As far as my belief structure - I'm certainly not going to stop being Catholic, but I could always improve the way I discourse with people. Being a lawyer, when someone disagrees with me I always have the tendency to start browbeating them with questions. I will need to work on that a bit.It's not just a question of tone. The level of research you'd be expected to do, for the rest of your life, requires a genuine, open-minded curiosity about your topics. Whereas in your law practice, you already knew the "answer" or end result you are aiming for--client gets acquitted; client gets house, kids and dog in divorce, etc--academic research is much more open-ended. We often start off with an idea or theory or thesis, and when we start to really delve into it, we find that our initial idea was off-base, or too obvious, or not original after all, or less interesting than some side-topic that ends up being the focus. The final product is often quite different from what we had initially thought we were going to write.
This doesn't mean you can't have firmly held opinions about any number of topics. It does mean that those topics may not be the most fruitful areas of research for you. When someone disagrees with you, by all means ask them questions if possible (much of what you encounter will be in published form). A browbeating tone is bad because it will alienate you from others, sure. But it's also bad because it usually expresses a burning need to win the argument, rather than to learn and grow from truly understanding another's argument and perspective. To do the latter, you need to kinda inhabit the author's or colleague's head for a while, so you can follow their ideas and logic. You may end up agreeing or disagreeing with them, or a bit of both, but your intellectual development will be enhanced by this kind of engagement.
Betterslac's discussion of two formulations of research questions re abortion being considered a female issue is is the highly relevant to what I'm talking about. It's not just that you have to COME ACROSS as an intellectual rather than a debater, you have to actually HAVE that approach.
