Openness as a key evolutionary process.

 â€œOpenness to experience (or simply openness) is a basic personality trait denoting receptivity to new ideas and new experiences. It is one of the five core personality dimensions—known as the five-factor model of personality, or Big 5—that drive behaviour. People with high levels of openness are more likely to seek out a variety of experiences, be comfortable with ambiguity, and pay attention to their inner feelings, more than those who are lower on the trait. They tend to exhibit high levels of curiosity and often enjoy being surprised.” (psychology today)

Despite all the positive connotations openness is spontaneously triggering, is often related with exposure, signalling to some people threat, with more and more human beings preferring "closing doors" to anything new, in the name of safety and control. Superiority misperception is often another barrier, preventing openness to people/ideas, limiting active listening and open heart approach.

 â€œI know better” or even worse “I know everything” are some claims most of the times done in an even subconscious way. Disagreement to our point of view can be easily received as even a sign of disrespect, rather than of thoughtful respect and sharing sign, driving people to prefer not to “waste” resources over listening or understanding others’ view and arguments. It is interesting that the "smarter" you get the more liable to fall for stereotypes and restrain growth. Adam's Grant research during his latest book, Think Again uncovers some truths that many have pondered. Some of my favorites include:

• The higher your IQ score, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes. Grant explains that those with a higher IQ are faster at recognizing patterns. He suggests that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
• Those who are intellectually curious and open to new ideas are more successful.
• People who score lower on emotional intelligence (EQ) tests are more likely to overestimate their skills and dismiss their EQ scores as inaccurate or irrelevant.

But why do humans despite their IQ levels, often want to “close doors’ via creating a world of “us” vs. “them” and how can the powerful “need of belonging” when in misuse, lead to polarization? How can the intention of defensiveness lead to offensiveness the same time? Why "different" instead of being appealing can be perceived as threatening?

We tend to make artificial divisions everywhere, we become extremely skilful on noticing the differences vs. similarities we have among each other. In fact we are more similar than we think.

“Our genes affect not only our bodies and behaviours, but also our societies, which are surprisingly similar worldwide. Humans everywhere experience love, make friends, have social networks, cooperate and create societies that are generally based on caring and trust. From exploring different cultures and even different species we can learn a lot about human societies. There is much more that unites us than divides us worldwide”. Humans are created on leaving in teams and the fundamental reason is that “we each carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society.” N.A.Christakis

Society is far broader than a small homogeneous team, shall enable in its boundaries acceptance, inclusion and diversity. So despite all above, I keep on wondering what other reasons can keep as "closed" in our own walls or in our teams’ nutshell.

What is the reason behind?

What could be the reason on building walls among each other, when our tendency as a human nature is to build relations and affairs? This answer might have more than one explanations. From age of Homo Sapiens Danger and survival instinct was the one that made people create teams in order to survive. “You watch my back and I watch yours”. Safety was the number one need, when in fight or flight mode for 24h. But this was natural with humans creating teams so as to protect each other and ensure “fight or flight” instinct alertness. Nowadays, as kids we could easily create stories of building walls to protect ourselves within our imaginary worlds! Forts made from sand, or a giant cardboard box that protect us. Burying ourselves in blankets and pillows protected and saved from dragons. Walling ourselves off from our enemies — real or imagined — to fight heroic battles until dinner time. Even for us as girls, princess was within fortress so as to be protected, awaiting for the prince to rescue her. Being human means there’s a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we’re all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.

What is not clear in our minds is that walling ourselves vs. others, is walling ourselves from our own possibilities. Possibilities to live a bigger better life, with unconstrained conscious thinking enriched with empathy and inclusion. And we are the ones paying the cost of limiting our evolution.

What is the cost?

We pay less attention to the evolution around us and we become less aware of the whole environment, respectively we exclude ourselves from our natural environment and our tendencies and our fears instantly grow and we become even more introvert feeling consequently even more exposed. How can we GROW if we do not grow our horizons, and how can we grow our horizons if we do not get exposed to new experiences even to those that at a glance do not indicate a clear benefit, there we might have to look further and deeper...

It’s easy to restrict ourselves — without even realizing it — to people like us and to views we agree with. Our story telling needs verification and its easy as we get older to avoid the heat of unrevealing new realities. Most of the times when we exchange arguments and discuss, we are biased and intentional on supporting our own view not even giving a chance on enriching our content with a different perspective. We do not have "time to waste" is a common excuse we buy in, so as not to bother at all, but we give away much more. At a point of time we have such a great need to verify our own story telling, so we intentionally or subconsciously exclude any option that might get in this way of verification and doesnot meet this golden standard we have set.

We become actually less safe. We have a constant feel of protection towards anything unknown. This instead of increase safety has the opposite result, since our loneliness can be our main danger with no one else being on our side. Safety means knowing how to protect yourself not just knowing.

We waste precious resources. Trying to wall ourselves off from entire groups of people is exhausting and inefficient. Fear is unbreakable if you consistently fight not not feel it and not embrace it and understand where it relies on.

We do not evolve. Walling yourself and preventing from interaction creates an area with no stimuli that provide evolution. Any new idea any new inspiration could trigger self-acceleration. Walls cannot provide it and self-improvement can have a limited effect.

What can we do about this?

Accept and embrace our inner wall-builder. The more we know about our own impulses to find enemies, the sooner we’ll recognize it when people are trying to manipulate us for their selfish ends. This also might be an opportunity to strengthen our own abilities which is always useful for our own evolution.

Give our wall-builder a place to play. Whether it’s barricading ourselves off in sand forts or escaping from the castle as a princess, we can channel the urge to find heroes and enemies into a more healthy competition cluster. There is a new word that we can create which is called “co-opetition” which indicates co-operation via healthy competition as well.

Do not “bucket” people. Do not paint whole groups of people with the same tarring brush. People are same but different and same colour, gender, race, uniform are not indicators for their human behaviours which can vary. Also people evolve, change and we are not allowed to nail labels on them based on criteria, so even if we place a label there are non “for ever labels” and for sure not “bucketing”.

Find ways to know the people who seem alien. We are all same but different. But different is not a priori good or bad. You may feel uncomfortable or even bored in the beginning (if not threatened) to get familiar with people that seem different than you. As time might pass by you may be surprised by your own self on new things that you can discover completely transforming your view even ideas. Only by understanding that we co-exist in this world in a gap or a difference that might never be bridged, is a valuable insight by itself.

Young women and men from all corners of society can work together to fight real common enemies like homelessness, poverty, illiteracy, diseases, now plague — and in the process get to know the best of our shared humanness and the Greatness of being human beings TOGETHER.

Be open does not mean lose yourself - but further exploit it.

There is a whole world out there full of opportunities and experiences why to miss it?

After all what life is for, if not experiencing

the real YOU

within this great WORLD!