“Nothing impedes your vision more than a point of view.” — Don Aminado

Life has a fascinating way of teaching us lessons: if there is a certain thing you have to learn, some knowledge you need to acquire, some experience you need to gain, some decisions you have to make, the same situation will carry on repeating itself over and over again until we either learn our lesson or find a sensible way of coping with that particular issue.

Guest author: Pedro Alvares

Our mindset has the biggest impact over how we react and what response we choose to give. There are probably no two people in the world whose thinking processes would 100% correlate with each other.

When we talk about an angle of view we realize that every person has his own thinking pattern which comprises of his hopes, beliefs, core moral values and principles, religion, and experience.

We are raised with a base of values dictated by our culture, environment, spirit of time, we inherit outlooks from our families, and choose to be surrounded by companions who share our views. That is how our ideas about this world is shaped.

Naturally, we are bound by our knowledge and experience, and we live carrying these ideas as the only true and valid ones, so when we face ideas which question or impugn our own, we are not capable of accepting them. What is more, some of us react more keenly to the ideas which push us out of our comfort zone creating false unnecessary dilemmas.

It happens because of one’s inability to distance oneself from one’s emotions and lack of control over one’s consciousness when it comes to perception of another person’s angle of view. The truth is that knowledge and experience are ambiguous, and open-mindedness is a beneficial thing to have.

A person sticking to a particular point of view could be considered strong-minded but, unfortunately, quite often our outlook and judgement is based not on experience, observation, and evaluation, but rather on stereotypes, ignorance and “I know better than others” factor.

It would be extremely useful for the humanity if people were more aware of their own way of thinking, of the way they evaluate things, make decisions and judgements. Most of us have never thought of exercising convergent thinking —  refining of ideas, so they are actually worth something, or even critical thinking —  evaluating the role of evidence to support our opinions, the role of emotions and usage of logic and reasoning in order to help ourselves make decisions.

Perfection simply does not exist in our world, that is the reason human beings are born able to absorb things, and by comparing ourselves with something else we finally head in a good direction, a right path to follow.

Once you consent to having an open-minded perception of the world, you deny the fact that you are all-knowing, and admit instead that there are possibilities you might have not considered, that the truth you have found might have had more to it than you realized.

Open-mindedness implies willingness to embrace new ideas and opinions of others, and considers the probability that you might be incorrect or might even completely change your own perspective. Learning experiences of other people broaden your mind and expand your way of thinking.

Taking advantage of these experiences would allow one to overcome biases in perception by connecting one with new people and developing cooperative attitude, which would be tremendously beneficial for our world.

For sure, recognizing and altering your way of thinking can be a long process depending on what patterns of thinking you employ and how badly you want to change. Of course, we cannot influence mindsets of all people, but the woeful truth suggests that the majority of us have no desire to change ourselves so far.

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