I think sometimes what we have to do is be courageous with our own judgements about ourselves.

And who that means we are if we shake our own internal identities.

And they are often reflected on the outside, but still the curiosity starts internally.

It's an inside out process.

Welcome to the World Beyond Resilience Podcast.

I'm Carolyn Gibson.

And I am Angela Philp.

And today we are talking about something that we're both super passionate about, which is the shift from assumption to curiosity.

And we have already been talking about several of these shifts, but we were just.

Discussing earlier that they're more like stepping stones.

Angela, do you wanna go further on that?

Yeah, I, I think the stepping stone is something that gives us more access because we are mostly living in this world of resilience and how to be better at hyper committing and hyper performing and being more endurant and producing even more.

And in that resilient world.

Especially with women who are already hyper resilient, it comes at great cost.

So we want to give some stepping stones to shift into that beyond resilience world where you can have higher performance, higher value creation, better impact, more influence, and more energy, and the shifts are.

Something that will happen internally and the stepping stone's are, the ways to get to those shifts.

So that's what one that we're going to be talking about today.

So before we talked about problem solving to creating, we've talked about vision, we've talked about resignation to, acceptance.

Yeah.

And now this one assumption to curiosity.

Angela, do you wanna kick us off?

Tell us more about what you think this shift is all about.

I think what's important to talk about here is I've often said certitude to curiosity, and mostly because I like the rhyming of the two Cs.

But we, we spend, a lot of our lives holding very many certitudes and assumptions, which are the more usual term for them.

And if we imagine.

Our thinking is a bit like a wall of bricks.

You know, like we've grown up, we've learned lots of things about the world.

We hold particular worldviews.

We have these ideas about ourselves and others, and it's a very fixed.

Wall of bricks almost that we have in, in our brain.

And then everything else that we see sort of filters through those, through what we already know.

It's like a habitual thinking of the way the world is, the way we are, the way others are, and the reasons why things are the way they are.

And resignation, which we've already spoken about, is.

A particular type of assumption, oh, it'll always be this way.

This is, you know, like, it's never gonna change.

It's a habitual way of thinking.

That's pretty sluggish.

And I, I find these certitudes these assumptions through which we see life, and I mean, it is, it's normal that we create them.

It's part of being human.

But they keep us in that resilience mode.

If I, if I can give an example of a personal way of looking at the world, a personal assumption, for example, might be, we were speaking before Carolyn, oh, I'm just not good at languages.

And what did you say?

That's such

a typical one.

Typical one, yeah.

And I was like, well, what, what are you speaking now?

Yeah.

You are not speaking any language.

No.

And, it's one of my bug bears.

Uh, for those who might not realize.

I, I've written a book about how to learn languages and teach languages to children.

it's because we're actually hardwired to learn language and people are told from a very early age.

Through perhaps, inadequate teaching or whatever that, that they get this impression, they're not good at it, and all of a sudden that that wall goes up.

I love the way you talk about this.

Brick walls.

There's a brick there in front of your eyes, you, that means you can't see.

Now the fact that actually you have this capability within you that's inherent and innate.

We, we learn all of these things about ourselves when we're, you know, when we're, when we're younger.

And I have a story too, so we can just sort of like show you how to move from this wall of assumptions that you have this wall of bricks.

We'll talk about the characteristics, a little bit of that wall of bricks.

'cause we have some.

Other metaphors.

We might have a few mixed metaphors, but they have, that has a certain feeling to it.

This wall of bricks as well, which is what you said, Carolyn, very fixed.

And then we're going to give you some ways to, shift into a different.

Frame I give you the stepping stones to shift into that curiosity, which is actually what will build your energy and lead you into, a different way of being the beyond resilient world.

Just to go back to some personal assumptions, so we'll look at personal, we'll look at professional, we'll look at the more global and the impact that that has and, and how that, I guess cuts off innovation and cuts off possibility.

