What Fascinates You?

By Lane Byrum
Director of Corporate Accounts & Emotional Intelligence Coach
SHIFT Company

A colleague asked me a question this morning that I haven’t been able to shake.

“What fascinates you?”

Not: What are you working on? Not: What are you good at? Not even: What are you passionate about?

What fascinates you?

Stephen Burton had recently watched Jerry Seinfeld give a commencement address in which he encouraged people to pay attention to what fascinates them. So, naturally, Stephen decided to start our perfectly normal website meeting by asking me an existential question.

Thanks, Stephen.

I thought about it for a moment, and my mind went to something I’d recently heard Jason Sudeikis say about Ted Lasso. The original show was intentionally built around a three-season story arc. They told the story they wanted to tell. It ended. Everyone moved on.

Or apparently, not everyone.

Sudeikis described how, even after the show ended, the characters continued talking to him. He would hear Ted. Rebecca. Roy. Keeley. The people who had occupied his imagination for years were apparently not terribly concerned that production had wrapped. But then something interesting happened.

He began hearing new voices. Characters who hadn’t existed before. People who didn’t belong to the original story. He started mentioning those voices to his writing partners. They began talking about them. Exploring them. Following them. And slowly, another story began to emerge.

Eventually, those voices became part of the creative spark behind returning to the world of Ted Lasso.

I found that fascinating. Not because I’m particularly interested in having fictional characters begin conversations inside my head. My brain has plenty going on already.

What fascinated me was this: He was listening.

He had somehow created enough internal space to notice something new trying to emerge.

That made me wonder how often the rest of us do the opposite. Most of us have become pretty good at managing the voices in our heads. The anxious voice. The critical voice. The voice that tells us we’re not ready, not qualified, not enough.

Good therapy, coaching, reflection, and maturity can help us recognize those voices for what they are. We learn that every thought doesn’t deserve a vote, much less control of the steering wheel.

But I’ve started wondering about the other voices. The quieter ones. The curious voice. The creative voice. The voice that says, “I wonder what would happen if…” The voice that keeps returning to an idea we haven’t quite been able to explain. The voice that notices something beautiful. The voice that nudges us toward a conversation, a project, a relationship, a change, or an entirely new chapter.

Are we giving those voices enough room to speak?

I’m not sure we can hear them very well while answering emails, scrolling through our phones, rushing from meeting to meeting, listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed, and treating every unoccupied moment like some sort of productivity emergency.

Sometimes the most productive thing we can do may be absolutely nothing.

For me, the voices tend to show up in silence.

They show up when I journal.

They show up when I walk along the beach and stare at the ocean longer than would appear remotely productive on a timesheet.

They show up when I stop trying to manufacture an answer.

And perhaps that is the larger lesson.

Our lives don’t only need more information. Sometimes they need more space. Space to wonder. Space to notice. Space to become fascinated. Space to hear the idea that hasn’t quite become an idea yet.

Because maybe those quiet internal nudges aren’t distractions from the important work. Maybe they’re trying to tell us what the important work is.

So I’ve been sitting with Stephen’s question.

What fascinates you?

And maybe an even better question:

Have you created enough quiet in your life to hear the answer?

 

Leadership is an inside-out journey. At SHIFT Company, we believe that when people grow, teams grow. And when teams grow, organizations thrive. That’s why we partner with organizations to develop leaders at every stage of their journey—through executive coaching, team coaching, and workshops on Empathy, Storytelling, and the Enneagram in Business.

Whether you’re investing in a single leader or transforming an entire leadership team, we’ll meet you where you are and help you take the next meaningful step. If you’d like to explore what’s possible for your leaders or organization, I’d love to start a conversation.  Please reach out to me at [email protected].