43. The Power of "AND": How Cultivating an "AND" Mentality Can Change Your Life

Are you stuck in an 'OR' mentality? Do you struggle with making choices between one option or another? Tune in to this podcast episode to learn how to embrace the power of the “AND” mentality and how adopting an “AND” mentality can empower you to find innovative solutions that incorporate the best of both worlds.

"One big benefit to having an “AND” mentality is that it increases your creativity and your innovation because it leads to new ideas and approaches to problems.”

In this episode, we explore the power or concept of an "AND” mentality and how cultivating this mentality can change your life. 

You'll learn how to:

• Cultivate an "AND" mentality
• Broaden your perspective
• Increase creativity
• Improve relationships and communication with others

Additional information: 

• PNC #9: Room For Two

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Chapters

• 2:33 Explore non-dualistic thinking.
• 9:42 Benefits of And Mentality
• 20:29 You can have it all

Transcript

0:58

Hey you guys, it's finally time! We are so thrilled to introduce you to our new consulting offer, the 6-Week Digital Nomad Money Making Roadmap. This is a program that's going to give you guidance on transforming your career into online work and becoming a successful digital nomad. This 6-Week Digital Nomad Money Making Roadmap is a one-on-one consulting offer that's going to help you avoid wrong turns, stay on track, and avoid feeling overwhelmed. We're going to help you find your passion, set clear goals, and make living as a digital nomad a successful and sustainable lifestyle. With our expert guidance, you can learn how to build a digital nomad career that allows you to work from anywhere in the world. We'll help you every step along the way too, from identifying your strengths to finding the best opportunities that match your skills and your interests. You can't wait any longer to start living the life of your dream. Sign up for our 6-Week Digital Nomad Money Making Roadmap today and get on the path to success. You can find more information and sign up at osatomonica.com slash moneymakingroadmap. So let us help you transform your life and take it on the road. Alright, let's dive in to today's episode! What is up everybody? We are both super stoked about this topic. This is something that we have just started diving into, and you're going to have to maybe bear with us a little bit. This is kind of the first time we're really breaking it down together and explaining this concept. We're talking about an and mentality. It's also called non-dualistic thinking. That's a little bit more of a technical term, but we're just going to stick to an and mentality. We're going to really break down what is kind of some of the problems with it, and most we can cultivate an and mentality and how that's going to help your personal development as well as your business development. Yeah, like Austin said, this is something that we just recently have started diving into, but honestly I can say that it's made a really big difference in my life, even just starting to understand it. So I'm really excited to break this down for you and invite you into our self-development journey and so that maybe this can help you as well. I asked Monica a few days ago, I said if you were a psychology grad student and for your master's or doctorate you had to choose one idea to study, what would it be? And after thinking about it, I asked myself that question and I think this might be it. It's so fascinating to me how this plays into our lives. Yeah, so before we really dive into an and mentality, let's talk about the opposite of having an and mentality, which would be having an or mentality. So an or mentality is the view that things can only be one way or another way. It's black or it's white, it's right or it's wrong and there's nothing in between. So we see examples of this or mentality in everyday life. Work and rest are mutually exclusive. Like you are either working really hard or you're resting or we see happiness and sadness as opposites. You can either be happy or you can be sad, but you can't be both. So I mean, really good examples of common or mentality that people have is I can pursue my passion or I can make a stable income. I can be in a committed relationship or I can be free. I can choose between my career or time with my family, hobbies and self-care. I can be authentic to myself or I can fit into societal norms and expectations, but I can't do both of any of those things. So hopefully you already started to see how this might be limiting or might be a problem. The very first example Monica just gave, I can either pursue my passions or I can make a stable income. If you believe that you have to choose between one or the other, that means either you're going to be happy, but you're not going to ever make any money and you're going to be struggling financially your entire life, or you're going to believe that you can be making money and have a decent income and be able to provide for your needs, but you're always going to be upset. You're never going to be fulfilled. Obviously, that's a very limiting way to view your life. That's going to have all sorts of negative consequences in terms of the choices that you make, what life path you decide to go down. It's just going to hold you back in so many different ways. It's having this or mentality. It's such an oversimplification of the world and it can really just lead to so many missed opportunities and that's kind of the headspace that a lot of people in the digital nomad space seem to be. In our experience, we meet a lot of people who feel like they have to choose one life or another life and that they can't somehow mix these things. