Welcome to the redefining high-performance podcast. My name is Ty Bennett, and I’m excited that you’re here with me, listening. We bring a new episode to you every single week, and normally they are short, sweet, to the point. Just a quick, actionable thing that you can take with you, and maybe you’re listening as you’re on walk, as you’re commuting to work, as you’re taking a break, eating your lunch, whatever it is, I appreciate you listening. And this episode is going to be that. A couple of weeks ago, we did a series of a few episodes in a row that kind of tied together, and so we’re gonna do a version of that. In our research, we’ve identified three specific mindsets that really stand out. One of those I did an episode on earlier. You can go back and search it, it’s called Relaxed Intensity. A relaxed intensity is how we have a sense of urgency, but also a calmness in that urgency. It’s not frantic, it’s not… chaotic, it’s centered, right? And so, when it comes to performance, a relaxed intensity is extremely important.
There’s two other mindsets that we’ve identified. Today, I want to talk to you about confident curiosity. And next week, we’re gonna have an episode where I introduce empathic drive. Those three mindsets, relaxed intensity, confident curiosity, and empathic drive are three mindsets that I think all of us, as leaders, as high performers, need to develop, need to work on.
Some are going to come a little bit more naturally than others, and so let me break down a little bit of what confident curiosity looks like. It’s belief without certainty. Now, that might sound counterintuitive, but in each of these mindsets, there’s really a balance. There’s a sweet spot. There’s a space that we can find, and in that is where the secret sauce lies.
Confidence is essential for performance, but confidence without curiosity? It actually becomes arrogance. And arrogance is where learning stops, and therefore progress, growth, relevance, all of that goes along with it. Confident curiosity is the balance between conviction and openness. It’s the ability to believe deeply while remaining teachable.
I want you to think about that. Can you balance those two things. Can youhave a surety or a confidence to move forward in a direction while still staying open to new possibilities, to better ways of moving forward. There’s a there’s a strong balance in that, that leaders have to find. This mindset is one that protects you from one of the greatest dangers of success, and that is overconfidence. When we know something works, it’s really tempting to cling to it, even when the world is changing around us. And obviously, we live in a world that is changing constantly, and so leaders and teams who thrive, they’re ones that stay curious, and they ask better questions, and they adapt to circumstances before they’re forced to.
Let me frame it this way. Go back with me and think about the housing crisis of 2008. Obviously, that was a major crisis.
subprime mortgages and all of the things that went along with it. But on a higher level, if I were to ask what caused the housing crisis of 2008 I might get answers like you know, obviously mortgages, banks, they were involved in the process, but often, I’ve talked to people and they say “it was incompetence. People were making dumb decisions, people were idiots.”
And that might sound kind of funny to just blame it that way, but if we if we say that it was incompetence, what we’re saying is that people on Wall Street, all the the best financial minds that we have in this country and across the world that they were completely incompetent. I don’t think that’s what actually caused it. I think what actually caused it was overconfidence.
You see, incompetence is the problem of those who are not performing at a high level. That’s the problem of high performers, of leaders, of achievers. It’s when we get to the point that we think we have it all figured out, and we’re invincible. It’s when we pass over to that arrogance, because when overconfidence happens we think that prior success makes us invincible. We think that we don’t have to keep preparing, we don’t have to keep adapting, we don’t have to keep learning. We stop asking questions and we block off all forms of feedback, we take unnecessary risk. It’s what crashes economies, in that case.
But sometimes businesses, sometimes families, sometimes individuals. overconfidence is something that we need to be very aware of, and avoid and the way we do that is by creating this balance, this mindset of confident curiosity. it’s not just in a business sense, it plays out really in every field. We have to keep growing, we have to keep developing, we have to keep hungry in that regard.
So, let’s talk about this balance between confidence and curiosity. Confident curiosity – it probably sounds something like this. I’m sure about our direction, but I’m also open to better ways to get there. Right? This is the goal all along the way, and we might adjust course, right? We might change some direction. It’s what keeps experts from becoming obsolete. and innovators from becoming irrelevant. Curiosity, it fuels exploration, but confidence gives it direction. Without confidence, curiosity drifts, right? There’s nowhere that it goes, but without curiosity, confidence calcifies.
Together, they drive progress, and so it’s this beautiful blend.
This mindset is also about connection. being able to connect with people, this confident curiosity. When leaders stay curious about people, their perspectives, their motivations, their strengths, they create a culture of openness, right? They exhibit humility in that process.
And so, for leaders it’s important because they must be first competent in their abilities, but they’re humble enough to keep learning. They’re explorers, not defenders. They understand that mastery is not the end of learning, it’s the result of never stopping it. That’s the key, that’s the crucial key, right? So, I want you to think about this maybe from a mantra standpoint, and that is be certain enough to act, and humble enough to adapt.
That’s the goal this week, is to work on this mindset of confident curiosity. Where you can be confident enough to act, but humble enough to adapt. Stay curious in that process. You’re not a completed project, none of us ever are.
This life is about growth, high performance is about growth. And that’s the beauty of it. I think that the world that teaches us that. It’s about accumulation, but I think that what we’ve found in our research, and what I’ve found to be true.
hopefully what you can what will resonate with you is that it’s really about growth.
This mindset of confident curiosity is one of the ways that I work on getting there. So, if you haven’t done so, go back and listen to the quick podcast I did about mindset of a relaxed intensity. And couple that with today’s mindset of confident curiosity, and next week, I will be back with a short, quick episode introducing another mindset called Empathic.
Drive. And together, those three mindsets, I’ll kind of tie it up together next week in that. Those three mindsets, our research has shown are huge drivers of high performance and separators. They’re unique mindsets to the group of achievers that we want to emulate, that we want to be like, that we want to learn from.
Thank you for listening. Again, this is Ty Bennett. I appreciate you being here every single week, and come back, subscribe, like, rate, review, share this with somebody else. Share with me your thoughts and ideas around this concept. I love getting feedback. Connect with me on social media if you haven’t.
You can find me at Ty Bennett pretty much everywhere, and I will be back again next week. Thank you.