The Power of Curious

“I’m curious.”

I’ve noticed my co-worker Heather using these two words a lot lately.

As I’ve observed her facilitating group after group (masterfully!), she often starts a question with the words “I’m curious” to get a conversation going. And you know what? It works. 

I’ve found myself thinking more about the power of “I’m curious.”

My teenage daughter and I were recently talking in the car about a tradition some people love that doesn’t make any sense to her. I started to say, “I find that when someone has an opinion that really baffles me…”

She finished my sentence. “I know, I try to understand why they think that instead of just judging them.”

In a world that encourages strong statements and hot takes, curious is gentle, inquisitive. 

In a world that values expert opinions, curious says I have something to learn from you. 

Curious takes a listening posture.

Curious acknowledges the other person’s dignity. 

Curious means we see people as whole human beings with depth, not flat, two-dimensional caricatures. People with backstories that may surprise us, with experiences that may be radically different than ours. With perspectives that have positioned them to see the world from a different angle than what we’ve seen.

And even if we don’t come to the same conclusion in the end, curious means we value one another. 

It doesn’t take more than a quick scroll through social media or a few minutes of cable news to get our sense of outrage fired up these days, to divide ourselves into camps and enemies. 

What if instead of cultivating our sense of outrage, we cultivated our sense of curiosity? What if we asked more questions out of a genuine desire to understand, not to win? We just might end up cultivating a world of dignity, value, and respect for one another. 

Faith Bosland is the ACTS/U4K Coordinator at Think Tank, Inc. To learn more about Think Tank’s work, visit thinktank-inc.org.

Photo by Maria Elena Zuniga for Unsplash