Daily Learnings: Wed, Sep 18, 2024
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. — Rachel Carson
The Learner’s Mindset vs. Fear
I was listening today to the Follow Him podcast while I got ready. The guest this week is Dr. Craig Manning, a widely-known sports psychologist the coach of the BYU tennis team. Apparently he’s also associated with “The Fearless Mind”, and his website is located here. He mentioned something about the interesting relationship between fear and those that choose instead “the learner’s mindset”, or to always be learning.
Fear is a construct or a concept or idea theory that leads to the emotion, vital flight response, anger and high anxiety, not just anxiety, high anxiety, I want to be very specific there. Low to moderate anxiety is actually good for us, but high anxiety isn’t. And then they both lead to aggression, which is where we act on that anger or where we act on that high anxiety. If we continue to create bad mental habits throughout our lives, you’re actually thickening and generating more gray matter in the amygdala, so you become an ornerier, grumpier, more dysfunctional person as you age, unfortunately. The bigger that grows, the more you’re struggling to cope with life.
The direct opposite of fear is learning, because learning is constructs, theories, ideas, words, why we love the gospel principles, fear is the opposite. So if you’re always in a learning mentality, always learning from every situation in your life, always learning and becoming like Jesus Christ, I’d love to talk about that if we have time. That the ultimate level of happiness is who we are and who we’re becoming. If you have a learning mentality, there’s no fear because you don’t look at life as a threat, you look at life as something you can learn from to thrive.
Some key takeaways:
- The more that we continue in bad habits, especially mental narratives and negative outlooks on life, the more that we thicken gray matter in the amygdala, and the more we get set into our ways
- “The direct opposite of fear is learning”
- “If you have a learning mentality, there’s no fear because you don’t look at life as a threat, you look at life as something you can learn from to thrive”
As I thought about this, I realized how true it is. An example that I’ve been struggling with is the advent and progression of AI, especially as it has been making semi-irrelevant the technical and development skills that I’ve worked so long to build.
For a while now, I feel that fight or flight response when thinking about AI and its continued advances. However, just yesterday I got an interesting opportunity at work to potentially change much of my focus to instead learn about and leverage new AI tools and technology to reshape our business operations from the ground up. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the very next morning after learning about this opportunity, I hear that a good way to combat fear is to approach life with a learner’s mentality. As I consider this shift in my role, and the potential I have to now skill-up in this burgeoning tech, I feel the fear releasing, and the excitement growing.