Happiness is Only One Question Away

What if you could break through decades of suffering with just one question? As a kid and then through my adult life I was incredibly good at ‘giving the right answer.’ I was a people pleaser, a great student, and knew how to play the standard version of the ‘success’ game. But none of that meant that I was happy? I didn’t even know what happiness was and I lived in constant shame because I was so disconnected from an experience of happiness and fun that others seemed able to experience. In this week’s episode, I talk about how one question turned all of this around for me. 

Transcript

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(00:05):

And the question went like this. If my intention is to experience happiness, then what will I choose in this moment? Hi, this is Adina here with today's episode of courage, to be curious with Adina Tovell and I am excited to be back the courage to be curious has been on about a six-month hiatus with the podcast and the podcast previously named wonder your way to brilliant is now relaunching with a little bit of a new look and a new name. We are now Courage to be Curious with Adina Tovell, to bring all of our branding and sync everything coming under the courage to be curious, name, we are still the same company. We still have the same area of focus of inspiring curiosity, inviting us all to wonder, wonder our way to brilliant life, brilliant leadership and brilliant relationships. We're just going to look a little differently and restructuring and organizing things a little bit differently.

(01:12):

So is this is our inaugural relaunch episode. I want to just take a moment and explain how this is going to work each month. We're going to have a theme as we have in the past. It is July for the past number of years, we have focused on freedom as the theme and we're going to do so again, this year, then the month is broken down that one week in the month, we're going to focus on our theme through the live lens. What does it mean to live with the courage, to be curious in relationship to that theme, then we're going to go to the lead lens and we're going to think about what does it mean to lead and in this case with freedom through the courage, through the courage to be curious, lens or lead, I'm sorry, lead with her at the courage to be curious through the freedom lens.

(02:00):

And then finally in the third week, we're going to look at it through that love lens. And those of you who know us know that we have Cardax live lead in love with the courage to be curious, filled with really productively and courageously curious questions. And we're going to organize our podcast in much the same way in the fourth week, week of the month, we're going to have a conversation conversation with people that I have met along the way who are incredibly courageously curious people. They are part of my tribe and they will come onto the podcast to really look at the theme through their lenses and see how they can deepen our conversation. We are also going to be much more present on social media than we've ever had before. And one of the reasons for that is that we want our community to really engage with us.

(02:53):

We want us to tell you how you're engaging with the courageously curious questions that we pose on the, we want you to ask questions. We want you to pose reflections, maybe even challenges that you're facing and let us interact and engage with them. We can bring them into our conversation in the last week of the month, and that's the way that we can be in dialogue together. We also want to be able to respond to you if you write in on different social medias or respond to social media posts. So please do that. We want to be much more engaged with our community overall and a few times in the year. I think typically it happens four times that there will be four Wednesdays. Our podcast is going to come out on a Wednesday that there were before five Wednesdays in a month, in which case we are going to have special bonus episodes on those months, our next one coming up is going to be in September.

(03:48):

And I'm going to leave you a little bit in suspense as to what that's going to involve. The very last change that we have relative to the podcast right now is the fact that you can listen to the podcast. As you do most podcasts on your podcast app, you'll now be searching for courage to be curious with Edina Tavel, instead of wonder your way to brilliant, but you can also watch the episodes. These episodes are going to are videotaped as well, and they will be on our YouTube channel courage to be curious. What's cool. If you go onto YouTube and you watch them as a video, you will notice that our backgrounds mimic our car decks and our overall branding. So if we are in a live episode, we will have a golden yellow background. If we are in a lead episode, just like our card decks, we will have a black background.

(04:40):

And if we are in the love episode and you are watching us on video, you'll see us with an orange background because that is the color of our love with the courage to be curious card deck. And when we have our conversations and have guests on, we will have a back, a white background with our full color logo on it. Just a little fun that we're having to bring all the branding together, the substance and content of what we're doing though, is going to be as compelling and hopefully as courageous as it has always been. So we're excited to be relaunching. We hope that you're going to continue to reengage with us, and also that you are going to continue to share the wonder your wage. Brilliant. Now, courage to be curious with a Dana Tavel podcast, with your friends and family and bring more people in because I really have much like that song.

