172: Dr. Diane Hamilton On The Importance Of Curiosity

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James, Say What Sales Buckley, and you are about to dive into another episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. This episode is brought to you by our partners, SalesLoft, Gong, VanillaSoft, Vidyard, Proposify, ZoomInfo, LoomCube, and our newest partner, Rise. Today, our guest is Dr. Diane Hamilton, a behavioral expert, CEO and founder of Tonera, and creator of the Curiosity Code Index. Today, Dr. Hamilton and John are going to discuss EQ, our emotional quotient, and how it impacts our day-to-day in sales. She and John are going to touch topics like stress, anxiety, empathy, self-awareness, and how leadership demonstrates and leverages EQ in their roles.

Diane believes that while it may be hard, constructive feedback is essential for growth and development. This episode is packed full of mindset and behavioral and tactical value. So without further ado, let's pass it over to John and Diane in the studio to Make It Happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays. Hopefully, you all had a fantastic weekend. I am continuing to struggle dealing with the Patriots, continuing to suck, but realizing that is the new normal at this at this point. But I am extremely excited today because I have somebody on who can potentially answer a question that I ask almost every person that is on here and nobody has a great answer.

And Diane Hamilton, welcome to the show. CEO over at Tonera. How are you? I am great. Now, no pressure. Nobody's going to answer. No, not at all. It's a nice way to set me up for that, right? It's funny. A lot of times when I get introduced, they're like, John Barrows. I'm like, oh, come on, man. Don't do that to me. But one of the reasons I actually started this podcast was because I always like learning from people who are smarter than me, right? And bringing and being, and this is the theme of today, of genuine curiosity. So Diane, tell us where you're coming from and kind of give us a little bit of your background here so we can set the stage for this, what I think is an extremely important conversation to have.

You know, it is an interesting conversation. And I think I was one of those annoying kids that asked why, why, why all the time. And we've seen those and everybody starts off that way. But I managed to stay that way. And it made me curious to know why other people didn't stay that way. But my background is really in sales. I started out in every kind of sales you could probably think of from agricultural chemicals to pharmaceuticals and then real estate lending. I was selling computers and software, you name it. And there's no way that you're going to learn anything better in life than to have a sales job because talk about rejection, having to be curious and learn things. I mean, everything you could, I think everybody should have to have one year of sales under their belt.

I 100% agree with you. I think I actually have this whole idea, like when you get out of college, before you can get a job doing anything, you have to get like a set of steak knives or something like that. And you literally have to go door to door and feel that rejection, feel that what it's like. And you can't really get a job until you sell all of them. And you can't sell them to friends or family. You have to sell them to people that don't know you, right? So you can at least go because sales, that skill, entrepreneurship, you name it, you know, translates to almost everything you do. So I absolutely agree with you. Well, I mean, think about it. Some of the sales I had, they actually took the yellow pages and threw them at you and said, Hey, dial for dollars, have a good time.

That gets you that thick skin tenacity that you have to have for so many other things. And I think that led, you know, it led to my desire to learn more for one thing. And then I, as a pharmaceutical rep, my company paid for us to have higher education. So I've got my master's. Hey, they'll pay for it. Why not? I never thought I wanted to teach or do anything like that. But after I had my master's, I really liked the distance learning aspect. And I got into taking classes online. And I loved that because to get me to go to class and sit through lectures for me. So I, I decided to try to get my doctorate just because I want to see how hard it was. I was curious, you know, so, and turns out it's pretty hard.

Yeah. That's why I didn't do it. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, but once I had that, I started teaching a lot of classes and I I've taught more than a thousand business classes and in my day and worked as a doctoral chair, which is like a job where you help people get their dissertation. You're the, their chair to help them through their process. So that's a really hard job. And then I ran the MBA program at the Forbes school of business. And so worked in that setting and just kept working in all these different aspects of just teaching. But as I left, I didn't want to run the entire MBA program. It was pretty, it was a lot to do. And so I thought I wanted to get back into speaking. I'd written books in the past.

I'd written books about personality assessing because I'd gotten interested in that from writing my dissertation. My dissertation was on the impact of emotional intelligence on sales performance. So yeah. Cause I was like, how are these salespeople so good? And these people suck at it, right? You want to know why? And so I started looking into that and the real, um, thing at the time you, you heard somewhat a little bit about emotional intelligence, but I hadn't, I mean, Daniel Bowman had made it really popular back in the day, but his book came out in 95. And, uh, of course others had studied it before that, but it really hadn't hit the popularity when I had gotten there. So when I thought about it, I thought, Oh, this is a cute little subject.

Let me look into this. And I had no idea what I'd hit, how important. Right. And so that had made me interested in just assessments in general. And, um, I had written a book with my youngest daughter about personality assessments, which we made it kind of irreverent for young people for the time. How old was she when you did it? She was in college. I wrote a lot of it and then she made it more irreverent and kind of sarcastic, kind of, you know, and, um, it was fun to write. It was, it's not you, it's your personality. So it was, yeah, it was fun. And so that was, I think my third book I had written one about online education, one about career, uh, reinventing your career. And then we wrote that and I didn't think I would write another book, but then, um, after I left Forbes school business, I started, uh, back to speaking.

And actually, uh, when I went back to go to my website as a speaker and consultant again, I hadn't been interviewed in a while for my books. And so I thought, well, I'll go get an interview or two under my belt to make my website more up to date. And I had just come off of interviewing people as part of my job as the MBA program chair. I had had billionaire Ken Fisher had come in to speak to the students. And if you've ever seen people interview him, he's, he's a tough interview. He's really smart and he kind of, he's got a biting wit and you never know if he's kidding or not. And that was my very first interview of all time. They threw me, I asked for it. I'm like, but I'm thrown in with this guy.

