Curiosity Over Fear: Achieve More in Life And Business
Hi there, welcome to Seeding the Lead YouTube channel. My name is Trevor, and I’m here with Adam Melnyk, and he is the coach at Seeding the Lead Coaching in Edmonton, and today we’re going to be talking about curiosity; curiosity is going to be the topic of today. So, Adam, because we’re going to be talking about curiosity, that sparks my curiosity as to what are we going to be talking about regarding curiosity and how that relates to leadership coaching.
Curiosity is really a fundamental skill when it comes to working with individuals, okay? When you look at it, it’s really both a sword to protect yourself, it’s a shield to also protect yourself from those that want to take advantage of you, and a tool to get you to where you want to go, okay.
Curiosity As A Sword
Let’s talk about curiosity as a sword: what does that mean; how do we use curiosity as a sword?
Well, when we look at curiosity, it’s about being naturally curious about what somebody is saying. Curiosity is much more of an internal desire to understand what’s going on, okay. When an individual typically is coming after us—maybe they’re trying to strawman us in a conversation—and they’ll tend to put a lot of vague sentences out there, such as “people have been talking about you.” To use curiosity in that sense is “what people, yeah, who’s talking about me,” right?
When an individual is trying to, for example, make us look bad or look poor, they’ll often say, “Well, when it comes to your sales figures DA’s not cutting the mustard.” It’s like, “What sales figures? Tell me a little bit more about what’s kind of going on here,” because when individuals are trying to attack us, what they tend to do is throw a lot of vague responses out there and nothing with concrete facts, and when we start asking questions and we just start being naturally curious, what ends up happening is that Veil comes away and we can see that there was nothing there, right.
So it kind of exposes their, their arguments, and then you can maybe get to a little bit more of an accurate response for them, and maybe there was really nothing there to begin with.
Exactly, and once we understand that, then we can start pushing maybe our own agenda or our own thoughts and opinions in the way that we want it to go, as opposed to being pigeonholed into a conversation that we didn’t want to have to begin with.
Curiosity As A Shield
All right, that’s awesome. So, number two was a shield—how do we use curiosity as a shield?
And it’s really the same thing. When individuals are asking a lot of questions about us and they’re really trying to dig into who we are, typically that is coming from a very nefarious place, okay. They’re either looking to discredit you as an individual or to damage your reputation, all right.
If we continue just to answer their questions, we kind of start playing into that hand and game, but by simply switching the conversation and becoming a little bit more curious—“Oh, where did this question come from; what makes you ask that question, MH?”—we start changing the dynamics, as opposed to one being of them attacking us to us just reflecting back and turning it into more of a dialogue.
Curiosity As A Tool
So, let’s get on to your third point for curiosity: using it as a tool. Okay, so help me out here, how do we use curiosity as a tool?
This one’s critically important when it comes to strategic thinking or goal setting, okay. Curiosity is fundamental. For example, if somebody says, “I want to make a lot of money,” what is a lot of money; what does that mean, right? Tell me a little bit more about that. If somebody says, “I want to, I want to be fit, I want be healthy,” well, what does that actually mean?
When it comes from an organizational standpoint, they’ll say, “We want to Institute values.” What makes values so important for this organization; what are we trying to achieve? By simply asking the right questions, by becoming incredibly curious, we can get to the root of what we’re actually trying to achieve and thus become more successful in the future.
Curiosity in Coaching
Yeah, I like that, and you know, being curious about those things specifically like when it comes to your, you know, physique, or you know how much money you want to earn, or whatever—you know, what, what does that actually mean for you? It helps them, you know, using, I guess, open, open-ended questions to help them be more descriptive in the responses that they provide you. So, how do you use this in your coaching?
Defining Burnout and Multidisciplinary Teams
What I usually do is anytime a client work comes to me and they start saying, “You know, I’m looking to decrease burnout,” the first understanding is “what is burnout; what does that actually mean, right? Tell me a little bit more,” because what I think of as burnout they may not think of as burnout, okay. And when you start defining words and becoming very curious about what these definitions actually mean, you start unraveling what we’re actually working on, MH.