(05:28):

Um, I think it's by the seekers and came out in 1971 where it's at, I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Well, I can't sing in perfect harmony, so I'm not going to, but one of the things, what I would like to be able to do is I would like to be able to teach people how to transform their lives, their leadership and their relationships for the positive, through the practice of productive and courageous curiosity. That is my goal. And the only way to teach the world how to be productively and courageously curious is by spreading that word, we want everybody to feel that impact, to be asking more questions, listening, more deeply leaning into the discomfort and the openness that comes with curiosity so that we can all experience more freedom and positive experiences in our lives and our leadership and in our relationships.

(06:23):

That's why we're here. So today's episode, you might also notice if you go on which most people don't, but if you went on to iTunes and you read the description of the overall show of the podcast, courage, to be curious with the Dina to value, you'll see that it gives a hint as to what this episode is going to be about because this episode is really the foundation I sometimes get asked, where did the courage to be curious concept come from? And this story that I'm going to share in today's episode is where it came from. So if you've been wondering, here's the answer to that question?

(07:06):

The answer begins back in 2011, when I had first signed up for my coach training program. Some of you, if you've been listening know a bit about my background, but I've had a number of different careers, I was trained as an educator. I've been a formal educator, I've been an educational leader. I have run nonprofit organizations. I've been a consultant, mostly in the education sphere. And in all of that process, the thing I was most fascinated with was change. And so for while I was engaged in a lot of work around change management with organizations, teaching change management, to leadership, how do systems change? And it was a very big bird's eye view of how big systems can make positive change over my years of doing that work. However, I realized that you could have all the systems in place, but there was something that was most pivotal that was really determinant as to whether an organization would make the change successfully or whether they would fail or just reach some of their goals, but not all of them.

(08:17):

And that pivotal component was the leader, the leader of the organization and their individual capacity for navigating the rough terrain of change. If you've been a listener in the past, or if you have been through any kind of change in your life, you know, the change can sometimes be fairly turbulent and uncomfortable. Some leaders had a really powerful capacity to lead and navigate through the rough waters and also to inspire and encourage people to come along, to stay with the discomfort, to move through the process. And I started to really focus on those leaders. And I asked myself this question, well, if you really want to have an impact with those leaders, as opposed to just the, you know, as opposed to working at the big scale with companies, you know, kind of at the 30,000 foot level, what would be the best way to train for that?

(09:14):

I considered going and getting a PhD in psychology. And then someone introduced me to a coach. I didn't really know what a coach was. What does an executive coach or a life coach? I didn't really know what one was, but I sat down with this woman who had just completed her training program not long before. And I met her and everything she was saying made me realize this is the training I need, because what I understood through our conversation is that coaching is the practice. The very practical practice of helping people to learn how to move through change and land in a more positive and productive place. Change is scary. A coach is the one who helps you to develop the skills, the resilience, and the mindset set to navigate through the difficult parts of the change process to get to where you really want to be on the other side.

(10:12):

So I decided that's what I want to do. I want to work with leaders. I want to work with those at the heads of their organizations. I want to work with those who are running the divisions in their organizations to learn how to make positive change and how to be successful with that. And in doing that, their success with trickle all the way down through the organization and benefit a large number of people. That's where I wanted to focus my energies. So off to coach training, I went and here's where we really get into the meat of the story behind courage, to be curious. So I signed up with AIPAC, the Institute for professional excellence in coaching. They focus solely on training coaches. They have a fabulous reputation, and I went all in. And one of the things I loved about them is that they had live training. This was long before COVID. So we were still doing everything live, but no, they had live training, whereas many programs didn't. And so I showed up for my first three day long training weekend, 30 hours, and three days of training, there would be four of these plus then a whole bunch of virtual and remote training as well. And I showed up and we made it through the first day. There's 27 of us in my cohort. It's fantastic group of people.

(11:27):

And first day

(11:29):

Go through. It's interesting. I'm engaged, I'm listening. There's a lot of interactivity. It's fabulous. And then we get partly into the second day and we'd been through a few exercises. And then they point, I said, turn to whatever page they said, I can't remember. And complete the exercise at the bottom of the page. And I open up and I look at the workbook and there's seven words there. The entire exercise was respond to these seven words and I was sitting there and I was looking at them and I was going through this whole experience. And my heart was starting to be, and my hands were starting to sweat. And I was planning my escape. I got to get out of this room. It was a true panic moment for me. So what were the seven words on page seven words on the page where list three things that make you happy. Okay. So you might not be panicking. You might be kind of wondering like, Dina, where are you going with the story? Like, what's so hard about that.

