#55 Curiosity

Read the full episode transcript

 Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women, like you, with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intention.

My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend. If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing-up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Well, hey there, welcome back to Your Favorite You. If you are listening to this in real time, we are in the midst of the podcast birthday bash. If you are listening at some time after October 2023, hello from the past, the birthday bash has come and gone.

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Let's get into what I want to talk to you all about today. The subject of today's podcast is curiosity. Now, you all know already that I am a self-proclaimed total nerd, and I love that about myself. So, I looked up curiosity in the dictionary, Miriam Webster defines curiosity simply as the need. “Desire to know”, I want to further define curiosity as the opposite of judgment.

As an aside, I spelled judgment without the E. And I totally judge those that add the E. I digress. Miriam Webster defines judgment in many different ways, but for the purposes of this podcast, I'm going to use their number one definition. And even it has two parts. So, judgment is according to Miriam Webster, one (A), the process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing.

One (B) an opinion or estimate. So formed in my coaching world, the concept that I try to get across to my clients is that if you are in judgment, it is very hard to be curious. And conversely, if you are curious and truly have the desire to know someone or something, it is nearly impossible to be in judgment.

Think about the last time you were judging someone. I want to say right now that it is totally normal to catch yourself judging things all the time. Your left brain was designed to do this, to categorize things, people, ideas as good or bad. And then most of us socialized to take it a step further and judge everything.

Interestingly, this leads us to judging ourselves with so much harshness, which obviously leads to no good. As I have said here many times, and I will say again, this judgment of ourselves with harshness happens because we are taught that if we beat ourselves up, we won't keep making the same mistakes, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This is where curiosity can come in. Everything you have done in your life so far makes complete sense. If you use curiosity instead of judgment to figure these things out, the outcome over time can change. Curiosity has you asking questions in a tone that says, I wonder why I did that. Judgment has us asking the same question, but with a completely different tone.

Why the fuck did you do that? What is the matter with you? Can you see how asking such similar questions of yourself with different tone and attitude might lead to different outcomes? The first way with curiosity leads you to open up and look for the answer. The second way simply shuts you down. It certainly leads to less desire to know.

As I have stated before, I think the purpose of life is to get to know yourself on the deepest level possible and stay in curiosity until you do. I'm going to use myself as an example for this. Prior to coaching, I was in a lot of judgment about myself. One of the things I judged myself the most about was my body.

So, if I was so smart and I could figure out anything that I set my mind to, why in the world could I not lose weight and keep it off my body in 2018, I decided to get curious, I started listening to Dr. Ubell's podcast. I started reading new books and I figured out that I actually could not out exercise what I was putting into my mouth.

The adage of exercise more wasn't cutting it for me. So, I learned the newer science. I started eating full fat foods. I only did exercise that felt loving to me. I started intermittent fasting, and I got rid of 60 pounds from my body with relative ease. I figured out how to lose weight with my brain. I finally got it intellectually and I kept the weight off for about two years, which was longer than I'd ever kept weight off before.

Over the past year and a half, I have put a lot of the weight I lost back onto my body. Now it would be really easy for me to be in judgment of myself for this. And believe me, there has been a fair bit of that going on. Then I decided I could get curious again. I remembered that I have built a business from scratch.

I started this amazing new podcast. I've helped well over a hundred women at this point. I have been concentrated on other things. And since I was actually liking my body for the first time in my adult life, it simply became less of a priority for me. My newfound curiosity or my once again, found curiosity has me recognizing that though I have worked on my conscious thoughts about my body and about food, I have not yet delved into my subconscious thoughts.

Which of course is running the show when I'm not concentrating so much on my conscious thoughts. So, this curiosity is going to lead me to the next steps of working with my body and my subconscious thoughts. I know that this is the next step in my evolution to becoming my favorite me. Okay, let's switch gears and talk about how curiosity works for you and judgment works against you and your relationships with others.

Curiosity will have you wondering what is going on with your tantruming toddler or school age child or teenager or husband instead of judging them as being spoiled or needy. Curiosity will have you noticing that perhaps you have changed a lot in the past few years, and that is why you have lost touch with some of your former friends, instead of judging yourself for not being a good friend or judging your old friends for not changing.

Curiosity will have you trying to figure out the steps you can take to make your relationships as good as they can be. Judgment will just take you further away from the people that you care about. Curiosity will have you figuring out what is most important to you to get done on your schedule and prioritizing your time accordingly.

Judgment will have you scolding yourself for not getting all 385 items on your to do list done in one day. Curiosity will have you trying to figure out why your kiddo is getting picked on in school and take the appropriate action to keep your child safe. Judgment will have you thinking that the kids that are doing the picking are just bad kids with bad parents.

That may be true, but as I have stated often, and other people way smarter than me have stated before, only people who are hurting are out there intentionally hurting other people. Curiosity will have you trying to figure out why you and your hubby seem to get in the same fights over and over and over again.

Judgment will have you thinking, oh, here we go again, and figuring out how to defend yourself. Curiosity will have you asking the people who you care about how you can help them. Do they need you to just listen or do they want your advice and help? Judgment will have you immediately giving them your opinion, which may or may not be welcomed or even valid.

Curiosity will allow you to think about the future and ask yourself what you want. Judgment will have you thinking that you're too old or too set in your ways to make a change. This is my wish for all of you. Get curious about what you want your future to look like. I would love to hear from you about your thoughts on curiosity and judgment.

Please feel free to DM me or email me at melissa@melissaparsonscoaching.com. I am sure there are plenty of examples that I did not think of as of the recording of this podcast. If you guys come up with lots more, I would love to do a curiosity 2. 0 podcast in the future. And if you know that this is something that you want to work on, please contact me for one-on-one coaching.

I would love to speak to you about all of it on a consult. All right. I hope you all have a beautiful week. See you next week.

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