And he was, you know, he ended up being somebody I really was close to later. He actually wrote a nice thing for my book, but it was funny because my very first interview with him, I'm talking to him and he's, uh, I said, you know, I just said, Hey, I watched your interviews. He goes, well, I'm a lot nicer than that. And I'm like, Oh, where are we going with this? And he said, yeah, you seem to be, or something like, you know, I haven't even started the profanity yet. Wow. This is going to go, where's this going? Right. So I got into this loving to interview thing from him really. And the next few interviews, um, that they did of me, I thought, well, I would like to do that. And I thought, huh.

And the guy who interviewed me for my web website, I said, uh, well, you have a nationally syndicated radio show. How did you get that? And, uh, he said, Hey, they have one spot open. You'd have to be there in two weeks and you have to figure this all out and have all your guests and everything ready and your ads. And all right, I'll do it. And I've thousand people interviewed later. Plus, I don't know how many more than a thousand I've interviewed. Um, that's how I got into the radio show aspect. And as I did that, I started interviewing all these people who were super curious and interesting people. And I thought, I'm going to write a book on curiosity because I would notice some of my students maybe wanted me to hand them a fish instead of teach them to fish.

And I wanted, I wanted that desire, that real strong sense of asking and desire to know things. And as I sort of write the book, I thought, Hmm, I'm just writing about curiosity. I'd want to do more than that. I want to fix it. So I started to look for the assessments on, you know, what, how do you assess your curiosity? And all the assessments out there told you if you had higher, low levels, and I'm like, you know, you're medium or you're high or what I'm like, okay, so I'm low, then what do I do? That didn't help me. And I want to know if you've hired somebody who's curious or not, but then how do you fix it? Right. So I wanted to create an assessment that determined what things inhibit curiosity, because if you know what stops you, then you can move forward and you can make a plan to overcome it.

So that's when I created the curiosity code index that went with my book. And, and, uh, that kind of led to my interest in assessments. My book on perception that's coming out has an assessment for perception. And so that's how I get to this. That's my long winded answer to it. I love it. No, I absolutely love it. I, uh, back up. If we could back up a little bit, as far as EQ is concerned, what are some of the things that you can measure from an EQ standpoint? Cause I've always been fascinated. I've always said, you know, for me, I'm definitely not the IQ. I'm more of the EQ. If there was one more, if there was one thing that I've been, you know, somewhat blessed with in my, in my life is, uh, is a genuine curiosity and, uh, and an ability to kind of assess situations pretty quickly and without a lot of data make some pretty decent decisions.

Right. And I, and I don't want, I don't overthink things. Um, whereas other people are the exact opposite, right? They get lost in, in those details. So like, what are some of the things let's talk about EQ first and then let's, let's morph over into curiosity, but what are some of the things you look for to, to understand somebody's level of EQ? You know, EQ is interesting because EQ means emotional quotient. So you're measuring your level of emotional intelligence and just like IQ, your intellect, your EQ is really measuring your ability to understand your own emotions as well as those and others and act appropriately based on that understanding. But if you look at different researchers, like Daniel Goldman has his levels of, or his, uh, aspects of what he calls emotional intelligence.

In my research, I used another, uh, instrument by a guy named Barron who had different things. And the reason I picked that one was because he included stress management and I was dealing with salespeople and I thought, well, I wanted to look at stress particularly, you know, but there's a lot of things that come under that umbrella. Um, it's really broken into two parts is how your, your emotions and the emotions of others. And then within those two umbrellas are sub factors. And a lot of those factors, you know, really break down into your interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. And the most important one, I think that I keep running into over and over and over again, that falls under the umbrella of emotional intelligence is empathy.

I was going to say empathy. Yeah. Empathy is huge because it's my ability to put myself in John's shoes and feel it from your perspective. And I used a lot of that when my research for perception, because I saw perception as a kind of a combination of IQ, EQ, CQ for curiosity quotient and CQ for cultural quotient. And it's a process. And for you to really understand, uh, somebody else's perception of a situation or a setting, you have to have that empathy. You have to have that curiosity to ask questions, but then you have to be able to see things from their viewpoint. And a lot of people have difficulty with that. And Goldman did some great work in the area of emotional intelligence. Travis Bradbury and others have done a lot of great work, uh, that have added to the popularity of it.

But I think that the real concern people have a very challenging time with emotions because you just get overreact and then you get, um, in this sense of it's all about you sometimes. And you forget that, you know, that emotions can take over so much. And that's why advertisers make a lot of things that play on your emotions. You know, it it's a big part of how we respond in life. So, uh, Goldman's work was really important because it's, uh, leaders can really be much more impactful if they have strong levels of emotional intelligence. But I know Travis had some great research that showed that, uh, some of the, the CEOs had some of the lowest levels of EQ. And, and I think a lot of that is they get, they had it, they do well, they get promoted, but then they start to get distanced from what the reality, because people start saying yes to everything that they say, and they get out of the important conversations.

And that's a, that's a problem. Well, I also look at people like Elon Musk or, or Steve Jobs. Right. And I, I think their EQ is, yeah, I don't know. You know what I mean? Their IQ is through the roof, but like the horror stories I've heard about other people working for them, right. Is they, they just, they, no matter what, if they're, you know, if that person's in front of them, then they're the problem, right? That type of scenario, because they can't, their EQ is, is off. I don't know. It's not strong. It's just, it's just in a different than, than a quote unquote normal person in a lot of ways. Well, you know, there's different aspects of what, you know, and that's a conversation I've had with a lot of people about Steve Jobs specifically, because everybody can relate to Steve.

Sure. And he, there's two Steve Jobs in everybody's mind. When I talk to them, there's the Steve Jobs, the first time he was in the company. And then there's a Steve Jobs the second time when he came back. And the first one was brutal at a lot of things. And his emotional intelligence wasn't as developed. He did get better the second time, but there's aspects of him where people would buy into his vision that he was able to get tie into people's emotions that he actually had high levels of emotional intelligence in certain areas, but his ability to empathize your pain and suffering and torturing. Not, not even close. Not so great. You know what I mean? Impulse control, maybe not so good. Super tactical.