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think there's a big debate in the digital nomad space about what a digital nomad is. You can either be a digital nomad or you can stay in one place for a long time. It's so interesting to me that people just don't understand that you can have them both and we're really trained and taught that way. Having this or mentality is just one way of making sense of our world. Another way to make sense of the world around us is an and mentality. There are some things, I will admit, there are some things in life that are either or, but there's also many, many things that are both this and that. That's what an and mentality is. It's seeing two things that might on the surface seem like opposite ideas or opposite concepts, but seeing them as complementary, interconnected, and that they can both exist in the same place at the same time. Yeah, it's really a more fluid way of looking at the world, right? And it's understanding that things can coexist together in beautiful ways that are complicated and messy. But the more we try to cultivate this and mentality, the more we are able to look at the world with greater understanding and it really increases our problem-solving skills as well. So really good examples of cultivating an and mentality would be I can work hard and I can rest. I have self-discipline and I'm self-compassionate. Solitude and community. You can have both of those things as values. I think Austin's a really good example of that. He really enjoys his alone time, but also he really, really, really values a solid community around him. Understanding the connection between the mind and the body, understanding that you need to focus on both those things and they play together. This is a really powerful one. You are enough right now and you have the ability to improve and you can be improving and there are tons of ways that you can improve. But for right now, you are enough. Like understanding those two concepts could take a long time to really let that sink in. But once you do, how powerful is that to really understand that you are enough and you are improving? I just wanted to touch on that one a little bit longer because this one's really fascinating to me. A lot of problems that I have with self-help books that I've read are they focus a lot on the you are enough right now part and they go so deep into that that it almost takes away this idea of you need to improve. You need to work on yourself. You need to get better because they focus so much on, you know, don't worry about how other people perceive you. Don't worry about becoming a better person because how you are right now is great and you don't need to change. And I think they miss this other half of it. And although I do believe that intrinsically, everyone is so incredibly valuable, everyone's priceless, just by virtue of being a human being, you have so much worth and so much that you can bring to the world. But that doesn't mean that you can't also work on becoming a better person every single day. And there's a lot of books that I've read that kind of fall a little bit heavier on that side. And maybe you have a family member, maybe a parent who's been on that side where they They kind of pound you and hound you about being better and improving and changing who you are and kind of leave this you are enough right now part out of it. But yeah, like Monica said, it can be it can take a while to kind of allow these two ideas to coexist. But I hope you can see how important it is to work on understanding that they can both be true. Yeah, that was really powerful. Thank you. And then just a couple of other examples we have here is is obviously we touched on this before, but you can be both happy and sad. And we often describe that as as bittersweet, like we can feel that bittersweet and that can happen at the same time. And it does happen at the same time. I can be strong and I can be flexible. There's so many different and mentality so we can cultivate the more you think about it, the more that are going to come up, it's going to be so easy to see all around you where these or mentalities are coming in and how you can shift it into an and mentality. Now, if we haven't convinced you already of why it's important to develop an and mentality, we're going to give you some specific examples of the benefits that come from this. We're going to try and make these examples pretty tangible so that you can think of how it would look maybe in your own personal life or your own work life. So one big benefit to having an and mentality is that it increases your creativity and your innovation because it leads to new ideas and approaches to problems. So for example, let's say that you are writing a blog or you are having a conversation or discussion about some controversial topic. Instead of taking the or mentality approach where you are only presenting one side of the argument and you are presenting it to the best of your ability, but trying to ignore or cover up the other side, you can instead choose to write a blog or engage in this conversation with whoever you're talking to that presents both sides fairly and a little bit more balanced. And that way, whatever blog you end up writing or whatever conversation comes out of this, it's going to be a lot more informative and engaging. Yeah, I believe it was in Adam Grant's Think Again book that I just read where he talks about the power of this, the power of understanding the other side of the argument and understanding that there are parts of the other side that can also be right as your personal side, you know, like that both sides are right to some degree and both sides, you know, maybe have some truth and really recognizing and understanding that really helps you open your mind to new possibilities, right? If you really want to dive into more of how these two