"Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace" (Wayne Dyer)

"People are very open-minded about new things – as long as they’re exactly like the old ones" (Charles Kettering)

I stumbled on the American supercoach Michael Neill two and a half years ago.

A shaky, handheld video of Michael popped up on YouTube. He'd recorded it during the Covid lockdowns. 

Something about the video caught my eye. So I hit play and as I watched, Michael started talking about “spirit” and “the divine” and “the power of the universe”. It sounded like woo-woo claptrap and it took me all of 30 seconds to flick to another vid. 

In those 30 seconds, Michael had moved onto my not-for-me pile.

A few weeks later, I came across a LinkedIn ad for Michael’s program Creating the Impossible (CTI). 

The ad intrigued me. 

I was still wary of Michael’s mystical mutterings. But CTI sounded so cool that I decided to roll the dice and sign up.

I’m glad I did. It’s no exaggeration to say CTI changed my life.

A bold statement?

Sure.

But without CTI, I doubt I would’ve ever found a way to enjoy the 9 to 5, I would've never felt calm behind my desk and I’d still be a prisoner to my monkey mind. My ambition, imagination and creativity would still be buried away. And I never would’ve have run my Mindset and Clarity Workshops (31 and counting now…) for my esteemed banking colleagues to help them find more fun and flow at work too.

Looking back, I can see one attitude led to this decision to put my doubts about Michael to one side.

That attitude?

Open-mindedness.

We could also call it curiosity or a willingness to explore.

But whatever we call it, I like the way the “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts talked about it.

When he was teaching, Alan often compared rigid thinking to a clenched fist and open-mindedness to an open hand. He’d explain that if you try to hold onto life too tightly, you create resistance instead of movement. 

You can’t clench your fist around flowing water. It’s opening your hand (a.k.a. your mind) which is the key to a life which flows.

And I quite agree.

It took me a long time to see this though. 

I think, on some level, I saw open mindedness as wishy-washy. Having a rock-solid stance which I could back up with evidence was the smarter move.

But open-mindedness has diddly squat to do with knowledge, intelligence or IQ.

If you want proof of that, look no further than two of the smartest men who graced God’s green earth.

The frizzy-haired brainbox Albert Einstein once said, “the measure of intelligence is the ability to change”

And over 2,000 years earlier, the parchment-powered philosopher Aristotle put plume to papyrus and penned “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”

i.e. if you think your IQ is rooted in your ideas, your knowledge or your view of how things work, you’ve got it back to front.

A subtle but important difference.

Why do I say important?

Because I got this wrong for years (maybe decades) and I can see exactly how this held me back. 

I always worked hard at school and I usually got good grades (let’s put a poker related uni blip to one side). And somewhere along the way I must’ve picked up the daft idea that an open mind was the same as an empty head and that acing tests & being smart were the path to getting ahead.

This idea looked so real that when I studied for my English GCSEs I’d rote learn my essays, just like an actor learns their lines. 

Then when I sat in the exam hall, all I needed to do was “press play” on what I’d learnt.

It worked too. 

I walked away from my English GCSE with a cheeky A*.

The further I went down this rabbit hole, the more it looked as if my knowledge was the key to everything. 

i.e. I was the guy who got results via what I knew.

And the more I relied on what I knew, the less willing I was to question what I knew and the less willing I was to recognise the limits of that knowledge. So I became more close-minded and shut myself off to anything which didn’t shore up what was already planted in my brain.

Funnily enough, it was stumbling across Michael Neill and gorging on his programs which started to put all this into question.

In 2023, I took Michael’s 7 month Genius Catalyst certification training.

During those 7 months, Michael spoke about thinking, overthinking and open-mindedness in a variety of wacky and wonderful ways.

On the Toronto leg of the training, one metaphor of Michael's really struck me. 

The metaphor was that of a radio set. 

Michael basically said that, just like a radio set receives a signal, our brains receive our thoughts. So our thoughts don’t come from our brains. They come into our brains. And listening to every thought that pops up is no different to blindly listening to every tune that comes on the radio.

Or, worse still, thinking that we ARE those tunes.

But if you want fresh thoughts, creative insights, solutions to problems and the clarity to make decisions, what’s key is having a mind that’s open to receiving something new.

Otherwise all you’re doing is relying on your old thoughts and becoming more of an expert on whatever thoughts got you stuck in the first place.

A bit like your very own mental echo chamber.

So lo and behold, even though knowing more can lead to acing tests and exams, it doesn’t help one iota when it comes to living a flowing, joyful and fulfilling life.

And guess what?

I’ve actually found life becomes better the less I know.

Yes, this is a complete flip-reversal. It's not what your boss or your teacher might tell you and it’s been a bit of a shock to the system to see this.              

Safe to say, sticking with what I know feels like wrapping a warm, comfy blanket around me. It’s secure and familiar and snuggly. So I certainly pop back to this blanket every now and then. 

But a rich, thriving, happy life doesn’t take place wrapped up inside a snuggly blanket. 

It takes place by leaving that certainty behind.

Curiously, I’ve found some things are much easier to be open-minded about than others.

Three years ago, the hoi polloi were gasping at me mouths agape when I started emailing daily. Daily!? OMG Tom! But to me it seemed completely natural to ignore the advice of a bunch of people standing on the sidelines and to follow my nose instead.

I certainly wasn’t betting the house on daily emails. I had no idea how they’d turn out.

