How To Broaden Your Mind

Expanding your horizons always plays a key role in your personal growth. The more you stretch your limits and challenge your mind the more experiences you’ll have and the more knowledge you’ll acquire. Broadening your mind is all about learning and constantly being in the process of learning. There are lots of ways that can stimulate your interest in learning and going for new experiences, thus creating the right opportunities to broaden your mind. Here’s a few of them:

1.Travelling
For many people, this is the first word that comes to their mind when it comes to the idea of expanding your horizons and broadening your mind. Of course, they’re right. When we visit new places, plenty of interactions occur. First, we interact with a new place itself, a different environment, consisted of its own unique traits, such as its landscapes or urban planning, its landmarks, its buildings and their architecture. All these create new images and bring us unique feelings, leading to the emergence of an entirely new perspective; a perspective of the world, the people, our surroundings, ourselves.

Secondly, we interact with different people. Although every person in the world is unique and one of a kind as personality, people who live in a different place from ours, either it’s the nearest village to ours or a country of another continent, can have a different culture, customs, habits, alimentary and musical preferences, ways of entertainment, religion, language and mentality in general. These factors determine significantly the way we interact with each other. And it’s exactly the exchange of opinions and beliefs derived by the previous factors that broaden our mind. How? By diversity. The more various perspectives we experience, the more new ways of thinking are introduced to us.

2.Meeting new people
Following the point that communication with people from different places broadens our ways of thinking, meeting new people regardless of where they live is also another factor for us to consider. As it’s already been mentioned, everyone is unique, with their own unique traits, temperament, talents, strengths and weaknesses and preferences. Therefore, it’s quite likely that their opinions can offer us a new perspective on any topic or area of our lives, which we might have never perceived otherwise. A different view not only does it expand our horizons but can also change our lives radically as a catalyst that shifts our mentality. For example, you may think that it’s ”too late” for you to change career and pursue what you love to do. Nonetheless, you meet a stranger at a bus stop. During the conversation, you realise that they make a living of what you love to do and that they also changed their career successfully at the age of 65. Their perspective for work and life can inspire you to make the change required for yourself.

3.Learning foreign languages
In this case, your mind expands in two ways, strongly interwoven with each other: Culturally and mentally. Your horizons expand culturally when you learn and understand an idiomatic expression of a foreign language. For example, the phrase ” Throw down the gauntlet ” in English means to challenge or confront someone, but in its earliest use it wasn’t meant as a metaphor, but was a physical action intended to issue a formal challenge to a duel during Middle Ages, when knight duels were common. As a result, we’re able to understand more about the history of people through their idiomatic expressions. And history is an indisputable part of every culture.

Regarding the mental expansion of the mind, this happens by neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. To learn a particular foreign language we need to learn how to read, write and speak in this language. Therefore, we have to read, write and speak in a different way that we’re used to with our native language. That is, to create new neurons, the neurons that are developed in the brain of the native speakers whose language we want to learn. To achieve this, our existing neuronal connections are not enough, but we have to consistently practise in order to form them. Different alphabet, grammar rules, vocabulary and sounds are required to learn a new language, resulting in the development of new neural connections in our brain.

4.Creativity
Creativity is necessary if you want to challenge your mind and keep on stretching your mental and intellectual limits. But before diving into a few methods that allow you to tap into your creativity, we need to make a crucial clarification: Everyone of us is creative by our own nature. Yes. You’re creative. Only 30% of our creativity is inherent and 70% is teachable. Creativity is a skill. It’s the skill to put your imagination into action, give your idea life and bring it to reality.

So how can you unleash your imagination and leverage your creativity, expanding in this way your intellectual horizons?
First, read. Reading about various topics and subjects gives you the opportunity to explore different points of view. Variety plays a prominent role in creativity, so don’t stick to a particular area of interest. Why is it important? Because when you learn different things, you gain new information, which introduces you to new ways of thought and approach. As a result of these new ways and their interaction, you can have new insights and fresh ideas on any area of your interest.

Besides reading, you can access your creativity through your hobbies. Hobbies open the doors for you to explore any thought and idea by action. Every hobby requires a minimum amount of activity. In other words, you explore and learn about yourself by doing, allowing you to uncover aspects of yourself of which you weren’t aware.

Start expanding your mind now! Travel, meet new people, learn foreign languages, practise creativity.