seemingly opposite ideas can come together and create something beautiful, something that's called the edge effect, go down to our show notes. We're going to link an episode, one of our previous episodes where we really dive into this and we talk about it a lot more. Okay, and and mentality can also improve your problem solving skills because it helps you identify solutions that originally might not have been apparent with your or thinking. So, for example, let's say you are a software engineer and you are working on a complex coding project. Initially, you might feel overwhelmed and you might feel stuck because you can't find a solution to this particularly difficult problem. But if you remember to work on your and mentality and that means you can approach multiple ideas at the same time, then that's going to help you approach this problem from different angles. And so instead of trying to find one perfect solution, you can brainstorm multiple potential solutions, which eventually will help you lead to combining different elements of different ideas. This is the big benefit of brainstorming and you'll be able to piece them together to develop a unique solution that solves the problem. So your and mentality led you to be able to overcome your mental block and complete the project successfully. Another benefit of having an and mentality is it helps you make better decisions and it allows you to have a more nuanced understanding of really complex situations. So you really go into these decision making situations with a better and broader understanding of what's really at play here. Having an and mentality also improves your relationships and your communication abilities. So I think a lot of times we approach relationships, especially when you get in an argument or debate with your partner or a family member or whoever. It's easy to think of your opinion, your stance, your point of view as right and theirs as wrong. And the amazing thing about this and mentality is you can maintain having different opinions, but you can both be right. And initially that might sound contradictory, might sound paradoxical, but it's true. You can both have different points of views, totally different opinions and both be true. And so if you approach a relationship that way, then it's going to help you avoid unnecessary arguments and unnecessary problems. Yeah, that's such a healing way to look at the world, especially, I mean, I'll speak for, you know, being a citizen of the United States right now. It's so polarized. It can be hard to even have a conversation with somebody. And so if we can really approach the world with this and mentality instead of automatically you're wrong and I'm right, approach it as we're both right. There's pieces of both of our thoughts and our beliefs that are right. It'll really help heal everything. I don't know. It's just such a powerful way to reframe the world. Well, this is one of the beautiful things about traveling that you and I both enjoy is you travel to a new country that has a totally different culture. They have a different religious system and a different government and a different, you know, just everything. The way they view the world is so different than the way we view it. But you don't have to look at that as, okay, who has the right one here? Who has the right point of view? Who has the right belief system? Who has the right understanding of the world? Neither one is right and neither one is wrong. They're just different. And those are simultaneously true. I think another really simple example of this and mentality is you don't have to try and figure out one or the other. It's both being a digital nomad really, really helps you cultivate this and mentality. And it really makes such a world of difference. You can have it all like literally everything right here is for you for the taking, right? Like you can have a stable income and you can travel the world. You can have a stable income and you can have a business that you love and are truly passionate about. You can make a difference in the world. While working on yourself, like you can have it all. Something Austin always says to me is he says, hey, you know what? The world is your burrito. It's here for your taking. You can put whatever you want to on this burrito. You don't have to limit yourself to an or mentality. And being a digital nomad really shows you how much that's possible. You can travel the world and have really beautiful relationships with friends and family members, even though you're not right there next to them the whole time. You can really have it all here. So as we've been talking about this, we really hope that you've been doing some self-reflection and looking at how maybe you've been viewing the world. Maybe you've been thinking of things as either or rather than both and, and you see some of the benefits of how your life can be different or how your life can change if you cultivate this and mentality. So how do you go about doing that? Now that we have a good understanding of what the and mentality is and why it's important, we're going to share some thoughts on how to cultivate and grow it. So my first suggestion is to just start recognizing and challenging when you have this or way of thinking. This is something that ever since we started learning about it, I've been pointing it out to Monica whenever either one of us says something that's more of an or mentality kind of thing. I'll just I'll call her out on it and I'll say, well, why does it have to be this way or that way? Why can't it be both? And a lot of times when one of us says that we both sit back for a second think and we're like, oh, I guess it doesn't have to be one or the other. So just pointing it out and challenging it and being aware of it can actually go a long way and starting to reframe the