CBP S3E1: How to be a “Learn-It-All”

Instead of being a “know-it-all”, be a “learn-it-all”! People that cultivate curiosity about the world around them experience greater levels of satisfaction with their lives, are more innovative, have better ideas, and are more engaged. You can cultivate curiosity in your life and at work to enrich your experience and get the most out of what you have.

Referenced in this episode:

• Psych Central: 6 Ways to Cultivate Your Curiosity
• Psychology Today: Cultivate Curiosity
• Harvard Business Review: 4 Ways to Cultivate a Culture of Curiosity
• How to Fail Like a Champ
• Growth Mindset: An Introduction

Show Notes

Something I learned about at a leadership conference a couple weeks ago was about being a Learn-It-All and cultivating curiosity.

• Marry curiosity and a growth mindset to learn much more than you might otherwise, and to create an environment where you’re excited by new things
• Benefits of being curious include:
  • Higher life satisfaction
  • You have better ideas
  • More engagement with the world around you
  • You innovate more easily
  • Life is more interesting
  • You have a greater sense of freedom
• Some tips to help you cultivate curiosity:
  • Read outside the box. Pick a type of book you might not normally read, and gain a different perspective.
  • Dig into someone else’s point of view
  • Don’t let fear stop you
  • Come up with a “bucket list” of random questions
  • Take an inquisitive approach to relationships and yourself
• You can also benefit from curiosity at work
  • Teams that are curious and cultivate inquisitiveness are more innovative, have better ideas, and are more engaged
  • In an example I found, a game company encourages inquiry.
    • Try framing agendas as questions, to encourage contribution and engagement
    • Help others feel like they are part of the answer
    • Assume all learning is good, whether or not it’s work related
• What’s something new you learned in the last 12 months?

Transcript

Hey everybody. It’s Dianne Whitford and this is your weekly Coffee Break podcast where we are making personal development accessible, one episode at a time. This is the start of season three which I’m super excited about. That means that we’ve already done 20 episodes and this is our 21st so I’m pretty excited to jump in today. Last week or the week before, everything all blends together anymore. But a couple of weeks ago I was at a leadership conference for a week and I had the privilege of listening to a lot of really great speakers and today I wanted to talk about something I heard there about curiosity and cultivating curiosity. And one of the terms they use that I really liked that I named this podcast after was called being a “learn-it-all”. Being a learn-it-all instead of being a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. And I really, really liked that.

And as I was researching more and more into curiosity and cultivating an inquisitive mind and things like that, I came across the term “radical curiosity”, which was super exciting cause it seemed like such a great way to express how we can really learn more about the world around us and about what’s going on in the people around us and all that kind of stuff is by having radical curiosity. So I started to wonder about curiosity and is it one of those things that you kind of have it or you don’t? And I found that, you know, and it’s true, I think in my experience that some people are naturally curious, you know, and some aren’t. I think we start out as kids being way more curious. If you’ve ever had a kid ask you the million why’s of everything, why is the sky blue? Why are potatoes white, why are tomatoes, red, whatever, all those kinds of questions.

Kids are naturally curious. It’s how they learn about the world around them. And I think that as we grow up, we start to think either that we have already learned everything or we start to feel self conscious about the questions that we’re asking and the things that we want to learn about. And I think that if we can recapture that sense of wonder, that sense of curiosity, that inquisitive mind that a child has, there is so much more that we could learn and understand about the world around us, and about ourselves. And you can develop a sense of curiosity, or at least work with what you have and increase your curiosity or increase the level of inquisitiveness that you show to the world around you. And so I did some research and looked at some stuff, came up with some ideas on ways to do that and I’ll get into that in a minute.

But one of the things that I’ve found is really makes a lot of sense to me is how you can marry your curiosity with a growth mindset and really learn a lot. Whether you succeed or whether you fail when you try something new, you may like it. You may not like it. You may succeed, you may not, but in any case, learning happens and you learn a little bit about something. Maybe you just have a fun experience to share with other people. Maybe you actually learn a new thing. Maybe you learn a new skill. In any case, it’s a good result. Being inquisitive and having that growth mindset creates an environment where you’re excited to learn new things. It generates interest. Your life is suddenly more interesting. The world around you is suddenly more interesting when you can start to feel curiosity and inquisitiveness about the world around you.

