A Seek to Understand Mindset
Welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse. My message on this Christmas Eve morning is to adopt a “Seek to Understand” mindset.
As a global society, let’s use the Holiday Season to reflect on how we approach interactions with our fellow cosmic travelers. When alignment is a challenge and viewpoints don’t seamlessly calibrate, seek first to understand—not immediately jump to tearing others down who don’t share our opinions or worldview.
If more of us seek to understand, we will continue to make progress toward a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive future state.
Components of a “Seek to Understand” mindset are the following:
Curiosity. Being curious about the world around you and what makes others tick is a sure-fire way to open the mind. An open mind is a necessary condition for curiosity to flourish within you. How is the mind opened?
Open the ears and quiet the mind. This is the balancing mechanism for curiosity. Too much curiosity can lead to a never-ending series of questions that lead nowhere. Too little curiosity is a hallmark of a fixed, unyielding attitude. Open ears and an open mind help create the space that’s necessary to process new information and leads to constructive curiosity.
Be willing to challenge assumptions and biases. Avoid absolutes like “always” and “never.” A closed mind believes it has no bias but readily sees bias in others. To get started, here’s a “short list” of cognitive biases from Very Well Mind. For those that want to dive deeper, there’s a very interesting interactive cognitive bias decoder out on Wikipedia that shows our our brain is wired to simplify a complex world and how that effort to simplify leads to various biases. For those interested in financial wellbeing, here’s a list of biases from The Decision Lab that focuses on behavioral economics (why we do what we do when it comes to money and investing). Also, do not be tolerant of intolerance. For a bit of head spinning fun, take a look at the paradox of tolerance.
Be a lifelong learner. Learning automatically knocks you off balance, challenges assumptions, forces constructive discomfort, and leads to the rewiring and expansion of connections within our brains as we work our way toward a new state of balance and “new normal.” When we “seek to understand” we’re learning, and when we’re learning, we “seek to understand.” Cool, huh?
Finally, be kind. Lead with compassion. Seeking to understand means placing more emphasis on others than on the self, allowing other voices to be heard and recognized.
Happy Holidays to you and yours. Irrespective of your religious beliefs or worldview, I wish you peace, joy, and love.
Andy
