“Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. But then one day I was driving my little boy to school and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall and it said, ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I like that.

So I get back in my car and I’m driving to work and all of the sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything figured out so they judged everything and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me – who I was had nothing to do with it.

Because if they were curious they would have asked questions. Questions like, ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?’

To which I would have answered, “Yes sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father from aged 10 until I was 16 when he passed away.”

This is my favourite scene in the Apple TV series Ted Lasso – where Ted challenges former AFC Richmond owner Rupert to a darts match to stop him harassing his ex-wife and current owner.

What I love about this scene is the importance placed on curiosity. Curiosity is powerful. American Author, William Arthur Ward described it as “the wick in the candle of learning.” When people are curious, they retain more information, persist longer when things get difficult, pay closer attention, and are more likely to go beyond surface-level understanding.

With curiosity having such a powerful effect on learning and the learner, curiosity could be one of the most powerful levers we can pull as coaches. But how do you actually pull that lever? Quite often in talent environments we talk about curiosity as if it’s something the player either has or doesn’t have. We’ll say a player needs to be more curious, or that the best learners are the curious ones, as though curiosity is purely an individual trait the athlete needs to bring with them. There is some truth to that, but the psychology of curiosity suggests that the environment plays a much bigger role than we might think. Rather than waiting for players to arrive curious, we can design situations that make curiosity much more likely to occur.

In the mid-1990s the economist George Loewenstein looked at the psychology of curiosity and found that, at its simplest, curiosity is driven by what he called an information gap. The gap is the difference between what we currently know and what we want to know. When we become aware that there is something we don’t understand, but feel like we could, curiosity kicks in. Once the gap exists, we feel a strong pull to close it. We pay more attention, we persist for longer, and we are more likely to remember what we learn because we were motivated to find the answer.

This idea always makes me think of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote about knowns and unknowns.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

In talent development environments you hear a version of this all the time - players don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a cliché, but like most clichés there is truth in it. If something sits in the category of an unknown unknown, curiosity can’t really exist, because the athlete isn’t even aware that there is something missing. They aren’t avoiding the answer, they simply don’t realise there is one.

Our role as coaches is often to bring those unknowns into view, to make players aware that there is something they don’t yet understand. We are trying to turn an unknown unknown into a known unknown. The moment that happens, an information gap appears. And once the gap appears, curiosity starts to do its work.

Importantly for us, Loewenstein’s work suggests there are reliable ways to create that information gap, and therefore reliable ways to spark curiosity in the people we coach. He outlined a number of triggers that make people aware that there is something they don’t know, and once that awareness is there, the natural response is to want to find the answer. Four of the most useful for coaching environments are:

So what might these actually look like in coaching?

Posing a question or puzzle
(Create a problem players feel compelled to solve)

Exposure to a sequence where the ending is unknown
(Build suspense — players want to know how it ends)

Violation of expectations
(Show something that doesn’t fit what players thought)

Knowing someone else has information you don’t
(Create the sense that there is an answer to find)

When you look at those examples, what stands out is that none of them rely on the player simply deciding to be more curious. In each case the coach has shaped the environment so that curiosity becomes more likely. A question is posed, a clip is paused, an expectation is challenged, or a piece of information is held back. In Loewenstein’s terms, the coach is helping create an information gap — making the player aware that there is something they don’t yet understand. Once that gap exists, the motivation to close it tends to come naturally.

This is why curiosity can be such a powerful lever in our learning environments. When players realise there is something missing, attention sharpens and effort increases. And once a player realises there is something they don’t know, growth becomes possible.

As Damien Rice sings in the final line of his song Cannonball,
“It’s not hard to grow, when you know that you just don’t know.”

The Ted Lasso Darts - “Be curious, not judgmental” scene

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