There’s a couple articles that I found especially helpful as I was researching all of this, and I’ll link them in the description, but in one of them had talked about how people who have, who express or feel higher levels of curiosity about the world around them experience greater life satisfaction. You’re getting more out of life! And I, and I believe that’s because you’re putting more into it, right? You’re, you’re expending more energy in learning about the world around you and that makes the world around you more interesting. So you get out what you’re putting in there. When you can be more curious, you have better ideas, you innovate more easily, you, you are more engaged in what’s happening. You‘re feeling less detached, you feel a bigger sense of community because you’re kind of reaching out and learning about the things that are happening around you.

Your eyes kind of start to open up to all the possibilities that are out there. Even if you don’t pursue all of them, even if you don’t succeed at all of them, there’s still a lot out there to understand and to see and experience. And if we’re, if we’re kind of locked in this, you know, “I’m gonna, I’m being an adult and I’m gonna go do work and I’m not gonna step outside my box. I don’t even like to try a new way to work. I don’t like to try new food. I don’t like to try new skills or new hobbies” or whatever. There’s a lot that we’re locking ourselves away from and it creates this sense of detachment where we don’t feel connected to the people around us or even life around us. But if we can turn that around, and try new things and and get curious about something you’ve never thought about before and go learn and do what you can to learn about that thing…that changes your mindset and it changes the eyes with which you view the world, right?

Now you’re looking at the world with curious eyes, and you want to learn more and you want to understand more about what’s happening around you. That creates a level of engagement that just isn’t there, if you’re stuck in your kind of blinders on and blinkers on, stuck in your, in your view of the world. Also, I don’t know about you, but when I was in school, you know, you get handed a list of topics you have to learn about English and math and and all kinds of other stuff and maybe some of that stuff was interesting to you and maybe some of it wasn’t. One of the cool things about being an adult is, I can choose what I want to learn about. If I want to go back to school, I can. If I want to go research a particular topic or try a new hobby or try a new skill, I can do that and it generates this sense of freedom.

If I want to learn about something I can, there is nothing stopping me. And when I think about it like that, there’s nothing that says that just because I’m an adult, I can’t go learn about this thing or that thing or why tomatoes are red or why the sky is blue. Just because I’m an adult doesn’t mean I can’t go learn those things or I don’t have to go learn those things or even that it’s weird that I go learn those things. I think that expressing your curiosity when you’re an adult brings even greater level of freedom to your life because you’re choosing to what you’re going to learn. You’re choosing what you want to go explore. And that also creates a little bit more of a sense of ownership of what you’re choosing to spend your time on. And it’s not just learning facts, right or about things.

Sometimes it’s just learning about the world around you. You know, there’s so much that is happening around us that we don’t know about. We tune it out or we don’t pursue it with questions. We don’t ask questions about what’s happening around us. And because of that, there’s a lot that we miss. You know, there’s, there’s things that are happening in everyone’s lives that we’re interacting with and there’s all these people we’re interacting with on a daily basis and we know very little about what’s happening in their world unless we’re reaching out and asking and being curious about that. And so not only are you learning new skills, learning new facts and figures and information, you also can learn more about the people around you. And see things from someone else’s perspective and now you’re opening your, your mind and you’re opening your eyes to a different perspective in addition to trying to learn things, you know, information.

And really all that can do is help you create better connections with people. If you are learning more about them, learning more about what’s going on, trying to understand their point of view, being curious about what makes them tick, all of that creates a better connection with that person. So I mentioned, I have a couple of articles that I’ll link in the description. One is from Psych Central and it’s called 6 Ways to Cultivate Your Curiosity. And the other one is on Psychology Today and it’s called Cultivating Curiosity. And both of them had very interesting points. I thought that I would kind of pull out some of the concepts that are in those articles plus some that I have experienced on my own about ways that we can cultivate curiosity in our lives.

