Have you ever started randomly struggling with a movement pattern? And it was SO frustrating because you swear you have done that movement THOUSANDS of times before… but for some reason your brain and body just couldn’t cooperate? And FINALLY, after royally pissing yourself off, you retrace the steps you used to learn that movement, and voila! You were missing the most basic of details. DUH!
I have been there, many, many, MANY times. And it’s actually a very common thing! After teaching Kung Fu and Tai Chi for over 10 years to hundreds of students I have seen it happen often. Although this is a completely normal occurrence, it can be helpful (and time-saving) to know how to prevent this from happening, and also to have a plan in case it happens again. The most simple (and my favorite) answer to this is to live by the concept of having a “beginner’s mind”. There are a lot of definitions for this; I will be going off of the way I interpret it, which is that having a beginner’s mind means you live humbly, open-minded, and growth-oriented every single second of every single day.
What is the benefit of having a “beginner’s mind”? Let’s break this apart and touch on each individual piece to interpret it fully. First, why is it beneficial to be humble? It allows you to keep an open-mind in order to grow and learn. It is impossible for us as humans to remember every detail when we’re learning how to do something, so staying humble allows us to not block out something someone is saying because we think we already “know” everything there is to know. Because we don’t! And we never will, and as soon as we accept that very obvious fact, the sooner we will start to skyrocket with our progress. On the other end, being a humble individual usually means we have the capacity to be better friends, partners, and family members, because we truly LISTEN deeply to what those around us are saying. People can tell when you deeply listen to them, and it allows you to build a closer relationship. If we’re constantly cutting people off because we think we know what the rest of their sentence will be, they won’t enjoy talking to us very much. And they won’t feel comfortable being open to building a deeper relationship either, because they won’t be listened to or heard. So, if we stay humble, we not only allow ourselves to grow with whatever we’re learning (a new behavior change, habit, martial arts form/technique, exercise at the gym, etc.), and it allows us to be better listeners for those we care about, growing deeper and more intense relationships with those around us.
Next, why is it beneficial to be open-minded? This goes along with the last topic of humility really well! It’s helpful to be open-minded so that we have the capacity to learn new things. Being a “know-it-all” or assuming we “know everything” severely stunts our growth. In the scientific community there are TONS of things that we thought we “proved” and then later found out were incredibly wrong (*cough cough* smoking cigarettes used to be thought of as healthy with no links to lung cancer). It’s extremely helpful to always have an open mind so we’re ready for things like that to happen. If we leave the drain open, whenever the sink is turned on water will always be able to flow, if it’s closed then it won’t (water is new concepts and ideas and growth-opportunities, and the drain is our mind; this could have been a better analogy but my brain is just not having it today!) The world and our understanding of the things around us are constantly changing, so if we allow ourselves to keep an open mind we have the ability to learn at every possible second, this helps us grow as an individual, making us stronger, smarter, well-rounded, and overall better.
Finally, why is it beneficial to be growth-oriented? Because we can ALWAYS learn and become better and happier. We have NO idea what the capacity for happiness is, and we will never figure it out if we don’t take every chance we can to grow! There’s no fun in being mediocre. I want to be the absolute BEST I can possibly be in everything I’m passionate about. Life will never get boring, and if we stay growth-oriented we will learn new ways to deal with the difficult stuff more efficiently to continue to get happier and happier. What’s the meaning of life? No clue. But for me, it’s happiness and contentment. I LOVE knowing that I have control enough over my life to turn every difficult situation into a learning moment, and that I can make myself pretty much immune to negativity. I love the feeling of happiness and contentment and peace. I’m sure you do too!! So, let’s stay growth-oriented to learn how to be better at being happy, better at being strong, better at defending ourselves, better at speaking to our loved ones and making them feel loved, better at everything we take pride in and are passionate about.
The message I’d like you to consider in this post is to learn to live with a “beginner’s mind”, not just for yourself, but for your loved ones around you as well.
That is all for today! Short post this week, there will very likely be a longer, more in-depth one next week.
Until then,
-Taylor