Hello everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert and I have a delightful woman with me today. A big shout out to Saiida Desalay who has connected us. Dr. Diane Hamilton, she’s here in the Arizona area but she’s an award-winning speaker, nationally syndicated radio host. We were talking before the show and I’m laughing like I don’t know how she does radio. Total kudos, I’m not worthy of anybody’s who’s willing to tackle radio, I have so much respect for that.
She’s an author, educator, her show is Take the Lead. She also happens to be a certified emotional intelligence in Myers Briggs, one of her books is It’s Not You, It’s Your Personality. She’s got some of that cool little cheekiness that we like here on this show. She’s very creative in how she goes about doing things and explaining things from business to, she looks very, very, very good on paper, I’ll just say that. I’m thoroughly enjoying just getting to know her and understanding what she does in the world. I’m excited to share her with you, we’re going to discover together some of her new projects. She’s a powerhouse.
Listen in and we’re going to be talking today about the curious entrepreneurial spirit so please join me in welcoming Diane to the show, welcome.
Well, thank you. This is going to be fun to be on the other side of the microphone. I’m going to take notes to figure out how to do it right.
I would absolutely contend that you are doing it right. I’m telling you, I have meant that with all sincerity. Radios, like that it’s just more than my stress level’s going to handle. Really, kudos to you. First, off we’re going to talk about, what are your superpowers?
Wow. You know it’s hard to what you think of as your superpowers maybe other people don’t see the same things. For me the things that make me successful I would think are I’m really super efficient and I like sharing knowledge and I have a deep curiosity for a lot of things. There’s a variety of things that fall under the area of soft skills I think I focus on and I think that’s where a lot of entrepreneurs could benefit.
Oh hugely. Hugely. Yeah, and that’s why I love the idea that you were talking about like curiosity and that coupled in with this whole the emotional intelligence piece and stuff like that. So I think that the word curiosity or being curious if you could really take that in a number of different levels but given your background and given the real groundedness of the work that you do, I think it’s hugely powerful dialogue. So I’d love to hear more about why your kind of diving into that at this point.
I’ve taught more than a thousand business courses.
You know I’ve taught more than a 1,000 business courses so I have seen just about every level of ambition and class with students, what makes them interested, what doesn’t make them interested. If they’re driven. If they’re motivated. And to me, it all boils down to curiosity. If they have it, if they develop it or if they look at what holds them back or not. Some people just get very comfortable in the way they’ve always done things or they fear change or they fear different things. There are several factors that I was looking at that hold people back and it all seemed to come down to curiosity. I mean you look at all these quotes you hear from Einstein or Steve Jobs or anybody out there, they all say what’s the most important thing always come back to curiosity.
So it fascinated me and I started looking at how people measure curiosity and they had these really nothing little survey instruments. They didn’t have anything that I thought, I’m certified to give EQI and emotional intelligence tests and Meyers Briggs like you said and I thought, well it’s gotta be kind of similar thing. But it really wasn’t. They don’t really have good measurement tools.
Well, it’s interesting and I wonder if part of it isn’t because we don’t really, it feels like a much more rounded out concept than some of the others. And what I mean by that is that as you were talking I was thinking of Justin and I used to teach at the counterintelligence special agent course before we left government and we taught agents like Carol Dweck’s whole thing about mindset and growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And I wonder if that’s not part of it. It’s one thing to be kind of curious about something but I think what you were talking about with Einstein and Jobs and everybody it’s like there’s a curiosity in action. And it’s like how do you assess for that? How do you assess for the people who are willing? I contend that big part of the reason for superpower experts and its success has been because at a certain point I just simply chose to play. I didn’t know what it was going to look like. And it was part curiosity and part courage like you’re talking about. Couragosity, there you go. That’s a word.
Nobody’s searching for that one yet.
Not yet. You better have a really good subtitle.
Well, you know you mention a few things. People fear things. They have an environment that maybe is the way things have always been in their family, maybe around them have told them, my father is a policeman, you’re going to be a policeman. There are certain things that just push people in certain directions. And sometimes it’s just their assumptions that they know they always were going to do this kind of thing and they haven’t thought outside of that box. Could be apathy, could be a lot of different things. Technology a lot of times scares people off. They just don’t want to deal with it. It’s too hard to figure it out. And so I kind of was wanting to see what holds people back ’cause I think you can’t really progress unless you know why you don’t want to do more.
And I have so many people come up to me and say, “Well can you teach me how to do this? Or teach me how to do that.” And they don’t have the desire to figure it out themselves and I found that fascinating. I’m thinking, well don’t you want to know how to do it yourself? And they don’t a lot of times.
