I’ve started my year with three guiding words: Simplicity, Curiosity, and Flow. (See my Monday Mindset Minute on this topic here!) And today, I’ll let the second word guide this post.
There are times in my life when I’ve struggled to ask great questions. In the midst of a conversation with a colleague I hadn’t seen for awhile, I realized I was asking questions that had defined, quantifiable, and not particularly interesting answers, like “When did that happen?” or “How many?” Now I can catch myself if I get stuck on the surface of a conversation, and I can find a way to dig in if I can connect with my genuine curiosity.
Curiosity requires time and focus. (BTW @leannegordon writes beautifully about this topic, and I find her LinkedIn “Drips” illuminating.) For too much of my life, I was stuck on the hamster wheel of accomplishment and “doing”, driven by some internal need to prove myself worthy in the world. Worthy of what? I don’t think I stopped long enough to ask. Many people don’t.
I remember one day years ago, in the summer, when I sat on the deck after a long work day with my Thank-God-its-the-End-of-the-Day glass of wine, and I spotted a strange brown blob on the shingles – it looked like a small triangular worm… Suddenly, I was seized with curiosity – I had to know what it was. I took pictures and sent them off to my local greenhouse and the university extension. Turns out it was a firefly larvae!
Just taking the time to dive deeper into that mystery absolutely made my day. It was as if time stopped, and I let curiosity overtake me. With my work encounters, I began experimenting with questions that would get the conversation off the surface: “How did you feel about that?” “Why do you think that happened?” “What’s been the best part of your day so far?” I knew I was on the right track when someone replied to that last question “Talking with you”.
There’s a terrific book I stumbled on a few years back “Ask Powerful Questions – Create Conversations That Matter” that takes direct aim at surface, mundane interactions. The late Will Wise and Chad Littlefield shared what they call the Asking Powerful Questions pyramid, which builds the base of the conversation from Intention, Rapport and Openness through to Listening and finally, at the top, Empathy. The book presents this as a framework to take us away from our assumptions and our fears of saying or doing the wrong thing.
Some of the work I currently do in counteracting staff burnout with Building Resilience offers some beautiful questions in their peer coaching model:
What is your heart telling you?
How do you understand what is happening?
What makes this problem important to you personally?
What have you done in similar situations?
Where do you see this going?
As I dig further into my own curiosity, I become alert to invitations that allow me to dig deeper into conversations, and to stop my internal clock long enough to uncover treasure by asking better questions. Often, I can’t halt everything I’m doing in order to follow my curiosity, so this year, I’ll keep a Curiosity List on my iPhone so I can continue to track good questions as they come to me throughout the year.
This makes me curious – how will you stoke your own curiosity in 2023?
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