Dr. Diane Hamilton: One Professor Away From Curiosity

Dr. Diane Hamilton is the Founder and CEO of Tonerra, a consulting and media-based business, as well as the former MBA Program Chair at the Forbes School of Business. She has authored multiple books, including Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key to Unlocking Human Potential, and The Power of Perception: Eliminating Boundaries to Create Successful Global Leaders. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® and the Perception Power Index, assessments that help leaders understand their blinders in perception and curiosity. Thinkers50 Radar chose Diane as one of the top minds in management and leadership. She was named to Global Leaders Today’s list of top leaders alongside Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Sheryl Sandberg, and LeadersHum included her on their list of 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership and in the Top 10 Most Powerful Women Leaders in HR.

Diane is a highly sought-after keynote speaker and nationally syndicated radio host who has shared the stage with top speakers including Marshall Goldsmith, Brene Brown, and Martha Stewart. She has been featured on Forbes, INC, Harvard Business Review, First for Women, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, among many other notable media outlets. Diane is an experienced leader, serving on multiple BOAs including Docusign, Global Mentoring Network, TED Wall Street, and LeaderKid Academy. Her experience on boards included working alongside top CEOs from Adobe, McDonald’s, General Motors, NASA, North Face, Salesforce, United Airlines, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and many other top brands. Diane has a history of award-winning performance and is a seasoned professional within education, software, banking, real estate, and pharmaceuticals.

Transcript:

Bryan Wish:

Diane, welcome to the One Away show.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m excited to do this.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. Well, thank you for making time for the audience then is here. Diane was up at what time? 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

I start working sometimes as early as 4:00. I’m crazy. I mean, I go to bed like it still light out though.

Bryan Wish:

Well, I’m going to get real curious about your work ethic here on this show, so all right. Well, Diane, what is the one away moment that you want to share with us today?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

There’s been so many from taking a one phone call I almost didn’t take to take a Kelly Girl job. It was called Kelly Girl at the time, the Kelly Services that turned into a 20 year career with a company, a marriage and two kids. But I think that was probably the biggest moment, but I think one of the most recent moments was probably how I got into what I’m doing now, which was I had a professor who I took for part of my doctoral training, who I thought was nuts, man. He was just really out there. And I remember I had to talk to him on the phone one day and I had to tell him what my topic was for my doctoral dissertation. And I knew I wanted to study sales, but that was really all I knew I wanted to study.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And I said something about, yeah, I’m going to look into sales performance. And somehow he heard me say, “Sales performance and how it relates to emotional intelligence. That’s a great topic.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant.” I had no idea what he was even talking about at the time. And it totally changed … I’d never even heard of it. And I looked into it and became very interested and I wrote my dissertation on it. I’ve even had Daniel Goldman on my radio show. I mean, I’ve gotten really into it and it changed my trajectory because I got into personality assessments. I wrote a book with my daughter about all these different personality assessments, like I think your last guess I looked at David Meerman Scott did something like that. I saw your last-

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. He wrote his data.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Yeah, yeah. I did the same kind of thing. And I have written five books now and all of them have kind of been based on just ending up with a PhD and different things. But it changed my life. And actually I dropped that guy because he was so crazy. When I got on the phone with him, he goes, “Welcome to the cave. I’m going to eat you up like jello pudding.” And he was this really weirdo guy. And I thought this guy, I can’t deal with him because the one paper I had turned in with him, he said, “You wrote that too fast. Think how great it would be if you took some time.”

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

So I waited a week the next time after I wrote it to make him think I spent more time. And then he said, “That was so great. Look how much better that was.” So I knew this guy was kind of crazy from just the two interactions I’d had with him. And I dropped him and I can’t remember what his name was. And I sometimes think I need to contact that school to figure out who that guy was because I want to kind of tell him he changed my life.

Bryan Wish:

Oh my God. Well, that’s wild. The fact that you don’t even remember his name, but seems like it led you on a bit of a path that where you thought you were going to maybe be doing one thing, but the lens in which you saw it was baked within this seems like this idea of emotional intelligence that you’ve been able to build a body of work around. Correct?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Right. It just led to me being a soft skills expert and behavioral expert.

