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Would you really want to experience wonder every single day?
An interviewer posed that question. It’s a fair one. I rephrased it for her:
Would you want to experience challenges with more openness and curiosity instead of constriction every day?
What if you could approach your work, your family, and yourself with more open intelligence? Would you want that?
To me, those questions are variations of the first, and most people do want that. It turns out that by tracking wonder, experts, team members, and creatives can cultivate a healthy Open Intelligence during their daily work flow.
The benefits of cultivating Open Intelligence:
- Healthier team relationships
- Greater cognitive resources for innovative problem-solving
- More value to customers, clients, a team, or an organization
Let’s get perspective.
What does wonder have to do with openness?
Openness to experience – in the field of psychology – refers to our measurable individual interest in art and beauty, our attention to inner sensations and feelings, our intellectual curiosity, our preference for variety, and our active imagination.
Your propensity to be open to new experiences or new points of view correlate to how effectively you approach the inevitable daily challenges that come your way as well as with how effectively you devote attention to the bigger projects you want to advance.
Wonder is the experience of surprisingly being cracked open to a new attitude, view, or insight. Sometimes the newness of wonder brings disorientation and confusion. Sometimes it brings delights. Sometimes it brings all of it.
Wonder is discreet, among our most discreet human experiences – meaning, it’s hard for psychologists to register and measure what happens in the body or brain when we’re in open wonder. That quiet quality also can make it challenging for you in your productivity even to notice let alone “track” this fundamental human experience that could provide a daily antidote to closed-minded approaches to projects.
You can cultivate openness.
When we wonder, we are more prone to accept what is in front of us before we chase after it or flee from it.
Think about when you’re faced with revising your organization’s website or changing how your team conducts meetings. There’s a tendency for us to shut down in the face of change - especially big change. But if you can notice yourself shutting down, you also can practice opening up to accepting the challenge for what it is - an opportunity to be creative, innovative, and valuable.
For a moment, however fleeting, your temples soften, your pupils widen, your mind opens.
Or think about how when you’re in meetings or conversations with a colleague you’ve known for a long time. There’s a natural tendency for your mind to have that person “pegged” and “categorized.” When you notice yourself sizing up a colleague, you can practice opening up instead of sizing up. You see with wonder eyes your co-worker with whom you’ve shared a thousand meetings. In a conversation, you don’t close it with your agenda or attempts to prove yourself. Instead, you turn in conversation with the other person, open to the other person’s point of view.
You might not experience wonder full-on in such work situations, but you are tracking wonder by cultivating openness.
This state of openness also literally expands vision (as opposed to fear, which constricts it). That is, when we experience such positive emotions, our peripheral vision widens, according to the work of Barbara Frederickson. Such open eye sight correlates with a greater range in your mind to solve problems and cope with daily work challenges.
Open Intelligence
This brings us to Open Intelligence - something you and your colleagues can cultivate every day. Open Intelligence is a crucial talent to cultivate among over-educated people, accomplished experts, and “authority figures” of all stripes, but it’s also an important talent for newbies, managers, and other team members.
Open Intelligence is one of four talents to track wonder. It’s the talent to receive what is there without judgment or projections or opinions. It’s what happens when you recognize the possibility of an idea or project – often where other people are put out or grumbling.
It’s a unique intelligence that we adults can cultivate. It’s the intelligence of beginner’s mind but more nuanced than what Zen masters describe.
When approaching problems, its three traits include cognitive border-crossing, circuitous approaches, and receptive exploration.
1. Cognitive border-crossing means, for instance, that if you sell real estate (one border), you might examine a book in anthropology (another border) to get ideas for how to build better relationships with your customers.
2. Circuitous approaches mean that you’re willing to consider the challenge from different points of view, which sometimes are less efficient and fraught with more uncertainty. The results, though, could lead to significant more innovation than had you and your team stuck with the most familiar, efficient route.
3. Receptive exploration means that when an immediate unexpected challenge arises, you respond with more questions than react and shut down. It means that when you begin a long-term project, you invite a discovery phase with more questions than answers.
A version of this article originally appeared on TrackingWonder.com.