But one of the ones that I learned when I was younger, more from watching, and what I was hearing was, my brother was very sporty and I was not, I.

So I was the intellectual and that was the assumption in the family.

And that became something that I lived by until when I was in my early twenties.

I went, oh, I want, I want to be an adventure racer.

And everyone turned around and went, you.

That's not who you are.

So their assumptions about me that I had, internalized and agreed with.

Unconsciously for so long I had believed that I was not sporty while all the while doing competition gymnastics.

It it's just really important to be able to see where we might be held back by our own personal assumptions that are things that we've learned that a actually aren't true.

We just haven't questioned them.

I think you have a couple of others to give as well, Carolyn.

Well, I was thinking, we've given some examples at the personal level and And there's a great book, obviously called Mindset, which you know, people may have read, by Carol Dweck, which talks about this mindset of whether you're.

Are you, are you somebody who is good at things or are you somebody that can be good at things and can be doing those things?

If it's that, it's that subtle shift between, is and.

Able to,

the fixed and growth mindset, like I have decided that I am, and that's the fixed mindset.

From the fixed mindset, from that assumption, there's no way out, there's no option.

You are closed.

And then what that leads back to then is a sense of either resignation, which we've already spoken about, or fighting against the resignation, which leads to struggle.

Sort of like a listlessness That's why I said.

It feels like a slug, you know, like there's like a dullness to it.

And you sort of give up, which isn't acceptance.

Yeah.

Or you can, move into struggling and trying to prove something.

And that's not growth mindset either.

That that's just I've gotta prove myself and everyone wrong.

But it also misses out on all of the flourishing.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, and the trick, the trick here, and what we're trying to point out is that, that curiosity is a way out of that sluggishness.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's all right to say tell people you have to have a growth mindset.

What how do you do it right?

Exactly.

But what, what is it that can help you move into that, shift into that?

And that's, that's definitely curiosity.

And then, the idea that, that you go from this brick wall in front of you to potential possibilities by trying to look beyond that.

Look, what is the range of possibilities here?

It it's not just this one thing.

So We are going to, as we normally do in our conversations, duck in and out OO of things.

So you get to follow us on the river's journey.

That flows in and under rocks in all sorts of different ways.

And.

Curiosity is such a simple thing for us to develop.

I just wanna pick up on what you said, Carolyn, about, the lightness of curiosity and that being an essential part of who we are, right from birth.

So it's not actually something that you have to necessarily, acquire.

It's something that you already have and that you have to tap into.

again, just simply., All babies are curious.

I.

Innately curious.

They want to know about what's happening around them in some way.

Like they wanna find out what fingers are and, and then they want to try and eat things that, whatever it is.

And then as they grow into children, you know, two and three year olds, they're innately curious about the same bug that they have seen over and over and over again and, and all of the whys.

And we'll come back to those.

So.

It's a remarkably simple and natural, element to come back to is your own curiosity.

There's nothing big and and difficult about this.

It's simply a practice.

Yeah,

it's a practice.

And even for me, I'm a super curious person from time to time you forget that that's actually something that you can bring into a room.

If we talk about organizationally, if we jump into that.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things, one of the things that, um, really held me back in my career early on is that I would go into a room, think I had to have all the answers.

Uhhuh

right.

Because that assumption.

Assumption, right?

Yeah.

And, and that, I couldn't say, I don't know,, or, or, as a result of that, I would come in and think, be thinking all the time, what am I gonna say about this?

What I'm gonna say?

That rather than really listening to a conversation, really understanding what people are saying around and being curious about what people are saying What it did is it brought me out of myself and out of that resignation.

I've gotta be so good at this and I'm gotta be, I'm gonna be judged by this too.

What is it that I need to learn in this room?

It's a

totally different, totally different mindset that makes you feel so much more relaxed when you're there because you're not then judging yourself the whole time you're actually looking and listening to the conversation.