Bryan Wish:

If I can unpack that, that’d be awesome.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Sure.

Bryan Wish:

When you kind of look back at that moment, do you sense knowing what you know now that you had a good, what’s the word, you were acclimated in a sense with emotional skills and soft skills or was it more this underground world that you felt like you really needed to dive into and learn for yourself?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

I think with emotional intelligence it’s the ability to understand your own emotions and those and others and then act appropriately based on that. And I think that I didn’t feel like I needed help in that area. Sorry.

Bryan Wish:

We welcome all dogs.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Okay. There’s a guy delivering something outside.

Bryan Wish:

Good. It makes the show more fun.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Okay. Luna. No. So she never barked and I have my own radio show, so I talk, we’d be fine. Can I deal with this for one second? Do you mind?

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll-

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

In case there’s somebody-

Bryan Wish:

Sure. Do your thing.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

No, I think it’s okay. I’m sorry.

Bryan Wish:

Do you want me to re-ask the question? So that way …

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Yeah, go ahead.

Bryan Wish:

Okay, cool. Just that my editor can figure it out or [inaudible 00:05:12].

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Yeah, that would be great. She’ll probably make noise, but I don’t want that much for you. Okay.

Bryan Wish:

So you had this professor who took you on a path that maybe you weren’t expecting kind of rooted in what sounds like emotional intelligence that you’ve been able to build a foundation or body of work around. Now, as you look back on that period of time, do you sense that you were acclimated with these emotional intelligence skills and with body of work or was it this completely underground world that you knew you needed to dive into that was calling you, but you didn’t really understand and know what you’re getting into or a combination of the two?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

It’s interesting to look at that because I’ve discovered emotional intelligence is really about understanding your own emotions as well as those of others, and then acting appropriately based on what you’ve learned. Right? And I don’t think I had so much of a problem with emotional intelligence, but I didn’t recognize how much of a problem soft skills were in the business world. I knew certain things made people successful, but I hadn’t really put my finger on it what exactly was what we needed to fix. And I think that it was really fascinating to me to delve into people are hired for their knowledge and fired for their behaviors. So behaviors became very interesting to me and I wanted to find out which ones were helpful, which ones were not helpful. And I found a lot of people would come to me at work for like, “This person says this, what do you think,” kind of things. You know what I mean?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And I don’t know. I seem to be a sounding board for people. I can’t say that I’m so great at my own emotions, but I guess I’m able to look outside and help other people sometimes. Maybe I should have gone into some kind of psychology. I don’t know. I loved having psychologists on my show. I find that whole realm endlessly interesting because it’s so subjective. I love things that are subjective. I teach ethics. Well, I teach I’ve taught so many different classes. I mean, thousands of different courses through the years and just looking at people’s perspective, fascinates me. Maybe that’s why my last book was on perception and why I write about curiosity so much. I just don’t think you ever really get to the bottom of all of it. And that fascinates me.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, there’s always more digging that you can do and it’s not like you ever run out. The show is always more alleyway to go down and it’s just how much do you really want to give away your own discretion? So it’s interesting though, the discretion you said about between fascinated by others versus like understanding yourself and how the combination of both more or less, how that drives behaviors around it. So you as this professor maybe like came in, shook up your way of thinking, knowing, or doing, how did you respond? I mean, how did it exchange your course specifically?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, after he said that, I immediately dropped him and switched to a professor who I know I loved and I was much happier, but I took what he said and I looked it up and I thought, “Wow this is a really a hot topic. It’s very fascinating.” And I started to get certified in different assessments not just emotional intelligence, but Myers Briggs, and then I got interested in [inaudible 00:08:53] and all these other assessments. And because of that, when I started later to research curiosity, I thought, “Well, I want to find the assessment that tells me what measures curiosity in terms of what stops it.” and I realized that all the assessments out there just told you if you had higher or low levels basically, or medium or whatever, but it didn’t tell you what to do if you had a low level. It just said, “Hey, you got a low level.”

