In an age of isolation, virtual events, and remote work, we could all use a little more connection. Derek Lundsten, CEO of LifeGuides, joins us to discuss how to connect with others on a deeper level, both professionally and personally. You’ll learn how to see other people’s viewpoints and hear about the power of open-ended questions.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Know What’s Important to People
It’s all about understanding what motivates people and why people choose to do what they do. Ask people, ‘What’s important to you?” The death bed analogy has been popping up recently where you ask, ‘What are the things that you don’t want to regret in your life?. What are the things you want to experience? What are the mistakes you’d like to avoid?’ If you were to put yourself in that point of view and reflect back, how does that inform your choices? What pops in that? Is it your career? Is it your family? Is it your spouse, your children? Is it adventure? Is it learning? Is it teaching? Depending on those questions, people are going to potentially have different life paths or different sequences that they want to do things in and how they want to do them.
2. Ask Open-Ended Questions
Curiosity is a big part of genuinely wanting to learn. The whole idea of asking open-ended questions and questions you don’t know the answer to, questions that you’re excited to hear a response to—that changes the entire way you listen. Listening with one’s entire being, not just with your brain, but with your heart, there’s a way to do that that I think requires a different level of presence.
3. Suspend Your Beliefs and See Other’s Viewpoints
Being curious means you suspend your beliefs, you suspend your agenda, you suspend your identity. You recognize that you don’t have the answers that you don’t have. It’s a blank slate to be curious, just to be malleable, to be receptive, to be willing to take on new beliefs and to be willing to see different points of view when someone is curious in that way. The magic can happen and the ability to share information, to share lessons, to pass and collaborate with what’s effective, or what’s helping people increases massively. And I think that is what curiosity is all about. The ability to step out of a pattern or a routine or habits, and to really look at them fresh. And to suspend one’s sense of self, and that requires some practice. It requires some awareness and it requires some commitment ultimately to do it.
Book Recommendation:
- Right Away and All at Once by Greg Brenneman
- Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kolter
Listen to the full episode: Episode 141: How to Get a Deeper Level of Connection with Derek Lundsten
