Unconditional Curiosity

If you have watched an old western movie, you have probably seen the Sheriff looking to deputize someone, like in the classic movies High Noon or El Dorado, appointing civilians with police powers to take on the trouble that has come to town!

I would sum it up as giving up or attributing some of your power to someone else.

In social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring or “reading between the lines” the causes of events or behaviors. In real life, attribution is something we all do every day, usually without any awareness of the underlying processes and biases that lead to our inferences.

It is this lack of awareness where so much conflict begins and leads to compromised or worse terminated relationships.

If I ask a group of people “how do you define success” will everyone have the same answer; of course not. Yet we go into in person meetings, zoom calls, and one on one conversations attributing our definition of success with apparent unawareness of the other persons definition and injecting our bias, real or perceived.

Let’s unpack an example.

The team leader Jane breaks their morning team huddle with “Hey Team, lets hit this month running expecting great success”. At the end of the month Jane is meeting with Tom whose month end results are way below expectations. Jane says to Tom, “I am really surprised at how little success you had this month, Tom; only 30 unit sold” to which Tom replies, “I disagree Jane, I had great success, having established 4 new connections that have massive downstream opportunity; you need to look at the big picture.”

In this very simple example Jane has defined success as being transactional first, attributing unit sales to her definition and hitching her emotions to it. Tom on the other hand has defined success as being relational first, attributing qualified network to his definition and his emotions to it.

The outcome from this conversation when emotions attributed to their respective priorities, transactional and relational, often leads to conflict either healthy or unhealthy.

It is right here where we can invest in healthy conflict, using unconditional curiosity or engage in unhealthy conflict allowing or attributed emotions to take us and the relationship hostage.

In the case of Jane and Tom, unhealthy conflict will often emerge as they each dig their heels into their attributed success bias and hitch their emotions to it. They are wrong, short sighted, or lacking and now its personal; “they are so incapable of doing their job.” Full blown, emotional led, attribution.

However, there is a choice and with Jane and Tom being intentional with healthy conflict they employ unconditional curiosity, (curiosity without opinion, expectation or judgement starting with my self) creating a conversation where they can passionately disagree without taking it personally.

We have never seen a time where attribution, the resulting bias and emotional high jacking is so easy and so dangerous. Just think about how many times you have done it on a zoom call or even a text-based conversation on someone’s “lack of attention” or word choice. Come on admit it, I know I have!

So, lets be intentional (doing something different right now) that will help us protect and invest in relationships. Let’s deputize each other with the power of unconditional curiosity and set ourselves and each other up for success that matters!

Love to hear your thoughts and experiences with emotional lead attribution and unconditional curiosity!

Coach Mike

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