The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.
— YUVAL NOAH HARARI, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
The word mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati. It literally means “to remember” — to remember that you are here, awake, alive, free. To remember where you came from, where you are going, and where you are right now. To remember the pain and possibility of being human. To remember to shift from autopilot to being aware. To remember to bring attention to the minute details and the immeasurable immensity of being alive. To remember to see, hear, feel, taste, and touch as though for the first time and as though your time on earth were limited, which it is. To remember to appreciate your body, mind, and heart. To remember to notice where you are holding back and to imagine what your life would be like if you were not holding back at all. To remember the amazing, mysterious, paradoxical nature of your life, that you were born and that you will die.
What gets in the way of remembering? Fears, habits, distractions, lust, aversion, restlessness, and more. These are all challenges for anyone, including leaders. One particular hindrance to remembering that stands out in the realm of mindful leadership is thinking we’re right. Thinking there is a correct answer and we know it.
Whenever I teach mindfulness and meditation in the corporate world — to health care professionals, to social entrepreneurs, to engineers, managers, and executives at Google, Disney, or SAP — I’m struck by how quickly and strongly the desire arises to compete, to excel, to be the best meditator. During our initial meditation together, I often see people’s effort — extra, unnecessary effort — expressed via a tightening and tensing of shoulders, jaws, and facial muscles. Afterward, as participants ask questions about the practice of meditation, two underlying concerns quickly surface: (1) Am I doing it wrong? And (2) are others doing it better?
When I answer these concerns by suggesting that an important element of mindfulness meditation practice is dropping our usual judgments about right and wrong, I often see somewhat curious looks as well as a sense of relief on people’s faces. There is no doing meditation wrong or doing it right. I generally propose that people give up trying to be the best meditators. When it comes to the practices of mindfulness and meditation, a central instruction is: Don’t be an expert.
Trying to be an expert is misleading, irrelevant, and even counterproductive when it comes to mindfulness. In fact, a key benefit of mindfulness meditation is that it helps us directly experience and understand that our pictures, stories, and mental models of the world are incomplete, often biased, and at times misguided. Training in mindfulness meditation means letting go of striving for success and letting go of fearing failure. This realization and understanding allows us to be more open, curious, and flexible — about our own thinking, feelings, and ideas as well as about the thinking, feelings, and ideas of others. This can transform the quality of how we listen to ourselves and to others and allow for greater understanding and connection.
When I first present practice 3, “Don’t be an expert,” to leaders and to people in the business world, I am often met with skeptical looks, shaking heads, and responses like, “Why would I do that? In my company, I would be ridiculed, or even crushed, for not being an expert or for not using my expertise.”
That might be true. In leadership and in business, being an expert is a highly valued and rewarded position. We need experts, and in truth, we usually spend our lives working hard to become expert in all our roles and functions — as parents, spouses, teachers, leaders, workers, students, and so on. Experts get the big salaries and bonuses, the straight As, the sought-after promotion, and failures are shown the door. Or so it seems.
But there are times to use your expertise and strive for excellence and times when those things get in the way, when they blind us rather than help us see the ground truth and what’s most important. Paradoxically, if we approach mindfulness like a beginner and give up the need to be an expert, if we relax the need to feel safe, right, and important, this can bolster our confidence, flexibility, and effectiveness. This is true when it comes to mindfulness as well as for leadership, healthy relationships, and enjoying and appreciating this human life. Curiosity, openness, and being aware of how much we don’t know are considerably more effective strategies than attempting to become an expert and then having to prove or defend our expertise.
One of Shunryu Suzuki’s statements sums up perfectly this approach: “The most important thing in our practice is to have right or perfect effort. Our effort in our practice should be directed from achievement to nonachievement.”
The concept of “right or perfect effort” is somewhat paradoxical. It is the effort to not make any extra or unnecessary effort. Even more difficult to understand and embody is “nonachievement,” especially in the context of work and leadership. A key to leadership success, presence, and satisfaction is letting go of our extra effort and unnecessary striving to achieve those results.
Mindfulness, by definition, is to experience our actual, direct, unfiltered experience and the full spectrum of our senses, thoughts, and intuitions. Mindfulness helps us acknowledge the beauty and mystery of our human life, as well as the inner critic, the judge, our feelings of shame, our fears and fantasies. Mindfulness includes cultivating attitudes of freshness, warmheartedness, and compassion. Mindfulness itself can be defined as not being an expert, which might be why Shunryu Suzuki refers to the practice as adopting “beginner’s mind.”
