INTEREST

Here are this weeks four prompting questions to get you started on the emotion of INTEREST:

1. When have you felt fully alert and curious, deeply interested in the mysteries or possibilities unfolding before you?
2. When has you felt both safe and yet captivated by something new and unknown?
3. When have you felt intensely open and alive, as though your own inner horizons were expanding before your eyes?
4. When have you felt an intense pull to explore and learn more, to fully immerse yourself in your new discoveries and take in a feast of new ideas?

We hope you have a great week.

Amie

Reflecting on these questions, this is what I’m adding to my positivity portfolio:

1. When have you felt fully alert and curious, deeply interested in the mysteries or possibilities unfolding before you?

💪 the first time I came across the idea of strengths… I just love that we all have pre-existing ways of thinking and behaving that are so authentic and energising to us and that can make us superstars. That first spark of interest has taken me on an amazing journey.

4. When have you felt an intense pull to explore and learn more, to fully immerse yourself in your new discoveries and take in a feast of new ideas?

👣 Going to places of historical interest, museums and old cemeteries, I can’t help but get swept up in details and stories (even if in the case of cemeteries I make up the stories based on what the tombstones say). One example is about 12 months ago I stumbled on the Jewish Museum here in Sydney, I could have stayed there all day looking at different things and listening to the guide tell his stories.

Joffa

I was fortunate and lucky enough to have participate in the Melbourne Tourism Leadership Program in 2018. This was a huge catalyst for me in my personal and professional development and it provided me so much guidance to where I am today.

Emotional Intelligence being the core topic, I would look forward to each and every class. It was my first exposure to E.I. It would absorb 100% of me and my attention and when I was there, nothing else mattered outside of the workshops. Every time I left the workshop, I was energised and and couldn’t wait to share the content with colleagues.

Still to today, the field of emotional intelligence excites me when I read on this topic and get to implement in my daily life and yet I’m only scratching the surface.

A big thank you to Mel, Michelle, Destination Melbourne and all graduates 🙂

Lucy

I also struggled with interest. It made me reflect that perhaps I haven’t been following curiosities more recently but it has also meant that I’ve really started digging deep to find my interests.

Here’s the key ones that have come up this week.

1. Travel – Seeking new experiences, visiting new places, meeting new people and learning about histories and cultures lights my interest. I have been very lucky to have explored many places both domestically and overseas and I still find myself googling and reading up on different places I’ve visited.

2. Exploring personal strengths and values. This is an area of study that I find fascinating to explore individually or in a group. It helps me to understand myself, my friends and the world around me. It challenges me and inspires me to learn.

Therese

I thought for a long time about how I could contribute to the portfolio, and wanted to challenge myself by finding out exactly what interest meant to me. For me that was typography.

From the moment I first got into Pinterest years ago and found this type of lettering and the beautiful interplay of fonts and pictures, my interest was definitely peaked. I have a whole board dedicated to these beautiful pieces of art and the beautiful use of words and colours.

I have tried my own hand a few times at creating my own typography art, however it is definitely something that takes practice and time to achieve. I have not yet fully explored my interest in typography and design, but I have great intentions to practice and explore this art form, and who knows where it may end taking me!

Chris

I found it hard to separate passion and interest from one another, but what I have landed on is vinyl.

Each time I discover a new record or artist I can’t help but follow my nose and delve in deeper to their back catalog and explore their musical history and releases through the net.

One thing that stood out for me was the choice of the words in the questions posed by Barbara Fredrickson – Curious, Captivated, Alive and Intense Pull.

When I’m listening to and exploring records I will often fully geek out while on the decks mixing songs together, blending different versions or covers of the same song, spanning decades and genres.

Discovering a new record store or a uncovering a recent bulk arrival at a regular haunt gives me this overwhelming curiousness about all the possibilities that could be awaiting for me in finding that rare/new gem to treasure.

Stacey B

Oddly, I feel like I’m interested in everything, and nothing at the same time… so this one wasn’t as instantaneous for me either!

What I mean is that there are many things that I really enjoy, feel curious about or that light me up, but I don’t feel that I’ve ever been totally captivated or intensely pulled by something that’s lasted, so Interest just isn’t an intense emotion for me.

For example, I love (and have always loved) art, craft and creativity, but I wouldn’t say my interest in this is enduring or consistent.

Before COVID I ran craft workshops (My Crafternoons if you want to see our crafty projects, hopefully I can resume them maybe next year) and I’ve been fortunate enough to learn many new skills through this, and through other workshops and classes.

I get really into each new craft – feeling curious to learn more, buy materials and to practice macrame or watercolours or weaving or ceramics or whatever I’m into at the time, but inevitably my interest wanes in favour of the new craft I get to try out.
Sometimes I will spend night after night on the same craft for weeks, other times I will go months without making a thing (instead cooking great food, travelling or walking with friends and listening to audiobooks).

