The River

One of the metaphors we use to describe self-curiosity is a river. I love it now, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t at first. A presenter shares their story, and we’re asked to turn inward. Then one person shares an emotion and a memory, then another, then another, and a lot of the time I couldn’t connect any of it back to what the presenter had said. I kept asking myself how it fit. You may have wondered the same thing.

Then I stopped trying to connect the dots and make sense of it. I let myself follow whatever came up and paid attention to where it took me. A memory I hadn’t thought about in years. A feeling I couldn’t have named an hour earlier. What came up for the people around me became part of my learning too. That’s when it started to make sense.

Here’s how I think about it now.

Imagine eight people, each in their own boat, moving along the same water. On the surface there are little ripples, things that catch your attention for a moment and then pass. Underneath there are currents. Some are gentle, some are strong, and some carry you somewhere you never expected to go.

Self-curiosity is noticing the deepest current of emotion and letting yourself follow it. There’s nowhere you’re supposed to arrive. You don’t need to figure anything out. You give yourself permission to explore.

Most of us rarely do. We make decisions, solve problems, respond to people, think about what’s next. When something stirs an emotion, we move right past it, or we explain it. I’m frustrated because. I’m worried because. We’re very good at explaining our emotions, and much less used to staying with one for a moment to see where it goes.

Sometimes it takes us back.

Someone in Forum shares a story about their father, and suddenly you’re thinking about yours. You’re eight years old in the passenger seat of his car. You can hear his voice. You can smell the car, and you remember the song on the radio. You haven’t thought about that afternoon in forty years, and there it is.

Or someone talks about their children growing up, and you’re back in a time when yours were little. Something funny one of them said. The feel of a small hand in yours as you walked somewhere together. For a moment, you’re there again.

Not every memory is happy. Some bring sadness or regret. Some remind us of people who are no longer in our lives. But we spend a lifetime collecting experiences, thousands upon thousands of moments, and most of them get tucked away. Then an emotion surfaces, and we get to remember someone we loved, or an afternoon we’d lost, or a part of ourselves we’d forgotten.

For a moment, we get to experience a little piece of our life all over again. I think that’s pretty special.

Self-curiosity gives us the gift of going back to visit a younger version of ourselves.

Now imagine everyone in the room doing it, and every memory setting off another.

Eight people can hear the same story and experience eight different things. One feels sadness and remembers losing a parent. Another feels anger and recalls a betrayal. Someone feels joy and remembers a childhood summer. Then one person’s memory triggers another’s. Someone shares the happiness of an afternoon at the beach, and another member remembers a family vacation they haven’t thought about in thirty years. Someone mentions feeling angry on a ski hill, and it brings up a completely different memory for someone else about feeling helpless. The memories may have nothing to do with the original story, or with each other. The emotions connect, and that can take each of us somewhere we might never have gone alone.

That’s what I find so interesting about popcorn-style sharing. We’re all on the same river, each carried somewhere different, and when someone says where they’ve been taken, it creates another current for someone else to follow. We discover ourselves through one another.

There’s a practical reason this matters, and it’s what finally answered my question about how it all fits. When I explain it to a Forum, I start with a simple picture.

Imagine your life as a giant filing cabinet. Every experience you’ve had is in there, each in its own folder. Relationships, conversations, successes, failures, celebrations, disappointments, childhood memories.

Now someone presents an issue in Forum. Say they’re struggling with their relationship with their father. What do most of us do? We open the obvious drawer. We look for our own experiences with our fathers, find something similar, and get ready to share it. That may be a perfectly good place to start.

Think about how many other drawers are in that cabinet. An experience with a teacher when you were twelve. A moment you felt rejected by a friend. A time you were frightened, or proud, or deeply loved. On the surface, those have nothing in common with the presenter’s situation. Emotionally, they may have everything in common.

Self-curiosity lets us open drawers we’d never have thought to look in.

That’s why the order of the Four-Step Forum Exploration^™ matters. In Step 2, we make room for it. We turn inward, notice the emotion, and let a memory surface. We share briefly and don’t explain or analyze. Sometimes a member simply says:

“The emotion I’m feeling is sadness, and the memory coming up for me is sitting beside my dad in the hospital.”

And stops. That’s enough. The rest of us are left to notice what those words stir in us.

In Step 3, the presenter chooses to move into shared experiences. And we arrive with more drawers open than any one of us would have found alone. Instead of reaching for the first experience that seemed relevant, we have memories and feelings we might never have considered. What we share may look nothing like the presenter’s situation, yet it can offer a perspective that helps them see it differently. The more we explore through self-curiosity, the more we may discover that we have to share.

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While one person explores an issue, everyone else is doing their own work. We reconnect with memories, notice our emotions, find our thing inside theirs. Some of my most important learning in Forum has happened when I wasn’t the presenter. I’m sitting there, listening for my own learning, and someone shares something that lands. It turns out to be exactly what I needed. That’s why I’ve always believed Forum is for me. I get to work on me, whatever the topic, and everyone else gets the same chance. Forum isn’t eight people working on one person. It’s eight people working on themselves, together.

So much of life is about getting somewhere. We set goals, make plans, measure progress, and sometimes we carry that into Forum. We want the insight, the breakthrough, the answer. Self-curiosity asks for none of that. We don’t have to know where a feeling leads, and we don’t have to turn every memory into a lesson. Sometimes we find something important about ourselves. Sometimes we notice a pattern that’s been with us for years. And sometimes we revisit an afternoon with someone we loved.

Inside each of us is a lifetime of experiences. Some have shaped us in ways we understand. Others are still waiting to be rediscovered. Often all it takes is following a feeling to see where it leads.

And we may find ourselves somewhere we didn’t even know we missed.

Four-Step Forum Exploration^™ is a trademark of YPO.