3 Benefits of a Beginner's Mind
As a teenager, I received the gift of a book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, written by a famous Zen master named Shunryu Suzuki. He was one of the earliest Asian teachers to bring mindfulness meditation to the United States when he established the San Fransisco Zen Center in 1962.
One of the things Master Suzuki wrote has stayed with me my entire life: "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few."
The trouble with being a leader is you sometimes get the feeling you have to know all the answers that you must avoid failure at all costs, and your experience tells you to play it safe by using tried and tested methods. This can lead to "safe" unimaginative decisions lacking innovation.
Beginners have no methods. When you lead with a beginner's mind, you are open to trying anything to get things done. Because you do not know, you don't see impossibility. As Alexander the Great once said:
"There is nothing impossible to him who will try."
Facing problems that are difficult to solve can be stressful for both you and your team members. Mindfulness meditation practice helps you to see those problems from a beginner's viewpoint, as though you were seeing them for the first time. It opens you up to a sense of spaciousness where potential solutions arise spontaneously.
Here are three significant benefits of having a beginner's mind:
Living life with a beginner's mind brings a refreshing sense of freedom and joy because you are full of the spirit of doing rather than succeeding. Mindfulness meditation emphasizes practice over results.
A beginner's mindset begins problem-solving from a place of not knowing, which opens unique possibilities to try out before choosing the best way forward. However, these possibilities arise naturally from mindfulness meditation practice–they are not something you can force or manufacture.
When you have a beginner's mindset, working, managing relationships, playing, and everything else in life blend into one joyful, learning experience, fully integrated, and whole. You lose that uneasy sense of disconnectedness that comes from things being in compartments.
Leaders that approach management, problem-solving, and innovation with a beginner's mind are sure to achieve greater success–in both the quality of team member's relationships with each other and in the product of the work itself.
"When you are sitting in the middle of your own problem, which is more real to you: your problem or you yourself? The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact." Shunryu Suzuki
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