I think the first and most impactful for me is to not let fear stop you. So I did a post on the blog a while back called Failing Like a Champ and talked a lot about fear. I think that fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of what we don’t understand is what many times prevents us from getting too curious or learning new things. Cause what if we try something and we don’t succeed or what if we try something new and we don’t like it? I know that for me, trying a new food is frequently hard. I don’t, I don’t really like to try new food. And part of that is because I don’t want to pay for something that I don’t like, but I think it’s deeper than that. It’s, I think I, I’m afraid to try something and it, cause if I don’t like it, then I’m going to be hungry or something like that. I don’t really know what it’s from, but, but it’s, it’s not so much that I…It’s that I don’t want to try the new food, but I think because I’m afraid. I’m afraid that I won’t like it.

I’m afraid I’ll end up paying for something that I didn’t enjoy. I’m afraid that it’ll ruin my meal, whatever. I’m afraid. There’s a lot of skills that I might like to try and I’ve been working really hard over the last few years to not let fear of failure stop me. So even if I don’t think I can do it, even if I don’t think I’ll be successful, I still want to try it because whether I succeed or fail, I still learned something and personal growth is still happening. Even if I don’t succeed or if I try something and I don’t like it, maybe I try some new hobby or I try playing an instrument or whatever and I, and I don’t like it. That’s okay. I don’t have to like everything that I try. I don’t have to be successful at everything that I try, but the fact that I tried open my mind a little bit and that’s really what I’m going for.

Another one I liked a lot was reading outside the box. So I’m a big reader. I think you guys probably know that already. I like to read a lot of stuff. Most of the books that I read kind of fall into one of two categories. Either it’s about dragons and magic and fantasy type stuff, or it’s something related to personal development. I haven’t always been interested in personal development. Almost all my life, I’ve read about magic and dragons and fantasy and stuff, but personal development is kind of a new topic for me. And I started picking books based on what I think I can learn from them. Something that I can learn a different perspective or something new that’s different. I’ve also been getting into biographies lately, trying something different. And so I would encourage you if there’s a specific type of – maybe you don’t like fantasy books or maybe you haven’t read any fantasy books and maybe all you read is biographies or nonfiction. Maybe try reading a fantasy book, maybe try reading something that is outside your paradigm and see if that gives you a different perspective. You’re probably not going to necessarily learn anything earth shattering other than to open your mind to something new. Open your mind to something different.

Another one I really liked was create a bucket list of questions. So like random questions that you would love to know the answer to. Like how many miles away is the sun? What kind of dinosaurs lived 230 million years ago? Why is the sky blue? You know, all of those kinds of things. Like make a bucket list of questions and go look up the answers and go find out the answers. Whether it is just a quick Google search or you read a book about it or you watch a YouTube or you watch a history documentary or something like that. Anything like that. You’re still gonna learn something. And, and it’s important when you think about that is be like a kid. Don’t judge yourself for the types of questions that you’re asking. It’s important not to do that when you’re in, in context with other people. Don’t let your fear of how other people are going to judge your questions stop you from asking the questions.

I don’t think anybody likes to look stupid, but I’ll be honest, I don’t think people that ask questions are stupid. And I think most people when they really think about it, don’t believe that someone who’s asking questions is stupid. I think they think this person wants to understand, they want to learn, they want to learn something new. And that is important. That is valuable. So if you’re, if you’re thinking to yourself, “I don’t like to ask questions, especially in group settings, cause I don’t want to feel stupid. I don’t want to show anyone that I don’t know this thing.” Show it! Let it all hang out. You are who you are, you know what you know. And the only way to learn more, really honestly, the only way to learn more is to interrogate, ask questions, ask questions of yourself, ask questions of the people around you, ask questions of the internet, whatever. That’s really the only way to learn.

Another thing I liked was taking an inquisitive approach to both your relationships and yourself. I think a lot of times we assume we know the answer. My husband comes home in a bad mood and I assume it is because he had a bad day at work. You know, he’s in a good mood and I assume it’s because of something else or he’s upset and I assume I know why. Rather than assume that we know and this goes with, you know, our bucket list of questions or any other situation, whether it’s at work or when we’re talking to ourselves or when we’re talking to other people.