You've touched on three key points even more.

One of the first thing I noticed is, it's like a double certitude, a double assumption.

The first underlying assumption is you have to know everything.

Yeah.

So that, that often fuels, what I see in leaders very often is it's an underlying current of I have to know it all, and know everything and be really good at it and be the most brilliant in the room.

And then the second assumption that you were talking about is that when you know everything, then everything will be all right.

And it will work the right way.

And it completely operates over the top of.

A lack of real, like you were just saying, real presence.

The, the presence of being is what is needed in the moment in the room.

And so it cuts off any relational capacity that you or anybody else can really have too.

'cause you're so busy, like you're saying, being the wall of bricks, The global assumption is we all have to know everything which doesn't allow for any innovation and any, what, what I was hearing you say, any true connection, in that moment either.

And

I, and I've had those meetings as well, where as all, people know what's gonna be talked about.

It's all pre prescripted, you know, and then, and there's no actually no real conversation that happens in the room.

It's so weird.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, that's

the dullness I'm talking about, right?

Yeah.

It's just.

I get these images in my mind.

But just like almost of like robots in a way.

And again, there's no real life.

There's no, spontaneity and possibility of anything new coming out that you didn't imagine?

Yeah, because like you said, it's already prescribed and I, I see this in the professional context quite often with, like general beliefs and assumptions.

Like if I work hard, sort of links a little bit back to what you've just said.

If I work hard, then I'll be promoted.

If I work hard, then I'll be noticed.

I have a really good good you right story on that, which is like, when I first started consulting, in the consulting world, I was, senior manager or something like that and I didn't really understand how it worked.

So I actually went to my, the head of the department and said.

Listen, can we have a conversation once a month?

I really don't really understand what I'm supposed to be, doing to help this.

And all my colleagues were like, you're ambitious, not said with a very, you know, weird, ambitious with a not.

And I was like, what?

Well, how are you supposed to know unless you ask?

And how are they supposed to know, give you any guidance if you don't actually give them a chance to give you guidance?

And I was like so surprised that people didn't do this.

Right.

So there's, but there was, there was a really active, like, no, we've gotta keep our head below the parapet and do our work, and then people will notice us,

right?

And do as we're told and do as were told, the sort of the good girl syndrome or the good boy syndrome as well and.

Also then just assuming that when you use your curiosity, how, I think it's important to say this, it won't always be as you've just shown, welcomed when we do, be curious, sometimes that will shake somebody else's assumptions.

And those assumptions, which are very often.

Unconscious.

If I sort of came to you or came to them and said, oh, you're just acting like a good girl, I would probably be met with, no, that's not true.

This is just the way things are done.

And, but we can know that our assumptions, our unconscious assumptions become conscious when we start defending them and we start judging other people for not acting in alignment with the assumptions that we already have.

So, and you have this

great example of.

Women that you were coaching in a, in an organization right, who had these very strong assumptions too.

Yes.

Well, it was a talent acceleration program, a leadership acceleration.

And they had been told as everybody is told, that mobility is like every two years.

Minimum.

So once you're in a post or in a job function, then you've gotta stay there for two years before you can move.

And of course, they were in this leadership program specifically to accelerate them outta that two year, timescale, if you like, or limit.

And they still held it really clearly in their minds.

So, the, the question was, what would you really love to be doing?

Where, where do you see yourself?

Of course, in five years, two years, one year or whatever.

But when we got to, what have you done to move beyond where you are now?

It's like, oh, well we can't, we have to wait for two years.

Have you asked?

No, we have to wait for two years.

So we pushed until I was like, right, we're challenge you, we're challenging.

You go and see if that's true.

And of course, every single one of them shifted, in less than two years into a higher, you know, level of operational leadership.

But it was funny how resistant they were to actually getting curious about this, because I already know.

That's the, that's the, I already know, I've been told, and of course there's an underlying I'm right, and technically that might be true, but it's really important, like you just, illustrated in your example, Carolyn, I.

