How fresh is your mind?

Learn from the children

If you want to see a fresh mind, just look at a child on Christmas morning. With all that eagerness and joyful anticipation, the moments before the festivities begin are as delicious to a child as the actual event. What makes this possible?

A fresh mind doesn’t take anything for granted. A fresh mind seeks answers. A fresh mind is curious.

When we’re curious, we enjoy new experiences and look for challenges. We keep an open mind. We’re eager to learn something new. Curiosity is contagious. Watching children on Christmas morning, we remember our own youth and feel it a little too.

If you want to make other people pay attention to what you have to say, keep them curious. One way of doing that is to show yourself enjoying an experience. It doesn’t matter what age we are. When we see someone having fun, we want to have fun too.

Smell the roses

Recently a good friend shared a photo of her son’s curiosity. One evening her husband came home with a dozen roses. She filled a jar with water, cut the flower stems and carefully arranged the roses as her husband watched. Then she paused for a moment and enjoyed the smell with a big smile on her face. Her one-year-old son was watching the entire time.

What happened next was practically inevitable. As soon as she went out of the room, her toddler son climbed onto the table to smell the roses. He was curious to find out exactly what made his mother smile. When he breathed in the roses, the toddler smiled too. Quietly watching from nearby, his parents caught a photo of the moment.

Foster your curiosity

We can learn so much from children and their curiosity. Entrepreneur Jim Rohn says that along with curiosity, children show us how important it is to experience excitement, faith and trust. But how do we cultivate curiosity as adults?

John Maxwell includes the Law of Curiosity in his book “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth”. Here are his ten tips for stimulating your curiosity:

1. Believe you can be curious. We don’t have to be children to let ourselves open to new thoughts and experiences.
2. Have a beginner’s mindset. Even if it’s something you have done before, if you approach it with the mindset of a person just learning, you will be more open to the full experience.
3. Make “why” your favorite word. The only bad question is the question you were embarrassed to ask. By the way, why is the sky blue?
4. Spend time with other curious people. If you surround yourself with people who love to ask the difficult questions and embrace learning something new, you will help each other grow.
5. Learn something new every day. It’s a simple goal that yields amazing results. In one year, you will have learned 365 things.
6. Partake in the fruit of failure. As Winston Churchill said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
7. Stop looking for the right answer. Narrow thinking kills curiosity. Try to not assume you know the answer. If you do, you may miss the question that matters the most.
8. Get over yourself. Being authentically curious requires humility. You must be willing to risk looking naive or having a misconception corrected.
9. Get out of the box. A curious business person challenges all assumptions.
10. Enjoy your life. Being curious is not merely an attitude. It is a way of life.

Curiosity is truly one of the keys to growth. So remember, never stop asking questions. Put no limits on your curiosity. To help yourself stay curious, hang out with children and feed on their inquisitiveness. Think like a beginner. Ask why.

Call to Action

Unleash your curiosity by getting up every morning, excited for the day, looking forward to new experiences and surprises. Learn something new every day and ask lots of questions. Then and only then will you have captured that child-like mindset.

The best is yet to come. It starts with you.

Your friends,
The UpCloseTeam