No. And it’s funny, I don’t know how much work you do in the entrepreneurial sector but I find that a lot there and it’s kind of like the whole eMyth revisited kind of conversation or if you’re a technician or a practitioner that’s a very different makeup and construct than perhaps being a CEO. And so how do you build a business then or again I’m using my filters of most entrepreneurs and stuff that we track but that’s where businesses start. They’ve got to start somewhere.
Well right. Leaders are more strategic and managers more tactical and you’ve gotta think, you’ve gotta kind of know the basics though about how things work and you can surround yourself with people who know the things you don’t know. You don’t have to know everything. But to just kind of, I think that it’s a lot more for the people that just haven’t pushed themselves to a level of CEO of course. They must have been curious to get to that level, to begin with. You know what I mean?
It’s a solid point.
It’s a little different. Once you get to that point you’re at a certain level that a lot of people never reach. I’m interested in the people that haven’t reached that level. Or even the people who’ve reached it but they just are kind of hitting a wall and they’re not growing past that.
Well, it’s interesting so what I’ve found when superpower experts kind of started up and I tell this story all the time. It was very guided and I was very much in resistance to the messages I was getting about what this was and creating collaboration and I’m like, ah, I don’t want to play well with others and I don’t want to teach people to play with others. All this stuff. It’s like, and so then when I finally caved I was like, okay, fine. Fine, fine, fine. People aren’t collaborating ’cause they don’t have a system to collaborate with. I’m brilliant at systems, I’ll create the system then they’ll collaborate. Well, and they didn’t. And it’s like, so, now I’m scratching my head going okay what now? I don’t know how to motivate people to collaborate and what I discovered was it was tied into their what I started calling the hero’s journey. Like climbing up your mountain.
What I found was that collaborations that really, really were comprised of people who had already climbed their own mountain. And so they brought into the collaboration a solid sense of self. And they weren’t defining themselves through the collaboration and I wonder if curiosity isn’t kind of the same way. Why are you being curious? Are you being curious ’cause you’re still really seeking that who am I and what am I here to do? Or are you being curious because you’ve already figured that out and it’s like okay, cool, now what am I going to do with this? And where do I want to take it? Or I’ve already had all these successes, what’s my next success? And now because I think if you’re standing on the platform of self-dominion and pretty clear self-esteem and self-identity and all those other great self-actualization whatever, it’s a very different dialogue than if you’re still seeking to find yourself within that.
Well, I think you could, I think a lot of people reinvent themselves through too. Or want to reinvent different industries and different things. I went to dinner with Naveen Jain who’s the billionaire behind iNome and Moon Express and we were talking about what he does ’cause I’m like, “Well you want to go hiking? Do you want to go bowling? What do you want to go play golf?” I was trying to find things to take him to do.
What do you do?
Where do you take a billionaire, right? I went to all levels and I go, “Well what do you do when you’re not working.” He goes, “Well I read.” And I go, “Okay but when you’re on vacation what do you do? You know what I mean?” “Well, we read.”
Oh how funny.
He reads. But then we started talking and what he’s so smart and he just reads so much because he wants to find an industry he knows nothing about ’cause he’s completely curious about how to reinvent it. He deliberately finds something he knows nothing about and learns everything from scratch. So fresh eyes so he doesn’t have to unlearn the wrong things and he starts all over again. Like right now he’s working on curing disease and going to the moon and when he’s done with that he wants to fix education. And when he’s done with that he wants to fix, you know what I mean? Goes on and on and on. And I love his curiosity. He’s hard to take places because I didn’t like, where am I going to take you? So we just sat and talked and that was even better. He’s so funny. He was such a great guy. And to talk to because he’s just so interesting, how his mind works. And I like that being around people like that who just constantly are looking for the next really interesting thing to discover.
Make yourself just a little uncomfortable.
I actually had Simon T. Bailey on my show today. And I was asking him since he’s one of the best speakers out there and he does a lot of this kind of training and things. I was asking him what he thinks that you need to do to develop curiosity and he thinks that you just have to force yourself to try different things. Drive home a different direction. Just little things to begin with which I thought was an interesting perspective. Just wear your watch on the wrong hand. Just try and make yourself a little bit uncomfortable just to see why do I have always done things this one way?
Oh, that’s a powerful thing to look at. I want to really kind of dive into that but we’re going to take a quick break. Before we do let’s tell people where they can find out more about you.
They can go to my website. It’s drdianehamilton.com and I’m on all the different social media sites as Dr. Diane Hamilton and it’s just D-R and not spelled out the whole word doctor.
Awesome. Very cool. We’re going to take a quick break. I love this conversation. When we get back. We’ve been talking with Dr. Diane Hamilton, when we get back we’re going to talk with her even more about kind of this idea of making yourself a little bit uncomfortable. Kind of getting out of your comfort zone. I think that there’s a lot to that particularly with the entrepreneur. So we’re talking about the curious entrepreneurial spirit and we will be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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