Wisdom Cafe for Seniors’ Ride of a Lifetime

Welcome to The Wisdom Café – A Journey of Curiosity, Connection and Growth. What if the most exciting chapter of life is still unfolding?

Join us for The Wisdom Café, a welcoming 12-week adventure where curiosity lights the way, wisdom is celebrated, and every conversation opens new possibilities. Together, we will discover surprising insights about our remarkable brains, strengthen our mindset health, and encourage one another to flourish.

When: Starts Sept. 16^th – Wednesdays, 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Where: WeSeniors Strathcona, 140–501 Festival Avenue, Sherwood Park
Cost: $2.00 a session for coffee & delicious muffin. Pay as we attend.

Imagine gathering around a warm, fireside-style conversation where every voice matters. Each of us brings unique life experiences, questions, laughter, and wisdom. Together we create a space where friendships grow, hope is renewed, and challenges such as loneliness, past hurts, conflict, discouragement, or a loss of joy become opportunities for fresh perspectives, meaningful connections, and renewed purpose.

Throughout our 12 weeks together, we will explore fascinating neuroscience discoveries in enjoyable, practical ways. Through engaging conversations, thought-provoking activities, and moments of shared reflection, we will awaken hidden strengths, discover new ways of thinking, and build habits that help us live with greater resilience, curiosity, gratitude, and grace.

Rather than listening to lectures, we become active co-mentors, contributors, encouragers, and problem-solvers. Dr. Ellen Weber serves as our guide and facilitator, creating opportunities for everyone to learn from one another while uncovering the remarkable potential that continues to grow within us.

Each week we will leave with at least one practical neuroscience strategy or growth mindset tool that can enrich daily living, deepen relationships, and inspire continued reflection long after the session ends.

Optional workbooks are available for those who enjoy writing and exploring further, but they are not required. The real learning happens together, as we laugh, listen, encourage, and discover that our brains continue to grow, adapt, and surprise us throughout every season of life.

Come with an open mind. Leave with new friends, fresh insights, and the confidence that the ride of a lifetime is still ahead.

The Wisdom Café offers 12 highly interactive sessions to where curious minds, caring hearts, and new neural discoveries come together to help us all flourish and thrive!

In contrast to a current world of chaos and corruption, we now have a wisdom café idea that could open a fresh conversation about aging, wisdom, neuroscience, and the future of healthier communities.

What if we stopped seeing seniors primarily as people who need things done for them, and began seeing them as a largely untapped source of wisdom that could help us solve today’s problems?

As founder of the Wisdom Café, an interactive initiative we will engage seniors in discovering and using the wisdom they have accumulated through decades of lived experience. My blog brainleadersandlearners.com shows my leadership, award winning growth mindset research and neuro discoveries shared in more than 20 countries over 50 years.

At a time when our communities face increasing division, loneliness, and difficult social challenges, I wonder what might happen if we deliberately brought the wisdom of older adults into more and deeper conversations, not simply as stories from the past, but as a resource for creating possibilities in the present.

New discoveries about the brain give us an exciting framework for this. Neuroscience increasingly helps us understand how experience, learning, emotional regulation, memory, relationships, movement, and continued growth can shape how we think and respond throughout life. The Wisdom Café uses these ideas to create practical, interactive experiences where seniors can experience their own wisdom in action.

The larger question is compelling:

Could we animate the wisdom of seniors, combined with what we are learning about the brain, to transform today’s conflicts and divisions into possibilities, while engaging the diversity of perspectives that different generations bring?

Rather than asking, “How can we keep seniors active?” perhaps we should be asking:

“What could our communities become if we actually used the wisdom seniors already possess?”

We are delighted to have filled our tables to overflowing for our first Wisdom Café in Sherwood Park, at WeSeniors.com starting September 16^th, 2026. We expect it to lead to a meaningful conversation about aging, not as decline, but as a potentially powerful source of wisdom, connection, creativity, and social contribution.

What is the Framework for the Wisdom Cafe?

My retired journey has taken me into an unexpected and wonderfully rich world of neuroscience, learning, leadership, and the remarkable possibilities that remain in our brains throughout life. My doctoral work and the years since have led me to develop the Mita Growth Mindset approach, which explores how we can use new discoveries about the brain to help people discover capabilities they may not even realize they have.

Much of my work has been international. I have taught and spoken with universities, business, and community leaders in Canada, the United States, Ireland, China, Chile, Mexico, the Caribbean and elsewhere. I have written books and articles, taught MBA leadership, and had the privilege of seeing some of my brain-based work used in many different settings. My basic question has remained remarkably simple:

What if we stopped asking, “How smart am I?” and instead asked, “How am I smart? And how can I grow that intelligence?”

That question has become especially meaningful to me as I have grown older. These days, I am putting much of that thinking into something very close to my heart called Wisdom Café. I am creating and facilitating it for seniors here in the Sherwood Park area. The idea is that we often make the mistake of thinking about seniors primarily in terms of what they need help with, while overlooking the enormous wisdom, experience, creativity and rich perspective they already possess.

The Wisdom Café can turn that around.

At the café we explore things like the amygdala, serotonin, cortisol, working memory and brain plasticity, as well as interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, spatial, naturalistic and kinesthetic intelligence. But the real purpose is much bigger than learning neuroscience. It is about helping us use what we have lived, learned and discovered over a lifetime to create new possibilities, not simply accepting old limitations.

We cannot imagine what some seniors have experienced and we can search with them for possibilities. I’m hopeful rather than simply accepting a toxic diagnosis as the end of our story.

Life has certainly taken us all in directions we could never have imagined a lifetime ago! Yet how beautifully our paths often continued in somewhat parallel directions.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about getting older is realizing that our most interesting chapters don’t necessarily come first. I truly look forward to connecting and hearing much more about our shared experiences, and sharing some of the adventures, discoveries, joys and surprises that have filled these many years.

Find Related Article Topics Below Online for all 12 Wisdom Café Sessions. Each interactive session will unpack one word into actions that open possibilities such as joy and peace where problems such as stress or PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) once existed.

CAFE 1 – AMYGDALA

CAFE 2 – SEROTONIN

CAFE 3 – CORTISOL