Our final Thought Partner on this month’s topic of Communication Essentials examines the role curiosity plays in both conversation preparation and conversation application.
If asked, my clients would probably say the sentence starter I use most frequently is “Out of curiosity” or “So, I’m curious,”. That’s because it’s my job to be intentionally curious. I can’t begin to understand the ins and outs of my clients’ businesses or industries, nor is it my job to do so. However, it is my job to assist clients in seeing the answers, solutions, and next steps they may not be considering, which comes from answering my genuinely curious questions.
As I prepare for client sessions, I ask myself how curious I am, and I check that my “Zones of Certainty” take a backseat to my “Zones of Curiosity”. As a result, my conversations and my client sessions are better for it.
I’m sharing a very short Harvard Business Review article titled “The Right Way to Prepare for a High-Stakes Conversation” because not only is The Curiosity Curve on page 4 (there’s only 8 pages total) a phenomenal tool that I encourage each of you to print and keep for continual reference, but the author, Jeff Wetzler, does a far better job of explaining the tool that I ever could.
I love this tool, *|FNAME|*, and I hope you do too!
Happy reading, Thought Partners!
