Ep #11: Curiosity + Practicing New Thoughts with Sira Laurel

Emily
Welcome to Emotional Leadership, the podcast for high achieving leaders. Because healthier emotional lives means stronger leadership, thriving teams and much bigger results.

Welcome! In this episode we are talking about curiosity and practicing new thoughts. And I’m talking with Sira Laurel from Method.

So, let’s talk a little bit about practicing new thoughts. A few weeks ago in Episode 7, we talked about choosing your response intentionally. And in that moment we were focused on choosing to allow instead of choosing to resist. But we also worked in a little bit about deciding AFTER you’d allowed your default emotion, where did you want to go next? And that next place is what we’re going to be focusing on today. We’re going to be focusing on how to choose and practice your next thought.

So the idea is basically very, very simple. A thought is a habit.

You can think of us as having two kinds of thoughts. I know I’d mentioned this a little bit in the episode on generating emotions. We have two kinds of thoughts. We have default thoughts and we have intentional thoughts.

Our default thoughts, think of them as a whole bunch of little drawers or shelves. And each one has a label of something that may have just happened. Someone calls my name on the sidewalk. My boss tells me that I’m getting a raise. Whatever it is, there’s a bunch of situations and in each one of them, our brain has a pre-programmed thought for how it’s going to think in that moment, which then leads to the feeling we have, the actions we take, right? That default model.

We also get to choose to take that spot on the shelf and replace it with something more useful for us.

Now that doesn’t mean that all default thoughts are un-useful and in fact, some of the hardest ones for us to learn to replace are actually ones that were previously intentional thoughts that served us really well, but that we’ve outgrown or moved beyond for some reason.

And these thoughts, in order to replace them, it’s just like a habit. So when we learn a new habit, we learn a behavior and then a trigger for when that should happen. And what I want to encourage you to do is to approach creating new default thoughts or almost installing new default thoughts, in the same way: two steps.

You’re going to identify the thought that you want and practice it until you know that thought, that wording by heart. Think of it this way…if I say “happy birthday”, you know exactly what comes next, right? Your brain just filled it right in for you, so we want you to be as comfortable with the phrasing of your new thought as you are with the words to happy birthday.

And then the second step is to associate that with a trigger. And this is where you’re going to do work across the upcoming week to identify what are the specific moments where you want this new thought to trigger.

The clearer you can get on that description–coming back to how valuable creating clear vision for yourself is–the clearer you can get on that description, the better off you are because the easier it will be for your brain to recognize that moment and to summon the new thought. At the end of the episode, we’re going to come back to a really specific step-by-step exercise you can do for doing that upgrade process in your own head.

I love combining this tool with curiosity, because of frequent case that comes up for my clients is where they want to show up as more curious in a certain style of conversation at work.

There’s a couple of those that I’ve been working on. For example, I’ve noticed that I resist curiosity about my team members’ personal lives. I’m so curious and I love them as human beings and I want to be the manager who knows what’s going on and knows all the names of their pets and their significant others and their children. But I also don’t want to be seen as prying. I don’t want them to feel like they have to answer because of my positional authority. Or, also, sometimes I’m embarrassed that I don’t already know the answer! But you’ll notice that’s probably because I’d never asked it in the first place because I felt awkward and didn’t want to be seen as prying.

The next place I find myself resisting curiosity is that I shut it down during performance management or challenging feedback conversations. If I end up finding myself in a place where I’m thinking that I’m just asking a lot of questions and the person I’m giving feedback to can’t or doesn’t want to answer them or if it feels like they’re rushing to end the conversation and assure me they have it handled. The commonality that I’ve noticed between those for myself is that Awkward overpowers Curiosity for me. So, I want to shift my mindset in those two situations from a model with Awkward in the feeling line to a model with Curiosity in the feeling line.

Join me back at the end of the episode after my conversation with Sira and I’ll show you how.

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Good morning. I am here with Sira Laurel. Sira, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sira
I lead Method’s People Strategy. Method Communications is a technology PR and marketing firm in San Francisco and what People Strategy means is that I oversee everything organizational and talent development. Employee relations, recruitment. I partner with executives and leadership teams to improve work relationships, build morale, enhance our employer brand and generally increase productivity and retention.

Emily
Awesome. And I’m so excited to have a guest on who’s studied organizational development academically.

