Klaudia Mitura: Hello, happiness seekers. Welcome to the third and final part of the happiness challenge for this month of staying curious at work. This month's happiness challenge has been inspired by the founder of Global Curiosity Institute and the author of the best-selling book, The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto, Stefaan van Hooydonk.

You can listen to episode 108 to learn more about my conversation with Stefaan. But for the last three weeks, as part of the happiness challenge, I have been practicing three dimensions of curiosity. Reflective curiosity, the desire to understand our deeper driver's beliefs and be in tune with our inner self.

Cognitive curiosity, the interest or drive to understand the world and environment around us. And empathic curiosity, the level of openness towards others, their thoughts, their feelings, their perspective. And I was practicing this because curiosity is essential for happy life. And also at work, it results in work engagement, job satisfaction, and innovation.

So, hey, wouldn't we all like to have more of that? So this is what I have learned from my challenge. For reflective curiosity, I have completed the diagnostic and available for free at the Global Curiosity Institute. And the overall score you can get on the diagnostic is 100%. And there are four levels or most categories you can score: excellent from 80%, which means you are in the flow of things, and you have a high level of curiosity.

Both your external environment and your internal disposition contribute to the score. Good is below 80 to 65 percent. That is, you are clearly a curious person, but you could make some slight adjustments to improve your curiosity. Fair, which was below 65 to 50%. While you have some strengths around curiosity, you definitely need to practice and improve your curiosity muscle.

And low was below 50 percent where, well, you need to start developing your curiosity muscles with some simple exercises to see some improvements. So, I scored overall 75 percent out of 100, which was marked as good, saying that yes, I'm a curious person, but I can definitely improve my curiosity, which frankly I was quite glad to hear, because, well, I set up on this challenge to improve my curiosity, so I thought, okay great, I have something to improve on.

And the diagnostic measured the three dimensions of curiosity. I scored the highest, on empathic curiosity, and followed by self-reflective curiosity. They both were around 80 percent each. And actually, I scored the lowest on the cognitive curiosity, which actually I scored only slightly over 60%.

And that was really interesting to see because the reason for my lower score for cognitive curiosity was because I'm a quite risk averse person. So I don't necessarily like that much uncertainty. And frankly, if I cannot solve something quite quickly, I will give up and I will actually go and ask for other people for help.

And it even said in the diagnostic that even though I enjoy change and reinventing myself and I love reading and learning about the world and visiting new places and meeting new people, I'm much more likely to be distracted by stress, when I'm faced with uncertainty. Which I completely agree with, but it was quite interesting to see that because of that predisposition or trait I have, I actually scored lower when it comes to cognitive curiosity, which I guess means that when I face uncertainty, I feel stress, but people who have higher level of cognitive curiosity most likely are excited to actually see what is going to happen and what can they learn.

I must say, I love this diagnostic and it definitely help me to learn more about myself. It's free. It takes around 10 minutes to complete, and I would highly recommend for you, my dear listeners, to complete it. You can just head to the website of the Global Institute of Curiosity. And I'm definitely planning to recommend it to each of my team members at work so they can all complete it and then we can discuss our scores and really learn from each other.

The diagnostic suggested some actions I can undertake to actually improve my curiosity muscle, which I was very happy about. For the cognitive curiosity, it suggested making myself a curiosity promise. And actually, that was what I already set out to do. I scheduled curiosity hour, and I really enjoyed it.

So during that hour, I would dive into a specific topic that was of interest to me. And again, I was looking at AI in learning and development. I was looking at more, wider topics, such as, okay, what's currently, happening in the world of cryptocurrency. So anything that really came to my mind that I was like, oh, this would be very interesting to understand.

I have researched that. And I must say that I really, really enjoyed that, but the time was often an obstacle. So sometimes I simply didn't have time to have full hour to actually research a certain topic. If that was happening, I was trying to research or learn something new within 10 minutes, so a little bit like micro learning and I really like that.

And sometimes actually I went into black hole of exploration and suddenly was like, oh no, over one hour has passed and I'm still researching specific topics. So I guess my advice is have a time limit if you're doing curiosity hour. Oh, and if you cannot do one hour, it's okay to do even 10 minutes, because again, the idea that you are curious, you're engaging that cognitive curiosity is more important than not doing it at all.

For empathic curiosity, I was making every conversation count and I enjoyed that the most. Well, I'm kind of not surprised by it because I scored the highest in this curiosity. So clearly it brings me lots of satisfaction. I reconnected with ex colleagues. I had 30 minutes curiosity conversations with new colleagues outside of my sector and love that, love that idea that we can be stopping, taking a moment and engaging with colleagues at the more curious level, and then thinking about who we can reconnect with, who we can connect, how can we meet new people?

I absolutely love that specific aspect. And again, the diagnostics suggested similar action but also, interestingly, it stressed that we need to find ways to keep curious in our relationships with our loved ones to really ignite them and had this really interesting line, which said that most divorces are not because of people fight, but because they are bored.

They did not invest in their relationships, which at that point, I thought, Oh my God. When I was practicing this challenge, I was only thinking about work and kind of wider and social connections. And so after reading this sentence, I quickly sent this tool to my husband to ignite his curiosity about the topic and to give us something new to discuss over dinner.

So to summarize, being curious is indeed really expansive. The more we are curious, the more we are open to change, and the more we grow and learn. And really, this turns us into a better version of ourselves. And of course, at work, it's definitely about increasing that engagement is sparking that interest again.

And I love this happiness challenge because, again, I learned so much about myself. I gained new knowledge and I reconnect with ex colleagues, and I had more fun at work, which, hey, I think is very valid. So I encourage you to take the free assessment to understand your level of curiosity. And then you can take three actions to practice your three dimensions of curiosity.

So reflective curiosity, schedule a weekly reflection at work to think about your three strengths that you have used that week and three most important conversations. I do that every week. Cognitive curiosity, again, make a list of things you want to learn and focus on one single new thing in your curiosity hour and empathic curiosity, have curiosity conversation, try to reconnect with all the acquaintances you have lost touch with, engage with colleagues outside of your network and, who have different ideas from yours.

So thank you so much for listening. I hope that this month's happiness challenge has helped you to stay more curious and that you're going to continue on the journey of curiosity. Let me know how you feel about your experiences. You can find me on LinkedIn and subscribe to my newsletter. I see you at the next episode and , as always, I dare you to be happy, but this time I also dare you to stay curious.

Bye.