If you have struggled to find success in either your personal or professional life, it may be because you have yet to open your mind to new ways of thinking or getting things done. Everyone wants to elevate themselves and grow as individuals, but they often attempt to do so while having the same mindset of thinking the same thoughts and doing the same things they have always done. The opportunities for personal/professional growth that either present or create themselves, cannot be properly exploited with the same level of thinking we have always been at. We cannot grow as individuals if we do not grow our minds. We can grow our minds by adopting a growth mindset, which allow us to be open-minded to new ideas, ways of thinking, and ways of acting. Open-mindedness is something we should make part of personality. Being open minded needs to be a part of who we are, being stubborn and stuck in your ways will prohibit your ability to grow as an individual and reach new heights in all aspects of your life. Having an open-mind is the best way to achieve accelerated growth. You can quickly grow yourself into a valuable asset and put yourself on an upward trajectory.
Imagine you have two individuals who both hold an entry level position at a corporation. One individual has no experience doing the type of work required for the position, but is very inquisitive, is always eager to learn, and is willing to receive all types of suggestions and feedback. The other individual is very experienced doing the work required for this position, but thinks he knows everything and is only willing to do things his way and rejects any input or suggestions from others. Which one do you think is more valuable to the corporation and has more potential? I provide this example to show that the more open-minded individual will be much more effective in the long term. Since he comes in with no experience, he has no preconceived notions or prejudices on how to most effectively do the work, so he is open to all input, suggestions, and feedback from others. Being open minded allows yourself to constantly improve and find faster and more effective solutions to problems. The more experienced individual will start off better but over time, his effectiveness will decline because you can’t always continue to do things how you have always done them. Our external world is constantly changing and evolving. If we do not evolve ourselves, we will become obsolete and irrelevant. Blockbuster had the same mindset as the more experienced individual from my example. Blockbuster continued to rely on their way of doing things with their outdated business model, keeping all of their inventory laid out on shelves in their brick and mortar stores. They didn’t want to change their way of conducting business because they thought that Netflix with their online streaming, would be a fad and something that was here today and gone tomorrow. They chose not to evolve with the times and therefore became completely irrelevant. All Blockbuster stores evaporated within the next year or so. Don’t let this happen in your personal/professional lives. Humans were meant to evolve, and we cannot do that if we are closed-minded and unwilling to adopt new ways of thinking and acting.
The first thing you can do to become more open minded is committing to be a lifelong learner. When you graduate from high school or college, it does not mean that your education is over, it is actually just beginning. Your formal classroom education may be over, but a lot of what you will learn in school does not directly translate into the real world. Considering how long our lives are, we spend a very low percentage of our lives in school. With modern medicine and its continuous advancement, I will assume that you will live ‘til you’re 100. That means you will likely spend anywhere between 18-25% of your life in school. That is less than a 1/3rd of your entire life. It is ridiculous to think that you can be at the most optimal version of yourself with the short amount of time spent learning and getting educated in school. You should constantly be on the pursuit of acquiring more knowledge and finding new ways to improve all aspects of your life. You cannot possibly rely on just the things you learned in school to determine your level of knowledge and your potential as an individual and in your career. You may be fine and get by just fine for a couple of years, but as time goes on, there will be so many people who will surpass you. It is like making it to the NBA but then never practicing or working on your skills again. You will be fine for the first year or two of your career, but as time goes on you will start to slowly diminish and all the other people who continue to work and get better will pull ahead of you and eventually take your spot. The people that have a want to learn and acquire more knowledge will always perform better than the ones who don’t in the long run. Just having the desire to acquire more knowledge and wisdom will put you much further ahead of so many people. Part of being closed-minded is thinking that you are always right or having set opinions on everything. This is an example of a fixed mindset, which prohibits growth and induces complacency. Having a fixed mindset is not a characteristic of being a life-long learner, but rather someone who goes with the first answer they hear and is unwilling to change their mind. If you are truly someone who is committed to be a life-long learner than you will always seek out the truth, rather than try to be right. There is so much knowledge and wisdom out there in the world, we can’t possibly know everything, but we can try to learn and understand as much as possible. An open-mind will always draw you to finding more answers and gaining more truth. Being closed-minded prevents you from seeing the whole picture, which limits your perspective. Having a limited perspective can distort the image of truth. A life long learner is always seeking more knowledge, more perspective, which helps them gain a better understanding of what is real and true.
