If you're someone who struggles with being spontaneous, you are probably lacking in a personality trait called openness to experience, according to a psychologist.
Openness to experience is one of the 'Big Five' personality characteristics, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas Art Markman tells Jim Mora.
He is the founding director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations.
It reflects how you are motivated when faced with a new situation or opportunity, while some people embrace new things and others simply don't.
However, there are ways those of us who are less spontaneous by nature can start saying yes to new opportunities more often.
Art Markman is a professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin Photo: The University of Texas at Austin
“If you are one of those people who finds new ideas to be frightening then really the first step is to begin to ask yourself, well what is the worst thing that could happen here," he says.
“Because I think a lot of times we stick with the tried and true, not because tragedy would ensue if we tried something different, but rather because we’re just worried about it. We don’t know how to predict all of the things that might happen. So, we reject new things just because they’re new.”
Markman says the danger in that is you restrain yourself to live a life that is only as good as what we are able to imagine today.
Whereas, if you allow yourself to engage to some of the opportunities that come along, particularly the ones that are unlikely to lead to tragedy, you may discover that you are able to lead a life that is far better than anything you could have imagined, he says.
Although we are often our own worst critic, over representing the negative.
“I think a lot of times we do worry a lot that if I go and do this people are going to think badly of me and then I’ll never get over it," he says.
"But actually, all of us have been to a bad presentation, a bad talk, a bad performance, and generally speaking that does not sour you on that individual forever. You think ‘well, they didn’t do so well’.”
The key is to call out the positives in doing something new and recognising these as a worthwhile possibility when engaging in something new. This allows people to work up the motivation to engage in something new, overriding the stress and anxiety that may also be felt.
He advises we seek to understand those who are more open to new opportunities, their calculus when taking risks in pursuit of new experiences.
“I do think that there are some people who do blindly say yes to things… But I think that there are a lot of people who are very thoughtful about those opportunities that they do say yes to and those that they don’t. So those people who take risks, still take calculated risks.”
He uses the example of entrepreneurs who start new businesses – although there is risk here, these people are careful about the risks they take on.
Not to try things causes regret later in life, while those who take risks usually don’t have regrets they tried something, Markman says.
He makes the distinction between adequate thinking and smart thinking. Adequate thinking involves solving a problem the way other people do, for example,emptying vacuum bag when it is full.
The inventor of Dyson vacuums James Dyson, however looked at the essence of the problem. He had knowledge of saw mills and how these employed technology to separate debris from the air. He took this industrial 'cyclone' technology and employed it when designing a new vacuum cleaner that got rid of the bag altogether. His smart solution was the genesis of a company that now makes hundreds of millions of dollars per year, Markman says.
Success, in the end, comes down to the effort to be smarter and the right kind of effort, using our unique creativity. Building a broad base of knowledge is key to creating the conditions where this can be achieved.
“What you need to do is learn as much as possible about as many things as you can and in particular to learn not just what there is in the world, but how it works," he says.
“How things around you work, because that knowledge, called causal knowledge of the world, that is the knowledge that really effective thinkers use to solve new problems.”
He says once you have this broad body of knowledge you are of reminded of it when faced with a problem and can use it to effectively solve problems.
Even if that isn’t possible, you can still endeavour to describe the problem in a different way to come to the essence of the problem. This can release new ways of solving the problem.
The book describes various types of thought and action, including motivational brain, the social brain, cognitive brain and the jazz brain, which he defines as our ability to improvise with all the knowledge and skills you possess.
He says with we over emphasise academic achievement and this capacity to solve problems smartly is open to everyone.
“I’m not one of these people who says organised education isn’t important," he says. "It is, not what it’s doing is just teaching you the scales and I think that if you want to be able to improvise you certainly need those scales, but you also need to expose yourself to other opportunities in order to figure out how those scales might be played in the real world.
“How do people actually go about trying to solve problems because one of the things about the education that we get is you spend a tremendous amount of your time answering questions that the person who asked the question already knows the answer to, which is not the way we live the rest our lives.
"For most of the rest of our lives we try to answer questions that the person doesn’t know the answer to and sometimes we answer questions that nobody knows the answers to yet and we get very little practice at that in our schooling.
“So, we have to develop the ability to be able to solve problems that no one solved. We have to develop the capacity to be comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing the answer to something and we have to be willing to trust ourselves that, even if we don’t have the answer now, that we’ll get it if you continue to work on it."