To get curious,

but also like, what you're also pointing out is there's a little bit of a fear challenging the system, right?

Mm-hmm.

And we all have that, you know, is the, if there the system might be, uh, explicit in your case or implicit in my case.

Mm-hmm.

You don't.

Yeah.

You know, but you have this assumption in your mind that the system works in a particular way and.

It's sometimes really hard to get up the, to get up the courage to do something like this.

And this is where curiosity comes in because you're not going in it to, to fight the system or you know, you know, well, you don't have to anyway punch for somebody in the eye or something like that.

You're going in it because you're curious about whether what your assumptions are right or not, and if you can do something differently and what the possibilities are.

That's so important, what you've just said that, I, I wanna come back to something I used to say, curiosity and fear.

Don't ride the same horse.

And, it sometimes takes courage to be curious, but in fact, sometimes it just takes curiosity to be curious, you know, I think sometimes what we have to do is be courageous with our own judgements about ourselves.

And who that means we are if we shake our own internal identities.

And they are often reflected on the outside, but still the curiosity starts internally.

It's an inside out process.

Oh, that's interesting.

Why am I judging myself for this?

Why do I think that would happen?

What else might be possible if, what would I really like?

These are the sorts of questions that we can ask ourselves and take it on as a practice.

This is not something to get right.

It's something to lean into as a way of bringing more energy, opening more possibility, feeling more aliveness, creating more connection, rather than being stuck in the rut of, well, that's my lot, or This is the way it is, which you then have to be in that fight against once again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So personally, you need to have that in you.

And then organizationally, I think there's another level of trying to encourage that as leaders in your own organization.

You know, there's the classic five whys.

A thing that's could have been written by toddlers, right?

Why?

When you get, when you come across a problem, don't just assume that the first answer you get to the problem is the right and the only answer, what are the, the other possible reasons why you're having this problem?

And keep asking at each level.

When you get to that, is that the root cause?

Why is this happening?

Why is this happening?

Why is this other thing happening?

And, and then you can start to see all the possibilities of how to solve the problem.

Whereas if you only come across that same one answer every time, you know, it's the fault of hr, that's an easy one.

Or, or you had one.

As well before we were talking about.

Going into a meeting and then asking everybody, does anybody disagree with what I, you know, do with With this proposal?

Yeah.

And they're talking about the disagreement and nobody raises their hand and the first thing you do is assume agreement in that case.

Yeah.

And you might wanna go to your five why's there already.

Why is nobody raising your

hand?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, you definitely wanna do that.

But you also have different techniques, right?

So instead of saying, does everybody agree or does everybody disagree, you can say, put your, give us a one to 10 about how you feel about this particular decision.

Yeah.

You know, and then you, they have the possibility then to understand why when somebody says 10 or somebody says one, what, what their concerns are.

And that opens up again, possibilities of a better solution or a better decision.

Mm mm That's

a great one

for.

Bringing your curiosity and bringing also the group's curiosity within, within a team meeting.

I was also thinking of just sometimes the why's within ourself as well.

Like how come I just went to that immediate straight line of everybody agrees and is this, am I doing this everywhere all the time?

I think some leaders could be a lot more self-aware about their own inner assumptions and their five whys they can apply to themselves first, and then they can start applying, like you were saying, it's.

The fault of hr.

Why Carolyn?

Is it the fault of HR before?

It's always

hr.

Yeah.

Um.

Yeah.

And then we also had a conversation we about how this affects the way we treat our planet and the people around us in our communities.

Right?

Um, we already have had a conversation with Keetie Roelen about people in poverty and the, all the assumptions we have about people in poverty and how, without curiosity.

You don't understand.

Mm-hmm.

Um, what they're really going through and the great capacities that people living in poverty have had to develop as a result of their situation and what they're, what, what they really need to thrive and to flourish, if we were to design systems better.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Keetie's, conversation was very much about empathy.

