and what brings you the most joy in life.
10. Don’t take things personally
Many self-help books are geared toward helping you become less attuned to what others think of you. However, doing so is much easier said than done. You’ll need to train your mind by learning how to keep your emotions in check and validate them accordingly.
One way to stop yourself from taking things too personally is to boost your confidence levels. As you begin to view yourself as competent and worthy, negative perceptions of you won’t be able to change the outlook you have about yourself. Give yourself credit for your favorite qualities about yourself and all your amazing strengths.
As you change your daily habits and increase your wisdom, you will eventually realize that people’s thoughts and opinions don’t matter. This mindset will allow you to find validation within yourself rather than in another person’s impression of you. In time, you will be able to deflect unflattering opinions and allow them not to affect you.
Learn how to be wiser with Headway
Despite what people may think, wisdom is not always achieved from within. At times, you need external resources to help you see the truth in yourself and the world around you. For example, book summaries offer an opportunity to explore various topics and put ancient and modern wisdom into practice. In this case, investing in an educational app that specializes in helping you meet your reading goals quickly may be the best way to increase your wisdom in half the time.
Headway is a bite-sized learning app that helps efficiently absorb valuable insights from the world’s leading self-help authors in conveniently short summaries. Users can make the most of their experience by participating in fun challenges, collecting achievements, and curating their own bookshelf designed to bring them self-fulfillment and triumph. If these features seem beneficial, go try out our free trial.
Download the Headway app to access a library of over 1,500 wisdom-boosting book summaries of your favorite non-fiction bestsellers.
FAQ
What does it mean to be wise?
Being wise is more than just having a high IQ — it’s about making thoughtful decisions that cater to your personal well-being and the collective good. Being wise can also allow you to remain calm and collected during troubling situations, which can benefit your overall well-being.
How do I increase my wisdom?
There are many ways to become a wiser person. For one, taking the time to focus on your mental health by practicing daily mindfulness can help you gain new perspectives on the world around you. Another way would be to work on your confidence to avoid letting people’s opinions and perceptions of you affect your well-being.
How can books help me become wiser?
Self-help books offer a great opportunity to learn new things you wouldn’t otherwise have learned in your everyday life. For instance, a book about relationships can boost your emotional wisdom by encouraging you to regulate your feelings in healthy ways. If you aren’t an avid reader, Headway is a great place to start taking wisdom from books in detailed 15-minute summaries.
