Clarity, Creativity & Strategy
- access wisdom, not gurus
I'm moving offices this month, and I've been using it as an excuse to declutter — shredding old files, and finally getting rid of books I either think are rubbish, bought on a whim, or convinced myself I needed. Sometimes recommended, sometimes a good review, sometimes an Amazon 'recommends' funnel I didn't have the willpower to escape.
As part of my very unofficial book assessment process, I picked up something I'd been gifted years ago and never really opened. I flicked to a random page — and landed on the quote above. Crazy, right?
If Seneca were alive today, I suspect he'd say something similar about the internet, Instagram reels, LinkedIn posts, the news, and the thousand other ways we now consume other people's ideas — and their agendas.
My own relationship with where I get my thinking from has changed a lot over the years. I used to reach for a book almost automatically. These days, I'm far more likely to check in with what my own thinking — my own wisdom — has to say first. Some might put that down to age. But creative wisdom isn't something that arrives with years; it's something we're all born with, and then, according to Land and Jarman's well-known (if since-debated) research, mostly educated out of.
Other people's ideas and strategies are interesting, and they clearly work — for them. That last part is the important bit. Their thinking worked for them. I'm not them. And you probably aren't either.
I've developed a healthy cynicism toward anyone billed as a 'guru'. My belief is that we're built to be our own.
What I do believe: most of the time, we already have the answers to our own challenges. The harder part is accessing them — partly because many of us (women especially — that's a whole separate post) were raised to look outward for answers rather than inward, and partly because our minds and our days are so full and so noisy that there's no room left to hear the whisper of our own wisdom.
Ego shouts. Wisdom whispers.
What we need, more often than not, is a moment. A breath. A pause to check in and reconnect with it.
That's one of the things I love helping people do — unfold their own wisdom. Because when that becomes the source of someone's personal or professional strategy, it's usually twenty times more potent than any book, article or bit of advice they could receive from outside themselves.
I'd love to hear what challenges you'd love to leverage your wisdom for, drop me a WhatsApp!
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