cultivate beginner's mind

My responsibilities at work are getting spread out, yet this doesn’t lessen my load. My bees are eager but they don’t have the skills to do a lot of the things they want to do. As a consequence, I want to say “no” to all their ideas because they mean extra work for me to implement. Yet, some of their ideas are ones that would be worth the effort. Figuring out which requires that I suppress the automatic ‘no’ that is my reflex.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are only few.” Shunryu Suzuki

The Universe, in the form of senior management that can’t seem to figure out what it actually wants to do and then just do it, has presented me with a ripe opportunity to cultivate beginner’s mind. Apparently they’re restructuring my department and not only am I getting additional supervision, I’m getting a team of bosses.

Knowing the personalities involved and knowing the way the organization functions – competition and turf grabbing instead of mutual cooperation – I could be sour about this, predicting doom. Or, I could keep beginner’s mind and see what happens, go with the flow and act according to what is best to achieve the goal (furthering beneficial goals for the organization while using resources efficiently and not overburdening personnel (aka: me)) in the situation at that time.

It won’t be easy. I will falter (I expect the worst of people after they’ve already shown it to me repeatedly) and possibly fail, but how can I pass up this opportunity to try.

I’ve found that by being unattached to a particular goal or outcome it is much easier for me to find the best solution – the one that is most efficient with time, money, and gets closest to the outcome that is valued by those who are invested – to the problem.

I have a new boss. He’s someone I’ve been working with for over a year at my job but now he is officially “my boss.” I realized recently that some of the things I specifically asked for – more support, more structure, regular check-in meetings (we are a widely distributed organization) – and that he is giving me are making me nervous. They make me accountable.

Accountability means being responsible and part of the reason I took this job is because it is so task focused – if the e-mail goes out or the web site gets updated and there are no typos or other technical mistakes my job has been done right.

To make the adjustment to my new boss, and yes, to more responsibility (what else would you call the $60,000 project I’m supposed to be managing?) I need to release the expectation that I must be perfect, that there can be no mistakes, no backtracking, that everything has to be to the second scheduled and if anything goes awry it is a comment on my personal worth rather than on the fact that life involves multitudes of people with different focuses and agendas. I must approach the situations I come to fresh, able to use what I have learned but not expecting them to conform to previous experience.

I found myself in a “working group” meeting instinctively seizing up when someone started suggesting improvements to the web site I manage. My gut reaction was to say no.

And then I stopped and kept listening.

I realized that I need to remember that there are very few times I should say no outright with respect to ideas about things we can do in our “e-communications strategy.” Most ideas are interesting if nothing else and even the ones that aren’t feasible should be met with “well, we could do that but here’s what it would cost in time, money, and organizational resources…are you willing to spend that?” The no answers will sort themselves out in that environment or those ideas will be prioritized over other things.

Being right is not center to my worth as a person or a professional. They pay me for my advice and my expertise and if they don’t listen, I can’t make them.

We’re about to start a huge project at my job, and it’s a type of project I’ve been through before a couple of times; the kind of project with a lot of moving parts that requires consulting with people both laterally and above me to get “buy in” and “facilitate change.” [Stop me before I buzz word again.]

The point is: I’ve been approaching this project tentatively, discounting my previous experiences and being unwilling to speak up until the last minute. I have not had good experiences with projects like these (yes, they got done but because of both how I approached them and the culture where I worked the fact that the work got done and achieved the goals was less important than my perceived “bad attitude”) so I have been hesitant to rely on my experiences.

This isn’t beginner’s mind: It is folly.

I need to remember that beginner’s mind is both wise and open; flexible but not naive. A hard thing to do with so many moving parts to manage.

It never occurred to me before that beginner’s mind also applies to the people in my life not just the skills or experiences in my life.

The idea that I “know” someone, that I have them pegged and can anticipate how that person will respond recently got me into some serious trouble. After clearing up all the misunderstandings and getting back on good footing with this person it is finally dawning on me that to say I “know” someone is to deny that person her essential right to change. The idea that I can approach someone I’ve had in my life for a decade, or more, fresh as if we’ve just started to “get to know” each other puts a whole new perspective on relationships.

Beginner’s mind implies to me the embracing of possibility that seems to elude us as we get older and less flexible. The true beginner approaches something she is interested in with just that: interest. Accepting that you are a beginner acknowledges that you might look stupid, you might “fail,” you might take more time than you want to master a subject but it also opens wide your life to the possibility of enjoyment, learning, and flexibility.

Real zen practitioners would acknowledge that even, and especially, a master approaches everything with beginners mind so that, actually, there is no “mastery” of a subject. I want to try for at least embracing possibility first.

This seems like a good first step.

The beginner’s insight, the beginner’s mind, is the best I can hope for. To approach a subject as an amateur is to be willing to recognize the wisdom of a savant when it attempts to cross that obscure bridge in my brain. I must never assume that I have the answer; rather, I must always assume that the answer will find me, if only I am patient and trusting and open.