What is Your Comfort Level with Vulnerability for Tackling Your Hardest Aspirations?

Leaders navigating today’s globally complex business environment recognize the importance of both a growth mindset—the belief in improving abilities through effort and feedback—and a global mindset—the ability to influence diverse others. Becoming comfortable with discomfort is vital to strengthening these leadership capitals.

What else is needed in an environment of significant and constant change?

How about a broader view on curiosity powered by the traits above, a sense of wonder, self-awareness and knowing what is most important?

A broader view can enable leaders to respond wisely when control fades, responsibility shifts to the individual, and opportunities to influence arise. Research and experience suggest that comfort with vulnerability is critical to taking on responsibility for making progress on barely visible, highly controversial, sometimes very personal, and possibly most impactful initiatives.

Consider a commander asking untrained medical personnel to bring a wounded soldier from under fire to safety. What is wise in this situation may be different from what is wise in a situation where there is no command-control relationship. Responsibility shifts to the individual in this transition. Leaders today face similar dilemmas in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and constant change (VUCA) environment.

By becoming mindful about curiosity, curious leaders can learn to ask more questions, experiment, connect with others unlike themselves and notice the insights they need to not just emerge with strength but thrive, becoming impactful and even legendary in the VUCA context.

As The Curiosity Coach, I partner with emerging leaders, innovative CEOs, C-suite leaders, and start-up founders to build comfort with “I Can” and “Interesting,” helping them progress on their hardest aspirations.

If you are curious, let’s meet and connect. Here’s what I can share with you:

• Coaching with The Curiosity Coach: a relationship that aspires to make progress on your unique opportunities and challenges through connection, learning, and wisdom.
• The Curious Leader’s Creative Studio: a series of learning experiences through which you can discover your “I Can,” mobilize your “Interesting,” and inspire “Why Not” also across teams, organizations, and communities.
• Curiosity Chat Series: global conversations to maintain the human voice in a VUCA world and inspire impact by connecting and learning from each other.
• The Curiosity Library: Conversations and exercises to grow curiosity, vulnerability, influence, and impact.
• Global Mindset and Quantum Negotiation Programming: to build critical curiosity through experiential learning and by applying a growth mindset.
• Executive Education (e.g. Stanford LEAD Program, Thunderbird Executive Education): to increase your awareness about executive education that not only enhances the resourcefulness of professionals and builds up their communities but also can help identify the one thing with the greatest impact on their goals and leadership.

I am deeply grateful to my supportive family, colleagues, clients, and learners who have shaped The Curiosity Coach into what it is today. From visionary entrepreneurs to graduate school and executive education alumni, immigrant, and women leader communities, each has inspired me to stay creative and driven by curiosity.

CuriousNews born in the early development of The Curiosity Coach will continue as weekly posts to spark curiosity, build comfort with vulnerability, and foster influence for impact. I welcome engagement and co-authors—together, we are more, even when we disagree.

Does CuriousNews have the potential to become a newsletter? I’d love to hear your thoughts.