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Interests

Two for You — take two minutes to live and lead with intention

Episode 4.2+

What makes something interesting? How can you pique interest around community events or to join community groups? Take two minutes to catch up on the positive emotion of interest. Discover two elements that makes us interested (or not!). Then get out there and do something you are interested in. As you do, think about why you are interested in it.

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Transcript

Note: Two for You written transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before referencing content in print.

[Denise] Hello and welcome to Two for You. It's another gorgeous winter afternoon in Minnesota so we thought we'd come to you outside to talk about interest. Now interest is one of the top 10 positive emotions and we find people talking about the importance of happiness and joy and gratitude but rarely about interest.

And what we're hearing from people in communities now is that people just aren't interested anymore. They're not stepping up. So what can we do about that?

[Lori] Right, so interest, what is it? So we're all interested in different things. So it's kind of a tricky thing to study in that way but they found that there are two components to think about what we think might interest. How new is something? And how complex is something, right? So it has to be new enough to intrigue us, to spark our curiosity. And also complex enough to engage us. But not too complex that we feel overwhelmed.

So let's see about community again, right. So maybe it's those boards that we're on, right. So if yours is something that's too new and it feels too overwhelming too complex for somebody, they're unlikely to join a board. Right so that's where leadership training kind of comes in.

But the other thing to think about is those community things that we have in our communities cultural components like ice fishing like we're doing out here. What the heck are we doing out here is ice fishing anyway, right. So interest. Our community events, people say oh they're not as engaged as they used to; they're dying.

So think about what's happening in your community. What are those unique opportunities that you have? How can people access them? How are they too complex that there so overwhelming that they're like I don't even know where to start? How can you as a community leader think about the newness of it to reengage think about it differently or to reduce the complexity of something so people become re-engaged again or try something new.

[Denise] That's our challenge for you this month as you live and lead with intention, bring others on with you. Create a spark of interest everywhere you go.

Authors: Lori Rothstein and Denise Stromme, former Extension educators

Reviewed in 2020

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