One thing that I notice about myself and also others is the defensive effort in the conversations. There should be something “uncomfortable/ wrong” if I would say “I don’t know about it”. Rather, we try look around to advocate that “I know it and that I may not be wrong”.
One day, my friends and I had a conversation/ debate on sex before marriage. There had been obviously around different points of views on sex and gender. At the end, we ended up the conversation by saying “this is my frame and that is your frame”. The thing is we keep holding on our own points of view regardless of a variety of perspectives.
Noticing in conversations, many of us hold the fear of “loosing face” or else, the fear of failure. I suppose this fear has been embedded since our childhood. As I could not know more than that, meaning “I am not smart enough” then I may not be accepted by a group of people. That’s how we may try hard to say “I have known it all”.
The thing is by the effort of “I know”, it may disable our learning capacity and block us from learning new things that we might not ever see before. It is the fact that we may have flaws/ limits in our current learning and experiences.
Then I suppose the first step to open up learning spirit is learning to be aware of and accept our learning flaws/ limits, then turning them into the willingness of learning something beyond us, that we may have ever not reached out.
Saying “I don’t know” and asking “may you help me to understand more?” would help us to learn and see more what we haven’t experienced. By saying that, we learn to open a new door of new discoveries/ learning.
Now what else could you see this differently?
