Why Open-Mindedness Is a Terrible Approach to Finding a Career Direction

Lots of people are currently in the midst of deciding what kind of career direction that you want to go into. You might relate to this especially if you are thinking of setting up a business, or if you intend to go freelance.

This is May, I’m an astrologer with 16 years of experience seeing clients in consultations. Most of what I do is literally speaking with hundreds if not thousands of people about their careers. And in this article, what I am about to share are some insights to a phrase which come up very commonly during client consultations when people are thinking about their career direction. And this phrase is;

“I’m open minded”

When my clients share this during consultations, immediately it flags up several issues and it is probably one of the worst approaches that we can take when you are trying to select a career direction. To start things off, these are 3 things you’ll want to take note of;

#1: It tends to generate too many options

Most people turn to their friends and peers when trying to find a direction, saying that they are “open minded”, open to any suggestions. And friends being friends, typically with the keenness to help, can provide many suggestions. Faster than you know it, it is quite easy for you to very quickly accumulate a few hundred options of paths or options that you could take.

And then now you probably face an opposite problem, which is that you confuse yourself and then you end up coming back potentially to an astrologer saying; “Well, I don’t know which path to take, there are just too many options”.

#2: Outsourcing the responsibility

The second issue with the behaviour and mentality of being “open minded”, is that it puts the responsibility on other people to help you generate ideas.

This can potentially suggest that you might be too lazy or too tired to come up with your own ideas. Often motivated by the need to gather as many suggestions from others as possible and then to select the best option from those suggestions. This might not seem very much like a problem, but I’ll like to share an analogy to help illustrate the point.

Imagine that you are a consumer and that getting your needs served and catered to, is probably of the most important criteria that a business should provide or meet. And if the business owner started the business out of just purely based on the suggestions of other people and much less of understanding what the consumer needs and requires, you’ll find that meeting and providing what the consumer expects out of the product or service, may not be the top priority of the business. Hence for this reason, starting a business based on suggestions from your friends is probably not the best way or to lay a good foundation for the business.

#3: Means of avoiding the commitment

Lastly in my opinion, this may be one of the most difficult issue among the 3 to deal with. When you seek suggestions, the percentage chance of you implementing and following through to set up a business based on the suggestion is extremely low.

Why this is so is because, there isn’t a penalty of NOT implementing and carrying out the idea. It stems from the mindset of ONLY doing the idea which you consider it to be a good idea. This then form a norm for not following through and the lack of accountability, which results in you not executing what might have been actually a good idea. Consider that there might have been many ideas which might have been very good ideas but because of the lack of accountability ended up becoming just “good ideas”.

Power of committing to one

So if for those of you who are looking for a direction to go, whether you are setting up a freelance venture or a business, consider that you can only be successful if you commit to one idea, one business and preferably should be something that you select powerfully by yourself. The motivation should be preferably driven by a desire to improve the lives of the people that you are going to serve. With a strong personal reason or purpose, this fuels the commitment to follow through on making that business successful.

And for those of you who are perhaps still confused, or still have a lot of options, possibly one of the best things that you could do for yourself is to decide today that you no longer want to be open minded. Select the business for yourself with the intention of making a commitment instead of wanting to explore multiple options and suggestions. I’ll like to end this off with a simple scenario;

If you are shopping for a shoe, and you find something that fits, its time to commit and bring it to the cashier and pay for it. Immediately, you are the proud owner of a new pair of shoes. Otherwise, being open-minded and wanting to explore other options, you will find yourself going from shopping mall to shopping mall and still not getting a pair of shoes – not getting a satisfactory result or a desired outcome.

With that, I thank you very much for getting to the end of this article and I hoped that I have provided you some insights to helping you define a career direction that fulfils your true purpose. I wish you all the best in the journey of self-discovery and transformation.

May