Why?

it's a crooked letter!

As a kid, I would often ask my mom, “Why?”. Her favorite response was, “Y is a crooked letter!”. This was pretty frustrating to a curious three year old, but now that I’ve had kids I understand. The constant questions by curious kids can be exhausting as many of you may know. The funny thing I never stopped questioning things. It was a point of frustration for many in my life. I’ve always loved to explore the opposite side of issues or ideas.

The Zen Buddhist call this the “Beginners Mind”. The concept was to always approach all things in life as if you were a 3 year old. Everything to them is new and exciting as they absorb all that life gives. Somewhere in our development, my guess is the teenage years, we become the complete opposite, we become a “know it all” or yenta and we shut down the inquisitive side of our brains. Some push through it and some do not, but to be successful you need to keep it. Ironically, I kept some of it though it was buried under the brash New York attitude which was certainly offsetting to a lot of people in my life.

Keeping an open mind is very difficult in this life. There are so many pollutants that cloud our thoughts and tribes, that you feel the need to belong to, that the Beginners Mind is destroyed or shut down. In my career, it came with the label of being a “Disruptor” though this was never my intent. Constant pushing for answers or flipping the paradigm simply can wear people out so learning to do it is important. Honestly, I struggled to navigate it successfully because my brash and direct personality seemed to shut down the conversations but for those that engaged in the process usually found that it helped to enrich the outcomes. I can tell you know that doing it while leading with an ego or snarky “know it all” attitude is a sure fired way to wreak the outcome.