Are you more open-minded than the average person?

Did you know our brains are wired to resist uncertainty, favoring what feels familiar and safe? This natural tendency often makes us less open-minded than we realize. The funny part? Studies show that most of us genuinely believe we’re very open-minded.

In this new Two-Minute Tip, I share a comical personal story about how my husband and I fell into this very trap. Watch now to discover how you might be unintentionally stifling creativity or holding back progress—and learn how to change that!

• Read the video transcript

  Well, I'm in the process of working on some home office redesigning. I'm thinking I'll add a paint color to this back wall. I have some new artwork coming in and the thing I'm most excited about is this big piece of furniture back here that I just moved in here.

  So, funny story about this piece of furniture. Many months ago we ordered this gigantic media console for our media room from West Elm. And when it, when it came, the furniture deliverers, had a heck of a time getting it up the stairs and into the media room. It's this huge heavy piece of furniture. Well, they delivered it and we started looking at it and there were some scratches on it. Not a huge deal, except this wasn't a cheap piece of furniture. So we reached out to West Elm and they were so kind, responded and said, oh, we'll send you a new piece. So they sent it. But when they delivered the new piece, we didn't realize that meant they were just leaving the old piece with us. And so the movers just shifted the old one into the hallway and set up the new one.

  So for months now, we have had this huge media console sitting in our hallway upstairs and I had this vision of wanting to move it into my office because I thought it could help create a great Zoom meeting background. But my husband looked at it and he said, there is absolutely no way this can make it into that room with the angles of the hallway. No way it will fit in there.

  Well, over the break, I was stuck home one day with a sick child and I thought, you know what? I'm gonna give this a whirl. So I got some of those furniture sliders. 'cause this thing is so heavy, like it was so hard for me to even get the sliders under the legs. But I did. I took the door off and slowly I was able to, you know, centimeter by centimeter, inch it into this room. And I was so proud and so excited, and so, new background coming.

  Anyway, long story short, what's my point here? My point is that our brains so prefer what we know to be certain and true. And they really struggle to be open to something that maybe seems a little uncertain. So in this case, seemed very unlikely that this would fit. And so we both just kind of wrote it off as impossible right away.

  And we do this in work all the time, right? Somebody shares a new idea and we think there's no way that's gonna work and we just write it off right away.

  In fact, I recently read from Shane Snow in his book, oh gosh, what was the name of it? Dream Teams that 95% of people think they are more open-minded than average. That's logistically impossible. 95% of us cannot be above average. So here we think we're open-minded, but in fact we aren't very open-minded and we quickly make assumptions and decisions.

  And so I want to challenge you. If you are someone in your organization who tends to struggle to be open-minded to new ways of doing things, especially if you've been there a long time, pause, catch yourself making those quick judgements and instead, challenge yourself to give it a shot. Challenge yourself to consider. Maybe this media console could just wiggle its way into this tiny office. Challenge your assumptions on how open-minded you actually are.