307: Squash Limiting Beliefs in 4 Steps with Tinsley Galyean
Description
https://youtu.be/7Gq4_nY3n_Q
</figure>
Tinsley Galyean, CEO of Curious Learning, is on a mission to eradicate illiteracy worldwide by helping people reframe how they think, learn, and lead through curiosity.
We explore Tinsley’s journey from the MIT Media Lab to co-founding Curious Learning, a non-profit transforming education for children in over 200 countries. He introduces his Eliminate Limiting Beliefs Framework, which guides leaders to let go of defensiveness, open up to curiosity, ask questions to understand, and create awareness of their assumptions.
Tinsley explains how curiosity dissolves barriers to change, why awareness precedes transformation, and how these principles can drive both personal growth and global literacy. He also shares stories of communities teaching themselves to read and offers a surprising belief that 90% of leaders would disagree with—challenging traditional notions of control and leadership.
—
Squash Limiting Beliefs in 4 Steps with Tinsley Galyean
Good day, dear followers of the Management Blueprint Podcast. My name is Steve Preda. I’m the host and my guest today is Tinsley Galyean, the CEO of Curious Learning, a nonprofit that is working to eradicate illiteracy around the word. And Tinsley received an Emmy nomination for his work on the Discovery Channel and has recently authored Reframe: How Curiosity and Literacy Can Define Us. So please, welcome Tinsley Galyean to our show.
Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me here.
Yeah. It’s great to have you and you have a really inspiring nonprofit.
Thank you.
Normally, I don’t have nonprofits on the show, but yours was an exception because I really like what you’re trying to achieve here. So let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it with Curious Learning?
That’s always a good question. Thank you. I’ll take a quick moment to do a little bit of background to lead up to that because I think like most people, my personal why has evolved over time. So I, my background is in computer science, electrical engineering, as well as design and media. I ended up doing my PhD work at the MIT media lab in the early nineties. Then was in the world of technology and media, mostly kids, space, and often had an educational component for a couple decades as a result of that. And then shifted my work more towards kind of nonprofit philanthropic work and was asked to work with the Dalai Lama to start the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. From there, asked to come back to MIT and teach and start to get involved in research projects. One of those research projects was asking whether children could learn to read if the only resource they had was a tablet with some curated apps on it and left to their own devices. This kind of skunks work research project was done in remote Ethiopia and gave kids that had no access to school and no one in the village that were literate that access to these tablets and left them alone for a year.
And after a year, they were roughly at the same place. They would’ve been in a well-resourced US kindergarten, which was an astonishing realization. And I was kind of at the right time, at the right place with the right history and the right skills to say, you know, what does this mean? Can we replicate this? Can we scale it? What could the impact be globally if we could make it a reality? And you know, that kind of became the birth of Curious Learning, you know, in terms of getting back to your real question, which is the personal why during that journey
I came to believe and understand that a big part of what we're doing as humans in our lifetime is learning and growing.
Share on X
That’s one of the most rewarding things we can do, and when we can do it for ourselves and we can promote that and encourage that in others, that that’s at the core of our being. I’ve come to a place where I’m working on an entity that not only allows me to personally grow and learn from the process of working on this kind of global stage. But also help my, all the people within my organization learn and grow during their careers and their process and their connections. And we have people throughout the world working with us. And then I also use that as a platform for helping as many children in the world learn and grow as well. So I can’t think of a kind of better way to feel like I’m doing the work of the greater good.
Yeah. That’s amazing. So how is, how can you achieve that, these kids with a tablet that they even know what to do with it and keep it charged? I mean, you see people who are highly educated, forget to charge their mobile phones. I wonder how can you get this who come from very disadvantaged backgrounds to actually be organized enough to even do this?
And I think there’s a distinction between kids, and adults too. Right? You know, when we handed out the devices in those first remote villages and we replicated this experiment in a number of places around the world, we don’t even tell the kids how to turn them on. We just give them. And then, you know, if they ask what they should do, we said, you figure it out. And it usually takes about four minutes at a maximum before some kids figured out how to turn it on. And it usually is not more than 20 minutes before every kid has it turned on, and they’re sharing and collaborating and talking to each other and working. It’s, there’s this innate curiosity that when you facilitate it and enable it. Just kind of takes over. And there is something magic about the touchscreen. The touchscreen is unlike a traditional computer interface where you have a keyboard and you have to know your letters. This, the touchscreen is something you really can’t engage with as a pre literate person. So that kind of innate person curiosity is part of the magic that makes it happen.
Yeah, that I mean, curiosity is such a huge motivator of people and it’s a huge, huge driver of progress. So this is amazing. So tell me a little bit about Curious Learning as it is in the name of your company as well, and how do you help people grow in a broader terms, maybe in a, you know, 30,000 view. What is blocking people from growing in general, and how do you help them get envelope?
Yeah. So, I talk about this a lot in the book and we can kind of touch on the high levels of it here and there’s a lot more depth in the book, but a big part of what we’ve kind of discovered over our journey over these last 10 years is that we all have beliefs that we hold about how things should work and how things should operate. And that’s certainly true in the educational system around the world, right? Those beliefs can be very helpful for us.
They can frame how we act and what we do and help us make decisions about whether something is appropriate or good to engage with or not.
Share on X
But when we hang on to those beliefs past the time, past, what I would call their expiration date, which is a date when that belief no longer or is inhibiting us from seeing some new possibilities, I tend to refer to them at that point in time as a limiting belief. So one of the things we try to encourage an organization, whether we’re talking to each other within the organization or talking to prospective partners, is to identify those moments when we feel like the conversation is starting to get shut down and kind of dive into it to better understand what’s at play there and what’s going on. And it’s often what we would call a limiting belief. And we have a kind of framework for doing that.
Okay. So that leads us to the theme of our podcast, which is frameworks that any entrepreneur or business leader can apply to their own business and their own situation. So what is the framework here? What is the framework for alleviating limiting beliefs?
Okay, so I’ll give you the high level one, the starting point. There’s a lot more depth in the book and there are a lot of examples, kind of global examples too that are very helpful to see in here as you go through it. But the general premise is that anytime you’re in a conversation with a prospective customer or a client, even somebody within your own organization, you c
United States
