Transcriber: Yiwei Huang Reviewer: Keira White
So who in the room is not feeling a little stressed out?
Maybe you’re trying to navigate the stresses and strains of relationships.
Stressed out about work,
or worried about the growing divide
between people in our community and our country.
I think we can all agree
that we want a life that is characterized
by well-being as we age, by healthy relationships,
to work in innovative organizations led by inspirational leaders
while living in communities that are welcoming to all.
Now I know what you’re thinking: that that’s a very tall order, isn’t it?
But there is something that we can do that is powerful,
that has a positive impact on every aspect of our lives.
What I want you to do tonight, I’m going to encourage you
to think differently about the act of being curious,
about adopting a curiosity mindset.
So what is curiosity, anyway? It's very simple.
Curiosity is the desire to learn,
the desire to explore, to answer questions.
And a mindset is being able to think in a certain way.
So a curiosity mindset is a very powerful way to look at the world.
So let's think about this.
You’re here tonight, likely because you have a tendency to be curious.
Most folks that follow TED talks are.
But it’s probably been a while since you thought
about really engaging curiosity in your life
because we spend most of our time as kids being curious.
I was fortunate enough to have parents
that encouraged me to be curious throughout my childhood,
and urged me to do things like enter science fairs when I was a kid.
Yeah, right.
(Laughter)
And I remember my fifth grade science fair, I created a model
of the Solar System that had a motor, and the planets revolved around the Sun.
It was great fun.
But unfortunately, our society seems to have relegated curiosity
to our youth and to our formal education.
It's as though when we got our diploma in the mail,
it came with an insert that said:
“Congratulations, you don’t have to be curious any longer”.
And who in the audience hasn’t heard the phrase, right, you ready?
Curiosity killed the cat, and certainly
that doesn’t speak well of curiosity.
So what I’d like us to do is to invite curiosity back into our lives.
So how do we do this?
Well, one way to approach this is you have to think about your life
as a steady stream of interaction.
We interact with people through conversation
or we observe their behavior, and then we react,
and when we react, we form conclusions or we behave in a certain way.
Now all this happens pretty quick and pretty unconsciously.
We're not really quite aware that this is happening.
But the problem is, is those reactions and those conclusions
are often not aligned with the truth of the matter.
And when things aren’t aligned with the truth of the matter,
we act and behave in ways that are not healthy,
and often end up having negative consequences on ourselves or others.
So let me give you, kind of, a basic example of this is:
Let’s say that you’re at work, and you understand, and you find out
that a co-worker sent an email to your supervisor
about something pertaining to your unit or your division,
and you weren’t on that email.
And your reaction is: “Oh my gosh, she doesn’t respect me,
she made me look bad in front of my supervisor, I can’t trust her”.
So then after that, interact, observation and reaction,
you then decide that you want to avoid her,
and that you really can’t work with her any longer,
and maybe you confide in your colleagues that you don't trust her.
So what the curiosity mindset does for us is something really powerful,
what it does is it causes us to pause and stop
between the interaction that we have with others and the reaction.
And the pause gives us a moment,
just a moment, to be able to pause and say: “I have an information gap,
I need to get more information about this”.
I like to think of it as solving a mystery.
So imagine you go back to that scenario,
and you see that that email came in and you saw that.
And you just stopped and went: “Hmm,
I wonder why I wasn’t on the email”.
No judgment, you stop and go be curious.
And you talk to your colleague, and you say: “Can you help me understand
why I wasn’t on the email?”
And she says to you: “I thought you were on the email”.
She goes back, looks at the email, and you all are familiar with this, right?
The autofill function on an email filled in somebody else’s name
that was similar to yours, and it went to the wrong person.
By stopping to be curious,
you intercepted something that was going to turn into a negative situation,
not only for the two of you, but for your co-workers.
The other thing about interrupting this interact and react process
is to note that it does have negative consequences on others.
And I want to share a personal story with you,
something that happened to me over 25 years ago.
I was a new faculty member, teaching, you know,
my first year, and of course spent a lot of time putting together my lectures
and my exams and my syllabus.
And I was in that, you know, that first semester and in a class,
about 100 students, teaching Introduction to Gerontology,
and I had given the first exam, and we were going over it in class,
and as the class ended and the students, you know, piled out of it, you know,
filled out of the the classroom,
I noticed a woman coming the other direction and coming towards me.
And, you know, she came to me and she said:
“Dr. Wacker, I’m sorry, I missed the exam last week”.