Sira
Yeah, that was a passion project of mine.

Emily
What do you love about leading and managing?

Sira
I have always wanted to be the mentor that I generally never had. Early in my career, I did have the opportunity to work with a CFO who did serve as a mentor to me. We ended up having a wonderful friendship. We were able to challenge each other in areas of needed growth. It was I think a remarkable partnership that allowed me to grow, in the five years that I was at this company, from an individual contributor to managing the business and managing staff of 15. I recognized that as this unique and wonderful and pretty rare thing to have occurred for me. And I’ve really never seen it since for me personally and so I’ve been in several organizations since, right? So I remember that so fondly and thought, I want to create that for somebody else. I’m in Human Resources because I want to create an environment that is safe and healthy. Something that I’d never really had, right, again, early in my career. And I wanted to go into leadership and management so I could influence change and that I could help others who are early in the career. You are not taught in school how to deal with the challenges of the workforce. And so being that rock for somebody just feels so fulfilling, to be able to give back.

Emily
I love that vision. So today we’re talking about Curiosity. What’s your quick pitch? Why is Curiosity an important emotion for us to be able to feel as managers and leaders?

Sira
Absolutely. If you want to grow your career, this one trait is absolutely essential. We hear a lot about, I think growth mindset now, which is essentially rooted in curiosity, right? [The idea] that you can further develop it. It helps to have, you know, a baseline, right? I encourage everyone to take the Big Five personality test. It is reliable as an assessment. There are many assessments out there, not all of them are actually rooted in science. This one is. But that essential trait is Curiosity and it’s essentially defined as a strong desire to know or learn something. But it’s so much more than that! When you’re curious, you’re open. You want to explore new ideas, experiences, possibilities, right? Open to meeting new people, making that connection at work, right? Talking to that executive or talking to that team lead. You’re open to leaving behind the past and only acting in the present moment saying, what is the current reality? Get rid of the outdated mindsets, get rid of those limiting beliefs and that allows you to make room for that next self. It allows you to make room for that future self, that career path, that person that you’ve defined yourself as being or wanting to be. That curiosity allows you to do that. It fuels your growth.

Emily
That’s awesome. So what does curiosity feel like in your body for you?

Sira
It feels like…it feels like…it feels alive. I feel energetic. My shoulders come back a little bit, I feel a little, a little more straight. I feel awake.

Emily
And one of the things that you kind of mentioned happening so commonly with curiosity is curiosity on one hand, excitement for something new, and on the other hand, a little bit of fear and trepidation for that thing that’s new. How do you sort out what you’re feeling?

Sira
For me, I go back to the science. I follow the Neuro Leadership Institute pretty heavily. I’m not a scientist by training, you know. My degree in organizational development was really helpful in giving me a kind of baseline understanding of human behavior for me to then go explore on my own more specifically, right? It’s a social science and so I had to go to psychology and psychiatry to understand more about how the brain works. And those basic automatic, again, nervous system responses that are trying to do their best to keep you safe. But your prefrontal cortex that most recently developed piece of your brain, that’s there for you to override, right? That ancient system and say, does this situation merit this worry, merit this fear, merit this trepidation? What is this situation reminding me of?

Perhaps it’s a similar situation in the past where I took this action and it didn’t work out right? I took a risk and I was reprimanded for it. Or there was some retaliation, right? Or I was no longer favored on the team. Right? There was some poor outcome that your brain is remembering for you in an attempt to keep you safe. Through mindfulness, through that practice, through reflection, you can train your brain to process what’s happening in the moment, recognize the emotions as they’re coming up and decide in the moment whether or not those safety based emotions make sense and you can decide that they don’t and move through it, right? And you can decide to frame things differently and move into a new space.

Emily
What’s a specific moment at work where you’ve noticed yourself making that decision about curiosity where you notice your brain trying to resist or avoid curiosity, even though it’s a perfectly safe emotion?

Sira
When I’m in an environment in which my curiosity and the actions that I’ve taken through curiosity, leaning into that have not resulted in an outcome that was positive for me and I continue to see that response occurring–maybe it’s on my team with a leader who is nonresponsive or responds poorly to that type of behavior–you learn then what is possible. And the framework that you had been operating in may have been larger and you have to make it smaller, right? As a result, you may have entered into a team in which you have a leader who is not open. And so you limit your curiosity in that environment.