But I kind of took the view “let’s see”.

Three years down the line, I can take stock. And I know without the daily emails I wouldn’t have snagged my column with Rob Wringham's print mag New Escapologist, Paul Millerd wouldn’t have published my Back to Work guest post and John Bejakovic wouldn’t have said “yes” when I ask if I could run my Subtraction Method training for his newsletter readers. 

Nor would I have made the connections I’ve made, learnt the skills I’ve learnt, found a reliable source of coaching clients and kept my piggy bank topped up with a few additional shekels.

Most of all, I would’ve shut the door on something that now brings me real joy. 

I LOVE writing these daily emails.

Now, contrast this with my working life.

I remember an old boss telling me that he thought I was very black and white with the way I approached my work. That I tended to take the fast track to an answer rather than sitting with a problem, exploring it and getting into the weeds & the nuance.

Today, if I’m being open-minded about it, I think he was right. I did see my work in black or white. And if it was black then good luck getting me to change my mind to white, and vice versa.

Incidentally, it wasn’t just the work itself. 

It was my relationship with work too.

To me, it was all “the system” and “the rat race” and "the rise and grind”. 

Even my old chessboard was less black and white than that kind of thinking.

If I hadn’t relaxed my grip here too and opened myself up to seeing work in a different light, I’m sure I'd still be getting pats on the back from my bosses on the way to another promotion but I’d also be utterly miserable with no idea which way to turn next. 

I’d probably also be signed off work with stress or some sort of mental health related illness. 

That was the way things were going.

But at some point I became a lot more open-minded about the fact that working harder and pushing for promotions and pay-rises wasn’t working. And even though I could eat out in fancy London restaurants and take nice holidays, they weren't making me happier. 

It took a long time to admit that to myself though.

It also took a long time to admit that all the softer stuff I was doing to try to find a bit more happiness in my job (meditating, mindfulness, going for walks, Wim Hof cold showers, positive thinking, affirmations, hitting the gym - the list goes on and on) weren’t helping either.

Everywhere I looked told me these were the answers to my stress.

But in one or two cases they were actually making things worse (ever find that you’re MORE riled up after a meditation session than you were before it?)

It was only when I started considering “what if what I think isn’t true?” that the light started to peek through the dusty curtain.

It was a very subtle shift.

Almost like going from being the thinker of my thoughts to the observer of my thoughts.

This is what the spiritual guru Ram Dass called “cultivating the witness”. 

But I still like the radio set analogy.

Either way, I have my own spidey sense for this now. 

There's space for thoughts to come to me, I see them arrive as they do and I can choose whether that thought is one I want to listen to or if it's one I want to mute, tune out, press pause on, turn the volume down on or if I want to switch to a different channel completely.

A good example of this?

Going back to my old job.

When the opportunity came up to go back to my old work, my old team and my old boss (even my old desk!), I stayed open-minded about it.

“Old Tom” definitely would’ve seen “going back” as “going backwards”. And even if he didn’t see it that way, he would’ve suspected other people would’ve seen it that way and that would’ve been enough of a reason not to go back.

So I would’ve been stuck between an almighty rock and a hard place, knowing on the one hand that my savings were now in the red but on the other hand not having the inner courage to also know that everything would still be okay (or amazing, in fact) if I did return to my old job.

Food for thought perhaps.

One last example while I’m tootling on about all this:

The coaching industry.

I know some people are hesitant about coaching or even see it as a big fat scam.

Just the other day I was on a subreddit where someone had posted “The problem with life coaching is that people simply don’t trust it”.

But this strikes me as a prime example of 1) a lack of open-mindedness and 2) mixing the raisins with the rice pudding (something I’ve written about in the past and will write about again soon).

In this case, the raisins are the coaching industry and the rice pudding are the people who work in the industry. 

In case it's not clear: 

There are bad apples in every industry but that doesn’t mean the industry is rotten. I work in banking after all. And while I doubt any of my colleagues would pick your pocket and sell you the lint, let’s not forget what happened in 2008.

So where does this leave us?

Well, as far as it looks to me, open-mindedness means to question, then question some more, and then when you’re done questioning to KEEP questioning and recognise that every answer is just the start of another question.

This is why the Dalai Llama said that Buddhism draws in open-minded people. The Buddha urged people to investigate things for themselves rather than simply commanding them to believe.

Quite right too.

Anyway, this email is much longer than most of my daily emails.

I’m over 2000 words now compared to my usual snappy 500.

But I figure if you’ve read this far then open-mindedness is something you’re open-minded about too (meta meta, nothing better).

In fact, you almost cannot NOT be open-minded if you’ve been reading my emails for a while now. 

That’s because I send my emails with such a metronomic ferocity that it would be impossible for you to agree with everything I say.

Yet you keep reading.

i.e. you don’t mind that you don’t agree with everything I write.

Thus you’re open-minded.

And doubly thus you’re more than welcome to stick around while the know-it-all’s go looking for a more predictable weekly or monthly newsletter. 

But enough. I think that's all I've got to say for now. 

Before I head off:

You might’ve gathered that I love writing about this stuff.

I love talking about it too.

If you host a podcast, run a community or you’re planning an event and you’d like a guest speaker to open a few minds and wax lyrical about any of the topics I’ve written about, I’m all ears. Just hit reply.

I’m also all ears if you know someone else looking for a guest speaker. Feel free to ping this email on to them if so.

Let’s see which radio sets this particular signal reaches...