Do you want your life to bloom and expand? Do you want your relationships to be deep and rewarding? Do you want your give your body the best chances to be fit and healthy? Do you want to be joyful and feel excited about life? Do you want your business to flourish and grow? Do you want your finances to flow?

Be Curious!

This is the key for discovery, self-growth, gaining self-awareness and overcoming one´s limits

This is the key to active listening skills and successful relationships

This is the key for learning and expanding skills

This is the key for effective reality checks and creating opportunities for improvement

This is the key to being more open-minded and tolerant

This is the key for keeping focused attention in meetings and social events

This is the key to a more successful and fulfilling life!

Caution!

First all, be careful! Acquiring this capacity may cause you to enter new levels of satisfaction and grant you the access to abounding resources. It may be a point of no return: once you will have started, you may never want to go back to the comfortable zone of the “well-known” and feel bound to doing something to move forward.

Discover About Yourself: Empower Yourself for Effective Actions

Draw an arrow on a big sheet of paper, and make marks for every 5 years of your life. And then, be curious: ask questions to each period. What happened in those 5 years? What and who has influenced you the most? What did you learn? What did you do? What supported you? What led you astray? What made you happy? What made you sad? What made you angry? What do you regret? What did people tell you? What did/do you wish? What were/are your goals? What are the common threads between all those points? Answering these questions will help you discover about your strengths and weaknesses, about what empowers/disempowers you, and about your values. 

Once you know what “works” out well for you, the next step will be about deciding on taking action towards using your strengths towards realising your goals. 

Discover About Your Opportunities: Regain Control Over Your Life

In the information collected with the exercise cited above, where do you see opportunities you have not yet tapped into? What are you good at? What did people say you were good at? What have others tried, but you have not out of fear?

Be curious about what you have been doing the last three months, and about what you are doing now. How do you spend your money? How do you spend your time? How do you spend your energy? What do you think of most of the time? Who do you spend your time/life with? Have you paid attention to your body? To your spirit? To your mind? To your soul? To your heart?

What could you do to start or re-start paying attention to each of these essential components of your being?

Discover About Others: Bring Your Important Relationship to the Next Level

Genuinely listen and ask open questions to the people around you. Observe what they do and say with the desire to understand what makes them move. Be attentive to what they say, and what they do not say, ask about their thoughts and feelings about what they tell you and notice what happens. While you do that, make sure that you suspend judgment, that your motives are pure, and you do not try to draw personal benefit from the information they give to you in a dishonest way. And keep what you heard for yourself. Genuine interest and curiosity for people will turn you into a wonderful communication partner, what is difficult to find in a world where we are all busier than ever.

Commit to experiment with focused attention and genuine interest for people at work and at home. Try to look at things with fresh eyes, and listen to the people who are talking to you, as if you did not know them, and really wanted to understand what is going on in their life. Do not try to solve their problem, do not try to find a similar anecdote to tell at the same time, do not try to decide if they are right or wrong, just pay attention , listen and try to reformulate in your own words what you understood from what they said. It does not matter if you have been married to this person for 15 years or if you have worked with this colleague for 5 years, ask them what is going on in their life/business right now, about what they want or what they wish, about what they think or feel. Genuine curiosity and interest for people can be one of your greatest assets for successful relationships and support you in making the best of every networking opportunity.

Discover About Your Business: Seize Opportunities to Grow

It does not matter whether you have been working in your field for 40 years or just 3,  try to look at your industry, your company, your employers, your employees, your colleagues, products and skills with new eyes. What are people saying about your company, what does a child/a stay-at-home mum think you are doing from the outside? Ask questions to people outside from your field and ask them what they think what your work is about? Ask open-ended questions to your clients or prospects, what do they expect from you, what would serve them the best, what would you need to do for them to be totally satisfied with the products you sell to them?

Pay attention, it all comes down through which glasses you will choose to look at things around you: what are your employees good at? What are your colleagues good at? Could you trade tasks to make both of you be more satisfied at work doing something you both enjoy doing? Do you see opportunities arising through paying more attention to what happens in you and around you?

Regaining interest and curiosity about work, people and life will lead you to being more productive and creative, what will create amazing opportunities for success and development.

