Welcome to the Curiousmind Academy
At Curiousmind we believe every problem is solved by finding the right question to ask.
Imagine knowing that you could approach any problem with confidence, optimism, and creativity? The Curiousmind Academy is dedicated to helping people from all walks of life reclaim their innate desire to explore, discover and learn.
As educators and change agents, we help individuals, teams and organisations become more confident, resilient problem solvers, innovators, and adapters. Rather than more analysis of what didn’t work or failed, we’ve focused our attention on success. We believe we can learn a lot more from studying success than failure. What we’ve found is that there’s one quality that stands out when it comes to improving creativity, innovation, problem-solving and learning; our Curiosity.
If there has been any silver lining to the COVID pandemic, it’s that we’ve busted a few myths about how people can work and learn without close supervision. Employees can be self-motivated enough (for a while at least) to work from home and effective learning can occur outside dedicated educational environments. This has been a game changer.
No one is suggesting the end of face to face education, but we now have much, much more flexibility in how we can deliver. This means that people who frequently missed out on further education because they didn’t work for a large firm, didn’t do well enough in high school, weren’t senior enough, couldn’t afford it or lived / worked remotely can now have access to quality affordable educational opportunities.
While Curiousmind offers traditional corporate training and coaching programs this academy is dedicated to people who want to improve themselves with quality training in an affordable and flexible manner. These E-learning modules present the best of our tried and tested corporate training.
Making learning work for everyone
With decades of experience in both the corporate and personal development fields, we understand the barriers to learning and change. We take great care and pride in providing education that works for everyone, regardless of your previous educational levels, learning preferences or personality. While face-to-face training has many obvious benefits, it’s not always practical and doesn’t cater for people working/learning at different speeds. Also, while two-, three- or five-day intensive workshops can pack a lot in, the real learning always happens back at work or home, where we put ideas into practice.
This format allows for that. You can pace yourself but still get support for at least a month afterwards.
Each program comprises several video modules with a bit of pre-reading and a summary with questions afterwards. The questions are not a test; they are specifically designed to help you reflect on what you’ve learnt – a core skill of good learners. We believe (and have been told many times) that some of our modules sink in deeper after multiple viewings. By going at your own pace, you can re-watch and reflect as much as you need.
E-Learning Programs
Andrew Lee
Curious about the world, himself and others, Andrew Lee is an Australian educator, executive coach, curiosity coach and amateur philosopher. Andrew has worked in many cultures worldwide, from stage crew and roadie in England (Bowie, Dylan, Queen & the Who) to apprentice stonemason and cook in France, Dr. of Traditional Chinese medicine in China and corporate facilitator in S.E. Asia, the Middle East and Australasia.
While volunteering with youth at risk and running leadership, change management and team alignment programs to tens of thousands of participants, Andrew had two complementary insights. First was a meeting with a group of psychologists who’d thrown the book out (analysing disease) and instead focused on studying healthy people. This realisation forms the foundation of most of his work and the idea that there’s more to learn from studying health and success than disease and mistakes. The second was to realise the compelling nature of Curiosity and how it impacts every aspect of our lives.
For the last 15 years, Andrew and his team have been researching our innate desire to explore, discover, understand and learn. Simultaneously he’s tried to figure out why it got such a bad name and what we can do to recover our birthright.
In 2009 Andrew presented a plenary on Cultivating Curiosity at the International Conference on Thinking in Kuala Lumpur. Since then, Curiosity has been his passion that infuses his work, personal development, volunteering and family life.
Curiousmind Academy
Curiousmind is a collective of passionate educators and change agents who believe our dedicated innate desire to explore, discover, understand, and learn is one of our defining qualities. We come from diverse backgrounds, including corporate education, personal development, psychotherapy, allied health, law, acting and finance.
We offer four complementary educational services;
- Corporate face to face programs in (anywhere from half-day to multi-year engagements)
- Online programs – usually in 2 or 4-hour formats over several weeks
- E-learning modules (the focus of the Curiousmind Academy)
- Coaching services, both face to face and online.
With all our professional training centred around personal development principles we’ve had countless participants ask us if there was some way their partners/children/parents could experience some of our work.
We have designed these programs around the success of our traditional corporate workshops. One of the significant benefits of this format is that it allows you to progress at your speed rather than having to squeeze it all into two consecutive days (to save costs).
Regardless of which program you choose, you will note references to Curiosity. At Curiousmind, our core work focuses on helping individuals, teams (families) and whole organisations rediscover their innate Curiosity, their desire to explore, problem solve, learn and innovate. We’ve found that while most people say they are curious it’s usually only about some things. Or more importantly, they have little curiosity about things they don’t already like. Our research has uncovered a group of parental, educational, managerial and even religious assumptions that actively suffocate our childlike fascination of nearly everything.
Consequently, cultivating curiosity is both one of our topics and our methodology for inspiring people to become more inquisitive, keen to explore, discover and understand learners.
As such you may find some of our post session questions a little different. Our Curious Questions (CQs) are designed to get you to reflect, infer, analyse and predict. At Curiousmind we believe every problem is solved by finding the right question to ask. A Curiousmind is more interested in questions than the answers they may inspire. Our CQs cannot be answered with a quick Google search or with a simple “yes”or ”no”. You could say they are designed to send you on a Quest for deeper understanding rather than “right” answers.