Embracing the Beginner’s Mind

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

Do you remember how you felt when you started writing your first story?

The excitement. The eagerness. The joy.

Shoshin, or ‘beginner’s mind’ is a concept from Zen Buddhism that encourages us to approach life with the heart of a beginner: with openness, curiousity, and enthusiasm.

It’s easy – especially as we age – to become stuck in our ways. To believe that we already know everything. That we’ve already tried everything. We become closed off to learning, and closed off to change. The beginner drinks in learning like water.

I chose to use the name Beginner’s Mind for a few reasons. For one, because in many ways, I’m still a beginner. I’m a beginner to coaching authors and a beginner to being a serious writer myself. Second, I believe we can all benefit from continual learning and self-improvement.

Adults don’t try new things very often. It’s easy to forget what it felt like to be brand new at something. Failure to remember that feeling sometimes creates a gap between teachers or coaches and the people who need them most. We get so far ahead that we start taking for granted that everyone has mastered the basics. Not everyone has.

In my day job as a hair stylist, (that’s where I learned all of my small business skills,) there’s a well-known educator named Sam Villa. He says that the stylists who consistently learn the most from his fundamentals classes are the stylists who have been doing hair the longest. Over time, they fell into bad habits and lost track of the basics, or they developed complicated processes and forgot how to do things simply.

Even though my focus is on helping authors who are absolute beginners to the world of business, I hope that over time I can uplift the author community at large.

With that being said, I want you to question what I have to say.

Another tenet of Buddhism is to never take anything on faith. The Buddha encouraged his followers to listen to his teachings, contemplate them, and decide for themselves whether or not they ring true. This goes not only for what I share, but for anything you learn about writing and publishing. Think critically, try things out, and determine what is right for you.

I wish you all of the best on your author journey, and I leave you with this wisdom: Enjoy every step of the process, and experience it as if for the first time.

ACTION STEPS:

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