How MORE Life Experience Fosters Wise C...

Virtually all people have experienced difficult challenges in the course of their lives, and virtually all people feel that they learned something from those challenges. However, there are very few individuals whom most of us would consider as wise – why do so few people develop wisdom over time by learning from life’s challenges? The MORE Life Experience Model proposes that life challenges are catalysts for the development of wisdom – they can lead to more wisdom, but they do not necessarily do so. Five psychological resources are assumed to be essential for how people appraise life challenges, deal with them, and integrate and learn from them in retrospect: Managing uncertainty and uncontrollability, Openness, Reflectivity, and Emotional Sensitivity and Emotion Regulation – in short, MORE. In this chapter, I describe the five resources in detail, illustrating them using stories that wise participants told us in narrative interviews about difficult life experiences.