How to Cultivate an Outward Mindset During the COVID Pandemic

COVID-19 has caused enormous strain amongst the American public in 2020 and 21. As Dr. Rosie Ward points out on her blog, this strain has caused many of us to adopt what The Arbinger Institute calls an Inward Mindset - or viewing people as objects, vehicles, or someone who doesn’t matter as much as we do.

When we adopt an inward mindset, we become self-involved to the point where others become vehicles, obstacles, or irrelevancies when compared to our own needs.

Unfortunately, when we operate with this mindset, it alienates us from others and even encourages others to view us very much the same way as we view them.

In the following article, Dr. Rosie Ward gives advice on how to adopt an outward mindset - seeing others as people who matter as much as ourselves - as well as why it’s important to cultivate an outward mindset more than ever in 2020 and beyond.

The unprecedented challenges we’re facing with this global pandemic can, and in many ways is, inviting us to operate from what The Arbinger Institute refers to as an inward mindset.

When we operate from an inward mindset, others around us simply don’t matter as much as we do – which means their needs, objectives, and challenges don’t matter that much to us either. In fact, with an inward mindset, many times we’re not even aware of what others are experiencing.

What’s worse, when we operate from an inward mindset, we invite others to do the same, putting us in a vicious cycle of blaming others and seeing them as a problem.

"COVID-19 has thrown all of us into an incredible space of adaptive challenges– which are those that have no known solution and require us to shift our mindsets and elevate our resourcefulness in order to solve."