I had a conversation today that made me realize just how much my quality of life has been improved by some very simple mind hacks.

My friend told me that he had gone to an empathy training for work, and that it was really dumb and poorly designed. He said that in the empathy training, he was asked to assume five reasons why somebody in his past might have done something to hurt him. My friend had immediately taken issue with the word “assume,” saying that assuming is not empathizing. I said that I agreed with him, but that maybe if he had actually done the exercise instead of criticizing it, he might’ve found that assuming five motivations rather than the typical one or two helped him have greater compassion for people who act out of fear.

My life has been greatly improved by following the policy of assuming that every person and every situation has something to teach me. They may teach me through their words, through their good example, or through their bad example, but if I come from a place of listening and seeking to understand, rather than from a place of seeking to be right, I am much more likely to derive value from my experiences. Our growth and learning are our own responsibility.

So, I suggested to my friend that if he ever found himself in another corporate training with the expectation that it would not provide value, he would go into it looking for ways to prove himself right, looking for reasons that it could not provide the intended value; but that if he went into that same training seeking to learn something from it, that he would almost certainly be able to find some value in it. That if he chose to open himself to learning from something he believed to be beneath him, he might find that even people and things that are inherently flawed have something to teach. After all, we’re all inherently imperfect. Anyone could find a million reasons not to listen to any of us. But if they chose to listen, and to try to understand more deeply, they would likely come away enriched.