Perspective Archive - This Moment Counts

How curious are you?

How many of you recognize this pattern in your organization?

A bit strange, isn’t it? Everyone loves to persuade while no one likes to be persuaded.

I wonder if that’s the reason why curiosity works so well.
Because it’s so rare …

A leader who shows up genuinely curious.
Who’s not pushing their agenda at all costs.
Or trying to save their face because they feel they can’t show a sign of weakness.

No, simply curious for what’s true.
Where we stand.
What the real assessment of progress is.
What the customers say.
What the quiet person at the back of the room is thinking.

That leader is rare.

But in my experience, if people feel that presence, they open up.

They share their thoughts more openly.
They raise concerns earlier.
They flag issues proactively.

What’s your experience?

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

PS: This is part of a new Perspective series that occasionally builds on my work on “What the Best Leaders Say”. There’s more on this in Issue 1, titled “How You Know You’re One of Them”.

If, after a car accident, you ask 10 eyewitnesses what they saw, you will hear 10 different versions of the same accident, possibly even contradictory ones. None of the 10 eyewitnesses is lying. None is trying to deceive you. Each one is merely recounting the truth in exactly the way they recall it.

Don’t expect that to be different for a speech. We shouldn’t assume that what we say will be recalled by our audiences in exactly the way we mean it. We shouldn’t even assume that what we say will be heard exactly like we say it. Or that what we show will be seen just like we see it. Or that what someone from your audience will say about your speech tomorrow, will correspond to what they are hearing today.

Each one of us has their own reality. We relate new information to this reality. Therefore, we may conclude different things from the same information than others do. Neither of us makes a mistake. It’s just the way that our brains work.

As a speaker, it’s a fact we have to deal with.

A new perspective

A fear that I often encounter among speakers is that their audience might “know this already”.

And quite likely that’s true.

Unless we have discovered something truly revolutionary (which is quite unlikely), people will already know much of what we’re going to tell them.

What people tend to forget is how “we know this already” is true for almost anything. There just isn’t a lot of new information out there. Most things have been pointed out by some person or another at some point in time.

Yet, audiences don’t show up for the knowledge. Knowledge is much more conveniently delivered in a memo.

Audiences show up because they want to take a look on that knowledge from your perspective. What’s your take on that?

Audiences want you to let them in into your experiences. What did you learn from applying that knowledge?

Because looking from different perspectives makes us see things that we might have missed before. It helps us see the unfamiliar in the familiar. It helps us discover new ways of applying what we know in a different context.

That’s why I think it’s a mistake to dismiss content that contains information our audiences have heard previously. It’s not about the knowledge. It’s about making them see from our perspective.

I’m dying to know what you let us find a new perspective on.

Posts in Tag: Perspective

How curious are you?

10 eyewitnesses

A new perspective