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

So that’s where I was fascinated was how can I create an assessment that determines the things that inhibit curiosity? So if I could do that, I could help people move forward and become more curious. So that’s why my work got attention, because nobody had ever done that before. And there was a good reason for it. It was really hard to figure this out. I had to spend years of studying thousands of people. So I think this really led to me opening up to some things that I really didn’t like, like statistics. I had to learn factor analysis to be able to figure out how to do this because nobody else could figure out what I had in my mind. And so I had to do it myself and it’s led to me creating a couple different assessments from curiosity and perception and different things, which really has drawn a lot of attention that I didn’t expect.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

I mean, if you look at how much people talked about curiosity before all this, there was very few articles coming out, very few things coming out. Now, if you look at it, there was just a research study that came out that linked in the conversations about curiosity in the last two years is just skyrocket. So I’d love that people are talking about this more because when you talk about all the things that you’re trying to fix in the working world, like soft skills all these behavioral issues. And I don’t think a lot of people are going to the root of the problem. And the root of the problem to me is curiosity and asking questions because we get back to emotional intelligence and everything in some ways, because you’re a big part of emotional intelligence is this empathy, which is the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and feel things from their perspective. You don’t have to agree with it, but you have to be able to at least understand that. And to do that, you have to ask questions. So you’re back to curiosity. So curiosity is the spark to everything that everybody’s trying to fix.

Bryan Wish:

Totally. I mean, to your point, it’s so important that we get curious at the underlying things. We ask, we explore, we see what the drivers and then yeah, to your point, it inhibits it to go on that journey in itself. Before we go there though, what I wanted to know from you is why curiosity? Why for you maybe on a personal level is it say, of all the things in the world, by the way, I think it’s amazing, why do you get so fascinated by studying just curiosity as a topic? It’s not creativity. It’s curiosity. It’s super-

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Very specific. Yeah. I think because like you, I’ve interviewed so many people, I mean, on my radio show, I probably have had 1500 people I’ve talked to about different things on the show. And the really fascinating thing to me was the people who were highly curious were the most successful. I was trying to pin it down I’m like, “Okay, you’d hear people like Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or whatever talk about how that’s what they thought would made him successful.” Then I’d start to read Oprah. And a lot of other people who would say similar things. And then curiosity is such a vague term to like it can mean what? Do you just read every day? And to me, I looked at it as getting out of status quo thinking, I looked at it as a whole different realm.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

But when I started to think about writing the book, I’d already written several books because I was interested after getting my dissertation done and all that I wrote about all these different other topics. And I never thought I was going to write another book, but the radio show kind of inspired me because I thought this is interesting why some people are curious and why others aren’t because the people on my show were highly curious. That’s why on my show. They were successful. And then I would teach and some of my students kind of wanted me to just give them the fish instead of teach them to fish and they weren’t that burning desire. It wasn’t in them.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

So that was what led to that.

Bryan Wish:

So cool. And if I can keep going here, like growing up, your environment was curiosity something that was cultivated and nurtured or was it something that maybe was more shunned in so you had to seek outside curiosity because of lack of certain developments? I’m curious how this has manifested for you.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, what’s interesting is I found four things inhibit curiosity and they’re fear, assumptions, the voice in your head, technology and environment. So fate inhibits curiosity. And so my environment did actually have a big impact on me, both good and bad. I would say the good, my dad was very curious. He was born legally blind and he would just read a lot. He could barely see the newspaper, but he was able to actually read it. He would have the radio going at the same time, he’d have the sports going at the same. He had like seven things going into his head all at one time. And he was always learning. At dinner, we had to play school at night, everything was a game. So at night if you’d lost the question, he’d create questions that were based on your age that he thought were appropriate.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And if you didn’t get it right, you’d become like a third of a hippopotamus or some silly thing but it was all to learn all the time. And I think that I got the curiosity and that multiple need for getting input in different ways from that. But I also was inhibited from my family because there was like good things to be curious about and the right things to be curious about, like sports was super important and I wasn’t really that interested in the sports. And if you weren’t interested in what they were all interested in, you were kind of like “what’s wrong with you” kind of thing. And I think a lot of people are like that they just have to go down certain paths because everybody around them says, “This is what’s good. This is what’s right.” And I did find that in my research, that was an inhibitor.