And I've, I've, I've, I heard this a long time ago is yawning. You know how we yawn, like you yawn and then I yawn. Is that a sign of empathy? That's what they say. You know, I think if I'm thinking about it though, I'm not going to yawn because I'm thinking about it, you know, but it's funny though, you know, who I had on my show was Paul Ekman who did the research that they use for lie to me. Do you ever see the show lie to me? Oh yeah, I did. I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you look to the right and look to the left, your mouth goes one way or whatever, you know, they used his research. And you know, it was interesting about that facial expressions. We all have the same ones. Like, I think there were six of them, but universal, whether you're blind or not, you still make the same facial expressions.

I thought that was really interesting to me. That is super interesting. Yeah. So, so how can, like, how can you understand, let's talk about self-awareness, right? Because a lot of that is obviously empathy, uh, the, the, you know, knowing, putting myself in your shoes, but also knowing myself, how do you know that you're not self-aware? Sometimes it takes a 360 evaluation. I was going to say, like, you need other people, do you need other people to tell you? Sometimes you do. Daniel Goldman and I talked about this and it's, um, a lot of these self-assessments can only get you so far and you sometimes have to get outside perspectives and a lot of leaders hesitate to do that, but it's really important that you get other people's input into what you don't know what you don't know.

And to answer any kind of assessment, if you don't recognize it, some people are holding back information. Um, I, I can think of a guy I worked with who really just didn't get it of how he came across to people. And even if he was told, I don't even know if you would ever get it. There's no, there's some people you just, you're never going to get this. And it's something that it's the really, uh, inspired leader who recognizes that you need outside influence to give you some perspective, because if you don't know, uh, if you don't get that negative feedback, it may be hard to take a little bit, but if you're, you're never going to grow if you don't get it. So it is critical to get some outside, uh, uh, feedback, but I think that's why a lot of these assessments can be helpful.

Just the discussion of what's behind them. And I've given a lot of different kinds of, uh, assessments beyond emotional intelligence tests, like disc or Myers-Briggs and different things. And you'll hear people criticize Myers-Briggs or some of these tests, but because they didn't, Oh, you don't want to put people in boxes. And, but you know, what it does is it brings up a discussion of, if you don't know what you are, when you're filling out a self-assessment, that's a little weird to me, you know, you kind of know if you're filling it out, you've just answered. So you're the one who gave the input. Right. Right. But, but you may not know the opposite of what you are. And when you go into these training sessions and just to know, like, I can remember when the, in the, um, MBTI, Myers-Briggs, uh, training, they would put us on different sides of the room and discs, they put you D in one corner and you know, how they do all that stuff.

Yeah. What was interesting to me was when they go, okay, who likes this? And then, you know, like everybody on one side of the room had this one kind of personality in them. Everybody on the opposite side had the opposite. And the whole other side of the room loved this one thing. I love, for example, how many of you like it when people give you a baked cookies for you? And I'm like, I don't care about it. Okay. And the whole other side of the room was just like, I want somebody to bake me cookies. And that was really interesting to me because I'm thinking, you know, by knowing that, that to me, it meant nothing, but to them, it was so important that somebody went out of their way. When I recognize that trait in people, I'll bring them cookies, you know?

And, and when you're in sales, if you're, we're back to the sales training, learning what your customer values, looking at what it is that means something to them is so critical that, that learning that it was interesting because I think that was the T versus the F personality traits on the Myers-Briggs and the thinking trait is more facts and figures or it might, and I think the feeling was more, you make your decisions based on values. And, and I, apparently I had very little of the cookie baking need, but I'll eat them if you give them to me, but it's not like, and I'll go, oh, thank you forever for that, you know? And I think that's, and that's that transition to curiosity, right? Because what's important to us is not, no matter, especially in sales, you know, so many sales are product-based, hey, look at all this stuff and how great it all is.

And at the end of the day, if they don't care about it, it doesn't matter. And I, you know, I had this personal experience with this recently. I just did a LinkedIn post on it actually where, you know, my mom, right? Actually, my mom's a career consultant. She did Myers-Briggs. So, you know, I've had that covered since I was like 10 years old. I've had a resume since I was like five. And, and my mom, you know, I, I put value on like, if it's your birthday. So this was the scenario. It was her, it was my dad's birthday and my sister and my dad have very similar, you know, the dates are very similar. Right. And it's been a crazy year. So I don't like, I didn't send a card. Okay. But I usually get really thoughtful presents, you know, where I travel.

I'm always keeping them in the back end of my head and I'm always picking up little trinkets or whatever it is. And I put a lot of effort. My dad's kind of a hermit and, and, and I want to get him to do stuff. So I give him puzzles and these like really thoughtful stuff, but I don't give a shit about a card. I personally could care less about cards. Right. But my mom, every Thanksgiving, Halloween, you name it, I get a card with a little note in it and whatever. And I just think it's a kind of, okay, so I got to go to have somebody else tell me what to say that, like, I just think they're stupid. Yeah. That's how I feel. Right. So fast forward, I didn't, crazy, you know, year, I didn't send a card.

Okay. But I called both my sister and my dad on their birthdays, had long conversations with them. Happy birthday, all that stuff. Fast forward. I, you know, I talked to my mom and she calls and she asked me, she goes, is everything okay? And I'm like, why? She goes, well, you know, you know, you, you didn't send your sister a card on her birthday. You didn't send your father. And usually you're so thoughtful with those things. And I'm just wondering why. And I was actually pissed. I'm like, are you shitting me, mom? I'm like the amount of effort that I go in to give, like to think of gifts and stuff like that. And I spent an hour and a half, two hours with each of them on the, like for their birthdays.

