Let Yourself Be A Beginner

When you start something new for the first time, you have the advantage of inexperience. While several may believe ignorance is a disadvantage, there is a benefit to being a beginner. As a beginner, you’re more likely to observe and absorb new information while adapting to something unfamiliar.

As you advance into intermediate and expert, you tend to lose that vulnerability that allows you to openly engage in the unknown. No matter how advanced you become, your mentality shifts from learner to teacher and your development reaches a threshold. You can find yourself set in a specific way losing the flexibility to interchange your points of view or approach. Without lessening the accomplishment of progression, with time, we can make the mistake of arriving at a place where we think we know it all. With redundancy and repetition, we tend to dismiss that invitation of a changed tactic, feeling as if we’ve learned all we can. The thing is, the learning never stops. So even if that won’t change, your mindset can.

Be a beginner more often. Take yourself back to a time when you were beginning something new whether it was with school, relationships, work, a hobby, exercise, or even when you became a parent for the first time. You dove into a new endeavor with ignorant excitement. You were once a beginner with a clean slate ready to make a dent in it.

No matter how familiar things become in your experiences, make an effort to shift your attitude by going into your day as if you were a student. The advantage of being a beginner includes excitement, energy, and a willingness for the unknown. These all factor into a focus that reveals several different viewpoints that can only benefit your expertise.

With everyday competition, we so badly want to rush through to the very top missing all the vital knowledge we learn from the bottom. Instead of competing with ourselves we compete with each other, losing focus of our internal development. Don’t be afraid to wipe off the slate every once in a while and go into the start of your week with a sense of unfamiliarity. When exploring from a place of newness, you’re able to explore a different approach. The flexibility that comes will keep your progress flowing forward. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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