Discover MORE Empowering Truths: Be Enthused to Create Positive Change

Pay attention to the big picture and the details, pay attention to appearance and reality, check the difference between what is said and done, be curious about contradictions and paradoxes happening around you, they will teach you a lot about what you could do to turn things around. Learn about what lies between your goals and your present reality. Learning about ourselves and others helps us regain control over our feeling and give us chances to be more positive. The better we understand what causes or caused us to act or react the way we do helps us be kinder to ourselves and regain self-esteem, and what causes us to be more positive supports us in creating a virtuous circle in our lives.

Research in psychology and human sciences has shown that he more we understand about issues, ourselves or others, the more emotional distance we can take from painful or negative experiences, what helps us regain our ability to choose how we want to respond to what happens in our lives. Being curious, learning and understanding things better, thus acts as a stepping stone for us to leave negative cycles behind, change bad habits and become empowered to live the life we want.

Discover and Tap into Your Creative Power: Be a Catalyst for the Creation of Synergy

Being curious will lead you to being more open. Being more open will allow you to hear different opinions, and learn about things that you have yet never heard of. Who knows where a genuine curiosity may lead you? I was bored and frustrated and started writing a journal again, gaining awareness about myself, who I was and what I really wanted. Along with it, I started looking around, reading everything I could, from every source I found, and discovered about coaching. I started a training, and begun doing what I believe is the perfect job for me making me feel balanced and fulfilled through living according to my values. Everything begun with a spark of curiosity, I listened to my heart again, and open my eyes and I begun to see opportunities and live and work with passion again… what a wonderful feeling…

Who knows where it could lead you? Maybe to the realization of your dreams? Maybe to finding the passion of your life? Maybe to meeting your soul mate, or a good friend, or a future business partner? Maybe you will hear about something that will help you solve your business problem or bring it to the next level. Try it out, it is one of the most powerful things on earth: be attentive! We all had this drive as children, and sometimes happened to let it rust, while it is one of the most empowering tools we have. Children become wonderful builders through curiosity, and invent and create new worlds. Children do it spontaneously and benefit greatly from it, growing their abilities and intelligence naturally. What if we did it with the intent of realizing ourselves, moving forward or reaching our goals? I believe it can make us move mountains! You first need to know what is your dream, your “promised land”, what “success” means for you and where is “your mountain” to have the chance to work at starting climbing it day after day to reach it.

What do you think? Are you up to the challenge? Are you willing to commit to a “Curiosity Quest” for 3 weeks? This would be the perfect start for building this empowering capacity. This will give you the chance to experiment and derive your own benefits from personal experiences. What do you have to lose? Believe me, you have everything to win!

After you have gathered started gathering information here is the last step to consider:

Be Curious AND Step in: Experience Momentum

Being curious can be your stepping stone, you will have the raw material, but knowing where the stepping stone is, and knowing how to step on it is not enough! You will then have to COMMIT to realizing your vision and make STEPS! We have often heard, knowledge is power, but it is in the APPLICATION of Knowledge that lies Power! How will you do that? After you have begun gathering useful knowledge after reaping the rewards of your “curiosity quest”, commit to choosing 3 things you have gained knowledge about during the discovery process, and do something concrete about it. You will be amazed at what the simple act of being curious will have changed your life for the better! This can be for example noticing that your work colleague does a certain task you hate very gladly, well and quickly, and that you do another task better than him: you may want to switch tasks for optimal results for the department.

You may have noticed your friend/wife/husband/sister/father is particularly joyful and happy when he/she meets that other person/friend, or does this activity: you may want to ask about it, or look at what really makes them that happy about it. Knowing about what the deeper needs of the significant people in our lives are gives us opportunities to find ways to meet them to enjoy successful relationships.

TIPS for Your “CURIOSITY QUEST”:

• When you search about something, enrich your perspective through exploring into a thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms ask people around what they think about that topic.
• Take a magazine at the store you would never have bought, and see what you can learn from it. Pick a museum you do not know, and go for a visit. Switch on a tv program you would normally not be interested in.
• When you want something, do not settle for the first attractive offer: compare.
• When you listen to something, suspend judgment first.
• Ask people “what are you passionate about?”, “what do you like the most about your job?”  or “what do you enjoy the most?” and enjoy learning about what makes them come alive.
• What would people from different origins/age/business fields think about that issue? think about it as if you were in their shoes, or ask them if you get a chance for it.
• Ask yourself “why?” or “how?” it could be the way it is.
• Ask “what if everything was possible?” and see where it leads you.
• Ask around what people think about the issues you are interested in, and do not say your opinion first to allow them free space for expression.
• Take one thing you are good at. Could you use it in another sector of your life?