So I thought: “OK, here we go again,
a student with another excuse.
Let’s see, what, slept in? Missed it,
maybe didn’t even read the syllabus?”,
and in the second or so that it got me to process those thoughts,
I said to her: “Now, you know, in the syllabus, I was pretty clear
that if you were going to miss the exam
that you needed to make sure you contacted me”,
and she, with her head down, in a soft voice said:
“I was sexually assaulted last week”.
In that moment, because I didn’t pause to be curious,
I created harm to this person,
and we have to be able to pause and be thoughtful.
And if I would have simply said: “Tell me your story”,
it would have made all the difference to her.
So the curiosity mindset is also beneficial to our organizations.
As a leader of a large university,
it is so important that we work to create an organizational culture of curiosity,
one that really tries to facilitate a curiosity mindset in all that we do.
And if you stop and think about it, most employees,
if you break it down,
are really charged with a task and a process
that is to to get that task taken care of and complete it.
How often do we make time and pause to be curious about the tasks that we do?
Are they efficient?
Does it make sense any longer?
Is the task in service to the right goal?
And you know, what research shows is that when we infuse
a curiosity mindset into our work and to our organizations,
employees feel so much better about the work that they do,
and it ends up having positive results for our organization.
And certainly institutions of higher education,
like many organizations, are facing a lot of unprecedented challenges.
And honestly, the only way to solve these problems
is to be curious, to be creative, to pause,
do some deep learning and listening to others,
to be able to see things from a different perspective.
So we need to make sure
that we’re moving in that direction, to be an innovative organization.
Now, at a societal level, what can we say?
It seems like we’ve created this “us versus them” mentality
in almost every topic and almost about every group,
and you know that this “us versus them” mentality
is predicated on the fact that there’s an observation,
or maybe you read something in social media and you react,
and the reaction happens because of those misperceptions,
and that those kinds of things go unchallenged because we don’t pause.
So we observe, we react,
and then we make conclusions about others that aren’t truthful:
based on their race, their ethnicity, their religious affiliation, age,
sexual identity, gender and so on.
And so when we do that, we also then engage with them
in a way that is negative and unhelpful.
So what we need to do is insert what’s called sociable curiosity,
where we pause to learn about others to try to understand others better,
to take the time that we need to do that and to learn.
And when we do, we create positive relationships
with people with whom we don’t know.
We create a sense of empathy and care to others.
All of that, I think, is in service to bridging the divide,
and the differences that we have in this country.
And so yes, we can also use curiosity mindset for ourselves.
You thought you were going to get off the hook, right?
Yes, we can use a curiosity mindset in our own lives, where we pause
to be curious, and wonder why we behaved in a certain way.
Why we reacted one way or another. What about the emotions that we feel?
What about how stressful it might feel to do a TED talk
and what that’s about, right?
But pausing to be curious about yourself
gives you the opportunity to be more self-aware,
to try to understand your feelings and your behaviors
so that then you can seek additional information,
and be curious about different ways that you might be able to engage.
So hopefully, right, you could use the I got the idea curiosity mindset,
it can be for your interpersonal curiosity,
relational curiosity, organizational curiosity
and sociable curiosity.
It’s very powerful.
But there is one thing that I want to close with,
that I think is important to mention about having a curiosity mindset:
you have to have courage to be curious,
and why is that?
It’s because when you’re curious, you go on what some scholars call:
“an unplanned journey” “an unplanned journey”
because the introspection that you use with yourself,
or the conversations that you have with others,
you really don’t know where that’s going to lead,
and it makes you a little bit vulnerable, right?, emotionally vulnerable.
Let's go back to that conversation about the coworker.
Let’s say that you go and you sit down, you talk with her and you say:
“Help me understand, why was I not on that email to my supervisor?”,
and she says:
“You know, I’m really glad that you came to me and asked me about this,
there was a reason why I left you off that email,
and I’d like to share with you why”.
Right? An unplanned journey. There you go.
All right, but isn’t it better to go on that unplanned journey,
to figure out what the issue is, to solve problems,
and build a relationship with another person
so that you can effectively work together and solve problems?
So, yes, it takes courage to be curious, it’s messy.
Sometimes it’s unplanned, but you know what, it teaches us,
it enlightens us, it’s better for ourselves,
our relationships, our organizations and yes, our society.
So tonight, have some courage, and go be curious.
Thank you.
(Applause)