What Is It Like to Be the Wisest Thinker in the Room?
Posted on June 30, 2025 by BRYAN FRANCES, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
I want to make you **the wisest thinker in the room**--which doesn't mean having the highest IQ, most knowledge, greatest serenity, or best morality.
Most of us don’t know what it’s like to win a sports championship. We have witnessed them many times, usually watching TV. But we don’t know what it’s like for the athletes themselves. Their experience is too far removed from our own.
In my coaching I say that my client will become the wisest thinker in the room. I can characterize what that involves; I do so in other posts and on my website (hint: it has nothing to do with having the highest IQ, most knowledge, greatest serenity, or best moral character). But what does it FEEL like to be “the wisest thinker in the room”?
We can get a window into what it’s like with the use of an analogy.
Our protagonist is Fred. His wife has trauma, from events that happened before she met Fred—events she never told him about. His brother suffers from stress, due to a troublesome marriage and a hectic job. His daughter is depressed, as a result of her excessive emotional attachment to social media. And his best friend Ted is sad, because both his parents died in the last year.
As far as Fred can tell, these four loved ones all have some “psychological difficulties”. But he is more or less blind to the differences among being traumatized, stressed, depressed, and sad. These are four distinct psychological states, but Fred is clueless about their important differences. Sure, he uses the four terms for the four states pretty much like everyone else does, with partial facility, but all four words activate the same vague, nebulous concept in his mind.
It’s a pretty common scenario. Most of us use “momentum”, “force”, “power”, and “energy” competently but have little accurate idea what the differences are in those concepts. Conceptual expertise is rare.
Now suppose someone educates Fred so that he sees clearly how the four psychological states differ. He’s reached a certain level of expertise regarding them. What are the benefits of this transformation in his conceptual framework?
He is much more perceptive and discerning now. He can interpret what his wife says in certain contexts so much better than before. His understanding of his brother’s mind is vastly improved. He can communicate with his best friend in a significantly more effective and accurate manner. And he can interact with his daughter in ways that help her start to overcome her problem.
The upshot: interpretation, understanding, communication, and interaction are vastly improved, as a result of his acquiring a new, more discerning and advanced conceptual framework. He sees the world better now. Before the transformation, he saw the minds of his loved ones at midnight, in a fog, with rain, and little moonlight. Now he sees them at noon on a sunny day.
The lesson:
Superior conceptual framework leads to superior communication, interpretation, understanding, interaction: WISDOM.
The psychology story is useful because it’s not hard for us to put ourselves into Fred’s shoes, both before and after his conceptual framework transformation. We can imagine what it’s like to be pretty clueless about the psychological states that confuse Fred, but we can also imagine what it’s like to have a sharp, accurate understanding of them as well. Most of us are midway between those two extremes.
Being the wisest thinker in the room starts with the same kind of transformation of one’s conceptual framework. This time, the concepts that are transformed are these:
• belief, confidence, and withholding of belief
• truth and falsehood
• opinion and knowledge
• justification, rationality, and irrationality
• independent thought and reliance on testimony
• expertise and reliability
• intellectual insecurities, weaknesses, and faults
• humility, controversy, and arrogance
• reasons, desires, and causes
• evidence and counterevidence
• objectivity, subjectivity, relative, and absolute
• vagueness and ambiguity
• persuasion, explanation, and disagreement
• proof, argument, theory, premise, claim, conclusion, and validity
• intuition and feeling
• intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom
Just like with Fred, interpretation, communication, understanding, and interaction are vastly improved. Those are some (but not all) of the benefits of my wisdom coaching.