And you're giving me shit for not giving them a card. But I had to then reframe my mindset into those thoughtful gifts that doesn't, at their age at this point, cards are what they love. It is interesting. Yeah. So I'm sitting there, I'm like, their perception of what, but they're, I think they're also looking at, it's out of character for you. And so was there something wrong? You know what I mean? But I, you know, as you say that, it reminded me, my husband used to give me these cards, you know, the preprinted ones and then Bob and I'm like, what am I supposed to do with this? Right. So I would give him so much crap about that. You know, I don't want a card that somebody else wrote that you wrote your name on the, what does that do for me?

And he thought that was, you know, kind of mean, kind of got mad at me. Like, you know, I give you a nice card. So then that like the next week we go to his mom's house and he gives her a card just like that. She's sobbing. It's the nicest. Okay. I'm a horrible person. You know what I mean? It's, but you have to see what the person, what it means to them. And so I would always buy her a sappy card because that's what she wants. Right. But don't give me a sappy card because that's no, and that's what it is to understand empathy, to kind of put yourself in. This is maybe that's what your family wants, the card, and that's their thing. And you, you, you do that. And I don't think I, and my family, they were always like, oh, well, I like this.

So you should like this. And that's, you can't, you can't do that with people. And in the business setting, it's really critical to, to find out, like, I was in not so many sales contests that, uh, I'm super competitive at the margin sales. I've won like present circle and all these different things. Cause I just, I'll, I'm tenacious and I'll just die to win. So I can remember they gave me, they do these contests who could beat Diane on time on the phone calls. Cause you had to be on the phone for like four hours a day and nobody could get more than two hours. And I always got it more than four hours, but the gift for winning was son's tickets. And I already had son's tickets, so I didn't need some.

And I'm like, I don't want the present, but it wasn't rewarding for me. They never asked me, but because I was super competitive, I wanted to win anyway. And then I'd give the son's tickets away, but you, for somebody who's not in sales and doesn't have that motivation, you have to find out what it is. If you're giving them son's tickets and they don't even like basketball or, you know, developing what people like and meeting them in the way that they want to be needed. I've met, I mean, it's the Tony Alessandra platinum rule. You know, you just do unto others as they would want, not what you would want. So that's a huge part of the emotional intelligence that we're talking about. Absolutely.

I mean, I learned that at an early age, very similar when I was a VP of sales and I had six or seven reps and I had, you know, different male, female, different stages of their lives. And I would put one incentive plan together and some reps would be all in on it. And other reps would, I would be like, why don't you want that? And, you know, reading a few books and duh. So I legit ever since then sat down with each of them and said, okay, outside of money and all that others, like what, what are your goals? What are your plans? What do you want to accomplish? What's important to you? And so if you hit your quota this year, you know, if you get 120%, what would you like to see? Right? So they created the goal, not me.

And then it was like, okay, cool. Let's go for that. And the motivation was through the roof for them to go get that. Cause it's what they wanted, whether it was time back, more vacation time, money, uh, driving a Lamborghini for a couple of days, you know what I mean? Like certain people, right, exactly. So, so I think, you know, thankfully, you know, I, I, like I said, and I, this is the, this is that transition to the genuine curiosity. I've always been relatively genuinely curious, right. To be, because I always, I don't know whether it comes from, I know I'm not the smartest kid in the room. You know what I mean? I didn't go to Harvard. I did, you know, I went to a state school, drank my way through four years of college.

I did. I'm, you know, I'm not dumb, but I, I, I have, I had to work really hard at school to be, you know, to get a 3.4 or whatever I ended up getting. Um, but I was always, I've always been able to connect with people to, to be curious, like, and give a shit. And I always call it the give a shit factor. Like in order for you to care, in order for you to be curious, you have to genuinely give a shit about what you're looking to learn about, right. Whether it's a person or a thing or whatever it might be. So that's my kind of non-scholastic, uh, yeah, non-technical way of explaining genuine curiosity. But help me understand this. How do you, for somebody that doesn't have it intuitively, like, what are some of the hacks?

Let's start with the, what are the things that get in the way of genuine curiosity? Cause I think you phrased that really well upfront. Like what does get in the way of genuine curiosity? Well, I think that we need to go to the beginning of where it, where it is to start with, because we all have it. It is part of us as we're even birds, animals, a bird flies around a bush of berries. It's not curious. It runs out of berries. It doesn't last very long. Right. So we have this innate sense of curiosity, but what happens is interesting to look at it around age five, it peaks, and then it just starts to tank completely. And that's what fascinated me. Cause you know, you talk about, you know, you can watch some of the, the, um, Ted talks about creativity and curiosity, and they're very similar in what happens at that five-year-old age point.

Um, sir, Ken Robinson has a great Ted talk. Everybody's probably seen it and they don't even know they've seen it cause it's so popular, but he talks about how we're educating people out of our capabilities. Yeah. And, um, and also George land has a Ted talk that he studied kids at nap through NASA, trying to figure out what happens. Cause we have these creative geniuses at, at age two, like 98% and then by 731, we have 2% or something. I mean, the numbers are just staggering. I don't think that number's on my head, but, um, it's very, it's dramatically different. And it's the same thing I found with curiosity. We have this unbelievably high level and then life happens. And that was what I wanted to find out.

What about life happened that, that takes it from some of us and maybe not some of the others. I mean, you mentioned Elon Musk and, um, Steve jobs. I'm thinking of Steve Wozniak and I'm thinking some of the people I studied when I was researching this, because there's some of them that continue to have this amazing desire to explore and then others, not so much. So what I did was when I started to research, what holds us back, I started out by looking at, um, just in LinkedIn, I started asking people, uh, just out of curiosity, Hey, what holds you back from curiosity? And people, I just started with a thread many years ago and people were giving me a lot of fear-based things, you know, initially.