Bryan Wish:

Got it. Yeah. I mean, to grow up, I mean, to watch your father in that capacity, I mean, unbelievable. Just even unbelievable for him to like … he had a choice, right? Do I want to let something impact my ability to learn, but it sounds like he wasn’t going to let reality stop him. So you grew up with the model who seems to be extremely curious about everything.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Yeah, he was, he wrote books, he did a lot of different things and he would do things that most blind people don’t do. And I think maybe what’s one of the reasons I had Erik Weihenmayer on my show who was the first blind guy to hike the seven peaks and all that. And I’d seen him climb at a rock climbing gym by me one time. And it reminded me of my dad because my dad would like go horseback riding and play ping pong and do things that he shouldn’t have been able to do. Play golf. You’d have to find his ball for him, but he would play golf and he would do stuff and I like that he didn’t let things hold him back. I mean, he wasn’t a perfect guy by any means, but he was interesting in that respect.

Bryan Wish:

Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing some of that because I think like you talked about the environment or the four factors that drive curiosity the environment was super interesting. So you said to me discovering, I mean, this is fascinating in itself, discovering like before finding what inhibits curiosity and the fact again, sounds like a math journey that you had to go down. Tell me about that process. How did you know where to start? What was your initial attempts? How long did it take? I’m curious about you figuring out the four ways that, yeah, so-

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

That was hard. I have to admit. I liked math when I was young. I mean, I liked algebra, but then when you get into college and you get into calculus and stats, I hated it. And I didn’t really think that it would be something I would ever want to do. Look for statistical analysis. I mean, I did enough to get me through my dissertation, but I’m thinking I’m never looking at statistics again in my mind. But I wanted to solve this problem like what stops people, because it was driving me crazy. And so I would hire people from like Harvard and Pepperdine, different places who had graduated from these great places. And they just kept giving me the same assessment, which was already written by a guy named Cashton, which is how high or low is your level.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And I go, “No, I don’t want that. That’s great. We need that. We want to know if you’re high or low and then see if things have impacted, but that’s not what I was trying to do because it had already been invented.” So I think what I was trying to do, nobody could do. So I couldn’t stand that I couldn’t do it. I forced myself to learn factor analysis, which is to look at how these things come out on the charts and different things. You’ve seen like those charts with the dots and you just got to figure out where things group together based on questions you asked. I mean the psychometric statisticians I had hired kind of taught me in a way how to ask questions. So I knew how to ask questions, but they just weren’t asking the right questions.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

So I realized they were just asking if they were curious or not. And I was asking what impacts this, right? So I started by just putting a question in LinkedIn, what keeps you from asking questions and meetings? What keeps you from being curious type of questions. And I started to see a lot of fear based things. People don’t want to look stupid, they don’t want to look unprepared. They don’t want to be put on the spot. Whatever the questions. The things that people said were, were all fear based, I thought. But then as I started asking a bunch of questions, I learned from just my experience with these statisticians, that you ask a lot of questions and then you whittle it down, because you’ll get outliers of different dots that don’t go together.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

So I just whittled down these questions over years and sent surveys to thousands of people over the years and just kept refining it until you get a certain percentage that shows that it’s statistically good on these reports, that it was a valid. So because I’m a PhD, I know how to publish peer reviewed stuff. And so I published my results in peer reviewed journals and you know, so it’s legitimate. It’s not just like I put this thing on my website and it’s a cool thing to take. It’s actually a legitimate assessment, but it took me years and it was harder than I had known what I was going to have to go through. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s like having kids, you’re better off not knowing how hard it is.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. Well, it’s amazing that you kind of went on a [inaudible 00:20:27] track to kind of say, “No, I don’t want what’s been done. I don’t want to just know how curious you are or if you are curious, but I want to get to the granular and the specifics of kind of what this means and what this could mean for organizations or people and then how to make behavioral changes, I’m sure. And kind of lead a more interesting life.” So, sounds like you cracked this, you got the formula or you got the parameters in place, so what did you do with it? I mean, how does it apply to yourself today? I know you serve on a lot of influential boards. You’ve been able to work with a lot of procedures, organizations. What does that work look like in practice?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, I work with a lot of organizations where they either give this to their employees last week alone. For example, I spoke to a big group of LinkedIn people. They hired me to come in and talk and everybody had taken the assessment first. And then we go through some of the results. I mean, that was that’s one kind of thing I do. I also do training of people who want to give this to other organizations. I can’t go everywhere to give this. So I have to train consultants and other speaker type people who do this kind of thing who maybe give DISC or other assessments and they’re tired of it, because it really isn’t as relevant today. We’ve got somebody working on my roof-