NERVOUS APES LOVE BEING EXPERTS
It’s safer and easier to be an expert. The default mode of the nervous ape is to scan for threats, externally and internally. The questioning, critical mind of the nervous ape often asks: How am I doing? Am I right or wrong? Am I doing well or badly? Am I protected or vulnerable?
To not know when others know, to lack information, and to be seen as unsure is to be vulnerable. It risks someone smarter and more skilled coming along and taking what we want. It risks not recognizing a threat when one appears. As nervous apes, we seek to learn as quickly as possible, and we feel better when we’re certain. Once we “know,” we can relax a bit, since the world becomes more predictable. We don’t have to work as hard to understand, and threats and opportunities are easier to spot.
The last thing a nervous ape wants is to go back to being a “beginner.” It works hard to become an “expert,” and that status further enhances and enables its continued success. This isn’t just an issue of status, however, and of our reluctance to let go of it. The difficulty also has to do with our sense of survival and habituated modes of thinking. This affects everyone, whether we consider ourselves experts or not.
This practice isn’t about renouncing one’s experience and skills. Rather, it defines what I feel is a productive way to approach nearly any situation: that is, with an open mind, one free of preconceived notions, much like a student or beginner. The attitude of the expert is “I know.” The attitude of the beginner is “I am curious and want to learn.”
This can be a difficult attitude for the nervous ape to adopt, which is why we often struggle with it. And yet, doing so is useful and effective. Our relationship with our self is the basis for all our other relationships, and the practice of beginner’s mind is foundational for learning and for personal growth and development. The practice of beginner’s mind is cultivating a relationship of inquiry and openness with ourselves.
This is what mindfulness teaches: how to respond and engage with openness and curiosity, how to observe while suspending judgment. When we practice mindfulness, we neither agree with a thought or belief nor disagree and react with skepticism. We adopt an attitude of inquiry that neither confirms nor rejects what we find. Either response — whether confirming what already aligns with our beliefs or pushing away what doesn’t align — is often the reflexive mental habit of the nervous ape. It’s generally a form of autopilot. It’s what develops once we believe in our own proficiency and expertise.
All seven practices are about noticing and transforming our habit mind, our autopilot, our asleep mind — the mind that narrows awareness and attention. Beginner’s mind doesn’t require adding anything; rather, it undoes assumptions and habits. In fact, each activity is new and fresh; each moment is alive. We don’t create this; we can only notice it. The term beginner’s mind simply describes our ability to experience what actually is.
EMBRACE FAILURE
Most models of leadership emphasize knowing and understanding, making decisions based on that knowledge, and persuading others that we know what to do. Yet mindfulness asks us not to act in these ways, which can make us feel extremely vulnerable, since we’ve evolved and learned to expect that, as leaders, this equals failure.
Thus, the starting point with this practice is to be less reactive. We aim to shift our mental framework away from reactiveness and protection and toward greater responsiveness. One great way to do this is to embrace failure, to practice and embody the reality that we can fail, survive, and learn. This was one of the first exercises I learned during an introduction to improv class I once attended at Bay Area Theatre Sports (BATS) in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Zoe Galvez, my teacher, instructed the class of sixteen participants to throw our arms into the air, smile broadly, and loudly proclaim, “I failed!” Then again, “I failed!” And a third time, this time with heart, “I failed!”
Announcing failure can be great fun and strangely liberating. Letting go of the fear of failure, even celebrating failure, was an important basis to practicing improvisational theater. Improv theater always risks failure, and every improv actor fails, time and time again, and yet they can’t let failure stop the show. Learning improv was an experimental and safe space to take risks and not to worry about winning or losing, or looking good or bad, or trying to do it right.
I began taking improv classes at BATS to help me be less terrified when speaking in front of audiences. I used to have nightmares about speaking to an audience, without a written script and not knowing what to say. Improv classes helped a lot. Cultivating this attitude, an attitude of beginner’s mind, has supported me to feel more relaxed and confident, right in the midst of my anxiety. Since then, I have learned and grown. For many years, I have led trainings with a wide range of groups. I have developed a good deal of experience and confidence in public speaking, but I still have to remind myself to avoid the nervous ape’s impulse to consider myself either a failure or “the expert.”
