How I Learned to Expand My Worldview

I grew up in a very small town. Around 500 people – and I didn’t even live in town. I lived on a hobby farm nearby.

The kids in my class at school were the same kids I went to Sunday school with, the same kids on my softball team, in my Brownies troop, and in the church choir. There was one class per grade. The community activities were limited, and we all participated in the same ones.

We shared the same faith. Similar cultural backgrounds. And we all looked like each other. My world was small and most of what I experienced in it was familiar, comfortable, and similar to what I had experienced before, because that was simply the nature of the place and the people around me.

My parents understood something about this, even if they didn’t explicitly talk about it with us. They made a point of travelling with us – mostly within Canada – because they believed that experiencing other places was important. We attended talks and activities led by Indigenous peoples to learn about the history of residential schools and to hear about the beauty and depth of the cultures on the land where we were living. We were a reading family, and we were encouraged to read widely, to encounter through books the worlds we weren’t yet able to visit in person.

That was the beginning of what I now understand as consciously expanding my worldview.

Worldview is the lens through which we interpret everything we experience. It is shaped by our beliefs, our values, and the accumulation of our experiences from the time we are very small – what has felt familiar, what has felt foreign, what has been welcomed, and what has been unsettling.

Because worldview is built from experience, it is possible to change it. Humans are adaptable, and when we encounter new experiences, new perspectives, and new ways of understanding the world, our worldview can grow. But that growth does not happen automatically. It requires a conscious choice to seek out what is unfamiliar, to stay with the discomfort of difference, and to be willing to update what we believe based on what we find.

For leaders, this matters in a particular way. The worldview we carry shapes how we see the people we work with, the decisions we make, and the conditions we create. Developing a preferred worldview – one we have chosen intentionally, rather than simply inherited – is part of the work of values-based leadership development.

The good news is that expanding your worldview does not require expensive travel or dramatic upheaval. Some of the most consistent and accessible ways I have found to do this are already within reach.

Music. Most of us have a streaming service and can use it to explore music from specific cultures, countries, genres, and time periods with very little effort. Music carries worldview in its rhythms, its instruments, its voices, and the history behind what was being created at a particular time and place. When you find something interesting, learning a little about where it comes from deepens what you take in.

Visual art and craft. Galleries and museums do not have to be large or famous to offer this. In my own city, there is a rotating gallery in City Hall and another in the basement of the library – both showcasing local, provincial, and national artists offering something distinct. Visual art makes the worldview of its creator tangible in a way that is hard to replicate. The materials chosen, the style, the emotion being expressed – all of it reflects how someone sees the world.

Literature and poetry. Books and poems written at different times, by authors with different life experiences, offer us windows into mythology, histories and perspectives that may not have made it into the mainstream version of what we were taught. They also offer us the chance to read about events and places we know – but from a vantage point we have never occupied before.

Food. This is one I find endlessly rich. Regional and cultural dishes carry generations of history: what grew on that land, who the people were, how they prepared what they had. Going to a restaurant serving cuisine from a place you know little about, and taking the time to learn something about the tradition behind what you are eating, is a genuine act of perspective-taking.

Media beyond your own worldview. This is perhaps the most challenging, and also one of the most valuable. Reading publications or watching broadcasts that reflect worldviews different from your own – not to be convinced by them, not to agree, but simply to ask what you can learn about how other people are experiencing the same world you inhabit – is a practice that consistently reveals the limits of any single perspective, including your own.

Expanding your worldview is not always comfortable. When you seek out perspectives that are genuinely different from your own, you will sometimes encounter things that disturb or unsettle you. You will finish books that leave you without a satisfying conclusion. You will hear music that does not resonate. You will read opinions you disagree with strongly.

That discomfort is useful information.

Sometimes it is telling you that something does not fit your preferred worldview, and in consciously choosing that, you make your values and beliefs more visible and intentional. But sometimes it is telling you something harder. It can be telling you that the worldview you have been carrying has been incomplete, or that you have been holding beliefs that are not as open or as helpful as you would like them to be.

The practice is to stay with that discomfort long enough to tell the difference, and then to make a conscious choice about what it means for your worldview going forward.

A few years ago, I came across a piece written by someone talking about the lack of visible representation of farmers who are people of colour in the area where I live. It pointed out that there are, in fact, farmers from many different backgrounds growing food in our communities – but that they are often not the ones we instinctively see as farmers.

I live near one of the largest farmers’ markets in the country, and I go often. I care deeply about supporting local food and local growers. When I read that piece, I started paying attention to something I had never paid attention to before: who I was gravitating toward at the market, and who I was walking past.

What I noticed was uncomfortable. I had been defaulting – without realizing it – to vendors who matched the image of a farmer I had formed in childhood, growing up in a farming community where everyone looked like me. And in doing so, I had been overlooking vendors who were working just as hard, growing food in the same community, and whose farms deserved my investment every bit as much.

It did not feel good to realize this. But I also realized I could do something different. I started introducing myself to vendors I had been walking past. I learned where their farms were, asked about their families, heard their stories. The same way I had come to know the vendors I had been buying from for years.

That is what expanding your worldview looks like in practice. Not a dramatic transformation. A specific choice, made uncomfortable by what you have recognized in yourself, followed by a different action.

The worldview I grew up with was not a failing of my community. It was simply a reflection of the world my community had access to. What my parents gave me – the travel, the books, the exposure to perspectives beyond our town – was an early invitation to keep looking further.

As an adult, that invitation is something I extend to myself. The music I listen to, the art I seek out, the food I try, the stories I read, the market vendors I choose to get to know – these are all small acts of conscious worldview development. They are how I keep building a preferred worldview: one that is more inclusive, more aware, and more aligned with who I want to be as a person and as a leader.

It is ongoing work. I do not think it ends.

What is one experience you have had recently that quietly challenged something you had taken for granted?