Bryan Wish:

God, we got dogs. We got workers. We got all the variables.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

This is such a professional atmosphere. No one’s supposed to be here today. But I started to train all these people to be certified. So I have training that I do for either them or for the organizations. And so I had to, because I’ve written a lot of curriculum because of being the former MBA program chair at Forbes School of Business and all this stuff I’ve done teaching wise, I have this curriculum background of, so I design courses and I design certification training and all this stuff. And so in addition to training, I speak to a bunch of people all the time. I’m on shows like this and different things, getting the word out about curiosity and perception and some of the other things I write about, but it’s just snowballed that you just learned so much you’ve I had to create I call my own organization to have this ability to deliver this. I mean, it was hard enough just to figure out how to get the report to generate when you take a DISC or something and it gives you that 26 page report.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

That part was probably the harder than anything else was finding people who would do that the way I wanted it to look the way without spending a zillion dollars doing it from my perspective. So you learn a lot of things and then now people come and ask me to help teach them, how do you do all these different things? So it goes into all different directions, but I really love when I get to speak to groups or when they’ve taken the assessment,I’ve gone to, I’ve worked with people, different groups, like Verizon hired me to do little videos for their onboarding and training. And it plays throughout all their stores and different things about curiosity. I speak to like EO groups about having them take it to learn, to be better as entrepreneurs. The Novartis big pharmaceutical companies, I’m part of their curiosity month that they do.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

I’m part of a lot of the different things that they do because that’s part of their core values. So these are all like really large major organizations that have just realized, especially now with COVID, that everything ties into curiosity. And I often give this as an example of how curiosity ties in it say you’re going to bake a cake, right? And you look at it curiosity this way, instead of thinking of about curiosity for a second, think about baking a cake, that’s your end goal. You’ve got ingredients, you’ve got flour and oil and eggs and whatever it is, and you mix ingredients and you put it in a pan and you put it in the oven and what happens? Well, you want cake, but if you didn’t turn on the oven, you don’t get cake, you get goo, right? You don’t get what you want.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And in the working world, when I’m talking to them, it’s the same kind thing. They know they want cake, which is money. They want productivity and financial success. They know they have all these ingredients. They want innovation and engagement, motivation, and they’re mixing everything. But nobody’s turning on the oven. And the oven to me is curiosity. And no matter who I’ve had on my show, like Francesca [inaudible 00:25:16] of Harvard, who does this great HBR piece on the case for curiosity or anybody who’s a curiosity expert or any kind of expert at all, creativity, doesn’t matter what they’re an expert in, if you ask them what comes first, they all say curiosity.

Bryan Wish:

Totally. Yeah. It seems like the essential ingredient to drive innovation in different thoughts because where do you go without it? So it seems like your work is very versatile. The applications are vast. You have different ways of applying it to the world and people to do a lot of different things in a positive way for you on a just personal level. Where do you find yourself the most gratified or fulfilled or feel the most impact with the work that you do?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

My work for decades was always in sales. So you get that rush from sales that hyper like things are going well. And so when I’m busy, I’m the most content. I love to do multiple things. Maybe it’s my dad with the radio and the thing and everything going on at one time, but so I’m the most content and happy when I’m teaching for 10 different courses at one time, while I’m going to different organizations and I’m doing my radio show and I’m on these boards. To me, life gets very boring if I just don’t keep doing things that make me uncomfortable. And I think a lot of people hit that uncomfortable area and they quit. And I want people to not do that because that’s when you get into status quo, that’s why the Kodaks of the world are gone.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

That’s why the blockbusters of the world are gone. I mean, they’re status changed if not gone because everybody feels that sense of comfort because, “This worked really great in the past.” But see with me, I get super bored if I try to just continue doing the thing that made me happy in the past. I have to constantly find something new because it’s like if you knew the meaning of the world and why we’re here, everything, all of a sudden was here in your head right now, the life would be really boring. You know what I mean? It would be like now what? So I love that exploration to try and learn a little bit more.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah, got it. No, I mean, I know that when … I was just bring this around when I was a freshman in college, a sophomore, I remember it was like the first time I felt like someone shook me and I felt like I was living in a box and he kind of cracked the box a little bit and I could build ideas around it. I’ll never forget. And it felt so freeing to be able to penetrate a problem with a whole new pair of ways to work.