I sometimes do this “I failed” exercise in my mindful leadership workshops, and at times I have incorporated it into the Search Inside Yourself program — as a way of cutting through our usual beliefs and attachments to success and failure. In one of my leadership workshops, a forty-five-year-old Austrian psychiatrist began to weep after participating in this exercise. He said he had never done anything like this. Since birth he felt that he was trained only to succeed. He only got the best grades, went to the best schools, and became a successful doctor. He felt moved and freed in this short moment of letting go of trying so hard to be an expert.
This is an easy practice to do on your own. Experiment with shifting your attitude to accepting failure. There are many opportunities, small and large, throughout an average day, such as any time you are late (I failed!), forget someone’s name (I failed!), spill something (I failed!), make a mistake (I failed!), and so on. First, notice your habitual response to failure. If you are like me, you may tighten or constrict and feel annoyed, impatient, or angry. Instead of tightening and constricting, see if you can shift your reaction: Acknowledge that an expectation was not met and think, “Isn’t that interesting.” Then, play the “I failed” game. Say to yourself or out loud to someone else: “I failed!” As you do, smile like you mean it. And, importantly, if you do tighten, try just noticing that, instead of tightening about your tightening.
SEE THROUGH FRESH EYES: THIS TIME IS THE FIRST TIME
Every day, I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight.
— MARY OLIVER
Do you remember the first time that you rode a bicycle, drove a car, used a new software program, or had your first kiss? Remember that feeling of awkwardness and newness, the sense of excitement, learning, and richness in that experience?
Right now, do you notice that you are breathing? Of course you are breathing, and you’ve been breathing since the moment you were born, but have you considered that this particular breath is new, has never happened before, and won’t happen again, ever? It is easy to forget this reality, to take it for granted. We have so many more important things to do and consider. But try pausing right now: Be curious about this breath, and then the next breath. The same is true for everything we do — riding a bike, driving a car, learning new software, kissing. Everything has a first time, and yet every experience is different, and unique, each and every time thereafter.
Usually, that’s not how we experience it. Once we do something a few times, or dozens or thousands of times, it becomes familiar. Once something is familiar, we stop paying as much attention to it. Many things we stop paying attention to completely. Like breathing. Or walking. Walking is a big deal when we are babies trying to get places. Watching a young baby discover how to walk can be inspiring: watching the whole process of standing, stepping once, holding on for balance, experimenting, falling and failing over and over, and finally putting it all together. Then, once you are a walking expert, and for as long as you walk without pain or difficulty, you most likely pay very little or no attention to the act of walking.
Personally, I’ve had two hip replacement surgeries in recent years. (Yes, I am a bionic man.) Walking without pain is something I no longer take for granted, at least most of the time. Sometimes I forget, perhaps because I am focusing on a conversation or another activity while walking. Other times I pause to remember: Oh, this used to be painful, so painful that I was unable to walk very far. In these moments of awareness, I feel grateful: It’s amazing to have two titanium hips. I appreciate the researchers and scientists who introduced these devices and the medical advances, the breakthroughs, required to develop this technology. I appreciate my surgeon, along with my wife and family for caring for me after the surgery.
Then, of course, I go back to walking, and I forget. Our tendency is to forget, to lose interest in whatever we are doing, particularly whatever comes easily or is repeated often. As we become more skilled, and do certain things over and over, we tend to take these activities for granted. This has advantages. We don’t need to think about breathing, walking, thinking, speaking, or seeing. These familiar activities require so little attention they become automatic.
Unfortunately, this habituation, this sense of expertise, of taking things for granted, can apply to how we think about ourselves, our relationships, and the world. Most of our activities may feel automatic. No part of our life is immune. The practice “Don’t be an expert” means reducing the filters of expectation and habituation, which get in the way of seeing how alive and rich our sensations are, how alive and rich each moment is.
TRY THIS: Hold up your right hand with your palm facing you. Just take a few moments to look, to see, to notice. See if you can look without naming, without words, without judgment. Shift your attitude from achievement — such as wanting to do this exercise well — and let go of seeking or grasping at a result. What do you see and feel? This hand: Is it you, or only part of you? Consider that you didn’t make this hand, which is more complex than anything a human being can make. Try moving your fingers: These small muscle movements are driven by more than two hundred thousand neurons. Notice the shapes of each part of your hand without using the part’s name. Notice the lines in the skin. As you do this, notice that you are breathing. Notice if, or when, your thinking mind asserts itself — thoughts of judgment (I didn’t know my fingers were so fat!) or self-consciousness (Why am I doing this strange exercise?). Bring your attention back to your hand, and stay with this experiment for a few moments longer than you feel you should. What else do you notice? About your thoughts and your breathing? What do you notice about your hand? Have you ever spent time like this before, getting to know the body that is yourself?