When we assume that we know, we close that avenue of inquiry. So I could, I could assume that I know why he’s in a bad mood or I could ask him. It gives him an opportunity to talk about what’s going on with him and it tells me what really is going on with him. Likewise with yourself, you might think you know why you do something or why you like this or don’t like that. Pretend you don’t. Ask yourself questions to help you get and reflect a little bit into why you behave in the ways you that you do, why you react in certain ways. And maybe don’t accept the first answer you get as the ultimate answer. Maybe dig a little bit. Maybe dig to try to understand more. And that sense of curiosity about yourself and the people that are important to you in your lives, (in your life, just one life), those people that are important to you in your life, are going to help you deepen those relationships. Not only with other people but with yourself. You learn more about yourself, you’re more self-aware, you learn more about the people around you, you understand them better, you see their point of view better. You’re opening your mind again to different points of view, and different ways of looking at things.

Another place that it really pays to be curious is at work. So teams that are curious, teams that encourage a culture of curiosity are the ones that innovate better. They have better ideas. Their teammates are more engaged. They, they are always thinking of ways and understanding what’s happening in a way that teams that just kind of clock in and clock out, and they aren’t really asking questions. They’re just there to do a job. Those teams are not getting those kinds of results. And I found another really cool article, I’ll link that in the description as well, about a game company that encourages a culture of curiosity. And some of the things that they do is they encourage inquiry.

So things like when you have a meeting, instead of having an agenda with the topics that you want to discuss, why not phrase that agenda as questions, what are the priority of the things, you know, of these items? What should we work on first? How should we tackle this? You know, those kinds of things. Rather than saying, here’s what I’m going to propose. Now, sometimes I do believe that sometimes you have to propose a solution and let others react. But you can still frame the conversation, frame the topics in such a way that it invites other people to participate in that conversation and they feel more engaged because they’re being asked to contribute. They’re being asked for their opinion, they’re being asked to engage in the conversation and therefore they feel more engaged. They have more ownership over the decision. They have more ownership over the discussion because they’re engaged in the conversation.

Another thing that they do is they assume all learning is good. In this article that I’ll link, they talked about a lady who wanted to get reimbursement for going on a, on a photography learning cruise. So it was like a cruise you could go on, you learn photography. And she asked for partial reimbursement. And of course some companies, probably even my own, would say that’s not work related. You know, that’s not, that’s not anything that we would reimburse for because it’s not something you can use on the job. But it turned out that this lady, when she went on that cruise uncovered this love of photography and that she had a real skill at it. You know, she developed some real skills and so now that company uses her to do all their internal photography. So they spent some money to send her on this cruise.

They uncovered this love of photography in this, in this woman, and now they saved a bunch of money because they use her to do photography for their events. So when you assume all learning is good, whether it’s directly relatable to work or not, when you assume all learning is good and you encourage that kind of learning and inquiry in the people that you work with or the people that work for you, you’re encouraging innovation, you’re encouraging their minds to expand, you’re getting them more engaged, not just in their work but in their lives. You’re giving, showing them that there’s interesting things out there and you’re encouraging them to go pursue those things.

So that’s, I think that’s about it. One of the things that I got out of the hearing, the person speak last week, couple of weeks ago, whenever it was, they asked me what have I learned in the last 12 months? And this was like, I think of myself as a pretty curious person, but I was trying to think of what’s something specific and big that I’ve learned in the last 12 months? And what actually finally ended up occurring to me is doing a podcast! Prior to the first podcast that I did for this channel, I had never done a podcast before. It was something that I wanted to do. I was really interested in doing it. I researched how to put together the episodes, how to host it, how to publish it, how to get it listed, all that stuff. Something that I learned. Now I feel a sense of accomplishment. I feel good about that. I added to my set of skills. So I would encourage you to think about what’s something you’ve learned in the last 12 months? How did you feel when you learned it? Did it make you feel good? What’s something else you could learn? I would love to hear about it. If you want to tell me in comments, if you want to send me an email, talk about it in the Facebook group, any of that stuff. I would love to encourage conversation. Love to hear from you guys. I really appreciate you listening. I hope you have a wonderful couple of weeks and I’ll talk to you next time. Bye now.