Bryan Wish:

And so what I love about what you’re doing is the fact that on an individual or one to one level, even they might work with organizations or people across assessments. It’s giving people that ability to look at things in a whole new lens and maybe a little outside the box or a little, which just not in the way they would before. I mean, it’s a very empowering way to move through the world. And so what I want to ask you now is when you look at your work and what you’re doing now, are there any examples of individuals that maybe stand out that came to you and said, “Hey, Diane, I just innovated this at my company. Or I just did this because you helped me with the way to think.” Does anything pop to you when I ask you that question or trigger?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, when I did those Verizon videos, one of the things we did was to take individuals from the company who had utilized curiosity and showcase what they did in the company that took advantage of them developing curiosity and share those stories. So some of these videos, like for example, they would say, I’d give a couple minutes of why curiosity is important in a background. And then they take these individuals and say, “Well, because of my curiosity, I took the chance to explore this, which led to this opportunity. And I became very successful.” So there’s a lot of those kinds of individual like people who will say, “I was just going through the motions and I hadn’t thought about it until I took this assessment or I listened to you talk,” or whatever it is the one thing that sent them over the cliff to the next level.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And I think that’s what I was trying to do with the assessment was open up your mind to the fact that this exists. Maybe you didn’t even think about it that maybe your parents said you always had to be a lawyer or that you don’t ask questions. Because every time you’ve asked a question, somebody makes you the head of that committee and then doesn’t pay you for it or whatever it is that’s in there that you just didn’t even recognize. And you just keep it’s, there’s this thought experiment where this woman keeps standing up and sitting down every time they ring a bell, because everybody in the office, she’s at a doctor’s office, they’re all doing the same thing. They’re all standing up and sitting down. She eventually does the same thing with them without knowing why.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And that’s called social learning. And we at work, we stand up and we sit down and we don’t even know why we’re doing it. And that’s what I was trying to get people to recognize. And so, yes, I mean, some of those videos are good examples of people who’ve decided I’m not going to just look at everything and not question it. Because I think when you do that, I think a lot of people are afraid to go to their leaders and because it looks like they’re confronting them. And what’s one of the things I get asked a lot when I speak, “How can I go to my leader without them thinking I’m questioning them as a person or making them feel like what they’re doing isn’t right by my asking questions?” And I think you can do that in the working world by saying, “I’m trying to develop my curiosity. I know that’s the core value here. So I hope you don’t mind if I ask this question that I normally wouldn’t ask.”

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

If you buffer how you come across to people, that’s a sense of emotional intelligence and recognizing that you’re empathetic to their sense that they may have an insecurity over you asking this question, right? So again, we’re back to emotional intelligence and these things all wrap around. And I found that was really true. So much that my book, After The Curiosity book was about perception because I saw it about IQ, EQ for emotional quotient, CQ for curiosity quotient and CQ for cultural quotient combined because this curiosity is necessary to get over our confirmation bias and think of how much everybody’s latching on right now to their beliefs, whether they’re right or wrong without even opening themselves up to anything else, because we’re just confirmation biasing ourselves to death with our choice of news, our choice of social postings. You know what I mean? So all this to me is about questioning and getting out of that “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. Well, I know that book think again, we’re all living these mental models of how we see the world and whether it’s our upbringing, it’s what we do consume all these different elements and it is really hard to change or bring yourself into a new world. And so when you give people the tools, the EQ tools, the IQ tools, you kind of blend them together, I think that’s what I’m hearing you say is a lot of the transformative aspects of this work can really start being done to an individual, but they need to have the recognition of both.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Right. Right. And I think recognition is all about exploration and then it’s all back to curiosity. And so if I could get people to just not be on cruise control and think wouldn’t life be much more interesting if I didn’t just be on cruise control because you’re going to hit some bumps and you’re going to fall down, but it’s like if hiking is the exploration to the top, if somebody just dropped you on top of the mountain on with a helicopter, it’s not nearly as fun of a thing as what you feel when you’ve made it, climbed it yourself. And I think a lot of people look for the easy way. I know a lot of my students did and they missed out on the exploration. They missed out on making mistakes. I mean, mistakes are some of the things that are the best lessons ever, no matter who I’ve asked on my show, would you go back and change anything?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