And I, of course I think, you know, yeah, a lot of people don't want to look dumb. Hey, you know, I'm in a meeting, sitting next to John in a meeting and I'm like, I want to question. Hey, John, why don't you ask? Cause I don't want to be the dumb one. You know, I have John ask. Yeah. I don't care. That happens all the time, right? You just don't, no one wants to ask the question that makes them look dumb. All right, everyone. Dr. Diane is super insightful. Her knowledge and expertise is really helpful when it comes to navigating sales conversations, but also when it comes to how we govern our day-to-day routines, the level at which our emotions drive decision-making made a huge splash for me when I heard her talk about that, but we have a lot more to come.

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Reach out to me if you have any questions. I'll talk to you soon. Let's get back to the show. And so I thought, okay, but there's more than just fear things here. I started looking and I started, I thought I'm going to do some research to see what holds people back from being curious because nobody had studied that. There's like big five factors of personality that looks at openness to experience and things like that, but that's really how high or low your level is. So I, I, I heard all these people from, you know, psychometric statisticians because who loves doing statistics? I love lots of people to do, but not me. Not my favorite thing, but I knew how to do it, but I thought, well, I want to get these experts just to make sure it's done the best way possible.

But it was really funny to me when they first started creating these questions, they were all, are you curious or not kind of responses? And I'm like, no, that's been done. I don't want to redo the wheel. I want this to be done. So I ended up doing my own factor analysis and teaching myself that to get it the correct way. And after a couple of years, I got some really great data back that showed there's four things that keep people from being curious. So the acronym is FATE, F-A-T-E. So fear, you probably guessed is, you know, you don't want to look dumb. You don't look unprepared. You know, you don't want everybody to think that you haven't done what you should be doing. I mean, there's so many aspects of fear.

But assumptions was also an interesting one to me, which is basically that voice in your head. And that can overlap with fear. And some of these can overlap to some extent. We tell ourselves, you know, I took that when I was young. I really didn't like it. Or somebody told me that that would be boring. Or, you know, you think of the dialogue you have going on. And technology is really the over or underutilization of it can keep us from exploring because we become overwhelmed or we become behind or, you know, there's a lot of that. And then environment is, you know, your brutal siblings who told you that's a stupid thing to research or your teacher who didn't have time to answer your questions.

But I think in all of these, fear with leaders, if, you know, you're talking about what can hold you back. I had a boss not that long ago. And, you know, since I'm old enough, and he was younger, he's probably your age, you know, and I can be tough to manage somebody older than you. Right. And I have had a lot of experience. And he gave me some kind of a task that I never had to do in any job never would have needed to do. And I said, Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to do that. How do you do that? And he goes, Well, I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. Okay, so he's trying to intimidate, you know, to make you feel stupid, right, that you don't know this. And that kind of thing, leaders do that, they don't realize that they do that.

And if I had been young, that might have shut me down, and made me never ask another question. But because I'm old and hardened, I'm like, don't say that to me, you know what I mean? I'm at that point in my career. Yeah, he didn't recognize he was shutting people down, because he had leaders who talked to him like that. And we told people in the past, you know, don't come to us with problems unless you have solutions. How many people you've heard that, right? Because you don't want whiners, you don't want everybody to come bitching about things and then not solving it, right? But you really shut out the people who can recognize things, but aren't qualified to solve things when you do that. So you a lot of leaders are causing this fear.

I had Francesca Gino on my show who wrote a great HBR article about the case for curiosity. And, you know, she has a lot she studies at Harvard that she just is amazing with this. But you know, she was talking about how a lot of leaders think that they encourage curiosity if you surveyed them. But if you ask their employees, it's way different of what they think. There's lots of blocking, you know, of their curiosity involved, just like that guy, he probably thought he was great. And it took me being this lovely, difficult child saying, Hey, don't do that. That's rude. Yeah. Pushing back on him, right? Because very few people probably did. Well, no one would have told him that, you know, in a lot of leaders, they do that pufferfish thing.

They want to seem like they know everything, but you know, they're just like everybody else. They don't know everything and they don't want to look like dumb like everybody else. So they have a high F on the fear sometimes. So that's huge. But I just, you know, go through the other ones a little bit on assumptions that voice in our head. It's I often refer to it as, you know, kind of like if you hold it to a glass of water, and if you just hold it for a little while, it doesn't bother you, right? You hold on to a little longer, your arm gets tired, you hold on to all day, you're paralyzed. Well, those are the thoughts in your head, you know, a fleeting thought, no big deal. The more you, you know, ruminate and think about it, the more it can hold you back.

And then eventually it'll paralyze you. And that's the thing with curiosity. It really will hold people back if they keep telling themselves there is too much work. I don't want to do it. I've done it in the past. I was going to say, is it to a certain degree, whether conscious or subconscious, is it a little bit of a laziness factor? Because we're trying to take a shortcut to something else, right? Yeah. Well, it can be. Have you ever noticed people who seem lazy are only really lazy when it's something that doesn't interest them? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, a lot of the time. Right. And they think that they're not interested in it because of what they're telling themselves sometimes, you know what I mean?

Or they're fearful of it. Or, you know, and then the technology thing, a lot of people are telling themselves, this is too hard, I'm overwhelmed. So it overlaps with technology. You mentioned Steve Jobs. I mean, I mentioned Wozniak before, and it makes me think of how he embraced technology so much at an older age. But a lot of that overlap was from environment because his father was a genius too. And he would come home with all these gadgets and things from work. And then he would give them to young Woz, you know, and say, hey, go play with this, but let me show you. He didn't just hand it to him and say, have a good day. He would just show him how the wires connect to this and why you need battery for that.

And, you know, if you get that outside influence of your environment teaching you that this is exciting and this is why this works, and then you become super curious. And so, you know, that environment can have a huge impact. That, so that's what I'm a little bit of afraid of right now. Because, and again, I'm going to talk in very general terms. Gen Xer, about to be 45. I feel like our generation was the last one who was inherently able to figure it out, right? So like when I was bored in the house, you know, my mom would kick me out of the house and say, go play and be home by dinner, right? And so I'd have to go break shit, whatever, burn things down, and I would come back, right? And so we figured things out.

