Chad Silverstein describes two ways to build wisdom: "vision over visibility," the ability to foresee results before acting, and an "experience transformer," a one-sheet exercise from Dan Sullivan's Strategic Coach that turns mistakes into lessons. Leaders who own their errors and share what they learned build stronger teams.
Chapters
I look at wisdom. There's two things. One, a belief. I have a way, I see building wisdom. And then another practical exercise that I go through to try to build it. The first one is being able to kind of have that vision over visibility, you've heard me say it before, and be able to see things happen before they happen. That to me is someone who's building wisdom. They are taking it upon themselves to be wise. And I think it doesn't matter how old you are, there is some power in being able to like, play it out to the end and see how your decisions, your actions are going to have a reaction, a result, and to play out those and to see what they are and to make a calculated decision, knowing the risks and many times knowing when not to move forward. To me, that's wise. The other way I use it from a practical way is I learned in Dan Sullivan's Strategic coach program. He calls it an experience transformer. It's such a cool thing. It's just one sheet. And it's a couple questions you ask yourself after you experience a situation that you can use as an experience to learn. This is usually after a blunder, a big mistake, something you don't want to repeat ever again. And it's simple. You just, you write out, you know what it is that happened and why it happened, how it happened and what you learn from it, and then what you can do next time to make sure that you avoid that same result. And it's just a way of again, putting thoughts on paper, capturing what you learn from the scenario. And what's powerful is you can share this with your team. And I think that, you know, a transparent leader who can, who can at times be vulnerable to admit when they've screwed up, it builds so much trust and chemistry on a team that, you know, every team needs so badly. High performance teams that feel flow and chemistry, it's all because they trust their leader. They trust, they don't. They're not scared. They're not as scared as other teams. So one of the ways to do that is to when you own when the team screws up or you screwed up and to be able to share the learning from that so that everybody can benefit from what we did or what I did to make sure that we don't repeat it. That's such a great, such a great skill. It's such a great process, something that's disciplined. For rare leaders to be able to build in when they screw up and they own it and take responsibility, it's one thing just to say you're sorry and just tell people what happened. It's another thing to kind of capture that wisdom and be a source of wisdom for other people. And if you're stuck in a situation, of course, that you don't know what to do or which decision to go, of course it makes sense. Go talk to someone who's. Who's been there, done it, who has the wisdom, who experienced it. That's another way to build wisdom. So lots of ways to build wisdom. Pick one and move. Go.
