The Element of a Beginner’s Mindset and Its Hope for Helping Us Respond to Challenges & Opportunities at Any Time In Our Lives

School Chalkboard Clip Art by Karen Arnold

At any moment in our life, we can be presented with a challenge or opportunity to do something different.

We can ignore this challenge or opportunity.

We will be tempted to ignore it, in fact, because it may seem like too much effort to do anything different from what we’ve been doing.

To say goodbye to a familiar routine, or to give up the course which we thought we were on.

To have to learn to adapt to new knowledge, a new environment, a new place, a new culture, or new requirements.

To have to risk failure and shame - any new challenge or opportunity carries the risk of failure and shame.

If all of us thought like this, there would be no new businesses, no new restaurants, no new ideas, and no new adventures for any of us.

And we might never discover our full capacity or potential.

It is much better to have a beginner’s mindset - so we can respond to new opportunities and challenges at any stage of our lives, and to explore our potential and capacity for those challenges and opportunities.

The Beginner’s Mindset and Our Capacity for Learning

Our capacity for learning never ends.

Besides being surprised by how much I’ve learned since June of 2010 (Xactly, Varicent, Implementations, White Papers, Project Management and several new Excel tricks for speedy data crunching and analysis), I am also reminded of my mother’s citizenship story. ….

My mother became a US citizen at the age of 74. 

To become a US citizen, she had to pass an interview about US history, civics, and government.

She had to learn 100 questions (which I printed for her from the Department of Homeland Security Site), from which she would be asked about 3-5 questions.

The idea of having to learn these 100 questions and take an interview on them was daunting to my mother.

But she threw herself into the task and learned the answers to all 100 questions within a week. 

Terrified she would forget the answers by the date of the interview, my mother studied the 100 questions again and again and would have people take her up on them.

Everyone and their aunt who walked in our door would have to take Mummy up on her 100 questions.

She would enjoy it when their eyes grew big at each successfully answered question, and she would smile at the compliments that followed. 

The actual test day was an anti-climax for Mummy. The examiner decided to go light on her because of her age and physical condition, and he asked her “Who is the President of the United States of America?”, “What is the capital of the United States of America?” and “How many states are there in the United States of America?”

Mummy was disappointed she wasn’t asked one of the harder questions, such as “How many amendments does the US constitution have?”

My mother’s citizenship interview story is amazing. She was an invalid at the time and took 20 different pills for multiple chronic ailments.  She had never had to study for anything, since she had graduated high school at the age of 16. 

Yet, there she was, at the age of 74, able to learn and master those 100 different questions – thanks to her adopting a beginner’s mindset.

If you are ever challenged to learn something new –adopt a beginner’s mindset like my mother.

Adopting a beginner’s mindset helped by mother achieve an amazing late-life learning victory.

The Beginner’s Mindset and Our Capacity for Change

We can change at any time in our lives.

We do not have to believe because we’ve been one way for all of our life, we can’t decide to be different.

We have to adopt a beginner’s mindset and be open and teachable and accept when something is not working.

I used to be a high maintenance, my way or the highway kind of person and a firecracker with a short fuse.

Because of being that way, I would freak out at a moment’s notice which was a real turn off for people; often I would regret this as soon as I had done it.

I could have been stubborn and said to myself, “This is who I am and people just better accept it.”

But I decided I didn’t want to be that way anymore.

After my mother’s death in 2005, I was motivated to work on and conquer my anger issues, so my daughter would never have to be afraid of incurring my wrath - as I narrate in my post “The Path to Change”.

I adopted a beginner’s mindset and it helped me be open to the possibility of change and to any strategy and idea that might help me.

When I took up meditation in 2010, I had already made tremendous progress, but I wanted to make even further progress.

My beginner’s mindset helped me become a low maintenance person.

I wrote How to Become a Low Maintenance Person because I want other people to experience how wonderful it is to be a low maintenance person.

When we become a low maintenance person, our life changes, because we have changed something which was a barrier to our success and happiness; we have made that barrier go away.

If you are struggling with a habit or trait you would like to be rid of, or with being high maintenance in any area, and you genuinely seek change, all you need is a beginner’s mindset and faith that you can do it.

I am an example it is possible.

A Beginner’s Mindset and Our Capacity to Grow

In The Element of Adapting and Its Hope for Thriving Even When Our Lives Do Not Go in a Straight Line, I told you about how I successfully climbed the hill in my first career in India, only to find myself at the bottom of the hill in my second career in the US.

I went from a high profile, high paying, high visibility job to a low profile, low paying and low visibility job, but I grew as a person because of it. 

I learned humility, I learned acceptance, I learned to roll with the punches. I learned that adapting to a new humbler career is a great victory in itself.

But I would not have been able to grow, if I didn’t have a beginner’s mindset.

A beginner’s mindset helps us understand there’s value in learning anything new, even if it’s how to order sandwiches for a meeting.