But this generation, and Morgan and I, my colleague that I brought on board, he's a millennial. We actually have a whole keynote around this about how this generation or younger generations, every minute of their lives have been structured, right? So they go from school to this hour to this hour, then they have soccer practice for, you know, two hours, then they have their iPad for 30 minutes, then they have to do homework for two hours. And then what happens is they get out into the real world, and they get managers like me who say, all right, cool, giddy up, go figure it out. And they're like, well, what do you mean figure it out? And then you layer on the fact that they've been taught to the test, right?

So now it's no longer critical thinking, it's you got to pass that MCAS, you got to get that score to be able to get into college. So I'm going to teach you to that test, I'm not going to teach you critical thinking, right? So you get a kid who comes out, and then a manager like me who says, figure it out, and they look at you sideways. And the reaction from our generation is, oh, well, you don't know? Well, then here's a script, here's a template, here's exactly how to do that, which crushes even more. And they don't like that. So I have this whole thing about structure, how structure is the connective tissue, right? I don't know about you, I don't like being in structure, right? You put structure on me, I think there's got to be a better way of doing this, right?

I like building structure, but I don't like being in it. Where this generation in general needs structure. And if they don't have it, they fall apart, but they'll thrive within it better than you and I ever would. Are we with our education system? And are we inherently the way that we are now, like every kid has to do all this other stuff? Are we inherently beating curiosity out of children? Well, it is back to that we're educating out of our competencies to some extent. I think, though, you know, I think that some companies really get letting exploration take place. I mean, we always hear about Google. Yeah, we always hear that story, right? And I've had a lot of Google people on my show, and we talked about that.

But I think that companies need to have reward systems for thinking in different ways and showcase when people do something that's outside of the thinking. I often talk about how we think too much in our own cubicle, but then we get maybe even our own division and in our own silo. And then we get that silo effect because we only want what we have. We don't want to share with this group. And there gets to be that really structured thing that that's when I train people. A lot of the things we talk about are some of the examples of companies that went completely outside and they think completely in a different way. I had a hospital in London I wrote about where they were losing people from the OR to recovery that when they would transfer them, they were having people die because they weren't having a very efficient process.

And, you know, a lot of people just go back to the manual and go, well, let's fix this. And they tried that. Nothing ever got better, right? It was very structured. But then they were watching one night, a couple of the executives were watching this Ferrari race car team and they would, did the pit stop, you know, they'd take part, the car, put it back together in seven seconds and they'd be off. And they're watching this and they're going, how can they do that? And we can't even move a patient from here to here, right? And so they actually hired that race car team to come into the hospital and watch what they did and interact with them to see how they could change things. And with fresh eyes looking at, you know, at this and from their own efficiency perspective, they gave a few suggestions and they dramatically improved their process.

So I think it's that giving permission to think outside of this box. But as you said, it, you can't do it all in one, like here you're let loose into the wilderness because people freak out, right? Totally forgot. It's baby steps. It's baby steps and rewards for those baby steps and working on them together. Like just the problem that you see together and, and just brainstorming and not necessarily where they're overwhelmed by other people that can overtake the conversation because you get a bunch of introverts in a room with extroverts and you're going to have a hard time getting introverts to give you their input, right? So what in that situation, they might do it if you give them a head of time, this is what we're going to talk about and give them preparation time.

And so you, you have to look at each person in an individual kind of way, not, not all Gen Xers are out this way and not all millennials are this way. But if you share with them the value, it's just like any sales thing is painting a picture of what they get or doing it a certain way and finding out their reward, what's rewarding to them and say, Hey, you know, let's, let's try you thinking this way for a while. Cause it does take a little bit of unprogramming. And, and there's nothing wrong with structure. If, if it's meeting the goals that everybody's trying to have, you know what I mean? But when structure is stifling you, you have to think that for people to be truly innovative, we want them to be curious to think about things.

The, um, I think it was the, uh, a hospital, I mean, a hotel chain, I'm trying to think if it's the, um, I can't remember which chain, but it went into business with, uh, it was the Regis, I think went in with Nate Neiman Marcus and they decided to take advantage of closet space in their hotels. They had, this is just, you know, you can look at the same way, the structure of how hotels work, right? They always do things the same way, but they looked at this blank space and they thought, how can we make this, make us some money? And so they decided to take Neiman Marcus and do a partnership. And they created a, uh, just a form where they give to people before they stayed at the hotel said, Hey, tell us what your shirt size and your shoe size and your, you know, different things and what you like and your colors.

And they stock the closet, which is normally empty, filled with some of these things that are really cool. And like a mini bar, if you use it, you pay for it when you leave and not, you know, it's getting those kinds of creative ideas of how you can partner and come up with different things that if you share stories like that with people and because people don't even think like that naturally, unless they hear examples sometimes, like I wouldn't have never thought to ask the Ferrari team to come look, right? I wouldn't have thought that we could, an empty closet could be anything, you know what I mean? So it sometimes takes, um, sharing some of these really unusual stories with people and telling them that nothing is off limits.

Uh, and I think that that's, that's kind of rewarding in itself that they have that freedom and maybe assigning a certain day. This is the day we have what if, why not days, you know? Oh, you see, that's my problem has always been, I'm a high D right on the disc. I'm a hard charger. And I've always said to my team, no, challenge me, challenge, you know, I need you to challenge. I'd got to get you. But the problem is, is I'm so opinionated that even if I'm wrong, I will go forward with whatever my opinion is. And people, to your point of the introverts, like they're like, yeah, he, I know he told me to challenge him, but I am not going to challenge him because that's just not the type of person I am.

Right. So it was inherently frustrating to me where I would tell my team, Hey, you gotta be, you gotta be strategic thinking, like stop just going through the motions here, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, John, I don't even understand what strategic thinking is. And so I, and I had to break it down to him and compartmentalize it. And I was like, look, strategic thinking is no, nothing more than creating a process. And then finding the weakest link within that process, pulling that little piece down, coming up with some ideas around that thing, plugging it back in and seeing how it runs. I go, that's how you can get on your way to strategic thinking. And then we are to almost force days, times where we would just take the gloves off and say, nothing's a crazy idea here.

