Back to the Beginning: Rediscovering a Beginner’s Mind Enhances Advice Provision to Novices

People often seek advice from those with more expertise. However, expertise can create a barrier to providing useful advice as it limits advisers’ ability to communicate concretely, yielding advice that may fall short of its potential value. In this paper, I examine how rediscovering a beginner’s mind—defined as a process of experiencing one’s former novice state of development in a focal domain—enables advisers to give more useful advice to novices. Because every adviser was once a novice, this former self can be a valuable resource when giving advice. Building on construal theory, I test whether rediscovering a beginner’s mind helps advisers communicate more concretely, generating advice that novices view as more useful and worthy of adoption. Across three main studies featuring managers and musicians, including one correlational study and two experiments (with 656 advisers and 571 advisees, generating 3,762 unique pairs), I find the predicted patterns and demonstrate how rediscovering a beginner’s mind operates beyond recalling past experiences or learning new skills more generally. I discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of how advisers can be better equipped to provide developmental advice.