Leadership

Currently I attend grad school and am learning about Marriage and Family Therapy. I got into this field because as I have worked with teens over the last eleven years in youth ministry I have bumped up against some pretty difficult circumstances facing people. I wanted to seek out and learn more about how I could help people in life. Basically I wanted to help people get out of their yuckiness or learn how to reframe those challenging things in life. placeholder;

One of the greatest lessons I have learned in all of my studies is to be curious. When I first heard it I thought it was ridiculous. I thought it was some kind of hocus-pocus or some kind of sage advice every self-respecting professor had to pass on. I was wrong.

I kept hearing about the need to be curious and over time I thought there might be something to this. So I started to look at my life and wonder about things more. I spent more time contemplating why things were the way they were. I wondered why so many things or people stayed the same. I wondered why I hadn’t made the changes in my own life. I really started digging deeper and pulling back the layers on everything in life.

The next thing I knew this natural curiosity within me sprung up and I went from challenging old thoughts I had to developing a whole new mindset. When I previously would not have engaged people in conversation I now find myself seeking conversation out and trying to learn more about people.

You see,  we can all go deeper. We can all be more interested in people, or businesses, or other topics if we just start asking more questions.

Here’s how you can develop your curiosity:

1. Remind yourself every day and in every interaction to be curious.

This may sound silly but it has really helped me to be intentional about the practice of curiosity. The days I have forgotten to remind myself of this value are usually the days when I seem to have the least enjoyable interactions. This isn’t other people’s fault, it’s my own.

2. Give yourself permission to NOT know everything.

Again, this seems obvious. The problem is that too many of us feel like we SHOULD know everything. When I start feeling like I should know everything then I start to feel bad about myself in interactions and act like I DO know everything. You don’t need to know everything. You can’t know everything. So know what you know, share it with others, and ask them about stuff they know about.

3. Give yourself permission to ask questions.

Why do we need permission to ask questions? Because we act like we DO need permission. Quit waiting for other people to give you permission to ask questions and just start. You’ll notice that once you start asking questions then other people around you will ask questions. More likely they will agree with you that they were wondering the same thing. Now you’ve found some common ground with someone. When we have common ground with someone we are then more likely to engage them in even more discussion and possibly even friendship. Who doesn’t want that?

4. Remind yourself in each interaction with someone that every person has something they can teach you.

Each person has a vast array or knowledge or skills that you do not have. Why not actively look for those opportunities to learn more about them. When you start to see other people as an expert in the things that interest them you will quickly learn just how in depth people can talk about their interests. When they share this knowledge with you it adds to your own memory banks and can inform you in the future about various decisions facing you. Who knows, you might even get to pass that knowledge on to other people in the future.

5. Make a list of questions you can ask people…then keep adding to it.

I am full of ridiculous advice today. This one really is one of my favorites though. As someone who has struggled with thinking quickly I have realized that I can more fully engage in conversation if I have already thought through questions I want to ask. When I am planning on talking with someone I will review some basic questions I want to ask and this frees my brain up to think more deeply about other questions to ask. Also, when I have a basic repetoire of questions I can ask anyone I don’t get stumped when I find myself in front of people I didn’t know I would be meeting or know nothing about.

6. Start asking questions.

What good would it do if you took all my other tips and didn’t do anything with them? So you might as well just start asking away.

7. After you learn something you didn’t know before write it down in a notebook or on your computer.

Notice that I didn’t say “journal it?” This is because for some reason all throughout my life I have had some kind of weird aversion to the word journaling. Yet I retain the most knowledge when I actually write stuff down that I have learned or am thinking about. I also find that I write notes down all over the place, I don’t have a specific journal where I put everything. I keep notes in my Moleskine, on post-its, in two programs on my Mac (one is called Day One and the other is called nvAlt, on my phone, in Evernote, and by recording them when I need to quickly get them down. The main thing to remember is to process what you have learned and have a way to externalize those thoughts so you can refer back to them.

What strategies do you have for staying curious?

Recently I have heard two different people on two separate podcasts talk about a problem that crabs have. I do not remember which podcasts these were because I was driving and I didn’t expect them to both discuss this topic nor did I expect it to resonate with me the way that it has. The basic premise goes like the following.

When crabs are caught they are in traps. There are often many many crabs in one trap and they are all scrambling to get out. Eventually one crab finally seems to have figured out how to get out and is just on the brink of climbing over the trap and then the other crabs pull it back down to the group still stuck at the bottom of the trap. This happens over and over again. It is so common and such a law of nature that the fishermen do not even attempt to put a lid on the traps because they know the crabs will not escape the group.

This strikes me because I think this is how so many people in our society are. If I am being honest then I must admit that there have been situations in the past where someone was about to succeed or they were doing great things and I would secretly want them to fail. I don’t think it is in my own nature to want people to fail. I think that over time I saw person after person doing amazing stuff and I was secretly jealous of them. I think this person’s success was a reminder of all the dreams I wasn’t moving forward and I was ashamed.