Let's talk. What's the goal that we're trying to achieve? All right. What is the most whacked out thing that anybody could think of to achieve that goal? Yeah. Okay. Let's back. Let's now bounce some ideas around here. Right. But it was taking myself out of and letting that foster almost by itself without me even there. And I find the more that I'm not there, the more creativity happens. Because I definitely can get overwhelmed by leadership or strong personalities. They'll take a backseat sometimes, you know, and as you're talking about that, when we would run these, when I was looking at redeveloping the MBA program, some of the things that we're trying to incorporate was critical thinking skills.

Right. And that's so important. But when I train people to do the curiosity code index, when I train like HR professionals and, and, you know, all these consultants and people like that to be certified, I teach them like how to do certain aspects of developing some of these skills. And what we do is we find out from leaders, what are your top things are trying to improve? Are they trying to improve innovation and engagement? And a lot of times critical thinking comes out. And so some of those things that sometimes we'll just say, well, what kind of things can you do as an employee? We go right to employees and ask them, what do you think would develop your critical thinking skills? And sometimes they'll give suggestions and, or if it's an engagement about that, and we take all those suggestions and then we send them back to leaders and in a report.

So it's not coming directly from the employee and it's, their name isn't on it. It's a combination of things. And, but it's answering all those questions. Kind of like Disney, when they had a lot of turnover, they went to their employees and that were a high turnover in their laundry division and said, how can we make your job better? They got feedback. I mean, real things that they could do for critical thinking. An example, you know, I saw somebody say, you know, if you'd let me on every other Friday, when we have these events, you know, meetings that we have, let me present something about a topic of my choice that I think would help people learn more about something. It would help me look at research, the different things and think which things to incorporate.

And if I, if I talk about something that I'm interested in, but I'll learn the most because I'm teaching it, no way to learn something like to teach it. Right. And yet, so that's building my critical thinking skills and yet sharing things that everybody else needs to know. I've had him come up with ideas of different games to help the salespeople. I used to play Family Feud a lot, you know, and Family Feud is a great way to learn your sales products, right? And build teamwork. So coming up with these creative curiosity-based ways to build these different ways of learning. I mean, I would much rather play Family Feud to build teamwork and to learn my product than to get there and study and take a test, wouldn't you?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But that is also, again, that's, I think, somebody like you and me versus somebody else who wants to do a test, right? So we still got to look at those individual traits. Right. So you have to give options to people. Would you rather, you know? But I don't think it needs to be all one thing or all another. You know what I mean? Mixing it up makes it interesting for everybody. And you find out what people like and what they don't like. Sometimes people think they would hate the Family Feud thing and then they love it. Or like the escape room stuff. I remember when I, like at first, my wife was like, she brought me to the escape room. I'm like, this is going to be dumb, right?

But as soon as we got in there, I'm like, ooh, I got this. You know what I mean? All of a sudden, I'm like, I'm like in it, right? Yeah. They're popular. They're fun. A couple more just genuine curiosity on my back. Do you believe that people, let's talk about sales real quick. Do you believe people buy on emotion, back it up with fact? Is that still something that you hear that all the time, right? People buy on emotion, so connect on the emotion 11 and back it up with facts. Is that too broad of a statement? Or do you think there's some meat to that one? I've written blogs about that, how much emotion plays into so many aspects of marketing sales. I wrote a brand publishing course that was all talking about a lot of those aspects of emotion.

It's a huge part in sales. I think that you have to know the emotion. You know what it brings to mind is a doctor I called on when I was a pharmaceutical rep. I remembered I had a migraine drug and my sales pitch was like, you know, I painted the picture. We used to have to paint this picture in their head. You know, and I'm like, your patient's going to call you at midnight. They're going to not, you know, they're going to wake you up. They're going to have to go to the ER and, you know, and I'm thinking, you know, I'm setting this guy up to just say, Oh yeah, I need that. Right. And he came back with, I don't care if they go to the ER that comes out of somebody else's budget. So the first thing I'm like is check this guy off my list for doctors.

Yeah. But his, the emotional pain for him wasn't the emotional pain I thought it was. So it trying to guess people's emotional pain is a tough one for a lot of things. And so that comes back to curiosity. So, you know, when I talk about curiosity, you were talking about, you know, sparks to things. I was talking about curiosity is the spark to everything else. And I didn't recognize it so much until I started to write about it because everybody hires me to speak about emotional intelligence, soft skills, and all these things before this. Right. So I started, I wrote a chapter on leadership. I wrote a chapter on critical thinking, or I wrote a chapter on emotional intelligence and engagement and innovation.

And I started to realize that, wow, curiosity was the thing that came first with everything. And so when I'd have all these Harvard professors like Francesca, do you know, or Amy Edmondson, or all these amazing names on Daniel Goldman knows the matter, whoever was on my show, say, what comes first curiosity or emotional intelligence, you know, what comes first. And everybody was saying curiosity is the spark. So here's how it happens in the working world. When you're dealing with this, these emotions and different things is, is you have to look at the curiosity aspect because, okay, let's say your end product you're trying to create is cake. Okay. Let's look at back to curiosity, but stay with me for a minute.

Okay. So cake is your end product and you know, the ingredients, you know, you need flour and eggs and all the ingredients you're mixing together. You put them in the pan, you put it in the oven. What happens? Well, you want cake, right? Right. But if you didn't turn on the oven, what do you get? Ah, yeah. You get good, right? Yeah. Okay. So if your end product in the workplace is productivity, financial, you know, results, money, that's your cake. The ingredients you're trying to mix together are critical thinking, engagement, innovation, all, you know, motivation, drive, everything that you talk about, mix it together, but nobody's turning on the cake. I mean, on the oven, I'm sorry, on the oven of curiosity.