For the rest of the day or week, or whenever you think of it, practice looking at everything with fresh eyes: at yourself, at the people you live and work with, at the world. Step back and remove, release, or reduce what you already know. Instead, see and listen with a sense of wonder and curiosity.
Another excellent way to experience this is to practice walking meditation (see pages 65–66). Explore walking with a childlike quality, as though doing it for the first time, and appreciate what a miracle it is. Bring mindfulness to walking whenever you think of it and see what happens.
BE HERE WHEN? REDUCE MIND WANDERING
Some psychological research estimates that 10 percent of our actions are conscious, and 90 percent are unconscious. That is, thinking, feeling, judgment, and actions are driven by automated, nonconscious activities. This automation process is said to have a neural basis. The activity of one of the oldest, most primal parts of the brain, the basal ganglia, transforms repeated conscious actions until they become habitual patterns.
Apparently, such automated processing doesn’t necessarily free us to think deep, satisfying thoughts. Other studies have shown that most people experience mind wandering — that is, they are not focused on what they are actually doing — 47 percent of the time. Plus, this mind wandering is associated with anxiety that fosters unhappiness. For example, here is an abstract summary of a scientific paper by Justin Brewer, director of research at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
The default mode is mind wandering, not paying attention to what you are doing. Mind wandering is correlated with unhappiness in the brain. Mind wandering was shown to be deactivated in the brain via mindfulness meditation. Experienced meditators showed greater awareness and cognitive control, as measured by regions in the brain.
Or, to use this book’s analogy, we might say: Nervous apes are not happy apes. Nor are imaginative or empathic apes. Our minds are constantly wandering in the same habitual ruts, focusing on uncertainty, anxiety, and “what ifs.” Our minds wander in the past and in the future, chewing old wounds and conflicts, and anticipating known threats, and if we focus on the present, it’s to defend ourselves.
Yet mindfulness meditation helps shift this. By practicing focused awareness and open-ended awareness, we learn to let go of habitual thinking and negative mind wandering. In a way, you might call open-ended awareness a type of positive mind wandering. This is what mindful walking cultivates. Of course, I think everyone experiences this sometimes, perhaps unexpectedly, such as while out in nature or while showering: New insights emerge, without any agenda to solve certain problems. This kind of positive mind wandering is free of worry or rumination, free of to-do lists, and free of concerns about time and place. These are the moments when we see the world and ourselves with fresh eyes.
TRY THIS: Everyone’s mind wanders sometimes. Explore, be curious, and notice your own mind wandering. If you notice your mind is wandering, bring attention to it, without judging or trying to become an expert. Even for a few minutes each day, ask: Am I focused and aware of what I’m doing? Am I consciously opening my awareness? Or am I ruminating about the past or worrying about the future? Just notice.
EXPERIENCE FIRST, TELL STORIES LATER
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychology professor, describes people as having two distinct selves: the experiencing self and the remembering or narrative self. The experiencing self lives in the moment and in the world of sensations. The narrative self creates stories to make sense of what is experienced. Being an expert is a story, and if our focus is using, displaying, or confirming our expertise, then we are less focused on what’s actually happening in the moment.
Kahneman has conducted a variety of fascinating experiments to clarify the distinction between these two selves as well as to demonstrate conflicts between these parts of us, especially when it comes to the perception of time and how our remembered selves are influenced by what he describes as the peaks and ends of an experience or event. For example, our memory of a vacation may be colored by one or two moments that stand out as strongly positive or negative peaks, as well as by our experience of the last part of the vacation. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman writes:
The two selves are the experiencing self, which does the living, and the remembering self, which keeps score and makes the choices. . . . We should not forget, however, that the perspective of the remembering self is not always correct. . . . The remembering self’s neglect of duration, its exaggerated emphasis on peaks and ends, and its susceptibility to hindsight combine to yield distorted reflections of our actual experience.
Remembering and storytelling is the realm of the imaginative ape, who processes sensations and experiences and weaves a narrative that makes sense of what we call self — our identity, values, and needs — and puts them in the context of relationships, work, and life.