(12:35):

Or maybe you're actually

(12:37):

Like me and thinking, yeah, you're right. That is a really tough question that would have had me freaked out too.

(12:43):

Well. What had me, especially

(12:44):

Freaked out is I was in a coach training program and I already got how this worked. The people who were our trainers were really astute folks. And they knew how to suss out the people in the room who might be struggling with something and who they felt could benefit from doing some live coaching in the moment. And so I figured I was about to become the object of the live coach coaching because I was clearly having a panic attack in response to this question. And so I sat there and I was like, I could, I could head right out the door to the bathroom. Nobody is going to question a woman on the way to the bathroom. I could easily do this. And then something just stopped me. And I sat there and I said, Edina, you are in a coach training program. If you dark before you've even made it through the second day, how are we going to do this?

(13:36):

And I sat there and I realized,

(13:37):

This is like, how you fail coach training is you run out the first time. You feel uncomfortable as you run out the door. I also was really, really tired. I was tired of feeling so burdened by not having an answer to this question. It might not seem like a big deal, but when you stood at parties and college conversations, people say, Hey, you know, what do you do for fun? What are your hobbies? You know, what, what things do you love? Any version of variety of this question? And you feel like you have no answer to it.

(14:09):

It's excruciating.

(14:10):

And that had been my life experience. So a little bit of background. How did I get to that life experience? Well, I don't know all the reasons, but you know, I did grow up. Both of my parents were born kind of either in or at the tail end of the depression era. Um, so there wasn't really this focus on happiness. There was a focus on like survival, right? And my dad was actually an immigrant. He came to this country, he didn't have any money. He didn't speak any English. He didn't have a college degree. He barely had a high school degree because his entire schooling got interrupted by the second world war in Romania, where he was born. And so he didn't have all of those things. And so when I asked my mom when she was about 83 years old and I sat down and I said, mom, did we ever talk about happiness?

(14:55):

Different, think about happiness when we're growing up. And she's like, she kind of turned her head and she looked up and that curious, reflective kind of way, and then said, no, she said, we just didn't, it wasn't part of what we talked about or thought about because, you know, we just were focused on running our business and survival. And so we did get a lot of really good things. We got a great work ethic and we got this sense of honor, and we got a sense of respect. You know, we accumulated all these really great values, but the thing that was missing from my life experience was this notion of happiness. And even this notion of fun, what did happiness and fun mean to me? They honestly had no meaning. They were words that were just out there. I did things. I went to, you know, gymnastics and ice skating and things like that.

(15:41):

But the fun has a kind of inner freedom to it. This space where we feel like we are liberated to just feel joy, right? To just experience openness and looseness and ease. And I honestly, wasn't sure I'd ever felt that. And in terms of happiness, you know, this thing of happiness and joy, these felt like words. And I knew that other people use them, but I just really didn't have any experience I could point to. And I think what was most painful about that is here. I was the mother of two children that I absolutely adored loved. Right. And I was thinking back to their boat births, which is, you know, when mother, many mothers say like that was the most joyful, wonderful, happiest moment of my life or something like that. That's of course after the labor, not during the labor and a specialty lay, if you do it naturally, it definitely is not during the labor, but after the labor. Right. And I couldn't say that, I could say I deeply, deeply, deeply loved

(16:41):

My kids, but I couldn't say

(16:44):

That I had felt this sense of joy. And that was really sad. And I was tired of living that way. Well, the good news is in case you were sitting on the edge of your seats, wanting to know is that the facilitators did not call on me. I wasn't the person they picked out of the room and did their live demonstration with somebody else. I don't even know who was in that hot seat. I was just sitting there a sigh of relief that it wasn't me, but I did decide for myself in that moment, I'm not going to live like this anymore. I want happiness and fun to be part of my life. I want it to be something that's like, I know what that is. I experienced that on a regular basis.

