Open Or Closed Minded?

How you react to problems and breakdowns can reveal a lot about your open-mindedness.

Problems and breakdowns are anomalies that occur when something doesn’t go as expected in a system that is otherwise supposed to operate predictably. Problems indicate that the world doesn’t work the way you thought it did. Therefore, these moments when you encounter problems can be worth their weight in gold if you pay attention.

Closed-minded individuals often overlook or gloss over problems. Instead of trying to understand the issue, they move on to make new assumptions and plans. Their approach is more like, “This didn’t work. No problem, I’ll try something else.”

In contrast, open-minded people dive in and try to comprehend the problem. This is often a difficult process because to understand what’s going wrong, they may have to question themselves- their own beliefs, ideas, and way of working.