3 Reasons why you should practice being a beginner

I am five years old and I have a stutter. It’s not a great start for someone who will one day make speaking an integral part of how they earn a living.

I am a cute kid, with my pigtails and my two front teeth missing after one of my five older siblings has dropped me on my face while running down a hill.

And I’m smart. By the time this photo is taken on my first day of school, I know how to spell “restaurant” because we drive past the Double Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant at least ten times a week.

But I am also the youngest child in a big noisy family so what my parents think is a stutter is actually me inserting a place-marker into the hubbub while I finalise the thought that I have just had. I want everyone to know that there are things I know and opinions I have.

Knowledge is valued highly in my family so, for us kids, having people think that there are things we don’t know is tantamount to having them think we have just failed every subject at school.

Also, being at the bottom of the pecking order in a big family has a tendency to instil a determined “I can do it myself!” attitude in a kid.

Needless to say, an appreciation of the value of beginner’s mind did not come to me until much later in life.

Beginner’s mind is a concept taken from Zen Buddhism to refer to the practice of approaching subjects we think we already know about with a degree of humility and an openness to allow new information to inform, and maybe even change, our ideas and opinions.

It is normal to act on the basis of our current understanding of what a situation requires of us. It would be ridiculous to think we could take action or make decisions without doing exactly that.

But it is particularly important in times of change and transition to be open to the idea that:

1. You can learn like a beginner when it comes to the skills to operate in this new environment;

2. You can think like a beginner when it comes to the ways of thinking about yourself and your place in this strange new world; and

3. You are just beginning to build the literal and figurative muscle to get things done now.

What part of your life could do with the injection of creativity, the increased empathy and the new experiences that adopting a beginner’s mind might bring?