I’m nearly four years into my challenge of hacking my brain to be successful at working remote with Attention Deficit Disorder. I’ve struggled with trying to understand my behaviors and challenge myself to change incrementely over time. There’s one repeated concept that always comes up in my practice – my past experiences both help and hinder my progress. The key is being able to experience life as a beginner.
Beginners have a great platform to learn knew things. First off they realize they have a set of things they need and want to learn. There is motivation to better yourself and usually a fairly well defined place to gain the knowledge from. Beginners have (or will quickly) admit they don’t have all the answers. Those of us with experience trying to learn new things may think we understand things well enough. We’re not open to seeing things as a whole.
So my challenge to myself is to start seeing things as a beginner. Challenging assumptions I have will make me more open to learn new things and become more effective at working and living.
Here’s to starting off with a less full cup! 🙂
Alister Scott
This is great Aaron, thanks for sharing. It reminds me of a Zen Buddhism concept called “Shoshin” which literally means “beginner’s mind”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
Aaron Douglas
I think that’s probably where I got the original concept from. The Calm meditation app talked about the concept in one of the week-long tracks and I really connected with the concept. Thanks for giving it a name!!