A Beginner's Mindset

Think back to when you learned something new for the first time, for example, doing a back squat. You likely had many questions:

Where does the bar go?

Where should your feet be?

What do you do with your hands?

How low is “below parallel”? (Along with the feeling that it is much lower than you thought it was)

But now, after having done back squats for a while, you don’t put as much thought into those things, and you do them automatically. The key point here is that once you are no longer a beginner, you forget what it was like initially. This comes into play when trying to share an experience with someone for the first time: you’ve forgotten what it looks like from their point of view and, as a result, skip over things foreign to them.

I’ve created hundreds of videos teaching people how to write code. One of the things that made those videos successful was capturing that beginner’s mindset. The scripts for many of my videos were written as I learned that particular coding language for the first time, resulting in capturing the questions I had as a beginner. Doing so made sure that I answered the questions a beginner would have long after I had forgotten those were questions.

This same technique applies to you too. As you interact and share your knowledge, experiences, and lessons in your community, try remembering what it was like as a beginner. When sharing your knowledge, active listening can reveal questions that may go unasked. Active listening is the act of discerning the difference between “what was asked” and “what was really meant to be asked.” For example, I work with clients to build new software frequently. Most of my clients have an idea and have thought about it a lot. The result is that they no longer have the beginner’s mindset, even for their own product. So my job is to quickly build the “thing they asked for” to determine “what they really meant to ask for.”

The first goal of answering a question is to determine what they really meant to ask.

Another approach to solving the beginner’s mindset is to start from the ground up. Guardian Training & Consulting does a great job of this. If you’ve ever taken one of their courses, you’ve experienced it firsthand. This approach involves starting at the ground and working your way up through every body part until you’ve completed the full motion. For example, start at the feet: where do they belong? Knees? Hips? Chest? Shoulder? Etc…. by the time you make it to the head, you’ve established the starting point; now, focus on moving the body parts corresponding to the desired outcome.

So, how does this relate to community?

Because at some point, someone will look to you as the expert. Oddly, when this happens, you will not feel like the expert.

But here we are.

Remember the beginner’s mindset and apply the techniques learned here to share what you know. An expert is not someone who knows everything about a given topic. It’s someone who knows more than the person looking for help or advice.