Shame does a funny thing to us. It makes us feel insecure, inadequate, and it puts us on the defensive. When we go on the defensive we no longer are in charge of our own path. Our path instead gets defined by reacting to those things around us. Dr. Brené Brown has done some fabulous research, writing, and speaking about the topics of shame, vulnerability, and living a Wholehearted life. I highly recommend that everyone read her book Daring Greatly. Dr. Brown basically tells us that to overcome our shame and fear we need to expose it. We need to be vulnerable and talk about those things.

“We need to believe that we can effect change if we want to live and love with our whole hearts.”
— Dr. Brené Brown

I decided a few months ago that I was going to go about intentionally changing some things in my life. I wanted to become a better, more authentic version of myself and live from a place of gratitude, joy, and worthiness. This has meant being intentional about many things in my life. Each of these things is small but collectively they give me focus, energy, perspective, and work to change my thinking.

These changes include:

• Waking up very early in the morning.
• Reading every morning.
• Listening to certain podcasts that give me ideas and fresh perspective while I get ready in the morning.
• Eating the same meal every morning so I don’t have to plan my breakfast.
• Taking stock of what I love to do and what I don’t like doing throughout my day.
• Being intentional about connecting with people.
• Writing in my journal at least four times per week.
• Reminding myself every morning that I get to choose my attitude each day and in each situation.
• I quit watching tv. (This was easy because I wanted to read so much and it’s summer so there’s nothing on. I suspect I will need to make rules about this when the new tv season starts up again but we’ll see. I haven’t missed it yet.)

After a few months of doing these things that seemingly have nothing to do with changing how I view others or other people’s successes I feel like a completely different person. I hear about things people are doing and I am excited for them…not jealous…not ashamed I haven’t done more. I am looking for opportunities to help people and connect with others more. I am passionate about finding ways I can contribute to the world, to certain niches, and to other people’s dreams.

Hearing the story of crabs brought me a deep sense of gratitude. It reminded me that we have an amazing ability to effect change in our lives and it’s really not even that difficult. We simply need to be aware of what is going on inside of us, start to take some kind of action to make small changes in our life, and each day try to make small progress toward the goal of changing.

How have small changes in your life have made a big impact on you and others around you?

I have recently been on a personal journey of really trying to discover my strengths. Maybe this is because I think there is so much more I can contribute to this world, maybe it is because I want to enjoy the work that I do, or maybe it is because I think I see other people doing amazing work and I want to join the party. Whatever the reasons, I know that it ultimately comes down to the fact that I am realizing that I cannot do everything. I am realizing that I cannot be doing a lot of things really well. And I realize that the work that I do love doing suffers because of all of the other things calling for my attention.

This is ultimately my own responsibility and I need to take ownership of that. Nobody has been there telling me exactly what I must be doing from one hour to the next. Nobody has structured my weeks or months and all of the allotted free time within those periods. I am the sole person who has the responsibility of directing my own ship, of finding ways to utilize my strengths and leveraging them so they benefit projects I am working on.

The past few months I have been re-reading books I previously read about strengths including StrengthsFinder 2.0 and Living Your Strengths. I have also read Marcus Buckingham’s books Standout, The One Thing You Need to Know, and Go, Put Your Strengths to Work. In addition I have been re-looking at past personality assessments I have done such as the Myers-Briggs, the CPI, and the Social Styles assessment to make sure I am thinking about all aspects of my life. Another book that has been informative for me in this process is Susan Cain’s bestseller Quiet. Finally, I am about to start reading Don Miller’s book Storyline and am excited to go through his process for figuring out what the main themes I want my life to be about.

All of this is to say that it would be useless if I just read these books or took these assessments. I need to do something with them. I need to work through them and find out how they resonate with me and speak into my life. I need to be diligent in taking Marcus Buckingham’s advice in Go, Put Your Strengths to Work and work through finding out what I love doing and what I loathe doing and then really digging into his followup questions for each of those activities. I need to fully enter into the journey that Don Miller proposes in his Storyline book and online tool. I need to practice talking about my strengths to people and finding ways to mitigate or delegate my weaknesses.

Building on your strengths is all about action. The action does not need to be monumental to create real, lasting change in your life. It simply needs to be intentional, practical, and constantly moving forward each and every day. This process of re-discovering my own strengths and clarifying them has even had an impact on my search for a practicum. I really want to narrow down what I am looking for and focus on a niche I want to serve in the future. The more I am going through this process myself the more I am realizing how it really fits into the mental health field. I get excited just thinking about how I can help other people discover their own strengths and finding ways to leverage those strengths in their professional lives, personal lives, and in relationships.

What have you been doing to evaluate your strength?

How have you gone about focusing more utilizing your strengths?

What has been helpful to you during this process?

Is there anything that hasn’t been very helpful?

Do you know of a resource regarding strengths, using strengths based approaches in mental health, or even a clinic/therapy practice that focuses on strengths based approaches?

Leave me a note in the comments or send me an email to tell me about it.