Cultivating a Beginner's Mind
The following is an excerpt from my book, A Change Would Do You Good: Proven Strategies for Creating the Life You Want. If you’d like a free copy, I invite you to enter my Instagram Book Giveaway contest which runs from March 1 until March 7, 2022 @cambioscoaching.
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The concept of cultivating a beginner’s mind is deeply rooted in Zen philosophy. The Japanese word shoshin describes living life in awe and wonder by abandoning preconceived notions and expectations. Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi brought shoshin to the West and popularized the concept in his teachings and in his 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
Seeing everything from the vantage of a beginner helps us set the stage for changing our explicit and implicit beliefs and behaviors. The goal is to be open to possibility: to spark curiosity. A beginner’s mind is easy to spot in children who are, after all, consummate beginners.
From the sheer delight of discovering one’s toes for the first time to learning to read and write one’s name, we all embody shoshin as children. Through years of social conditioning, we unlearn the beauty of shoshin. We’re told not to ask so many questions, so we stop being inquisitive. We learn to hide our vulnerabilities. But anything learned can be unlearned.
Rightness
In order to cultivate a beginner’s mind, we must first detach from being right. We’re culturally conditioned to value being right. Our Western educational system is deeply steeped in right or wrong answers. Early in our tenure as students, we’re programmed to raise our hands to answer questions posed by instructors only if we’re sure we have the correct answer.
Being incorrect often results in embarrassment and humiliation. Most of us have witnessed a fellow student being ridiculed for giving an incorrect answer or asking a “dumb” question. The threat of a similar fate is too great to take the risk. In this way, our aversion to making mistakes, big and small, gets cemented in our brains.
The need to be right as a way to avoid humiliation leads to a closed mind—a fixed mindset. On the other hand, modifying our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors requires a willingness to see things differently, take risks.
The beginner’s mind—an open mind—helps us meet our goals and improves our well-being. Curiosity and fear aren’t compatible emotions. When we approach problems with curiosity, we tackle learning with great abandon. Procrastination is heavily rooted in fear: fear of being wrong, fear of looking foolish, and fear of not being good enough. Thus, cultivating an open mind is a remedy for procrastination.
Open-mindedness is also an antidote for anxiety. Anxiety can be situational (a reaction to a specific threat) or can be a pervasive feeling or a persistent trait, and is typically associated with inflexible thought patterns. If a highly anxious person gets criticized at work, he or she might instinctively catastrophize the situation and worry about being fired, unable to pay bills, and ultimately becoming homeless.
Psychological flexibility is the ability to stay focused on the present situation and choose behaviors based on one’s values and commitment to well-being. Psychological flexibility—open-mindedness—helps us stop the endless loop of negative thoughts. By practicing open-mindedness, a person who receives negative feedback at work views this as an opportunity for self-improvement rather than a reason for self-flagellation.
Not Knowing
As byproducts of the dominant American culture, we’re loathe to admit we’re wrong or we just don’t know. We may divide the world into two camps: us and them, right and wrong. Such an oversimplified attitude is a feeble attempt to build our self-esteem. We see opposing beliefs and behaviors as a threat to our self-concept. A nuanced approach allows us to recognize a variety of attitudes as valid and worthy of consideration.
I get easily flummoxed by this. My gavel is always at the ready: who is right and who is wrong. I was not conditioned to believe that two opposing beliefs or behaviors could peacefully coexist.
Victor Ottati, psychology professor at the University of Edinburgh, conducted seminal research on the dangers of feeling like an expert. Through his studies, he found that as self-perception of expertise increases, so do tendencies toward closed-mindedness. Ottati coined the term: the earned dogmatism effect, meaning, when people believe they are experts, they have a tendency to select and process information to support their expectations and beliefs.
Ottati and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments in which subjects were randomly given tests and received scores that indicated they had all correct answers or very few correct answers. The researchers then observed the behaviors of those who considered themselves experts. The so-called experts were less likely to say they didn’t know the answers to subsequent questions and were less inquisitive than those who received lower scores. The researchers concluded that the role of being an expert can undermine being open-minded.
Applying the anything-is-possible philosophy to our own growth choices, we can begin by acquiring the traits and practicing the behaviors that enable opening our minds to other possibilities of thinking and behaving.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi