All of us get stuck in expert brain. Our expertise tells us that things should be a certain way and can only be that way. It prevents us from seeing possibilities and other ways of doing things.
🧠 In our brain, there's a protein and fatty substance called myelin. It makes up about 50% of your brain's white matter. When you learn something new, a neural pathway is formed. These pathways became insulated with myelin.
The more you repeat a behaviour and get good at it, the thicker the myelin gets and the more likely you'll do that activity in the exact same way. Heavily myelinated highways become your default behaviour.
➡️ And this is exactly why we get stuck. Expert brains and myelin default us to do things the exact same way as before.
It takes tools for us to shift gears and break free from our expertise and that takes the beginner's mind. I often talk about the importance of adopting a beginner's mindset because it's a foundational mindset in innovation.
➡️ Here's how I'm applying this currently. Some of you know I'm going to be a LinkedIn Learning Instructor next year (I am BEYOND excited for this 🤩). Over the past months, I've been very busy in script-writing mode in order to prepare for my video shoot.
When I was approached to create a course for LinkedIn, I immediately thought I'd base it off my very popular keynote talk, YES! You Can Innovate. That talk has deeply resonated with thousands of people all around the world so I know it's an impactful, eye-opening talk that makes innovation both accessible and tangible for people.
➡️ The easiest thing for me would have been to literally transcribe that talk into a course without reimagining what it could be. It would have taken little time and effort on my part. After all, I literally have tons of data points telling me it doesn't need to be reimagined!
But, as someone who always wants to improve and be better, who believes there's so many more possibilities out there, I wanted to do my due diligence to put in the work. I fought off my expert brain and took the approach of a beginner's mind and started over.
I decided to use the framework of my talk in terms of how the course would be structured, but everything else was up for grabs. I wanted to embrace this with a new perspective and sitting down to write the scripts has really changed my mind about everything.
💫 I've been writing each of modules, one at a time. And while this has taken a LOT longer than I expected, the investment of time has been tremendously worthwhile to me. It's open up new stories, new thoughts, new ideas and new approaches on how I can teach concepts and make it even MORE better than before. Giving space for the creative process to come to fruition has been incredible. I actually feel like I'm writing a script to a book! 🤔
Some of these scripts have taken hours to write, but this has been a complete labour of love for me. ❤️ I'm SO excited to be bringing this course to the LinkedIn Community and can't wait to share it with you all next year. 🥳
➡️ Take a moment and reflect. Is there something your work or personal life that could benefit from the beginner's mind? Has your expert brain restricted you into seeing only a few possibilities when there are in fact, LIMITLESS possibilities out there?
🙋🏻♂️ What could benefit you/your work from beginning, again? Share with me in the comments. ✍🏻
Unleashing possibilities is the power of the beginner's mindset. There's always more out ways to do something than you think. If you're interested to learn how you can adopt this mindset in your organization, email me or write "begin again" in the comments. 🌱
0 comments