Open and curious is a helpful mindset shift for navigating relationships and challenges. In this week's episode, we dive into Pam's mantra and some of the many ways that it has proven to be so valuable in our lives. Being open and curious takes us back to beginner's mind and allows us to see possibilities and question limiting beliefs that no longer serve us.

We hope today's episode sparks some fun insights for you and we invite you to dive deeper with our Episode Questions. Join us on Instagram or YouTube to continue the conversation and share your reflections.

Let’s dig deep, challenge paradigms, choose connection, and live joyfully!

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EPISODE QUESTIONS

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1. How does it feel to think about being open and curious about the people in your life? What do you discover through that lens?
2. Try being open and curious while navigating a conflict this week, rather than jumping right to the solution you have in mind. What felt different?
3. Think about something in your life that you’re feeling stuck around. What bubbles up when you approach it with openness and curiosity? What other possibilities exist?
4. Next time you’re judging something your partner or child is choosing to do as “bad,” play with the question “Who would I be without this perspective? What would I do instead? How would that feel?”

TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us as we explore relationships, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

If you're new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and have really enjoyed how they've been building upon one another. And if you've already been enjoying the podcast, we'd love it if you could leave a rating and a review. That definitely helps new people find us.

In today's episode, we're gonna talk about being open and curious. This is something you will hear us say a lot. I first heard about it from Pam and I find myself saying it daily at this point. When you think about the opposite, it's being closed and disinterested, so it's pretty easy to see why we both love it.

I don't want to move through the world feeling closed and disinterested, and it definitely doesn't help us solve problems or to connect with the people around us.

Being open and curious serves us in our relationships on a lot of different levels. When we're open and curious about our partner, we want to understand them, what's important to them, why they see things the way they do. We want to set aside any judgment and really lean into connecting with the person in front of us.

When I find myself not understanding something they did or said, I can remind myself to be open and curious about it, to not jump to conclusions, to not write a story, like we were talking about last week.

That gives us the best chance to avoid a misunderstanding. And part of being curious is asking questions and listening.

PAM: Yeah. I love this so much. I have found open and curious to be such a helpful lens to bring to my relationships. For me, it's a quick way to get to beginner's mind, which is a place where I don't feel like I have to know the answers, and I'm just curious to learn more. I often feel a sense of wonder and a childlike energy when I can get there. And it's not childish. Childlike. There's a big distinction.

So, when I'm open and curious, I'm attentive and I'm interested in hearing new ideas and new perspectives. I want to learn how the other person is seeing things. I want to learn what they're interested in and why it lights them up. And, of course, that doesn't mean forgetting about who I am.

To me, beginner's mind is about understanding that the world is richer than just my story. My story, the one I tell about myself, is definitely a vibrant thread, but it also weaves alongside the stories of the other important people in my life. And it reminds me that their story is theirs to tell and I want to listen. I want to know them, not my version of them.

And to take that metaphor just one step deeper, being open and curious reminds me to explore the tapestry of my life, which includes the people I love and care about, not just the thread of my story, thinking it's the one right way to move through the world. It's a tapestry of unique people and stories that weave together to create the bigger picture of my life, which leads us nicely into the next aspect that we wanted to talk about, doesn't it?

ANNA: It does. Because being open and curious also really serves us when there's a conflict. So often, when we find ourselves in a conflict, we have in our mind the right answer, how this needs to resolve for me to be satisfied. And unfortunately, It just rarely works out the way we plan.

If we come into the conflict pushing our agenda as the only way, we put the other person on the defensive and we end up spending a lot of time defending ideas back and forth, really rarely hearing the other person's perspective at all. And if we come into the disagreement with this open, curious mindset that we're talking about, we aren't abandoning our ideas, like you said, we're just remaining open to hearing the other person's perspective.

That energy is felt by the other person, and then they are so much more likely to join us on the journey to understand and figure out options. We're going to be committed to finding something that works. We're going to get there faster by remaining open and not tunneling in on our one perspective or idea or what the fix should be.

PAM: I know, for me, when I first heard the advice years ago to listen to my partner, it made so much sense. So, when we were navigating a conflict, I listened. But eventually I realized I was still holding tightly to my right answer, and my listening was mostly focused on picking up the pieces that aligned with my solution, right? Everything else just kind of flew by. I truly wasn't hearing their perspective. I wasn't hearing their story. I was only taking in what I thought I could use to support my agenda or my solution, that tunnel vision that you mentioned.

And unsurprisingly, we often ended up at an impasse that way. Each person trying their best to defend and convince the other that their interpretation of the situation and their proposed solution is a right one. Our conversations were energetically draining and steeped in a power dynamic that definitely strained our relationship.

So, once I came to recognize what was happening, I chose to instead try to bring an open and curious mindset with me into our conversations. How are they seeing the situation? What parts of it feel important to them? What parts feel especially challenging to them? Does that make sense alongside what I know about them as a person, all the things we talked about way back in episode three that make them the unique person they are, their personality, their strengths, their weaknesses, sensitivities, all those pieces?

And in these more open conversations, with defensiveness down and curiosity up, there was space for me to share my thoughts and perspectives, not with the energy that this was the solution, but as more information to consider. And without that grasping and no longer feeling like the only choices we have are their initial solution or mine, we could often find a third or a fourth or a fifth path forward right through the situation that took each of our perspectives and needs into consideration.

So, it turns out that open and curious mindset not only gave me the space to learn more about what was going on, it also gave me more space to get creative in finding a solution that worked for everyone involved.

The process is like a muscle that gets stronger with practice. With each experience, where shifting to being open and curious helped us creatively navigate a challenge or a conflict, it became a bit easier to shift the next time, and then the next. Over time, I found myself shifting more quickly from defending myself to trusting that we could find a way through together. Being open and curious just helps me in so many ways, in so many situations with so many people.

ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. I see it in so many different ways and I feel like it's one of those tools we can cultivate that gives us something to do instead of taking things personally when we're in a conflict. And that is so key when we want to navigate those conflicts with more ease and connection.

And this idea is also really important if we find ourselves stuck or with some limiting beliefs. Often thi