way that you view the world around you. Yeah, it's been really helpful for me to have an accountability partner be able to call me out on some of the things I say, because sometimes it's so subconscious. I don't even realize it's there. And literally as I'm actively working on cultivating an and mentality, I'll slip into this or mentality, you know, and it'll just slip out of my mouth and Austin will be like, wait a second. That's not what we're working on. That's not what we're talking about. Why can't it be both? And it's really it's been really, really beneficial. So just practice mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness practice can really help us become more aware of our thoughts and thought patterns. So you like try for a second to go off on your own thoughts and then I am currently reading the Atomics Habits books and he talks about developing mindfulness and like becoming aware of your thoughts and thought patterns a lot. And one thing that really helps is to start saying things out loud, because when you say things out loud, it pulls it out of your head and lets you kind of look at it more objectively. And then you're going to start recognizing some of these or thought patterns that you have. And with this greater awareness, we can catch ourselves more when we are engaging in this or mentality and we can start making a conscious shift to change it. So whenever an or mentality thought slips out, you can change it. You can say, okay, instead I can work hard and I can have a rest day and that's okay. And you can rewrite your thoughts. It also helps to start embracing paradox and ambiguity. It sounds simple, but recognize that situations in life are complex and that they don't always fit neatly into a box. We know some people who sometimes they're hard to be around because they always try and put you in a box. And maybe you've experienced this where you come back home after you're living away and your old friends or your family members who haven't been with you as you've changed and grown up. Maybe you've been living abroad for several months or years and you come back home and people still try and fit you in this box. That can be really difficult to live with. And in that same way, it's difficult to try and fit everything in your world into a box and try and understand it. And sometimes you're not going to be able to understand it fully and maybe just embracing the idea that life can be paradoxical, even if you don't understand how or why. That's helpful. Just embracing that idea. Yeah. And then develop a growth mindset. So a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset is the belief that we have the ability to change over time. Right. And we're actively seeking ways to grow and adapt and change. And the more you can cultivate this growth mindset, the more we are going to be able to view situations as opportunities of growth and development rather than either or choices. So I don't know how to fully express this idea. I mean, this is really something that I'm trying to process through myself. But the more you can bring in new information into your brain and challenge and stretch your beliefs, the more you're going to recognize that the world around you isn't black and white. It's not super clear cut. And the more you recognize that the more your brain is going to accept these and mentalities and the easier it's going to be to fully embrace an and mentality. So you'll find that naturally you stop looking at things as either or, and you'll start seeing them as and when you start actively searching out these ambiguous thought challenging situations. So let's recap real quick what we've talked about. Having an or mentality can, you know, thinking of things as either one way or another can actually be really limiting and have some negative consequences, whereas an and mentality can broaden our perspective. It can help us increase our creativity, our innovation, our problem solving skills, our decision making skills. It can improve our relationships and our communication with others. And there are some things that we can do to cultivate this. We're not born one way or another. We're not stuck in one mentality or another. You can work on cultivating and growing an and mentality of your own. So we hope that this has been helpful as you go about your day and you're looking at the world around you and you're trying to make maybe some major life decisions. You're trying to balance how you feel and, you know, figure life out. We hope that this and mentality kind of gives you an alternative way of thinking and viewing the world around you. All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning into our podcast. We really hope that you found today's episode informative, valuable, and that you were able to find some actionable insights to apply to your life. If you're interested in taking your career on the road and becoming a digital nomad, then we invite you to explore our newest consulting offer, the six week digital nomad money making roadmap. This program is designed to guide you through the process of transforming your career into online work and living a successful, sustainable and location independent lifestyle. With our years of digital nomad experience, we will help you identify your passions, set clear goals and find the best opportunities that match your skills and interests all without getting overwhelmed. So don't let the fear of taking a wrong turn or feeling lost hold you back any longer from living the life that you've always wanted. Sign up today for your six week digital nomad money making roadmap at austinandmonica.com slash money making roadmap and let us help you turn your aspirations into a reality. Thanks again for joining us on this journey and remember to stay curious, stay adventurous, and stay connected. you