Let's talk about the three mindsets for learning and change. Open-mindedness, curiosity, and courage. Those are interesting words; open-mindedness, curiosity, courage. You have to start with an open mind. You have to be open to learning new things. But the curious person doubles down on that open-mindedness by asking questions, simple and complex, but with a sense of wonderment and a desire, really, a need almost to look for patterns. When this process of open-mindedness and curiosity, actually, leads to new ideas or new things to do, well, you have to have the courage to make this change. Courage is an important word because sometimes you're breaking some barriers, sometimes you're breaking things that you've done in the past, you're making adjustments that maybe are not quite as comfortable as you'd like them to be. Really, the question is, are you willing to take yourself out of your comfort zone? Sometimes we have to go out of our way to do this. Now, I'll tell you a couple of stories about this. As a professor one of the things that we occasionally get to do, and we're very, very fortunate to be able to do it, is to have a sabbatical, which basically means away from the university for a period of time to work on projects pretty much uninterrupted by anything else. In my case, if I go back to the major sabbatical I took in my career over 20 years ago, we moved to Paris when I was writing a book. Actually, it was the book that eventually became Why Smart Executives Fail, which is the theme for the first course in this specialization. I know you're thinking, wow, that's cool. Who's going to do that? But Paris wasn't an accident. It doesn't need much justification. Let's get that out of the way. To live in Paris for a year, you don't have to explain. It's obvious. But I also knew that I wanted to create a little bit of pushing me away from my comfort zone. Paris, this is in 2001, was certainly different than it is in the 2020. Paris is always French, but it was even more French and very few people spoke English, or if they did they weren't all that willing to speak English. I had to function in the world. I'd spoken a little bit of French, not fluent by any means, but I had to function everyday getting my point across and communicating to people in a language that wasn't my own, and then you have to maneuver around. There's so many cultural differences in how you behave, how you talk. When you walk into a store, for example, and again this is going back over 20 years, but I'm not sure if this is the case today as much, I suspect it is. When you walk into a small store you would usually greet the owner or whoever is behind the cash or behind the counter because you're entering, not quite their home, but a place that is very meaningful for them, which we never do here in America and probably in many other countries, and we walk in and we'd say, bonjour monsieur or bonjour madam. There's so many little nuances like that that happen. Living there and operating there, and then writing a book there without my usual support system and without the libraries I was used to, it was a bit more challenging. It was far from impossible. Don't get me wrong, but it was a purposeful choice to take yourself out of your comfort zone. We can do it. You don't have to do it quite as elaborate way, is that obviously. But if you can think of little, little ways to push yourself out of your comfort zone, that's a good thing. I also think about my daughter who consistently, as a kid, put herself into challenging situations. Both her parents had gone to summer camp a lot. She wanted to go to summer camp and back in those days they used to send you DVDs to put on your TV and watch. It was barely digital. Certainly, nobody was talking about streaming. We would look at these DVDs that they sent, and we looked at two or three and then maybe the second or third one, she says, "That's where I'm going." It was like no debate, no discussion. She didn't know anyone there. She didn't know anything about it other than what she had seen, which is good advertising, I guess. But she put herself in that situation. She did that all the way through from high school to college, to going to different schools. She had a choice. She didn't have to do that, but she did. For her it wasn't me coaching her or berating her to say, ''You got to put yourself out of your comfort zone.'' She just did it in a natural way. The growth that you get from doing that is fantastic. That's something to keep in mind. More generally for our kids, we want them to be able to survive but thrive as independent adults. We want them to be happy. That's pretty much it. Are we doing them any favors by being the proverbial helicopter parent? For solving their problems for them, are we really protecting them or making them more vulnerable later when we can't always be there? We hate the idea of any of our kids suffering in any way. We need to be a safety net to make sure nothing really bad happens as best we can, but a few bumps in the road are not a bad thing. Putting people, whether you're a kid or an adult, professionally or in our personal lives, into situations that are a little bit more challenging that's a great way to learn more about yourself and to change.