(17:24):

And

(17:25):

I wanted to figure out how I was going to make that true for me. I knew I couldn't just keep say what makes you happy? Because I'd been trying to do that for a long time and never had any results. I needed something else. One of the things we'd been learning, if you go to coach training, at least where I went, the two things you learned in the first weekend are really how to listen. And you start to learn how to ask questions. And I remember them telling us, like, you didn't go through any of the rest of the training. And all you did was listen more deeply to people than they usually ever get listened to and ask more questions. People will love you. You probably, you know, you could build a practice just from that. I was a little skeptical, of course. And I did go through the entire coach training program, but I remember them saying that and through the work that we were doing, I was realizing just how incredibly powerful questions are. I would watch as a facilitator would ask

(18:27):

A really well structured,

(18:29):

Very focused question and get a response from somebody that's surprised. Even them that a question could open a door as though it were a magic key and bring forth things that were inside. Somebody that they may not have even known was there. It was like a magic. And I really picked up on this. And so when I committed to saying, I want to know what happiness and fun is going to be for me, what that's going to mean for me, I realized that the tool I was going to use was I was needed a question that was going to be the thing that was going to activate the inquiry and keep me focused on it. And so I structured a question to ask myself again and again, every single day, oftentimes multiple times a day. And the question went like this. If my intention is to experience happiness, then what will I choose in this moment?

(19:39):

If my intention is to experience happiness, what will I choose in this moment? Well, here's how it worked. So a friend calls me and said, Hey, I'm going to pick up your kids from daycare and you, you can have another 30 minutes to yourself. So in the past, maybe I would have put in more chores and more errands or gotten two more things on my checklist done. And then that moment I paused. And I said, if my intention is to experience happiness, what will I choose in this moment? And just asking that question interrupted my habitual go-to, which was to get another thing on the checklist done and forced me to say, what might that be now? I want to just put this out there, that it could be scary. And many people who I have worked with as a coach have a hard time getting started on this because they say, well, what if I ask the question and I don't have an answer to it.

(20:39):

We don't like not having answers right in school. If you didn't have an answer, you got points off, right? You could fail the test. Well, this isn't school and there are no points. Part of it is that we need to ask the question to start to condition the mind and the soul and the spirit to start looking in that direction. So if an answer didn't come up right away, I didn't get discouraged. And I didn't let that defeat me. I didn't let that say, oh, this is never going to work. Or maybe that's a bad question.

(21:12):

Instead, I stayed with the question. And at first I didn't

(21:17):

Have a lot of answers. I might say, what would I do with this 30 minutes? And I'd be like, I don't really know. Okay. Well, I don't know. Maybe I could go outside for a walk. All right, we'll try that. It didn't feel overly inspiring. It wasn't dramatic, but I decided to make a choice to try something, but it was a lot like going to the gym. And if I go to the gym and I've never lifted weights before, and I start, I might be starting with two or three pound weights, but if I stay with it, eventually I'm going to be listening, lifting five pounds and then eight pounds and 10 pounds and 15 pounds and 20 pounds and so on, which is, does actually happen if we stay with it. So I decided to stay with the question without discouragement, without a sense of failure or defeat and just stay with it. And I did. And I asked the question again and again and again, and not in a big war, but in a soft kind of trickle. Eventually the answers started to come. Eventually something would rise up. Somebody would say, where do you want to eat dinner? And in my past, I would say, well, where do you want eat dinner? I'm okay, whatever you choose. But this time instead I paused. And I asked myself the question, if your intention is to experience happiness, what would you choose in this moment?

(22:28):

Huh? Well, you know what? I don't really like Chinese so much. I like Mexican. I would choose Mexican. All right.

(22:35):

And off we would go to a Mexican restaurant and it started a habit change.

(22:42):

So where does courage

(22:44):

To be curious, come from

(22:47):

Being curious and maybe not

(22:49):

The curiosity, that's about like, why is the sky blue or how many stars are in the galaxy? Because you can look those up in Google or someplace else. And it's not so scary to do,

(22:59):

But asking

(23:00):

Questions about ourselves, asking questions about why

(23:05):

We work, the way we work, where our unhappiness stems from, what can, what

(23:11):

Is the source of our limitations or limiting beliefs and how can we break through them?