Emily
What might you be seeing in the environment around you that would trigger that thought of, Oh, curiosity is not rewarded here, this is not okay?

Sira
Mmhmm. “Best practices” is a term that I…I don’t hate anything but I really dislike it. What it means is “we’ve done things a certain way for a certain period of time and it pretty much works and so we’re going to keep doing that thing.” That’s not based necessarily in evidence to support that this is truly the practice that is best for us and our environment. It’s not necessarily rooted in a rigorous evaluation and curiosity, right? We weren’t necessarily evaluating this thing or being open to something else. And so I see and talk with a lot of folks who that’s [their mindset]…”well we’ve been doing it this way and it’s working. So why change it?”

Emily
And when you notice your coworkers using phrases like “best practices,” when you notice them using phrases like, “well this is how we’ve always done it and it works well enough.” What are the kind of sentences or beliefs that start popping up in your head that lead to you wanting to avoid expressing curiosity in that situation?

Sira
That environment is not one of a growth mindset, right? Or of curiosity or openness.

Emily
And where are places where you’re not using curiosity? And where showing up with more curiosity would help you get a better result?

Sira
So, currently, in my organization where we’re grappling with the notion that we do need a formal employee relations process. That heavy employee relations concerns can happen here.

Emily
Cause they can happen anywhere!

Sira
Cause they can happen anywhere. And that, for our management team, our partners–until this year [it] has been let’s have conversation, right? We just need to talk to that person or, well, that’s just so-and-so, or they don’t mean anything by it. I’ve been met with a lot of resistance in bringing this to fruition. Because investigation is a scary word, right? So if you do an HR investigation, “well, I don’t feel like we need to do that.”

What I personally would have wanted to do differently if I could go back, is seek change quicker and try to affect change sooner. Made me think of different ways to get the same end, that maybe my language was too formal and accepting the resistance as, well, this is the way it is right now, and that maybe we could have dealt with that situation sooner had I worked on it a little more diligently and just kept going back to it and not having my own mindset of limits there.

Reflecting on that time period, and my own behavior and how I contributed to this situation, I wish that I had been more open, that I had met this resistance with curiosity. Why are they being resistant? What is it about this process, this reality, that they have difficulty understanding, embracing, even not just accepting. We need to create an environment of safety and why isn’t that the response? So if I had taken that approach of being more curious about why this leader was resisting it for X reasons and this leader was resisting it for X reasons…can I then change my approach and do something differently and get us to a place where we could have, maybe not prevented this, but resolved it much quicker?

Emily
So why do you think you avoided curiosity in that moment?

Sira
That’s a really vulnerable question. It’s a painful thing to reflect on because it’s my job to protect our staff. The Human Resources function, right, is looked to as that employee advocate. And so in some respects, I feel as though in not doing that, I failed right at my very important job. You know, above all, yes, I’m supposed to recruit and yes, I’m supposed to do performance management and yes, all those kind of very, very important aspects of the human resources role. But above all else, and this is my personal feeling of this function, is that it’s to create an environment where people feel safe. And so when I think about why I didn’t have curiosity then in that moment, I thought that I had time to understand. I thought I had time to allow my executive management team to come around. I was testing an alternative way and it was a failed test.

Emily
Which is in itself a form of curiosity, and an important one.

Sira
Yes. To not be so hard on myself. Yes. That the decision was okay, not this path. They want to try this path. Let’s see if that works. Yeah. I suppose why I don’t refer to it or think of it as curiosity is because I knew it wouldn’t work.

Emily
Ah, yes, okay. I love that answer because the way I think about emotions is that they motivate all of our actions and how we’re feeling…we can take the same action and we can take it from three different places and we get totally different results. And so there’s a way that we could label your trying a new approach to this as a form of exploration and curiosity. But you know it wasn’t coming from that place.

Sira
Yes.

Emily
What place was it coming from?

Sira
There is a framework for radical candor that has two sides. It’s got challenging directly, right? That’s one spectrum. And then on the other spectrum it’s how much you care personally and in that lower left quadrant where you don’t care and you aren’t challenging directly, it’s called Manipulative Insincerity. And when Kim Scott put this out in the world, you know, I saw that and thought, Oh gross, how could you ever, ever be there? That’s terrible. And if I’m honest, I’d say that that is what…that’s exactly what that was. I slipped into that space. Perhaps demotivated by the attempts before to affect change, to plead a case, right? To influence and having it being rejected, that I moved backwards for a time, on this particular thing, on this particular challenge.

