I recently visited a friend in Germany. I don’t know the language. At all. It was uncomfortable and at times disorienting.
Because I knew I did not know, I came to every conversation with pure curiosity. Honestly I did not feel I had a lot of choice in the matter. I did not know and so I wondered.
As a coach, my objective is to bring curiosity to all my conversations. However, I do know the language that I coach in and because of my training, I also know some things about human nature. Because of that, I do have a choice about my curiosity. I can say I am curious, but my brain will bring in its beliefs, whether I want it to or not. There are so many things in the way of being truly curious. There’s a part of my brain that believes it knows some things already: what certain words mean, what certain “types” of people think, how certain people can be expected to act in certain situations.
I observed this part of my brain looking at German words or hearing them and thinking, “oh, I know what this means” because it looks or sounds like something I already know. And then I ask my friend and I am 100% off the mark. What a shock to my little brain.
Even knowing that I don’t know, my brain tries to tell me that I do know. So what chance have I got when I do speak the language? How often do I decide I know something because it looks like something else?
As coaches (and maybe as humans in relationship with others), we must shift ourselves to curiosity. Since I’ve been home I’ve been practicing. I’m playing a game. I am pretending my clients’ language is as different from mine as if she was speaking German? I am asking myself what if I truly do NOT know what she means? Then what would I do?
#Neugier