And if you don't spark that spark, you're not, I'm thinking in a mission impossible light. Can you sing that for me? Cause I can't sing. Yeah, no, I can't sing. Did you know what I mean? You won't see the thing burning into the end. And that's where everybody's not starting at the beginning. And I didn't recognize it. So I did this research of how critical that spark is. And to spark that you have to look at what stops it. And to figure out what stops it, you got to assess these things. And then you make baby steps towards all these little aspects and create kind of a personal SWOT analysis of, you know, what's holding you back? What are your weaknesses and threats? And then steps to overcome those and just baby step Bob this way through this of just bite-sized pieces of ways to overcome those fears and assumptions and technology.

And you know what I mean? Have low tech days, high tech days, recognize that your family screwed you up, recognize that because of that, you never tried this. And so now, Hey, I don't care what my brother said, or my sister said, or my mom, you know, said I had to be a lawyer or whatever it is. You have different interests than they have, and maybe look into exploring and different things. And it could be starting small, like reading a different section of the newspaper today, or taking a different route to work. It could start small. But I think that recognizing what you tell yourself and writing down in the minute of when you say you don't like something, why don't I like, what did I just tell myself?

And maybe I would, if I did it in a different way, maybe I had this instructor that was monotone and she drove me crazy. And what, you know, I don't know. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I think of, uh, you know, the Jim Carrey movie, yes, man. Right. Right. He just says he was saying no to everything. He just starts saying yes to everything. And it all of a sudden the world opens up to him. Right. I mean, it has its limitations. Yeah. Yes. So awesome. Well, this has been fascinating. Uh, you know, I appreciate the conversation here. Where can, um, where can people learn more? Cause I know you've got a lot of books and you do a lot of different things here. So where can people learn more about this specifically, you know, from a sales standpoint of unlocking curiosity and maybe pulling away some of those inhibitors that you talked about?

Well, you know, I have so much information at drdiannehamilton.com, but within the site, there's the curiosity code index. You can take that there. There's the, uh, if you want to, if you're a consultant or an HR professional, you can come certify if you want to give it to your organization, if you're a leader or whatever you want to do that, I also certify people to give it, but, uh, you can also find out more about perception and perception index there. Uh, I have a free course on my site. Uh, develop curiosity, uh, is on there. You can learn more there, but just contacting me through Dr. Diane Hamilton or social media at Dr. Diane Hamilton, just the VR for doctor. You can find me anywhere.

Follow me, ask me questions. Happy to answer. Awesome. And just out of curiosity, are you a high, I low D on the disc? ID, secondary I. Okay. Cause, uh, have you ever seen last thing here? Have you ever seen crystal nose by any chance? No. What is that? So crystal look it up. Crystal C R Y S T A L knows K N O W S. It's a disc profile of anybody you're connected to on LinkedIn. And it tells it just based on how you write. So how you write tells me a lot of, so this, I'm looking at this right now. It says it comes naturally for Diane to lead the conversation in a meeting, stick to the big picture, speak persuadably in a one-on-one meeting. Diane is most motivated by experience with new things, public speaking, thinking on her feet, uh, most stressed by repetitive routine tasks, rigid, inflexible schedules, researching data.

When speaking, you tell a few jokes, use visual aids when possible, be less polished and more dynamic. So it actually goes through and gives you tips on how to get better. Yeah. Well, it also gives me tips on how my personality matches to yours and how I need to adjust. I love that. I have to have them. So I know the CEO really well. He's a, he's a friend of I want him on the show. I will absolutely bring you on. He's absolutely, it's fascinating to me. I was freaked out when I first got it. Cause it was so spot on with my personality. I called him up. I'm like, how did you figure this out? I'm like, you know, have you been following me type of thing? But it's actually one of my favorite tools in sales.

Cause it's kind of the shortcut because right before I meet with you, if you're an executive, I put your name in a crystal nose. And what I'm trying to see is, are you and I the same? Like, are you a high D and I'm a high D? Cause that's what I did with this one. And I knew I didn't have to adjust our, my, my approach, right? If you were a high S or a high C or something like that, I knew I would have to adjust a little bit, but it's a, it's a really fascinating. And it's based on your LinkedIn profile. So it's interesting of how many people are telling the truth on me. Well, well, regardless whether you're telling the truth, the way you write, right? Neurolinguistic programming, all that stuff, like the words that you use, tell a lot about you, you know, short punchy versus long and detailed.

Right. So, uh, I'll introduce you to Drew. He's a cool guy, but, uh, I would love that. Thank you so much though, John, this was fun. I love to do it. Great conversation. I love trying to get people out there to embrace curiosity. I couldn't agree with you more that I think it's one of the most important traits of any true sales professional who cares. Right. And when I, and again, I generalize it as the give a shit factor. Um, you know, once you genuinely give a shit about something, that's when you really start to click on that curiosity factor. And so, because I am curious about curiosity, you know, that that's how I was really happy to see you up on the schedule here for the podcast. So thank you so much for coming on, Diane.

It was my pleasure. Well, look, everybody, hopefully you're all got as much value out of this, this conversation as I did. Uh, and as I always say, no matter how bad your day goes, uh, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause, uh, if you made somebody smile, you know, you had a good day and we need a lot more of that these days. So thank you all very much and have a fantastic day. All right, guys, Dr. Hamilton had some amazing insights to deliver on the show today. I know that if it weren't for the constructive feedback that I received through my sales career, I wouldn't be where I am today. We're looking forward to next week's episode, before then be sure and visit on demand.jbarrows.com.

There you can subscribe and start learning to prospect using JB sales techniques and tactics, build your personal brand and ultimately become the well-rounded sales professional that you want to be. Reach out to me at jamesatjbarrows.com and hit me up. If you'd like to connect and talk about what you can get from the platform, have a great week, everyone. Let's make it happen.