Emily
I think your mention of moving backward is really interesting. I think it could also just be learning and trying new things. For a quick thought experiment: if you wanted to move from that place of manipulative insincerity, into curiosity, what are the sentences or thoughts you could use to generate that curiosity when it isn’t coming naturally for you in the moment?

Sira
Yeah. Oftentimes, the kind of fixed mindset phrases are “I can’t” or “I’m bad at.” And that could be, I’m bad at influencing, right? I’m bad at challenging. I can’t approach this person with this ask. The other side of that is simply “I can’t YET.” Which is shifting yourself into that learning mindset, right? It’s very positive. You know you’re going to get there. It’s goal oriented phrase and all you did was add yet, right? I’m getting goosebumps just saying that–I can’t yet, but I will. Or acknowledging what you currently struggle with. “I currently struggle with” is much different than “I can’t.” Those small tweaks in language really help shift the mindset, right? And can lead to really profound changes in itself.

Emily
And how do you get from that growth mindset, then further down the line into the space of active curiosity?

Sira
It’s honestly…it’s a practice. So you’ll start to take on those phrases–I currently struggle with, I can’t do this yet, but I will, I’m going to set a goal around this thing. You’re still going to struggle day to day, but like any habit, you eventually will find that the things that were causing you anxiety, that you were fearing before, you no longer are. It’s no longer an active thought process that you’re having with new situations. It’s now automatic. And so instead of fear, you will not have that negative or unhappy or stagnant feeling, right? Because you’re learning new things. You’re now open to the possibilities and you’re challenging others in areas of needed growth. You are suggesting new ideas and you see other people being open to them because you’ve learned how to convey a message that is also right for the audience. You’ll transform into a lifelong learner. And you’re not going to notice that as it happens over time. You might one day, all of a sudden, kind of feel different and think, Oh, there it is! Because you’ve been behaving in that way and you feel more positive.

Emily
Yeah. And if you could have transplanted one sentence into your mind as you were thinking about creating that employee relations policy, that would have just instantly snapped you from the place where
you were looking at your management team’s resistance and saying, I’m just going to have to roll with this, there’s nothing I can do, into that place of being super curious and digging in. What would that sentence have been?

Sira
It would have been, what is the consequence for not doing this?

Emily
Oh, I love that one.

Sira
What are you sacrificing? What is that better possibility, that open door that you are closing as a result of not taking this action?

Emily
Yeah, we talk in the coaching training that I’ve done about the way to make decisions is to make sure you love your reason. And I think that ties in really well with that idea. So as we’re wrapping up, what tips do you have for other managers and leaders about how they can show up and really generate and use curiosity to improve how they do their work?

Sira
You’ve got to approach things with the brain in mind. That’s why I like the Neuro Leadership Institute so much, is that the fear is natural, but it’s often unnecessary. We’re not met life or death situations in the workforce generally, most of us, right?

Emily
It is very rare.

Sira
Very rare. And knowing that, educating ourselves about how our brain functions helps us be better managers, leaders, humans. It’s imperative that managers are on a quest for self discovery and their own clarity because their role is so important, as it’s influencing the decisions and the development of others. So knowing oneself is really the starting point for everyone. Increasing your own self awareness will make everything else that much easier, to know why you do a certain thing, right? What your tendencies are. Take a big five personality test! How open are you or not open are you? How does that affect your decisions? How does that affect the way that you hear other people, new ideas? Just knowing that you can help yourself, in decision making moments, to know that, alright, I tend to be less open. How can I through language shift that? How can I teach myself to be more open? It’s pivotal.

Emily
Yes, it absolutely is.

Sira
Mindfulness, I think, is pivotal. That constant reflection of, why am I feeling this? What is this thing that I’m feeling? Can I articulate the emotion and what is it asking me to do? And do I want to do that thing? And the more that you practice mindfulness, the more that you increase your self awareness and self regulation, your emotional intelligence, you can have that conversation in your mind pretty quick, as you’re being met with new situations. You’ve got to lean into the fear and failure and accept that it is okay and it will happen and it should happen because if you’re not failing, you’re not trying. And experimentation is part of the learning process. So yes, take risks, take calculated risks, and learn from those failures.