I used to ask that when I first had a show of course everybody says no, because you learn everything that way. And I think that we’re so afraid sometimes of doing the wrong thing, that there isn’t a really a wrong thing. And I think that we have to recognize that there’s so many things that hold us back. And part of getting over that is to do kind of a personal swot analysis and look at your weaknesses and your threats and things that hold you back and come up with kind of smart goals and things to overcome some of those things. That’s part of that curiosity growth journey that I talk to people about. It seems so simple and yet very few people do it.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah, no, I’m shocked. I think just growing up and being more entrepreneurial, I look at the world. I think there are different lenses to you. Not that it’s about our lens, but I always question why it seems like the vast majority of people. They just float through life. Just very comfortable yeah. In their own way of doing things. And I don’t look down on that. I just find it really hard to connect into that.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Yeah. Well, we need worker bees. We need some kinds of different people. I mean, we can’t all be Warren Buffets, you know?

Bryan Wish:

Right. Totally agree. But I guess my question is it’s like how do you make people care, desire to be more curious?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Right. That’s a good question.

Bryan Wish:

Who aren’t maybe naturally inclined to display those qualities or care to display those qualities.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, it’s kind of like emotional intelligence, the people who need to read the book aren’t going to be the ones that see it on the shelf and go, “I need to learn to be more emotionally intelligent, or I need to be more curious,” right? So it was people like Daniel Goldman that made emotional intelligence a big buzzword with his popularizing it, and then leaders saw the value of it. And they instilled that as training and different things in organization. So that’s why I came at this from an organizational standpoint, people who are in the working world, who want to get better or leaders want them to get better because there’s people sitting on a farm somewhere, which they love what they’re doing. They’re not going to need to do a whole lot to change what they’re doing.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

But if you’re in an organization and you want to climb the ladder, then I need leaders and individuals in the workplace to recognize the value of incorporating this into the core culture and our mission and vision for the culture. I mean, Zander Lurie was on my show from SurveyMonkey and he’s CEO of SurveyMonkey. They actually changed their address to one curiosity way, because everything they do is based around curiosity. Because it’s asking questions and surveys and so when companies have it in their core culture, the leaders take it on and emulate what they want to see. Then that’s how we get other people to recognize, “Okay. So this is rewarded. This is okay.” Because if we’re not rewarding them or emulating, we’re not going to change that.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah. Wow. Looks a great story. And I mean, I think you’re right. It’s got to take people from always the people who go look for the book that need it the most. People probably walk right by it and say … So it’s a hard challenge, but hopefully the right people end up doing the work that they need it the most. So as you look at where we are today as a society more globally have you noticed or study at all with different cultures, ones that drive more curiosity once parts of the world or regions using the factors where are areas that you see curiosity is really ingrained. And then maybe other areas where the way of doing things is very kind of hardwired.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Yeah. There was a study by Merck and it looked at like Germany and United States and different countries and Germany maybe was more curious than US. US was more curious than others. There’s research out there that shows different areas. I focused on the US. But when I wrote my book on perception, I looked at just the meaning behind certain things like in Asian cultures, it’s not polite to ask certain things or to act in certain ways. And I think Joe Lurie had a really interesting book. He was on my show. He wrote about perception. Can’t think of the name of the book off the top of my head right now. But I remember quoting him and the book I co-wrote with Dr. Maya [inaudible 00:39:36]. And we looked at a lot of these cultures and the meaning behind a lot of different things.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

So we were all going to do this exploration in a way that fits in our culture. You’re not going to go to somebody and ask them an insulting question that in somebody else’s culture and that’s part of what we see companies training people to do when they have to go work in other areas. Maybe we want you to be curious, but remember, this is the culture within you’ve got to be respectful. And so there’s that you have to be curious about the culture then at that point and make sure that we align to the values of where we were.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Another common question I get is what do you do if your boss isn’t curious and they don’t want you to be this way. And the question is a good one, because if you work for a company where they aren’t valuing some of these really important soft skills, either the leader’s going to end up leaving because they’re not going to be successful or the company might crash or something’s going to happen. So you either decide to tough it out, wait for that guy or gal to be gone. Or you maybe sometimes it’s time to switch and work for someplace where they do value what you think is meaningful.