(23:17):

Those can be scary. Those can be really

(23:19):

Scary. What if I asked this question about happiness and nothing happens? What if I am doomed to be unhappy, even just facing the fact that I don't know what happiness means is scary. So we need courage to do it. We need courage to inquire within. We need encouraged to inquire about somebody else. What if they say something that surprises us or what if they get offended by it? What if you know any number of things we need courage to do it. So why do we, why bother? Well, if everything were a hundred percent perfect in our lives, every aspect of our relationships, every aspect of our day, our sense of self, our sense of confidence in ourselves, our the way we communicate, the relationship we have with our children, our spouses, our friends, our coworkers, if everything about our leadership is as impactful as we want it to be. If everything is a hundred percent on point around that wheel of life, and we can say every single aspect of our lives is at a hundred percent satisfaction, then you don't really probably have that much of a reason to get courage, to be, to be courageous and get curious.

(24:24):

I haven't met that person yet. I'm not

(24:26):

Yet that person myself and probably never will be because I think the human experience is about this inquiry. I think this is what it means to be human is to really explore and examine ourselves and to examine the experience of being alive in this world. And to be curious about the experience of being alive in it with other people, I think it's why we're here. So let's get good at it. It requires some courage. The notion of courage to be curious was born in that moment. When I decided to get courageous, to start the inquiry, to seek the answer that would bring me a kind of inner freedom,

(25:15):

Which it has. So the month

(25:17):

Of July, I started this by saying that the month of July, we're focusing on the theme of freedom, this inquiry for me into happiness. And then later into fund really did liberate me. It liberated me from a lot of shame and it liberated me from a lot of insecurity that kept me from having strong relationships with people. If I were at a party or an event, and these kinds of conversations come up and I dart and I leave for the bathroom, or I walk out the door, I can't be in relationship with people,

(25:54):

But as soon

(25:55):

As I inquire and I can allow the responses to come up and I can break through that shame and allow the growth to happen, I'm freer. And that's the point. So our focus this month is on freedom.

(26:14):

The lens of

(26:15):

Live with the courage, to be curious that we are looking through, as we examine this freedom relates to, are we willing to look at any place where we may be in presenting ourselves in our lives? Because we are afraid to look, we're afraid to discover. We feel shame. We feel fear. We feel hurt. We feel sad. We feel angry. And what if we could put all of that aside and instead get curious.

(26:43):

Well, if this sounds interesting

(26:45):

To you, then yes, you are a part of our community become a regular subscriber to courage, to be curious with Edina Tavel, our podcast, you can find us on virtually every podcast app that is out there. We are on almost all of them. You can find us on Instagram, on Facebook, on Pinterest, definitely on LinkedIn and probably a whole variety of other social medias that my marketing team says we're going to be on, but you will look for us. One of the ways to stay in touch with us is to sign up for our newsletter, courage, to be curious.com. Right now you may land at our old website. We have a new website coming, but either way, there are places to sign up. If you sign up, you will also get notifications around programs that we are running special offers that we are running all kinds of things.

(27:35):

So go onto our website, sign up for our newsletter so that we can be in touch with you, sign up for this podcast and follow us on any one of the social media outlets that you follow. Because we want this to be an interactive experience. We want to participate with you. We want you to participate with us. We want you to leave us comments, ask us questions, give us feedback so that we can incorporate it, particularly at the end of the month, when we have those conversations with some of our guests. And if you like the show, please refer your friends to it. They may benefit from listening as well. And if you are somebody who is even the least that willing to leave us a review on iTunes, leave us a review for the show. It does help. It helps, you know, all these are algorithms that helps the visibility so that other people can find us.

(28:30):

So, as I conclude,

(28:31):

Today's episode this inaugural episode, I hope you have a sense as to what we're going to be doing here, why we're going to be coming back to the table every single week. And we're going to be looking through these three different lenses, the lens of our lives. How do we live with the courage to be curious, the lens of our leadership, which could mean formal leadership. Maybe we are in a leadership role, a CEO, a VP, a director in a company or organization, but there are many other ways that people are leaders, too. We're leaders in our community, in our households, in our schools, as teachers, as long as we are influencing are impacting others where a leader. So tune into those episodes as well. And then we'll be looking through that love lens and love is not only intimate love in terms of partnership, but love is how we care for people, our children, our parents, our friends, our siblings, and then of course, intimate partners that we might have in our life. But how do we love well and how should we allow the experience of being loved? So you will see episodes aligned to each one of those things, themes live, lead, and love with the courage to be curious, thank you for listening. Keep joining us every week back here, courage to be curious that the Dena tow bow.