The Promise of Wisdom with Sunil Raheja

A commonly held belief is that wisdom comes with age. In this episode, Sunil Raheja explains why wisdom is essential for living a rich, full life - no matter how old you are. Sunil is the author of the book, Dancing With Wisdom: A Sacred Quest to Restore Meaning, Purpose and Fun to Your Life and Work. Raheja says it is his privilege to work with senior leaders who feel stuck - empowering them to re-engage with deeper purpose and live life in crescendo, so their best days are still to come. On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast: Sunil explains what are the four vital questions of life The importance of leaving a legacy Sunil's definition of wisdom Why Sunil believes wisdom is like a diamond The difference between internal and external locus of control How someone can acquire wisdom Connect with Sunil Sunil's workbook: drsunil.com/workbook Sunil's website: drsunil.com Quick Links: Join the Live. Love. Engage. Community Intuitive Business Coaching The Live. Love. Engage. Book Support the Podcast with BuyMeACoffee.com Enjoying what you're hearing on Live. Love. Engage.? Subscribe on Goodpods or your favorite podcast platform, and click here to leave a 5 STAR Review. You can also watch the conversation on YouTube. TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand: I am Gloria Grace Rand, and I am delighted to be with you again and to have a guest with us on the show. Always. One of my favorite things is when I get to interview interesting people, and today's guest is one of those fascinating people who has a lot to offer our world right now, and I'm gonna tell you a bit more about him in a moment. But I want to first welcome Dr. Sunil Raheja. Sunil Raheja: That's right. You did right there Gloria. Thank you. That's wonderful. Gloria Grace Rand: Yes. I wanted to make sure that I pronounce his name right. Right. And then I was like, stumbling. Anyway, but but we got it. So I'm so glad you're here today. So let me share with our listeners just what you do in the world. So he is the author of the book, dancing With Wisdom, A Sacred Quest to restore Meaning, purpose, and Fun to your Life and Work, which definitely sounds like, sounds like something we all need to be able to make sure that we do, because otherwise what is the point? Right. , I think he's also a psychiatrist, a blogger, a podcaster of his own and a coach. And he says it's a privilege to work with senior leaders who feel stuck empowering them to reengage with deeper purpose and live life in Crescendo. So their best days are still to come. So are you a little musician there with that crescendo reference there? Actually, I'm Sunil Raheja: A musician. No, I'm not a musician at all. But I think, but it, it certainly this understanding that yeah, living with our best years ahead of us, I think particularly as we get older, there's a tendency to talk about good old days, which I don't really believe ever existed. And I think that, you know, as we get older that it is just gonna be downhill. But I believe that if we have the right understanding, the right perspective actually the best is yet to come. Gloria Grace Rand: Hmm. Yes. Well, I'm certainly counting on that because, and, and actually I believe that's true because I, I really do feel like every decade that I've gone through has been better even than the one before. So, so far so good. So I'm getting ready to enter my sixth decade, I guess if you're in your sixties or is it your seventh? I, I forget, but whatever , how that works math wise. But anyway, I'm gonna be 60 soon, so I'm looking forward to my sixties being even better than my fifties were. Sunil Raheja: Wonderful. Gloria Grace Rand: Yeah. So I, I usually do like to start off the podcast by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about your journey, you know, what, what got you maybe even interested in psychiatry and, and, and how you even then have become an author. So, Sunil Raheja: Wonderful. Well, it's a long journey, I think for me. I mean, I, I came as a best place to start, probably start at the beginning really in sense of, I came as an immigrant child from from India to the uk. Uh and very much, you know, I think one of the, one of the sort of, you know, when you look back into your life, you think about the themes and patterns that have repeated themselves, and one of those themes and patterns. I've always been like an outsider. So coming as an immigrant child from India, I actually came speaking Hindi and the sort of perceived wisdom at that time was only speak to your child in one language or they'll become confused. So although I came speaking Hindi I quickly forgot that and I only spoke English. And growing up going to school and meeting, you know, mixing with my peers I was often told, you know, this isn't your country. Sunil Raheja: Your true home is in India. And so I had this sort of sense that actually now I