Emily
Oh, thank you. This has been so much fun.

Sira
Yeah, this has been great. Thank you. This is wonderful. I reflected and I’ve learned about myself!

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thank you again to Sira!

Now let’s jump into our exercise for this week. So, we’re going to do a little bit of upfront work right now and then you’re going to practice your new thought all week.

So let’s start off: Where is a place at work you want to make curiosity into your default stance?

Great. Now describe it really clearly. How would you notice if this Circumstance were happening?

Fantastic. And now you need to figure out what you want your new default thought to be, that will create curiosity for you.

One way that I suggest going about this is actually filling in the rest of the model. So let’s jump ahead of the Thought line. You’ve just described your Circumstance. We have our feeling, it’s Curiosity. If you were acting from curiosity in this circumstance, how would you be acting? What would you NOT be doing? What would you be doing more of?

Now pause for a minute and sanity check that this feels right. Is this the kind of outcome you want in this situation?

Great. If not, pause for a second, go back and tweak those Actions to the Actions you’d want to be taking to produce the Result you do want as your outcome here.

And now let’s go back up to that Thought line because having a Result makes it a lot easier to find a thought. So for me, when I want to be more curious and actually ask my team members questions about who are the people in their lives and what’s happening and going on beyond the cursory, “Oh I hope you had a great weekend, anything exciting?” I want to change my result to: “I know what matters most to my team members in their lives outside of work.” And you know, I can just use that thought up in the Thought line as well. And I can say, “I want to know what matters most to my team members in their lives outside of work.” And I feel great about that! I do want to know, because I know that those things are going to impact them at work too, because we’re a whole person in every aspect of our lives. And for me, when I think I want to know what is important to my team members in their lives outside of work, I do feel curious! So that works really well for me. Do that sanity check for you: What’s your thought and how does it make you feel?

Fantastic. Now grab that thought and write it down. If you’ve got a piece of paper handy nearby, that’s great. If not, pull out your phone and type it in.

And now each day, this week you’re going to do three things. You’re going to get a little bit clearer about exactly what it looks like in the world around you or inside your own head in the moment where you want to have this thought become your default thought. So you’re going to write down a better and better, clearer and clearer, description of that every day.

The next thing you’re gonna do is you’re going to create an intentional practice. Literally, this means rewriting that thought for yourself a few times and then saying it out loud a few times. It sounds silly. It makes a HUGE difference. This means that your neural pathways get used to thinking those sets of words one after another in exactly that set.

Think of what happens when you type something on your phone a lot and then the auto suggest starts popping up the next word. That’s how you want your brain to interact with this thought you’re trying to make into a default thought, a new habit, right?

And then third, you’re going to reflect on your progress over the last day. You’re going to make a list of where are the places where you could have used this new thought, where you would have wanted it to kick in by default for you. And, next to each of them, put a note as to how far after that situation you had actually remembered this was a good opportunity for using this thought. And if that’s, right now, when I’m writing this down and doing this exercise, that’s a perfectly fine answer. But over the week, you’re going to notice those timeframes getting shorter and shorter and shorter.

And now for this one, when the week is up, make sure you keep practicing this thought. It’s going to take some time, right? But eventually you’re going to have programmed your brain into thinking this automatically without you even being conscious of it. And the first time you see that happen, it is going to be this amazing gold and rainbows and glitter moment when you see the possibility of this tool to really shift your unconscious and default behavior. And you get a sense of how you can move from a work life and a home life that often feels on autopilot and often feels outside of your control, into one where it feels like you’re really crafting and creating exactly what you want.

Make sure that you grab the Podcast Guide this week. It’s got all the questions I just asked during the exercise with space to write your answers, a link to one of my favorite books that has a GREAT explanation of habits and how to create new ones, and more. Just click the link in the shownotes.

So, have an amazing week. Make sure you’re taking time to practice your new thought so that your brain gets really comfortable with it. As familiar as it is with the lyrics to happy birthday. And I’ll see you next week!

If you loved this episode and want to dive deeper into improving your own emotional health so you can feel better and have bigger results at work, you have to join me for a one-on-one call. We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and create a solid plan to get from here to there. Just visit go.exceptional.vision/call. See you there!