Bryan Wish:

Well, yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, we said about Germany and the studies. I mean, it’s so interesting to me how parts of the world or different areas you go, there’s an energy here. There’s a [inaudible 00:41:04] that you walk in and it’s very stimulating and it feels very open to explore, others don’t. And so I think for your work, I think it could be so powerful. I think people really want to be unlocked. I mean, part of your work too. It’s so cool. It’s like by helping people be curious, you’re helping them like realize their potential, you know? Falls a lot into what you’ve done. So take me maybe on a journey like five or 10 years out, where do you see your work evolving? How do you see your work continuing to make an impact? When you look down the road a little bit, what do you see for yourself with your work?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, I’d like continuing to work in behavioral issues. I really can’t do a lot of it all by myself. So a lot of it, I partner with other companies. I’m in a group that Reed Hoffman from LinkedIn had created, backed this group flourished, they were incorporating the curiosity code into apps and different things to grow your abilities through that way. So I’ve got things like that going on. Eventually I could see probably partnering or selling to large organization that just the way Daniel Bowman did with his emotional intelligence test that like Korn Ferry, I think has his now and some of these major organizations that can put the weight of a huge engine behind making this be, I would hope bigger than DISC, bigger than other things out there, because I think that DISC and Myers Briggs and all these are really great for conversations to not only know what … I mean, you can make fun of some of the research behind Myers Briggs or whatever, but what that does is tell you not only what you are, but it gives you an insight as what the opposite of what you are, what they have that you don’t have and what they need to make them thrive.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

And I think what interests me about creating assessments and having these assessments get out there at scale is that this opens up this really important discussion of how can we go beyond where we are and build our curiosity to get more innovative, to get more engaged, because I mean, companies lose 500 billion year a year here in the United States on engagement alone. And if curiosity, which we’ve seen ties into engagement, Novartis has proven that in their own individual studies. I mean, but we really know it’s tied into the bottom line. So to me, getting this out there, having a much broader reach with it would be my goal and partner or sell out to somebody who wants to do that.

Bryan Wish:

Yeah, no, it’s amazing. And if you do that, the more people you’ll impact, the exponential effect of that on the ideas they’ll create and cultivate and the change you’ll make for people’s is really rewarding. And it’s hard because you can’t always measure that. But to know you’re inflicting that change is really cool. Diane, this has been actually a joy to have you on the show.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Thank you.

Bryan Wish:

Where can people who listen to this hire you, reach out to you, buy your books? What is the best place for them?

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Well, it’s pretty easy. It’s just my name, Dr.DianeHamilton.com, but you can follow me on social media at Dr. Diane Hamilton and just I’m the same at all the social media sites. And it’s just D-R D-I-A-N-E H-A-M-I-L-T-O-N.com. And there’s all kinds of dropdown menus and things. You can get free chapters and whatever on my site, there’s all kinds of different areas to explore from the radio show, to the curiosity and everything else is all on the same site. So you can find it there as well as the perception information. So it’s been really fun. You’ve asked such great curious questions, Bryan. I loved it.

Bryan Wish:

Well, I know it wasn’t your typical let me dive through your book and ask you about your frameworks and this. And so I appreciate the autonomy to march it to the beat of my own drum. And thank you for showing up as you did.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

This was fun. And thank you. And I look forward to chatting with anybody who contacts me. Let me know you heard me on Bryan’s show.

Bryan Wish:

There you go. Well, we’ll send them your way. Thank you, Diane.

Dr. Diane Hamilton:

Okay.

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This post was previously published on arcbound.com.

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The post Dr. Diane Hamilton: One Professor Away From Curiosity appeared first on The Good Men Project.