Curiosity Didn’t Kill The Cat - Part 2

Further to my post the other day about curiosity I wanted to take this a step further.

In 2002 I was in London with my dad when he had a stroke. The ambulance came to collect him and I had the crazy job of following it across London in rush hour whilst it had its emergency siren and lights going. Irrespective of the circumstances, that was not fun I can tell you as people refused to let me in, gave me the finger and hurled abuse at me.

Of course they didn’t know why I was driving so aggressively because if they did I have absolutely no doubt that the traffic would have opened up for me like the parting of the Red Sea. These people probably thought I was just some jerk trying to take advantage of a speeding ambulance to beat the traffic and who could blame them?

They were wrong though.

What if they had been curious? What if instead of presuming I had selfish intentions they all asked themselves what else I might have been doing and why was I driving so recklessly? What would the net result have been from adopting that curious rather than judgmental attitude? I am guessing that they would have been less irate, their blood pressure would have been lower and they would have felt calmer and more composed. Nothing would have changed externally, there was still some ‘crazy guy’ driving like a dummy but it certainly wasn’t worth getting upset about.

The vast majority of people, myself included, make inaccurate spur of the moment assumptions from time to time. We see events unfold and adapt them to our map of the world by joining the dots as we see them. We then presume the other person perceives things the same as we do and therefore cannot understand why they do not arrive at the same conclusions.

What if instead of doing that we got really curious and asked ourselves questions like: I wonder why he feels like that? I’d love to appreciate how she could come to that decision, I don’t understand why she said that but I would really like to?

Wouldn’t that be better for everybody?

Try it out next time somebody ticks you off. Get genuinely curious as to why they have acted like they did, ask yourself if you are missing something or if you have misunderstood. Maybe they had an upbringing that left them with completely different beliefs and values to you and if you knew what they were you would understand their actions. See it as a learning opportunity because that is exactly what it is.

By getting curious you cease taking things so personally and stop judging people. You also become calmer and put less stress on your own body. That’s the weird thing about all this. The more angry and frustrated we get with other people the more harm we do to ourselves and seldom do we have any impact on the object of our ire. Now that is something to be curious about!

Enjoyed this post? Please share it!

Digg it | Stumble it |

 

Comments are closed.