Love Your Life

Staying Open to New Ideas

September 8, 2014 /

Staying Open to New IdeasStaying open to new ideas can be a lot harder than it sounds.  There are some simple mind hacks that can enhance your ability to enjoy trying new things and looking at life in a whole new way. Let’s focus on a few simple tips that make it easy to stay open to new ideas.

3 Tips for Staying Open to New Ideas

1.  Remember how it was before.  Remember the time before you tried your favorite food?  You’d never tasted it before, never enjoyed discovering it, never known how much happiness it could bring to your life.  If you had never taken a chance on trying that new food, it wouldn’t be your favorite today.
Life is like that in every aspect.  When hesitation starts taking hold, just remember that you may be about to discover one of your new “favorites”.  You’ll never know until you try!
2.  Ask, “What’s the worst that could happen?”  If you’re putting the brakes on moving forward, it might be because you’re expecting the worst case scenario to happen.  Catastrophizing is a common problem for many people.
Being prepared for – or actually expecting – negative consequences from making a choice can paralyze you.  The unknown can be scary.

  • What if I try this new way of doing things and it goes badly?
  • What if I change my holiday traditions and my family gets mad at me?

Those questions are both realistic for someone making a choice to do something new or different.  Catastophizing would put those questions in more drastic (or irreversible terms), such as:

  • What if I try this new way of doing things and it goes so badly that it can never be fixed?
  • What if I change my holiday traditions and my family never speaks to me again for the rest of my life?

Do you see the difference?  In the first set of questions, we recognize that a choice could have a positive or negative outcome.  In the second set, we see a “gloom and doom” mindset that assumes the worst possible outcome, something usually unrealistic or unfixable.
Luckily,  when we start to feel nervous about trying something new and recognize that we may be overdramatizing the negative possibilities, it’s helpful to ask ourselves that powerful question:

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

Calmly looking at a new choice and realizing that the worst outcome probably isn’t that bad anyway can make it easier to stay open to new ideas.

3.  Spend a day in the life of a child.  For children, life is filled with new experiences.  Most days of a child’s life hold events and ideas that have never occurred to them before!  Children are always ready to do new things because they spend so much of their time doing activities for the first time and being enthralled by the results: so funny, so exciting, so happy, so yummy!
If you find yourself having a hard time thinking about things in a new way, spend a day with your child experiencing things as they do.
Here is a crazy exercise that is so simple and shocking that it’s sure to cause a few revelations in your thinking:

→ Spend 5 minutes being only as tall as a 3 year old.

That’s right, get down on your knees and see everything in your house from the height and perspective of a small child.  I do this all the time and am not only amazed by how different everything is, but by how many things in my own house that I’ve never seen!
Be brave today and stay open to new ideas!

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