Empathy requires you to feel your heart, but it also requires some form of curiosity about others, their situations, So I think, again,, there's a systemic curiosity to have rather than that simple straight line.

That's just the way things are.

Yeah.

No.

Poverty happens because somebody has, because a whole group of people just haven't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

Is it without going into your five why's or, you know, the

classic, the other classic one that we hear all the time, the trope around immigrants are rapists and murderers, right.

And how many of us are descendants from immigrants?

Uh, ourselves, right?

Or our immigrants, ourselves.

That's me.

You, Angela, we're both immigrants, right?

Both.

Both descendants of immigrants

and an immigrant myself.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I, I think the reason we're getting to this as well is because, um.

The parallel with how, like you were just saying, Caroline, how we treat people in the world and how we treat our world.

And you and I are both optimists.

I, I see beauty and possibility and you see beauty and possibility and wonder everywhere.

And as I walk out, I'm incredibly privileged and so are you.

We live in places where we are safe And yes, we have worked for this and it's not just our own work alone that's had us.

Had us be here.

It's also how we've been born and the privilege.

And that is something to be thankful for, not judgmental of in ourselves or judgmental of in anybody else that they haven't had it.

But I think it's important in our resilience conversations that what we are looking at is the parallels between how we treat ourselves in terms of resilience in this constant over committing and over Achieving and over extracting from ourselves at all costs and the way that shows up in the way we treat the earth, the environment, the world, and other people on a global scale.

The people, yeah.

Yeah.

So that's why we are, we are weaving all of this into the conversation and we want you to think about this as well and how this practice of curiosity, shifting from assumption to curiosity will have an impact in your own life and on your own experience and, and energy and impact.

But also how if you saw that amplified in the world, that might create change in a whole other way.

And the other thing to be aware of obviously is from a kind of, a negative standpoint, I say is people in power, use our assumptions against us.

They create our, the world and the assumptions around us.

So if we're not curious, we don't have the ability to understand what levers we have to create the world that we want.

Yeah.

Exactly, I wanna bring this round to something that we were saying at the very beginning.

There's a lot of talk, at least in the coaching world and the psychology world, and it's all true about how our brains are.

Fear-based.

How we have evolved from, the savanna is that we had to know what was going to go wrong so that we could survive.

And so talk is about how our brains have evolved for our survival totally unrefutable la evidence.

And our brains have evolved with curiosity and creativity.

And that is actually what has helped us to flourish.

And leadership in general.

There are of course some notable exceptions, but, what we see in leadership in the world right now is very fear-based.

And it preys on the survival resilience aspect of our, human evolution.

We really need to be more evolved now and look at the other ways that our brain, can create.

And I, I think that's the point of this as well, and curiosity is the way there, and curiosity is as natural as breathing and it's a lot

more fun and

it's a lot more fun and it gives you a lot more energy and it creates a lot more connection.

Yeah.

Everything you ever want will come from curiosity.

Yeah.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

I think it's fantastic that we've, been able to weave this all through and, look forward to hearing your comments.

Yeah, so do, do, send us your comments.

Let's have more conversations about this, and if you want any more information about the, The Five Why's or, there's something called the ladder of assumptions.

Anything about that to help you with your assumptions and build your curiosity.

Curiosity, get in touch.

Thank you.

Thank

you.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the World Beyond Resilience Podcast.

If anything you heard today sparked an aha moment or made you think differently about resilience, please tell us about it in the comments.

We'd love to hear from you,

and

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And of course we have additional resources and deeper dives into all the topics we discuss on our website, which is world beyond resilience.com.

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So.

If this conversation interests you and you start to feel that spark as well, and you think it would be useful for yourself or within your organization, feel free to get in contact.

So until next time, remember, there's a whole world of possibilities beyond just being resilient.

Take care.

Take care.