EU406: Foundations: Open and Curious

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Open and Curious. Open and curious is a helpful mindset shift for navigating relationships and challenges. In this week’s episode, we dive into Pam’s mantra and some of the many ways that it has proven to be so valuable in our lives. Being open and curious takes us back to beginner’s mind and allows us to see possibilities and question limiting beliefs that no longer serve us. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS How does it feel to think about being open and curious about the people in your life? What do you discover through that lens? Try being open and curious while navigating a conflict this week, rather than jumping right to the solution you have in mind. What felt different? Think about something in your life that you’re feeling stuck around. What bubbles up when you approach it with openness and curiosity? What other possibilities exist? Next time you’re judging something your partner or child is choosing to do as “bad,” play with the question “Who would I be without this perspective? What would I do instead? How would that feel?” TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us as we explore relationships, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and have really enjoyed how they’ve been building upon one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, we’d love it if you could leave a rating and a review. That definitely helps new people find us. In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about being open and curious. This is something you will hear us say a lot. I first heard about it from Pam and I find myself saying it daily at this point. When you think about the opposite, it’s being closed and disinterested, so it’s pretty easy to see why we both love it. I don’t want to move through the world feeling closed and disinterested, and it definitely doesn’t help us solve problems or to connect with the people around us. Being open and curious serves us in our relationships on a lot of different levels. When we’re open and curious about our partner, we want to understand them, what’s important to them, why they see things the way they do. We want to set aside any judgment and really lean into connecting with the person in front of us. When I find myself not understanding something they did or said, I can remind myself to be open and curious about it, to not jump to conclusions, to not write a story, like we were talking about last week. That gives us the best chance to avoid a misunderstanding. And part of b