belong over there, and this is at a time, which is hard to imagine now, but it was a time before the internet and for the, you know, before the connections that we had the technology gives us. Gloria Grace Rand: Right. Sunil Raheja: And so I grew, so I had no real connection with India in, you couldn't make phone calls. If you wanted to write a letter, it would take two weeks for you to, you know, take a week for a letter to get there, take a week to come back. So there was no real communication. But when I eventually got to India, you know, I was only about eight years old, I realized actually, well, all my relatives told me that actually you are, you are English, you're not Indian either. And I couldn't speak the language. Sunil Raheja: And so a theme that's followed me all my life is this sense of, of being an outsider. I, I got, you know, you mentioned about being a psychiatrist, so I, I trained to become a doctor again. I, it's funny, I, I I entered into medical school not sure what I wanted to do with my life. And I was very good at mathematics and physics and subjects like that. But you know, again, in a naive 18, 19 year old, I thought, well, what's the point of any of those subjects? You know, because, you know, you, you, you end up working for the defense industry and you create nuclear bombs and things like that. And the only career I could think of that was actually genuinely helping people was medicine. So that's why I did medicine. But to be quite frank with you Gloria, I was totally unsuited for it because I was very left brained, as I understand now, very good at problem. Sunil Raheja: So solving in terms of, you know, would've done better in math or engineering, something like that. But medicine's completely different. You know, it's understanding the systems of the body it's understanding, you know, the anatomy, the physiology, the biochemistry, the pathology, very descriptive subjects and I really struggled. I struggled a really big time. I think it's, it's, it's a miracle of God that I even got through . I had a switch awakening. I was at medical school. That's, that's, that stayed with me to, to this very day. But again, it's a sense of feeling an outsider. And I think I found my niche in psychiatry because psychiatry is very much about not treating people as machines, but treating them as people who, you know who have worries and fears and interact with within their families with wider society. So that's always fascinated me. Sunil Raheja: You know, we need people who are, you know, who are you know who, who, who do internal medicine, who are who, who are surgeons. We need those people. But that just wasn't me. And so I found my niche in psychiatry, but then as time has gone on, I've also become very fascinated by the whole area of positive psychology. And that's really about why is it that some people, well, two, well, you take, take two groups of people who go through similar circumstances. Why is it some thrive and others, as it were, flounder? What's the difference between them and the skills that you need to do well in life are very different to, as it were, to just dealing with illness. You know, health is not the opposite of illness. It's qualitatively very different. And,that interest is growing. And that's particularly one of the reasons why I've gone into coaching as well. So I work as a psychiatrist, but, but primarily as a coach using my psychiatry background to inform that as well. Gloria Grace Rand: Yeah. And I can see how they can be very complimentary to one another. So that's, that makes sense. And, and yeah, I, I sympathize with, with your struggle. And, and yeah, I was like, that must have been so frustrating as a child. And, and here you're struggling to, to get along in the uk then you go to India and then they're like, well, no, you are still not, we're still, you know, you're, you're English now. So it's like, oh my goodness. Sunil Raheja: I think One of the things you begin to realize as well is that you have these struggles, and then as you get older, you realize everybody has their own struggles. And,you know, it's it, and, and it, it's, it's, it's very difficult to comment on somebody else's struggles. You know, it might not look too big deal to you, but to them it's big. It's a bit like, you know, major surgery and minor surgery. You know, there is major surgery, you know, having have a corony artery bypass or you know, have, have, have,have a liver transplant that's major surgery, and there's minor surgery in terms of have a blood test or have a,you know, have a, a hernia removed, relatively minor. But if it's your body, it's all major surgery Gloria Grace Rand: That's true. Sunil Raheja: Happening to you. So I think it's, it's, we all have our own sets of challenges and struggles, and because we all have different backgrounds and experiences, it's very, it, it, it, yeah. We need to just as it were, treat each other with,...