As Kahneman points out, the trouble is. . . these stories are often inaccurate. Not only is our personal perspective limited, so that we never see the whole picture, but even our perspective of our own experience and memories is often biased. As a matter of course, we choose only certain aspects of our experience as important and build a story out of those. In other words, we might assume that we are at least experts about our self, our history, and our identity, but Kahneman makes clear we should be skeptical of that claim as well.
TRY THIS: See if you can observe the distinction between your experiencing self and your narrative self. Play with noticing pure experience — in any moment, what do you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch? Then, pay attention to what you remember as important and how you create a narrative or a story that makes sense of yourself, others, and the world. What can you learn from this, by discerning what you experience from the story that you create about your experience?
LISTEN WITH OPEN EARS: DON’T BE A RELATIONSHIP EXPERT
For mindful leaders, the practice of not being an expert is particularly useful in relationships. Some of my favorite opening lines from a book are from The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing:
I cannot experience your experience
You cannot experience my experience
Therefore we are invisible to each other
Invisible is a strong word. I believe that, as empathic apes, we can sense, share, and convey feelings. But we are not mind readers. My takeaway from Laing is that we shouldn’t assume we know someone else’s experience. We are limited by our perspective and frequently wrong. Therefore, it is useful to practice being attentive and curious in order to increase our understanding of others. Usually, the more familiar we become with others, the more we assume we “know” them. We risk believing we are “relationship experts.”
The practice of beginner’s mind, of not assuming we know, is a way to build greater understanding and trust, especially when we have a disagreement or conflict with someone else. Listening is a key skill in creating that trust and connection.
In practice 1, I note that one of the three “jobs” of a leader is to listen (see pages 53–54), and in practice 2, I describe four levels of listening (see page 70). But what is the quality of your listening? That is the key question to ask whenever you are in conversation with someone. Are you listening to discover, to learn, and to expand your world? Or are you listening for your own benefit, through the filters of your needs and fears, or to confirm your own story, which reflects your need to be the expert?
In your conversations, explore listening with beginner’s mind — without judgment and expectation. This is much like generative listening. Being willing to be surprised by what the other person is saying. We’ve been listening our entire lives, but how often are we really hearing what the other person is saying, feeling, meaning? How often do we seek to learn what is invisible to us?
What I think of as “filters” often clog our ears and distort what we hear, or what we understand someone to mean. These filters relate to the three apes: They might be the nervous ape’s fears or perception of a threat. They might be the imaginative ape’s story of our expertise, leadership, priorities, and goals, of what needs to be accomplished. They might be the empathic ape’s assumptions and mistaken beliefs based on what we sense, feel, and see in the other.
To practice not being an expert in relationships, notice your filters. What attitudes, stories, fears, and desires get in the way of listening to and seeing someone else’s experience? Practice cultivating being present for whatever is happening in this moment, with an attitude of curiosity and warmheartedness. When in doubt, ask for feedback from others. The nature of filters is that we don’t notice them. Others or the world appear a certain way, and we think we are seeing what actually is, until someone points out our filters. Then we have a choice: Remove the filter and listen or look again, or create another filter by blaming others or circumstances or the world for not conforming to how we think, in our expertise, things should be.
Another good way to become self-aware of your filters, and to listen better, is to practice noticing the feelings of others. We tend to focus on our own feelings, and to react to what we feel, but if we reserve judgment, keep an open mind, and investigate the feelings of others, we might find unexpected solutions. In everyday life, experiment by being curious about how happy people are. Just notice, and listen.
TRY THIS: As an experiment, choose three people whom you know reasonably well and see regularly, either at work or at home, and rate what you believe their happiness level is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being “very happy” and 1 being “very unhappy.” Consider how you make this assessment — what is it based on? On their own words and body language, or on what you believe they feel or your own filters? See if you can notice your own judgments. Then for the next few days, pay attention to what these three people actually do and say, to how they behave. What do you learn?
FAILURE AND SUCCESS IN TOKYO
As is true in many areas of my life, it is easy to coach and teach others these practices. It is much more challenging to incorporate them into my own life. Here is one example of me being tested in the practice of beginner’s mind and not being an expert.
When I first began my executive coaching and leadership consulting practice, I had a fair amount of confidence despite having little experience in this realm. One day I received a phone call asking if I would facilitate a three-day retreat in Tokyo for eight CEOs and their spouses from around the world. With both excitement and concern, I said yes. I was somewhat nervous, since I had never done anything like this, and I was excited to travel to Japan for the first time and to have the experience of leading a retreat.
