Curiosity killed the Kat?

This is a blog mini series on leadership and culture.

In the introductory post, I explained why I think cocks make terrible leaders but CHICKENs make great leaders! To refresh your memory, CHICKENs are leaders who outwork the values of:

Curiosity

Humility

Inclusivity

Compassion

Kindness

Empowerment

Nourishment

My wife, Kat, is hands down the best person I know. A total CHICKEN.

One of her best qualities and one of the reasons I love her, is her incredible and insatiable curiosity.

When she was training as a therapist, her mentor was always saying to her, ‘stay curious!’

And she does. She is. Curious. Not as in strange or unusual. But as in, she is genuinely interested to learn and know more about people. She has this incredible ability, to lock eyes with someone, let them know she deeply cares about them, tilt her head to the side and create a beautifully safe space in which her curiosity helps unlock healing for people. Amazing. And it’s never killed her – not even once.

Curiosity is such an important quality and for me now a core value, in life generally, but especially in leadership. Perhaps it is far too unusual as a quality valued in leadership.

Curiosity allows us to suspend our judgments. It stops us from thinking that we know it all. It allows us to be surprised, to ask better questions, to dig a little deeper. Curiosity prevents us from assuming we know the answer before we have really heard and seen what is emerging. It allows us to celebrate difference, recognise uniqueness and opens up new possibilities. It is open handed and tender hearted. It holds complexity and is not afraid to feel insecure in the ‘not-knowing’.

We all know what happens when we are not curious. We keep on trying to answer the questions in front of us with the same old mechanistic answers. And then we wonder why we don’t see the changes we need.

Curiosity allows you to look at data about a group of people and then go and sit with them to find out whether or not that is, in fact, their lived experience. Curiosity enables you to explore why things might not be working and to discover creative ways of engaging with the issue at hand. Curiosity is deeply joyful because it can open up new paths, fresh perspectives and exciting new potentials.

One of the best leaders I have met is Ellie McNeil, Chief Executive of YMCA Together. There’s a good reason why it is considered to be the best charity in the UK to work for!

Image from YMCA Together Website

One of the things Ellie has done so well as a leader is to instil curiosity in all of her team and volunteers.

She uses Cognitive Analytical Therapy (CAT) as a means to developing compassionate leadership throughout the organisation. In other words, she encourages everyone to be actively curious about why they might treat one person differently to another, or why they might have a particular reaction in a given situation. It allows people to be kind, to ask better questions of themselves and others and be honest about what is going on inside themselves in any interaction.

In my team, we’ve recently had some difficult conversations about finance. I found it so interesting that when we introduced the topic of conversation, every persons body language changed. Having learned from Ellie, I simply asked them to notice this, to reflect on it, to be curious about what changes in them when we start to talk about money. Then we postponed the conversation and brought it back next time with people being more self-aware about what was happening in them and for them.

If we’re going to develop truly caring organisations in the NHS and social care, we need to develop genuine curiosity. What’s going on in me? I wonder what’s going on in you? What’s really happening here?

In every consultation I have with a patient, I’m asking myself these questions: What’s your story? What matters to you? What do we know? What do we not know? What do we need to know? How can we find out? What are we going to do with the information when we make those discoveries? What choices will you make about your own care, once we know the options?

Curiosity never killed anyone in health and social care. On the contrary, it literally saves thousands of lives. It is a lack of it that is dangerous.

So…..Don’t be a cock. Be a CHICKEN – it starts with being curious.

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Personality Health

imgresWe often talk about physical, mental, social and even systemic health, but we don’t often think or talk about the health of our personalities. Our personalities are shaped by our self-esteem, our values, our truths, our needs, our struggles, our instincts and our gifts. They impact every part of our lives, relationships and interactions with the world at large and although we give some focus to understanding them through tools like Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram and Strengths-Finder, (perhaps to make us more successful), we give little thought to how healthy we are when it comes to this subject.

 

enneagramdisordersNow, what is particularly interesting to me as a doctor are 2 things related to this. Firstly, our personality type is hugely linked to the kind of mental health problems we might be more likely to develop. I wonder how often clinicians see the presentation of a mental illness and are able to talk with the person in front of them about which aspects of their personality might need therapy in order to help their mental health improve? As the whole area of positive psychology develops, it is vital that there are learning environments in which clinical teams can learn about innovative approaches in psychology that avoid the over prescribing of medication, especially in our younger population.

 

14516526_OPiwmgUE_c_large.jpgThe second area of interest is to do with how we can be more self-aware of how healthy we are or when we have reached a point at which we can no longer really help ourselves but need others who love us or care about to to intervene.  Below is a chart (of sorts) which I learned about during a weekend on the Enneagram. It helps to explain aspects of personality health. I recognise that at times I am functioning more healthily than at other times, due to a combination of internal and external factors. I think there are behaviours we can be aware of, or ways in which we are operating in relationships and situations which should serve as a WAKE UP CALL to us. When we notice more negative patterns, we need to take stock of where we are and work out our lines of responsibility to help us back into a more healthy state. However, if we don’t, things can continue to worsen until we reach a point at which we need others to intervene on our behalf and rescue us from our self-destructive and damaging sickness.

 

We can make a comparison with heart disease. For much of the time, our hearts MIfunction healthily. However, through a mixture of internal and external factors, our hearts can become less healthy. When this occurs, our body will fire some warning shots to us, giving us a chance to change before something more serious occurs. This might be signs and symptoms do do with our weight, nutrition, fitness, level of breathlessness, vague chest pains, markers in our blood tests – like high cholesterol and high sugar, rising blood pressure etc. However, if we ignore the opportunities to change and continue with our unhealthy choices, eventually we will reach the point at which we have a significant event, e.g.the start of angina, a heart attack, a stroke, the development of diabetes. At that point we need the help of someone else – we can no longer do it on our own. Of course, we still have choices and can reject the help on offer, but if we do, we risk our own demise and ultimate death.

 

images.jpgMy point is this. If we do not take the health of our own personalities seriously, there are serious and significant consequences, not only to ourselves but those around us and the world we live in. Many of us reach a point when we need help, but might not even face up to this, due to the poor health we are in. In those times, we need those who love and trust to be brave enough to reach in and offer us a life line. We may have even reached the place where we need resuscitation, when all our pride has gone. When we have ignored the red flag, we need those around us who will risk our total rejection of them to love us enough to offer us a way back to health. We need to take the health of our personalities seriously – it actually has a huge bearing on all the other aspects of our health. We also need

 

enneagram-health

 

HEALTHY

  • 1. Level of Liberation – Ego transcended – balance/freedom – i.e you become a gift
  • 2. Level of Psychological Capacity – Ego as particular mode of being – choice of how to be
  • 3. Level of Social Gift – Ego operating in constructive way – sublimating ego

 

Wake up Call – need to listen to internal warning bells

 

AVERAGE

  • 4. Level of fixation – Ego role assumed – falling asleep (not self-aware) – losing contact with presence
  • 5. Level of interpersonal conflict – Ego controlling environment to support self – manipulative/defended
  • 6. Level of overcompensation – Ego inflation, demanding others and reality support it – aggressive defence

 

Red Flag – need of help from others

 

UNHEALTHY

  • 7. Level of violation – Ego willing to violate self and others to maintain itself – abusive/desperate
  • 8. Level of Delusion and compulsion – Ego loses touch with reality – out of control – personality disorder
  • 9. Level of pathological destructiveness – Extreme pathology and/or death

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