With experience comes a lot of value and power in business. You can typically raise your price or hourly rate as you learn more and hold yourself out as an expert. We teach entrepreneurs how to narrow into a market just so they can do this – become experts. But with experience and knowledge comes the belief that you ‘know enough.’ You prove this to yourself every day as you solve complex problems and you become the person that people go to for answers. You begin to believe that you know enough.
This belief can sneak up on us as we grow more wise in our craft. But we never do ‘know enough,’ do we? Further, it’s okay that we discover that we will never know it all. It is a reality that can relax your certainty in what you know and help you begin to ask more questions. You begin to learn when you realize you don’t know enough.
Julie Shipp, my partner, gave me this framed image a long time ago as I was having to learn how to start again in my own businesses. This image is Shoshin, the Japanese phrase from Zen Buddhism that means beginner’s mind.
Shoshin is a way to let down your guard and approach new things as if you don’t know anything. This concept helps you to avoid the hubris that comes with believing you are an expert. This concept encourages us to approach all of our work much like a beginner would. Beginners don’t know where to start, and they have no experience to apply to what they are pursuing. So they are fresh to learn all of the things that come from approaching a new topic, experience, or relationship.
Approaching our work with a beginner’s mind opens our minds to see new ways to do things, ways that may be more valuable than any with which you have ever approached work before. Shoshin can also mean to start anew in a relationship, to begin back at the beginning of when you first met someone. When you only had the hope of growth together. Shunryū Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind made this concept popular in the 1970s. This Zen teacher is most quoted as saying:
“in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few”
So we seek to approach our relationships, our businesses, and our craft from a new vantage point – one that lets us see in the way that a beginner would see. It’s seeing by starting over and relearning everything you have skipped over on your way to becoming an expert. What walls or hurdles are in the way of your business learning or growth? Or where do you believe you have hit a dead end in your relationships? Why not approach it with a beginner’s mind?
We teach and talk a lot about growth, expertise, and beginning again with agency and design firm owners, nonprofits, and other service-based consultancies. Sign up for our Newsletter and subscribe to our YouTube channel to learn more about beginner’s mind.
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