For example, we tend to talk about multidisciplinary: “Okay, I want a multidisciplinary team.” What does multidisciplinary actually mean, right? Are we looking at only getting one or two specific types of profession within our team, or are we hiring a whole host of professions within the team? Like, what exactly does this term mean to you, right?
Understanding Productivity Concerns
Helping people be more defined in what they’re, what they’re saying so they, they can say it out loud, hear it back to themselves, and then, you know, really realize and be more descriptive of exactly what they’re looking for. Exactly, okay.
For example, I’ve often heard, you know, “We have unproductive employees.” What does unproductive mean; tell me more. Because typically when I hear unpr—unproductive, I go, “Maybe they’re just not working when you’re around, okay. Are the task getting done?” Because when people think that their team isn’t being productive, they think deadlines aren’t being met, that, the work isn’t being completed, that we are not hitting their stretch goals. But oftentimes, when I start really digging into that, “their team’s just not productive,” it turns into a “Oh, when I’m around they’re just not doing their job,” and those are different things.
Okay, yeah, completely different things. If things are being met, deadlines are being met, but then when you’re around they’re just not doing their job, so that becomes a question of “Is there just not enough work for your team, or is your team working just not when you’re around?”
Light-Bulb Moments & Deeper Insights
I see, so the, the type of coaching that you do is really for leaders, right, and so this really plays, plays well into that to help them, you know, maybe ask better questions of the employees or maybe better questions of themselves to really, you know, narrow in on, you know, “Is it, is it really a problem with the team, or is it a problem with me,” or some, some variation thereof, so that they can come up with a better response or maybe a better question for the, the employees.
Exactly. So, how, how do you see this play out when you are in a coaching session with people? Do they get, like, a light-bulb moment and they realize, like, “Oh man, I, I’ve kind of messed that up,” or “There’s a better way for me to, to go about this”? Like, how does this play out with them?
So, they’ve never thought about it. I typically see very surface-level thoughts of really what they’re looking for, and when we start doing a deeper dive into the conversation, they always stop, and there’s this silence of “I’ve never thought about that,” like exactly, right, because if, if this was something you had thought about, you would have the answer right away, and you could define these things in deeper terms.
So what I typically in a coaching session is when we really start becoming curious, defining things, and probing into, for example, “Why, why are we doing this initiative; what makes us more so important?” They stop, and some of them have a huge light-bulb moment of “Hey, we shouldn’t be doing this; this doesn’t meet our goals, right; this is coming from a place of insecurities from within the team and is not coming from a place of ‘Hey, we need to be doing this because it will benefit the team.’”
Okay, that’s good, and I’ve also seen on the other end where they have that light-bulb moment and they say, “Oh my gosh, like, the reason why we’re doing this is because this is incredibly important to what we want to accomplish; this is far more important than anything else we’ve ever done, and we need to make time and energy for it.” Gotcha.
Parting Advice: Always Be Curious
Well, those are two really great responses on how you can use, curiosity to, you know, really get to the root of things that people thought were issues or thought were problems in, in their lives or in their leadership roles. And would there be any parting, advice or information that you’ve got on this topic?
It would always be curious; always dig into the whys. What are we doing; why is this important; what do we want out of this, okay? When you’re in a board meeting and you’re hearing a lot of jargon or a lot of acronyms, don’t be afraid to just be the idiot in the room and ask the questions—be curious.
I hate acronyms, man; they’re terrible because they, you can insert any word you want for, for an acon, so I, I think they’re, they’re awful, and people just should just use the, the regular terms—that’s just me, but anyways.
Oh, absolutely.
Seeding the Lead Coaching Can Help You Become a Great Leader
Anything else that you’d like to share with us today on curiosity?
I think that pretty much is a great overview of curiosity and how we can use it.
All right, so if you are curious about some leadership coaching and really getting some help to expand who you are and help you to become a better leader in your workplace, I recommend you get in touch with Adam here at Seeding the Lead. Reach out for an initial consultation—a quick call to discuss some things and see if it’s a right fit for you—and, if so, get on board and see how it can, you know, spring board you forward into your career and into your future. Thanks so much for joining us today and sharing with us.
Appreciate for having me you back.