Openness

Opening your world to new possibilities
Openness, as one of the “Big Five” factors, opens the gate of mind for us to see the world differently. In today’s fast-paced complex world where things may be far from what we used to know, cultivating our openness is an essential attitude to learn new things, to meet new people, and to embark on new adventures.

Openness reflects your levels of imagination, creativity, and curiosity. Being open in many aspects of life often enables us to engage with multiple perspectives and see more possibilities in new and unusual things. Before jumping into what exactly is openness and how to further develop your level of openness, why don’t you spend a few minutes on Truity and see how open you are?

Seeking new experiences beyond the comfort zone
Openness can be clearly expressed in our attitudes and behaviours. Having a higher level of openness usually symbolizes the tendency to accept new ideas, feelings, people, and boundaries. With openness, we are able to enjoy the seeking and reflection of new experiences where it also empowers us to have more access to our thoughts, feelings, and awareness.

Notably, being open also means embracing the fact that everyone’s level of openness is going to be different from yours. Our ability and interest in processing “complex stimuli” differs. Below are the six traits, or dimensions, that shapes your level of openness.

As openness is often associated with creativity, you may also dive deeper into the four factors (i.e. explicit cognitive ability, intellectual engagement, affective engagement, and aesthetic engagement) mentioned in our video illustrates the relationship between opening up and creative achievement.

We all need openness to enable our own journey of awakening. Otto Scharmer’s Theory U takes you on a mind-changing deep dive into the importance of openness in this complex world with uncertainties. Developing our open mind, open heart, and open will empower us to overcome the three resistances of openness: ignorance to listening, greed to love, and fear to courage. This enables us to connect to our best future possibilities and create powerful breakthrough ideas.

Learning more about the three resistances of openness that allows you see situations from new perspectives and act from the emerging whole.

Slowing down to embrace
What is often missing in our current societies is our ability to enable deep seeing, which needs to happen collectively and across boundaries. Openness is what we need in order to truly develop true listening, or as Otto Scharmer puts as the four levels of listening. The four levels are Downloading, Factual, Empathic, and Generative.

These four dimensions help us to reach higher levels of openness by first being an attentive presence and interpreting messages, then showing empathy and acting generatively. When mastering the skills of listening, we experience life as the others as we are trying to enter their world. Listening for openness generates real changes and creates unexpected outcomes.

As a listener, here are some tips for you to reach a higher level of openness:
1. Step back, look at the big picture.
2. Focus on being present
3. Make good use of silence and pauses in a conversation
4. Slow down
5. Listen to learn, do not judge