Motivation and Curiosity are symbiotic.
It is fairly safe to say that we all find ourselves at some point or another with negative thoughts, even fleetingly. It may be as a result of a job interview or business presentation that did not play out as expected. It may be due to a conversation that ended badly, or due to how someone else actions have impacted us. Those negative thoughts and feeling arise. These ‘should have’, and ‘could have’ beratings come from how we unconsciously react to situations. We react from the ‘story’ about the past or an imagined future and very often our ego takes over our thinking and feeling. We become the victim, despite our knowing that we are not our thoughts and feelings. Does this seem familiar?
Choosing to take responsibility to move from this way of being, this state of victim consciousness, involves a mindset shift from ‘things happening to me’ to ‘things happening for me.’ Jim Dethmer, co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, suggests this shift comes from choosing “curiosity and learning over defensiveness being right.”
I often get asked while coaching to shifting States of Consciousness: How do I get genuinely curious?
In a recent email entitled, The Key to Unstoppable Drive, Steven Kotler from Research Flow Collective, suggests getting curious requires looking for places where three or four topics of your true interest (passion) intersect. If you can spot the overlap between multiple topics of interest, you not only increasing your engagement, you start creating the necessary conditions for linking new ideas together.
He then suggests; by layering curiosity upon curiosity and detecting links between ideas (patterns), you create a great starting point for increasing your drive, productivity, and well-being i.e. by combining curiosity with your intrinsic motivation (mastery, autonomy, passion, and purpose), resulting in “tiny squirts of dopamine,” says Steven. We all know that dopamine is the brain’s feel good chemical. It is as if curiosity and motivation are symbiotic.
So, how do you get genuinely curious? Get motivated. Get into flow.
Reference: Dethmer, J., Chapman, D., & Klemp, K. (2014). The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success (Kindle). www.booknook.biz.
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