Lately I have been thinking about how being curious is a key to so many things in life—curiosity to travel, try new things, meet people, grow and continue to learn and be inspired. Without curiosity, life is simply same old same old.
In my classes, I teach curiosity in combination with listening and questioning. I tell concierge training participants that they should act like detectives whenever possible. As a matter of fact, I have a very good friend that lives with a New York City detective and her nickname for him is DET. I realized DET is the perfect acronym (Describe, Explain and Tell Me More) for maintaining curiosity in all aspects of life:
I suggest that you ask people to please
DESCRIBE: what they are asking for or trying to communicate
in order to
EXPLAIN: exactly what do they mean
and to use the world’s greatest communication tool by responding with the words
TELL ME MORE: it shows you are interested and gets a person talking
I find it curious that one of the things I have not been curious enough about are social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. It all seems like too much work so I shut down rather than stay curious. I don’t quite understand all the fuss and it feels easier just to let someone else do it. Sometimes I hear myself saying that this too shall pass, or I don’t have time for this, or any number of other reasons not to check out the latest and greatest ways to socialize and get your voice heard over the Internet noise.
Just like I encourage my students to keep curiosity high, question, listen and be a detective, I think I’ll go get curious about 140 character tweets in Twitter, SO FOLLOW ME!