We should not confuse growth with earning more money or professional status. 

In fact, there is a negative correlation between growth, and earning more money or status. 

We often grow more when our income and status has gone, or is challenged.

That’s when we learn survival skills, and humility; that’s when we learn to take care of ourselves and reinvent ourselves; that’s when we learn to shed all those past habits and routines and inhibitions that are doing us no good.

So remember, if you are going through a rough patch, adopt a beginner’s mindset and look forward to the opportunity to reinvent yourself.

A Beginner’s Mindset and Our Capacity to Go Off The Beaten Track and Thrive

It takes courage to go off the beaten track.

When I went off the beaten track the first time, and started skipping college and writing middles for the newspaper, and composing silly songs, it didn’t take a lot of courage.

I had no money, no status, no track record.

In fact, it was rather foolhardy.  If not for that lucky first copywriting break (Thanks to Mela), I do not know where I would have been today.

But when I went off the beaten track to start Purple Patch, it was a different story.

I gave up a solid job in the number one agency in India (the Indian arm of JWT) for a dream.

And not only that, I had decided to pursue this dream in a city where I didn’t have a network.

If our household overhead was low at the time, and I knew my husband’s income could keep us going, I risked failing in my new adventure and making a laughing stock of myself. 

Several friends thought it was a hare-brained idea and tried to stop me. 

They couldn’t picture mousy, badly dressed, absent-minded, poor conversationalist and dependent Minoo pulling it off. 

I couldn’t blame them, really.

Besides being a copywriter, I had shown myself capable of little else up to that point.

But I ignored the naysaying, adopted a beginner’s mindset, and went ahead.

If it was slim pickings at first, by the time a year was out, I had generated enough work, I could afford to take on 4 part-time copy cubs, a typist and a driver.

I had gone off the beaten track and made it work.

In mid 2010, I went off the beaten track again by quitting my full time Commissions Analyst job.

The economy was down. I was a single mom. It seemed rather foolish.

But when the economy is down, we experience powerlessness as an employee.

I wanted to reclaim some of that power.

When we start moving in the direction we want to go, things fall into place.

I signed up for the Xactly Administrator’s Course.

The next thing I knew, I was on Solution Partners’ implementation team

2 years later, I was contracting for Spectrum Technologies as well.

I would not have been able to do any of this without a beginner’s mindset.

In my new SPM Consultant role, if not for a beginner’s mindset, I would not be good at my job.

Every new assignment requires me to adopt a beginner’s mindset because there’s so much new to learn.

I have learned to enjoy the process, and I appreciate the new knowledge, new experience, new challenges, and the opportunities to work with new people that each new assignment brings.

Interestingly, since becoming a contract worker, I find myself more determined to delight than I ever was as an employee.

If you are interested in going off the beaten track, adopt a beginner’s mindset, have faith in yourself, and go for it.

Take a leaf out of my book, or my cousin Vinita’s book.

A Beginner’s Mindset And Our Capacity to Become More Self-Sufficient

When I think about all the things I thought I could not do which I now can, I am glad for the higher challenges that made them possible.

Learning to cook, learning to drive, learning Excel, learning Xactly, Centive and Varicent; learning how to do implementations and UAT testing are some of them.

And though I was late in learning all these things, I was still able to learn them.

We can become self-sufficient in any area by adopting a beginner’s mindset.

The Beginner’s Mindset and The Capacity to Bounce Back

It’s a mistake to think of our failed challenges as our highest challenges.

We can fail on a job or assignment, just because we did not click with the manager, or because we were out of our element, or we were in a position we were not cut out for.

Likewise, we can fail in a personal relationship, because our partner wanted something and we wanted something else.

Our failed challenges are not our highest challenges, but they most definitely are our learning challenges. They have things to teach us.

We learn what we can take and what we can’t take, what we are good at and what we are not good at, what kinds of situations we will work out in, and what we will not work out in, what kind of people we will click with, and what kind of people we may not click with.

Failure develops our intuition and wisdom, so we can take our future steps with a firmer foot.

But only if we adopt a beginner’s mindset, and are open to being teachable, can we learn from each of our failed experiences

When we do, we can stay positive when things are below par in our lives, by thinking about all the things we have successfully achieved in the past, and knowing our beginner’s mindset will help us meet the new challenges and opportunities that await us in the future.

So don’t worry if you are currently below your peak.

It’s possible the pace you were going at may have been impossible to sustain.

You will definitely find a measured, sustainable pace to operate at.

You just need to have faith in your long term track-record.

Go forth with your 2014 adventure – with full confidence you have the capacity to learn, to change, to go off the beaten track and thrive, to become self-sufficient and to bounce back. You have all that you need if you have a beginner’s mindset, and the faith that ... yes, you can!

As always thanks for reading and have a great day and week…..M….a Pearl-Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay, Audrey, Badri, Rosie and Subhakar for their comments on Facebook on my last post and to everyone else for their votes.  Much appreciated.