Klaudia Mitura: Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia, and you are listening to the happiness challenge. And this is how to stay curious at work part two. In the previous episode, we had some fantastic insights from the founder of the Global Curiosity Institute and the author of the best-selling book, the Workplace Curiosity Manifesto, Stefaan van Hooydonk. And Stefaan discussed with me why curiosity is important to our success and happiness, as well as how we can build a stronger curiosity muscle.
And just as a recap and a reminder, curiosity is your willingness to engage in new unfamiliar complex topics or activities. And it's absolutely crucial to happy life. Research shows that curiosity boosts wellbeing, shielding people from depression, because if you are curious about something, then there is always something to look forward to.
People who score high on curiosity also score higher on life satisfaction and happiness, mainly because when we are curious, we learn new things, meet new people, and seek unfamiliar experiences. In the workplace, curiosity results in work engagement, job satisfaction, and innovation. And finally, curiosity also prevents cognitive decline in older age due to the fact it activates brain regions responsible for high level cognitive processes.
So as a result, curious elderly participants, outperform those who are not so curious on the tests of memory and brain teasers. So as you can see, fascinating number of studies and research showing that curiosity is very important to our happy life, but also healthy brain. And Stefaan discussed with me three dimensions of curiosity.
Reflective curiosity, the desire to understand our deeper drivers, beliefs, and be in tune with our inner self. Cognitive curiosity, the interest or the drive that we have to understand the world and the environment around us. And finally, empathic curiosity, the level of openness we have towards others, their thoughts, their feelings, their perspectives.
So in this happiness challenge, I'm going to engage in one idea for action in each dimension of curiosity to strengthen my curiosity muscle.
For the self-reflective curiosity, I'm going to head to the Global Curiosity Institute and I'm going to take the free personal curiosity assessment to find out how well I'm going to score in different dimensions of my curiosity.
So I'm being curious about my curiosity here, but I'm really looking forward to actually see what I can discover about myself as a result of this diagnostic. For the cognitive curiosity, I'm going to set one hour a week to be curious about a new topic. So I'm just going to find out some information about how the world and environment around me works.
I put one hour on Wednesday morning in my Outlook calendar. And in that appointment, I have a list of topics that I'm always, well, fascinated about, or how does it actually work? And I'm going to simply say, well, today I'm going to be curious about this specific topic. And I'm going to search relevant information on the selected theme.
And finally, empathic curiosity, I'm going to make every conversation count. So again, following Stefaan's advice, I'm going to stay curious every day and learn something new from every person I interact with. I know that that may be quite challenging, but I'm going to try to go beyond the superficialities and start having more of curious conversations.
So I hope you will join me in this happiness challenge of staying more curious at work. Remember to keep in touch and join Happiness Challenge newsletter on LinkedIn. I hope to see you at the end of the month to hear what I have learned.
Bye.
