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Learning How to Thrive: Wisdom, with Arianna Huffington, Co-founder, The Huffington Post and Author, Thrive
Disconnect
We see a lot of very smart leaders around us in politics, in business, in media making terrible decisions. The problem is not that they lack IQ. The problem is that they lack wisdom. We now have so much evidence about how much harder it is to make wise decisions when we are tired. In fact, President Clinton, he’s quoted in my book saying every bad decision I made, I made when I was tired. I think we can all identify that when we’re tired it’s harder to tap into our intuition. It’s easier to miss the red flags or to tap into the wisdom that is necessary to actually make the best decisions we can. And that’s why one of the steps I recommend is at the end of each day to pick a time when we turn off all our devices and gently escort them out of our bedroom. Because if we charge our smartphone by our bed we are more likely if we wake up at night for whatever reason to want to look at our data and we now have a lot of scientific findings that show that when we do that we are actually going to find it harder to go back to sleep. And when we do go back to sleep it’s harder to go back to a deep really recharging place.
Communicate with care
Social media, like technology, generally are a tool, you know. It has been used and we continue to use it to achieve amazing things in politics, in terms of making a difference in people’s lives, in giving a voice to people who otherwise would not have a voice. But at the same time we see social media being used simply to retweet or perpetuate something that is entirely not contributing anything, not even fun to our lives. So it’s just really up to us to use social media in a way that promotes good things including laughter and humor. I’m not just talking about substantive good things.
Audit your life
I love doing life audits. And that for me means looking at all the things in our lives that no longer serve us. Sometimes it’s grudges and resentments. Sometimes it’s projects that we thought one day we’re going to start and complete and realistically we’re not going to. In my latest life audit, for example, one of the things I dropped was the idea that I would one day learn to be a good skier. And it was very liberating to realize that you can actually complete a project by dropping it. So I simply dropped the idea that I would become a good skier. And now when I go skiing with my daughters who love it, I sit by the fire, I drink a cup of hot chocolate and read a good book. So as far as I’m concerned skiing is done.