Another key component of becoming more open minded is not judging yourself too hard. A major facet of being open minded, is being willing to step outside of your comfort zone. Being out of your comfort zone obviously insinuates that you are uncomfortable. When you are in discomfort, you lose your sense of familiarity. You typically have no prior experiences or knowledge to draw on, so being open-minded is what will allow you gain some comfortability and ultimately familiarize yourself with whatever it is you are dealing with. When you step out of your comfort zone, you become vulnerable and open yourself up to failure and judgement. If you fail, you cannot be too hard on yourself. Stepping out of that comfort zone is a great way to accelerate the growth process so you must understand that their will be some painful moments involved. With anything, you are not going to be great at first. You have to alleviate yourself of any pressure, because open-mindedness is not about being right or proving yourself, it is about truth. If you judge yourself and let failure prevent you from finding new opportunities or trying new things than you are being closed minded. You are going to find things that you may not be comfortable with or do not like, but you can’t get too down on yourself for it. Being open minded, means you are doing things you haven’t done before, thinking about things you haven’t previously considered, and acting on things you would before have just put off or not do. With failure and mistakes, there are consequences that come along with it. These are not life or death consequences, so there is no point of judging yourself for it. You obviously shouldn’t do something that can cost you your life, health, or freedom but not fearing the consequences of putting yourself out there is super important in not just being more open minded but being happy. It is hard for others to judge you if you don’t judge yourself. Those painful or negative experiences will add to your overall understanding and help you gain more perspective. As I mentioned earlier, having understanding and perspective adds to what you know to be true. Again, we should all be on the journey to find what is true, and not just trying to be right.
There are many ways to become more open minded, but perhaps the most effective way is by practicing and deploying empathy. Closed-mindedness is not trying to relate or identify with others that are different from us. Differences are not necessarily binary, it is not that one person is wrong and the other is right. We forget that two people can see the same thing and still be right. Having a mindset of not valuing differences restricts our understanding and prevents us from building relationships with people who come from different backgrounds, represent different cultures, or just simply think or live in a way that is different from us. We tend to disregard anyone who we have disagreements with as being wrong and we are right. It may just be that they are not wrong but have a different way of thinking, looking at things or solving problems. Your experiences and background make up your paradigm, your view of the world. Therefore, everyone’s views are going to be different, it is not about right or wrong. Empathy is the best tool to see the world through other people’s eyes and understand differences. Empathy is the number one gateway drug to open-mindedness. Empathy helps us accept and make sense of other people’s ideas, thought processes and perspectives. We are all products of our environments and as we get older, we tend to do the things we are comfortable with or have always done in the past. We just go with what we know and is familiar, which is fine but how do we know there isn’t something better out there? There could be more effective ways to live our lives, but if you are unwilling to open your mind to them, then you will never know.
A key component of higher-level thinking is being able to think outside of your own circumstances and way of life to accept other people’s ways of doing things. Empathy is not about judgement and it is not about comparing ways of thinking or doing things, it’s about understanding and being able to identify with those other ways of thinking and getting things done. We are so quick to place down judgement when we hear from others about different ways of thinking or doing things but being able to understand other perspectives and see things through the eyes of others is how we become more open-minded. In order to truly be open minded we must eliminate all forms of judgement – both on ourselves and others. While using empathy, it is imperative to ask questions and be genuinely curious. It is not true empathy if there is no authenticity. Asking questions aids in our understanding of other ways of thinking and problem solving. Like I mentioned, we all come from different backgrounds, circumstances, and experiences. By asking questions, we can further our understanding of the thinking and actions of others who may differ from us. It is certainly acceptable to disagree, but it is unacceptable to judge. We should still be able to be empathetic and considerate to opposing viewpoints, but we don’t have to adopt them for ourselves. Having good and honest disagreement can often be the most effective tool for deepening our understanding of opposing viewpoints. Asking good questions allows you to really get to the bottom of others thinking and understand the reasoning behind them. Often, many disagreements occur not because people don’t agree on the answer or outcome, but how to arrive to that answer or outcome. This is due to having different outlooks and paradigms. The reason paradigms are so different amongst people is because everyone grows up with different experiences, and those experiences help determine their truth. A great example of this is how police/law enforcement is viewed, specifically here in America. People who come from affluent and suburban neighborhoods may have an extremely positive view on police. They view them as an extremely valuable resource that works hard to protect their community and keep everything safe and running smoothly. Their interactions may be very limited, maybe only for speeding or running a red light. However, you ask a minority from the inner-city about their views on the police, it may sound very different. They will likely have a very negative outlook on the police as they likely have had frequent run-ins with the police that ended up in violence or wrongful accusations/arrest. They may view police as a bunch of crooked people who have nothing better to do than harass the people in the community and unfairly target their people. The minority from the inner-city won’t be able to convince the affluent/suburban person that police are crooked and problematic, and the affluent/suburban person won’t be able to convince the inner-city person that the police are good people who just want to help. It’s not about trying to convince the other person that they are wrong, and you are right, it’s about getting to the truth. Both people are right in their own minds because they have completely opposite experiences and paradigms. They can disagree, but if they are open, honest, and willing to listen, then both people come out of this with greater perspective and understanding. Another way we can be open-minded, is by being humble and staying down to earth. If you are so consumed by your ego and infatuated with yourself, you will not have the want to try and understand things from opposing perspectives. You must be able to look outside of yourself if you want to be open-minded. You cannot be considerate of others thoughts and viewpoints if you are unwilling to get out of your own head and remove yourself from your ego.
Being open-minded is fastest way we can grow and reach new heights in all aspects of our lives. In order to do this, we must break free from a fixed mindset. We must be willing to step out of our comfort zones and try things we haven’t tried before. We cannot possibly grow as individuals if we do not change the way we think and begin to empathize with others and their ways of thinking. Most importantly, if we want to be open-minded and grow, we must be on the search for truth, not being right.
JONATHAN MCCLURE / THE ROLLING J
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