by
Anas Ashour , Country Fresh Food Category Manager , The Sultan Center - Oman
In my opinion, an open mind is an internal thing, and the biggest sources of bias are from outside yourself.
Don't read anything or talk to anyone about the topic at the start. First, just think about it deeply by yourself, feed your mind the information it needs and see how far you can take your search for understanding by yourself.
Take your time doing this. Then you can expose your answer to other opinions and see if your ideas need modification.
An open mind starts from within yourself. You are training your own mind to explore, not filling it with a potentially chaotic rush of ideas from other sources. Testing your idea in that way should come after you yourself have examined the problem deeply yourself - in silence and solitude.
There are a few challenges:1. the easiest person to fool is yourself2. it's very hard to put yourself in another person's shoes3. emotions can be a way of understanding, but can also undermine it
And keep in mind that our brains are strongly programmed to make things fit into patterns (stereotypes) as fast as possible. This is hard-wired, and the struggle against this will be with you forever
