Scott Shigeoka
speaker
62 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Scott Shigeoka’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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walk the talk of what I was sharing around curiosity. So I spent 12 months going across the country. I went to Trump rallies. I met with religious leaders and I met, I lived in the South. I met people who are very different from my day to day. And it was beautiful to actually see that I could also connect and find commonalities with people who are very different from me.
And I can move from a state of reactivity where we're not getting further at all in understanding one another's views and life stories to a place of curiosity. And the last thing I'll say here is that curiosity... inspires curiosity in others oftentimes, not all the time, but oftentimes.
And so what I mean by that is when you are getting curious about someone else and their viewpoints and their perspectives and their life stories, oftentimes they will be inspired to give that curiosity back to you. And researchers sometimes call this like the give and take spiral.
It's when you're in a conversation and you're asking a bunch of questions, they're asking questions to you back and it's like a great meeting, a great date, whatever context you want to put that in. And so I wasn't just learning about the people, that I met on my road trip, but they were learning a lot about me and my life story as well.
And a lot of people say, Scott, I can't hop in my Toyota Prius and take 12 months off of work and go on the trip that you went through. And I often tell them, you don't have to. We're often in families, let's say, where there's very different perspectives and viewpoints and politics and identities.
We're often in communities with neighbors who have very different life stories and very different life experiences than us. But oftentimes, not only can we get reactive, but we can also close ourselves off from others. And what I'm trying to express in the work that I'm doing and
my book Seek is really about how do we move away from reactivity or closing ourselves off to this curiosity, which actually feels really good, right? Curiosity releases dopamine, which is often called the happy hormone. It's something that drives and incentivize behaviors that are really important for us. and our survival and our livelihoods and curiosity is no different.
So, you know, I don't just say do something that feels bad because it's good for you. You know, like there's actually a pleasurable feeling that happens when you're curious. It's often like the gym, right? You know, for many of us, the biggest weight in the gym is the front door.
But once you get into the gym and you start working out by the end, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad I did that for myself. I feel so good. And the same is true for curiosity.
Is there a story or a personal story in your life where someone made you feel that way because they were curious about you, Mike?
Absolutely. Someone that sees a value in the people that they're talking to, you know, and I'm not coming from a place of judgment or assumptions about who you are based on their own biases, but saying, you know, there's a lot that I could learn from you. There's, you know, I've come in with an open mind and open heart, a curiosity.
And I want to, you know, ask you questions and have a great conversation with you. And I think, yeah, that you're right that, you know, many of the folks that I think about who give me that same curiosity are the people that I love and cherish the most.
And that conversation fosters a better connection. I will say sometimes though, I recently talked about this in the New York Times article about a term that I coined called predatory curiosity. And so what I mean by predatory curiosity is it looks a lot like curiosity, right? Someone's asking you questions, they seem to be genuinely interested in what you have to say.
But then all of a sudden, the conversation quickly turns, and there's almost like a gotcha moment. And they say something like, I knew you were going to say that, or that's totally wrong. You're wrong with the facts. You walked right into my trap. That's not actual curiosity, even though it looks like it. Predatory curiosity is when we have an agenda or some kind of ulterior motives underneath
you know, our exploration or underneath the questions that we're asking. And in order for it to be true curiosity, it needs to be truly genuine. Truly, I do not know what I'm about to encounter in this conversation. You know, just like what you said, I said, hey, is there any anything that you're looking for from this conversation? And you answered in the most curious way.
You said, no, for the podcast, I'm just going to see where it ends up. I'm totally open to how we have this conversation together. And I think that's such a great example of true curiosity. So often, we are looking to take our conversations or to take our relationship to our particular destination. And there's many things that might be driving that, but that is not actually curiosity.
We have to be much more open to the unknown and to the uncertainty of what might unfold in this conversation or in this relationship for it to be that way.
Yeah, well, in my book, I talk about the dive model, which is to detach, intend, value, and embrace. And I can describe that in a little bit, but then I'll share some tangible practices that are helpful. So the D is detach, which means to let go of what I call our ABCs, our assumptions, biases, and certainty.
And what I mean by that is you can write down the assumptions that you have about another person. Just write them down. Before you meet them for family gathering or before you have a conversation with them in the workplace, wherever you're coming into a conversation with someone, write down your assumptions about them.
You might find that a lot of those are not backed by facts or things that they've told you, but they're just stories that you've really invented in your head. So that's an example of how we might detach and let go from our assumptions, biases, and certainty. There's I, which is intend, which is how do we set the mindset and the setting for curiosity?
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