Host Sue Stockdale previews Series 7 which is on the theme of “Curiosity” and she highlights a few of the guests that will be coming up in the series.  They include:

• Thomas Andren worked as a computer technician for 10 years in Sweden. Deciding to change career, he used curiosity to guide his decision-making, which led him to study to become a massage therapist.
• Dr Nashater Deu Solheim is a psychologist and CEO of Progressing Minds from Norway. She is an HBR contributor, executive coach on leadership influence, and will be talking about her experience of working with psychopaths.
• Jenna Howieson from Scotland, whose question to the CEO at a round table meeting, led to her ultimately creating and implementing a diversity and inclusion strategy for a global company
• Ronald Paredes a graphic designer and artist from Venezuela started conducting studies and research on the subject of creativity and its connections with psychology, neuroscience, and creative processes as a way to rediscover our natural creative capacities.

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Preview Transcription 

Sue: Hi, it’s Sue Stockdale and welcome to our Series Seven preview. You know, inspiration is like a magical gift. That’s within all of us. It’s free energy that we can give to others when we share our experiences, our insights, and what we have learned about. Clive Steeper and I created this podcast with this idea in mind so that you, the listener can be inspired by people who may be unlike you, whether it’s talking to an astronaut in America or a refugee, that’s been on the run, their stories have the power to shape, strengthen, or challenge our values and views.

We hope each episode ignites new possibilities within you. Makes you think…What if? What next? Or maybe just, Why? Our podcast has a social mission to create positive impact through conversation and having published almost 50 episodes. Now we want to be able to measure that impact what our listeners and guests have done differently because of engaging with us.  So we’d love to get your feedback. All you have to do is take three minutes to complete our short survey. And there’s a link to it in the show notes.  So go and have a look there.  If you’d prefer to record a short voice note for us, you can do that too. You can get details on both of those things on our show notes.

We can’t wait to get your feedback. And so on to series seven, the theme of this upcoming series is curiosity. And we will be featuring a variety of guests who have used curiosity to explore what’s possible, which has led them to very interesting results. I’ll give you a taste of what’s to come in episode 53, I will be speaking to Ronald Paredes, a Latin American graphic designer and artist who believes that we begin with lots of curiosity.

Ronald: When we’re in kindergarten, we are free to explore. Well, it also depends on the school and the teacher encourages that curiosity, but you are free to explore, but as soon as you start school, then you have to perform in a certain period of time. We take away something that is very, very important in creativity that is failure. You’re not allowed to fail anymore. So, if you’re not allowed to fail, you’re not allowed to explore. If you’re not allowed to explore your, have no time to be curious. Our education, we don’t have time to be curious. We don’t have time to explore. You have to perform and you have to perform well under scrutiny in a certain period of time, if not, you fail and that starts gradually killing your capacity of being creative.

Sue: Another guest I’ll be speaking to is Thomas Andrén from Sweden. He used his curiosity to discover what his dream job could be. It led him to ask himself over 900 questions as he recalled the subjects he had learned.

Thomas: Yes. So I stumbled over anatomy and I thought, okay, let’s get one or two books out of this and start reading it and see if I remember this as well. Or if it does make any sense to me when I read it. So I did and pretty much everything was very easy for me. When I started reading it, I remembered names of muscles and anatomy, and I remembered physiology quite easy.And I thought, okay. Hmm. Interesting. So this should be something I should look into. Maybe a profession within this sector of subjects would be something seems clearly it comes easy for me. So having identified the subject, I knew that this would be something I would have to do for the next 10, 15 years or something.

So I started writing down questions to myself. I bought an old book and I started just randomly. Typed down questions to myself, easy questions where you would answer yes or no a little bit every day, sometimes in the mornings when waking up and having dreams, I would make questions out of those dreams and just write it down. Mainly in the evenings. When I’ve had a whole day of experiences, I would note down questions about the days completely random until I feel the entire notebook. Which was maybe two, two and a half, three months or something like this.

Sue: Well, that sounds like an epic effort from Thomas. You can find out how these questions helped him to switch career into becoming a massage therapist from the world of tech in episode 51.  Also in episode 52, I’ll be speaking to Jenna Howieson from Scotland and she is going to be explaining to me how she ended up leading the global diversity and inclusion strategy for a company after asking the CEO a question in a round table meeting.

Jenna: So I have kind of accidentally made a career for myself in this space. So yeah, when I started in that initial role was sort of an admin assistant. I had the opportunity randomly to speak to the CEO of the company at the time about their inclusion policies. It was a sort of round table discussion and it was pretty much all focused on gender and women in the work. And I kind of sheepishly put my hand up cause I was very, very new to their office and said, oh, I’m actually here to speak about LGBT inclusion, not gender inclusion. And I was wondering why there’s nothing here about that and why there’s no work on that. And he kind of thought about it and sort of admitted that it wasn’t, that they weren’t passionate about it. It just was that they never thought about it before. So if I wanted to see that in the workplace, I should go ahead and create it. And so with absolutely no prior experience or knowledge on how I could possibly create an LGBT inclusive workplace, I set to work.

Sue: And to open the series I’ll be speaking to Dr. Nashater Deu Solheim a psychologist and author whose TEDx talk. What working with psychopaths taught me about leadership has been viewed over 750,000 times. Here’s how her journey started.

Nashater: When I was doing my clinical training, I did a specialist placement in forensic at a special hospital which is what they are called in the UK, which is essentially a maximum security hospital, which is housing people who have committed offenses, usually very, very violent.and are considered very, very dangerous individuals. Hence they need maximum security environment, you know, high walls, barbed wire locked doors and intensive supervision. But they are called hospitals, because they also present with a mental disorder or mental. illness. And I just fell in love with the whole way of using psychology to understand what brings people into these experiences.

What are their stories? What are they journeys? How can we as individual psychologists, but also as a society, perhaps even begin to think about preventing people from having these experiences where we can so that they don’t end up committing these terrible crimes and going on to creating the harm that they do, both to others onto them.

Sue: Nashater also explains how leaders can use curiosity.

Nashater: So for me is the antidote to a lack of empathy. If you’re struggling to understand somebody else’s perspective, get into curious mind, listen very actively and ask very open questions. Silence actually can be very helpful. I think in empathy often we feel that the best way to show up with is to keep talking, but listening silently and allowing the other person to speak and then see if that curiosity opens up a different perspective

Sue: And so I hope this preview has piqued your interest in what’s to come over the next few weeks. We’ve also got a new partnership with I worker, a social enterprise who will be supporting CDs, and you can hear more about them in the next episode.  Remember, you can keep in touch with access to inspiration on social media. We are on  Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, just search for access to inspiration on our website. You’ll find transcriptions for all of the episodes as well as a number of specific playlists. So just hop on over to accesstoinspiration.org and you’ll find them all there.  We’ll look forward to connecting with you soon and receiving your feedback.