In identifying my Values in MTLP, I realised that I highly value novelty and challenge, so it’s no wonder I’m flaky with crafts and don’t make much progress in any one discipline, but I think that’s OK, since I believe there’s still value in being a jack of all trades/crafts, and master of none, if it brings me joy 🙂

Hopefully in the future my interest in creativity will continue to take different forms as life allows for it, and I will also foster curiosity and interest in some of the other things that have piqued my interest in recent years… emotional intelligence, leadership, entrepreneurship, resilience, investing, Spanish, cookery, travel, growing plants and veggies, interior design… the list goes on!

Maybe it’s better to be interested in lots of things and to just go with the flow, accept that you don’t have one passion and just be?

Mandy

I have struggled with this emotion. Not sure whether I have understood it properly, or whether it is so intrinsically connected to other emotions, that I cannot separate them. I feel that in my life INTEREST is very closely intertwined with SERENITY.

If I look at the four questions separately or as a whole, I keep thinking of our travels, both overseas and domestic. At these times, when I contemplate these questions, it is also the time when I have felt complete serenity.

The fjords of Norway, the standing stones on Orkney Island in Scotland, the Cattle Pass near Applecross in Scotland when the snow started to fall. The Gordon River dam in Tasmania. The magnificent palaces in Vienna and Prague. The 1626 Vasa warship that capsized in Sweden and was found 333 years later in almost mint condition. The Stanley Chasm in Alice Springs as the golden glow of the sun hits its rock walls at midday. The list goes on.

As I read this back to myself, I think my interest is connected to nature and history. The beauty of this world and of those that came before us. The majestic buildings, the wonder of the feats of the human race from days gone by. It makes me realise how truly powerful a life can be, no matter how long or short. That nature is possibly the most powerful of all.

Now I think I’m waffling!!! Maybe its the emotion of interest that is the most powerful tool of all?????

Jarred

Interest… this one really got me thinking. I think for me interest is often attached to dreaming.

An example that came to mind was when my family and I were staying in Torquay on a holiday a few years ago.

I was flicking through a local newspaper and came across an advertisement for an accommodation business in Lorne that was for sale. I started looking into it at first just out of curiosity but that’s when I came across the trip advisor reviews. They were bad. Like really bad. At the time they ranked dead last out of all accommodation in the Lorne area and after reading the reviews I was not surprised.

At that point, interest began to hijack our family holiday. I had to know more. What was the story behind the reviews? Why was it so bad? When there was so many strengths according to the real estate advertisement how could it possibly be failing so badly?

Even with the little information I had, I could sense the beginnings of a ‘restart’ business plan coming together in my mind but I needed to know more. Captivated, I spent quite a few hours that night researching online and changed our holiday schedule so we could drop in and visit the business to see it first hand.

We got there it didn’t take long to see a plethora of issues. Directional signage was useless, the reception building with all the facilities was missing (turns out it burnt down in a fire a few years earlier but wasn’t replaced) despite still being advertised on their website, there was an inground swimming pool (full size) sitting empty in the middle of the tennis court along with a clapped out BBQ,, we walked over to the first cabin and there was a random door leaning against the building with a laminated note stapled on it saying to call a mobile number which rang out, looking through the windows, beds were poorly made, there was a telephone sitting randomly in the middle of the floor in the kitchen, they’d made shade sails our of old canvas advertising banners that had been badly painted over… and that was just the start of it… there was so so so much wrong and very little right… and they were still taking very bookings!!! By now I was totally heading down the rabbit hole with my family in tow… I had to know more.

After making inquiries with the agent and more online research it turns out the business was run like a body corporate with a number of investors owning individual cabins at the property but they guy who had been appointed to run the body corporate and reception/customer service was a customer service nightmare. He essentially destroyed the business one customer at a time and the owners were almost powerless to do anything about it. It took them something like 4 years in VCAT to get him out. By then it was far too late.

I could see the way out but it was expensive and with more than 10 different owners it was too much of a complicated mess for me to take on at the time. I was ok with that though. The process of exploring and unravelling the full story behind was so much fun and oddly entertaining during my holiday (maybe not for our poor kids though haha). It was great to dream about the possibilities with no real consequence which fueled my interest and inner tourism nerd.

If you’re curious… check out the pre 2017 reviews.

DJ

I find that I always go back to Batman and delve as much as I possibly can into the universe and world that DC has created.

I am a bit (n.b. very) nerdy at heart and for as long as I can remember Batman has been my absolute favourite character. I even have Batman tattooed on my arm 😀🦇

From the 60s Batman TV series with Adam West to the Animated Series of the 90s with Kevin Conroy (the best Batman of all) to Batfleck – I can’t go past watching a film, playing a video game or reading a comic and fully immersing myself in the world of the Dark Knight.