Jeremy Watkins
Mentor, Trainer, Speaker, Skateboarder.
I work with leaders and their teams to help bring curiosity to life.
Professionally, we work on mindset, leadership and performance. Personally, the focus tends to shift to perspective and balance.
This plays out differently every time, typically we arrive at the same discovery: the relationship between our mindset, energy and state has a profound influence on our life, leadership and performance.
It becomes a conversation about how to be our true, best, selves.
Over the last decade as a leadership mindset and performance coach I’ve found that it is in the space, between our reactions and our responses that we are challenged to be “our true best selves”.
Hence, The Curiosity Map.
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Curiously, it wasn’t until I began skateboarding, at the age of 49, that I started to experience many things differently, and the idea of “The Curiosity Map” began to crystallize.
Learning to skateboard meant I needed to drop being the expert and literally ‘drop in’ to uncertainty.
I became even more fascinated by the process of how we learn, develop and grow as humans.
Skateboarding has helped me develop even more empathy for people who are willing to intentionally choose to put themselves on the line and be open to learning something new. I truly understand how frightening this can be. Especially as “experts”.
Two and a half years, and many crashes later, every time I go skateboarding I’m still:
challenged to deepen my curiosity and keep learning how to adopt a beginners mind,
invited to approach everything in life from a place of vulnerability and humility, seeing those traits as strengths, not weaknesses,
conscious about really noticing and paying close attention to my reactions and responses, especially in stressful situations,
reminded the importance of my energy, physically, mentally and emotionally
Skateboarding has helped me to see, even more clearly, when I’m coming from my self, leadership or performance mindset. It helps me to really understand the impact my behaviour is having on myself and others.
It helps me ground in the impact I want to have as a leadership and performance coach, mentor and trainer.
To this day skateboarding helps me to “really know” when I’m being constrained, calculated, cautious or curious.
But most of all, skateboarding continues to teach me that how I choose to be and how I choose to respond is what matters most.
And to do this, without hurting myself or others, I need to let go of certainty and embrace my natural curiosity, to explore what possible and learn to experience whatever happens.