Weeks before the retreat, I had a series of planning meetings with one of the group’s members who was acting as the organizer. He communicated that the group was interested in experiencing a Zen style retreat. They wanted to be introduced to meditation and mindfulness practices; while they anticipated some discussion, the three days would be spent primarily in silence with a fair amount of meditation.
The sixteen participants, eight couples, were in their late fifties to midsixties and hailed from the United States, Australia, South America, and Europe. The men were all CEOs of midsized companies, and many were approaching retirement. I learned that this group had been meeting in different cities around the world once or twice a year for several years. They liked to begin their trips with a retreat, followed by touring whatever part of the world they were in for several days.
I thought the first day of the retreat went well. We sat two twenty-minute periods of meditation in the morning and in the afternoon. I organized several listening exercises and some journaling; free writing on several prompts that I gave them. Much of the day was spent in silence. I checked in with the organizer at the end of the day, who agreed things were off to a good start.
On the second day, we started with a short period of meditation, and then I suggested that we go around the table and each member of the group say one word to describe how they were feeling. The first person said, “Bored.” The next person said, “Confused.” And so it went counterclockwise around the room: “Curious.” “Tired.” “Unhappy.” “Frustrated.” A few positive and more neutral words were sprinkled among the negative ones.
I was stunned. Obviously, despite what I had thought, the retreat was not working for this group. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I felt like a failure. Here I was in Tokyo, at the first business retreat I was leading, and people were not happy. As I stood at the head of the long wooden conference table, the sixteen retreat participants looked at me, wondering what was going to happen next. I wanted to disappear, run away, or cry.
I took a few deeps breaths and noticed the mixture of feelings I was experiencing, the tightening of my jaw and chest. I knew this was a time to come forward with my best and highest self, to dig down deep to find as much equanimity, curiosity, and beginner’s mind as I could muster. I looked at everyone and said, “Clearly, something is not working here. I apologize. I’m curious and interested — what is it that isn’t working, and more importantly, what is it each of you wants from this time together? We have two more days scheduled. What would be most useful to each of you? Let’s go around the circle and hear from everyone.”
I was surprised to learn that these eight couples were eager to explore this time of transition in their lives. They were all in the midst of a major shift in their work and personal lives. For many, their children were no longer living with them. They expressed a mixture of fear and anticipation regarding retirement and the next stage of their lives. They wanted time to explore these issues with their partners and with the group.
I could have stuck to my agenda or attempted to maintain my role as an authority or expert. I don’t think it would have worked out very well. Instead, I felt I needed to be transparent, present, curious, and open to learn what was actually happening and needed in this situation. I needed to let go of my assumptions, my needs, my fears, and my plan and listen to the participants.
I shifted the focus of the retreat toward an exploration of how they as individuals and as couples would engage with the next part of their lives. I got them into groups of threes to talk about their fears and their aspirations. Next, I asked them to go into separate spaces in the room as couples and had each of them answer the question, “Please tell me, how can I love you better?” During these encounters, a good deal of emotion and some tears were expressed. Now the retreat was much more aligned with their needs. When we came together as a group at the conclusion of the three-day retreat, and I again went around the table asking for a single word, people said: “Surprised.” “Calm.” “Community.” “Hopeful.”
The book Be Here Now by Ram Dass was published in 1971, when I was nineteen, and it had a major impact on me. It presented the possibility of finding a meaningful life by going beyond conventional ways of seeing ourselves and the world. I was introduced to the concept of not being an expert, of beginner’s mind, through what Ram Dass called “the most exquisite paradox” — as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. When you relax thinking that you already know, there are many more possibilities.
This practice is simply about making a sincere effort to listen without grasping, to respond without reacting, to be willing to learn from each person and each situation.
DON’T BE AN EXPERT
KEY PRACTICES
• Adopt “beginner’s mind,” or seeing without assuming, anticipating, or judging.
• Embrace failure. Practice “I failed” when things don’t go as planned or expected.
• Practice seeing things as if for the first time, such as your hand or while walking.
• Notice mind wandering and rumination.
• Bring awareness to your experiencing self and to your remembering or storytelling self.
• Notice your filters. What stories get in the way of listening?
• Avoid assuming you know what others feel and think; instead, listen to learn what is “invisible” to you.