The most precious times in life may be those that jolt you out of your normal way of seeing the world

Most people value creativity and look to it to help them change. Yet change is more often about letting go of old ideas than finding new ones.

The main difficulty with change comes from being sufficiently happy with the way things are that you see no need to alter anything. Life may not be perfect, but it’s good enough; the effort and uncertainty change brings look too great to be worth it.

That’s why those moments when you’re fully open to change are so precious. Miss them and the possibility of renewal goes on indefinite hold.

Robert Thurman, Buddhist scholar and friend of The Dalai Lama, describes such times as ‘teachable moments’ — times when you recognize your current ways of thinking and coping aren’t adequate for what’s in front of you; times when life serves up something you can’t handle, at least with the approaches you’ve used before.

Your mind is armor-plated with habits

Most of the time, your habits, ingrained social conditioning and long-term values have your mind tightly barricaded against the possibility of any significant change. When challenges to your outlook come along, they pretty much bounce off this armor-plating.

“Why change it, if it ain’t broke?” you ask yourself. It’s a reasonable question, of course, but it does have a tendency to leave you stuck where you are. That is, until something comes along that not only convinces you — at least for a moment — that it really is broke, but maybe breaks it some more.

When events are powerful enough, that doorway to your innermost mind is forced open — yet only for a little while. Immediately, all your habits and past conditioning set up a howl of protest and start closing it again, even if the result will be a choice or action that won’t turn out well. They prefer to keep the status quo, regardless of anything else. Wait too long and the slim opening to real change will be shut tight again.

For a few, precious minutes or hours, your mind is receptive to fresh ways of seeing the world. It’s an opportunity not to be missed.

Teachable moments may hurt too

I’ve described this process in stark terms to make an important point: having your defenses broken down like this hurts — often quite badly.

Prolonged periods of being put mentally out of joint by a clash between what you thought you knew for certain and what overturns that belief aren’t that common — most people won’t allow them to happen — but a few mystics have chosen to experience them. They are what is often called ‘the dark night of the soul‘: a terrifying period of confusion, pain, and bewilderment that seems essential to any major breakthrough into a different way of experiencing life.

The good news is that, for most of us, our teachable moments come in far smaller doses: more like the dark half-hour of the soul.

However, the point is the same: during teachable moments, you’re likely to feel confused and disoriented. The temptation is to push such feelings away as quickly as possible and return to the comforting old certainties. Do that and the teachable moment is wasted.

Mistakes will always produce most teachable moments

You only ever learn anything from success once — the first time it happens. Repeating the success simply reassures you that it still works.

Then comes the day when — horror of horrors — whatever is it doesn’t work. You try again. Still no success. You start to feel puzzled and irritated. You try yet again. Nothing. Your world is slipping out of its habitual paths.

That’s a teachable moment. Every failure is one. You can shout and swear and try to shut your mind to the problem — blame someone else, the government, the weather, global warming, your cat — or you can seize the moment and learn something, before your mental defenses snap back into place and convince you it was ‘just a blip’ to be ignored.

Here are some ways to take full advantage of precious ‘teachable moments’:

• Push yourself consider the exact opposite to your normal way of thinking. Even if it’s not the answer, it will allow you to see past your habitual mind-set. For example, if you usually like to plan carefully before acting, imagine what might happen if you just took the first, most obvious decision and allowed things to develop from there.
• Let your imagination run wild. Play with analogies and metaphors for the situation. Challenge your mind with thoughts like: “Suppose I was 20 years younger (or 20 years older, or the opposite gender, or had unlimited money, or decided to re-locate to Africa), what might I do then?”
• Recombine known options into all sorts of novel combinations. Allow your mind to play. Create as many combinations as you can, then pick a few and see how you might make them work. The vast majority of truly creative thoughts are based on new combinations of what is already known.
• Don’t allow the fear of failure to freeze your mind. There are no failures; only actions that didn’t turn out as you anticipated. Take them and track what happened, using that knowledge to produce more alternatives — this time, backed up by actual experience. Teachable moments may come along in groups.
• Above all, do something. Anything is better than nothing. Any action will lead to a result you can learn from, even if it doesn’t work out exactly as you wanted.

Teachable moments of real open-mindedness are worth more than gold or diamonds. Try never to waste them. Use every one to learn something. There’s a name for the rare people who make this a way of life. We call them ‘geniuses’.

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