“A decision is not made in your head.
It’s made when you move.”

—Mel Robbins

Well, now you’ve done it. You’ve gone and cracked a Delusional Ambition. You want to change the world. You want to vanquish the fiercest Goliaths. You want to transform your team, shift politics, live forever, cure cancer, become the oldest kick-boxing champion in history, and launch a billion-dollar company. And perhaps you want to do them all at once.

Where do you begin? How do you move yourself or your team from the razzle-dazzle thrill of thinking big to the actual task of getting the big job done? How do you move from the sublime to the practical?

You’ll be tempted to explain, to make a case, to persuade your audience about the merits of your Delusional Ambition, to “bring them along” or “enlist” them for the journey, as the organizational theorists would say. This desire to explain is the natural instinct of good people. Offering information and proof points and “reasons to believe” is a generous act indeed.

But it’s also the disastrous mistake made by The Reasonables. All that explaining—on the heels of a great ambition—sticks your audience in place, keeps them thinking, mulling, and, even worse, questioning and arguing. At this stage, weighing pros and cons is all con.

Now is the time to obsesses about Action. What do you want your audience to do—not think, not feel, just do. Do you want them to work the weekend, finish their homework by 7 p.m., eat a yogurt, call now, visit a website, vote at the public library on the way home from the office, wash their hands, share a hashtag? The Muse is crystal clear about the very next step that needs to be taken, the thing to be done.

Let’s call this the Inspir-Action—the inspiring action that is the first step toward achieving your Delusional Ambition. It’s small thinking with big effects. In fact, the specificity of your Inspir-Action is a complement to the sublimity of your Delusional Ambition. It makes the haze clear. It makes the ridiculous conceivable.

And it begins to build converts to your cause without the need to resort to pesky arguments. Behavioral psychologists have identified the counterintuitive insight that it’s easier to change behavior than it is to change thinking; in fact, when our behavior changes, our thinking follows—not vice versa. Let me write that again, because it’s easy to miss how radical a notion it is:

 

When our behavior changes, our thinking follows.

 

That’s a hard pill for The Reasonables to swallow. They want to believe we “think through” our actions before we take them. But the Muse knows better. The Muse knows the best way to move people is to…get them moving.

Sol’s Dictum

“The human body can do anything for thirty seconds.”

—Sol Brandys, Coach and Trainer

Sol is my trainer, the man who has taken me, an exercise-averse business executive, and turned me into—if not a gym rat—certainly, a gym mouse. He has helped me find the joy in exertion, the pleasure that comes the moment you push out of that last push-up your body can possibly handle, arms shaking, alarmed that your face will be smashed on the wooden floor. Sol once coached me through a regimen on a rowing machine so intense that I puked in a bucket. It was one of the proudest moments of my life—because pride always follows the almost-fall.

Lifting groceries, lifting kids, lifting spirits. Thank you, Sol.

The human body can do anything for thirty seconds.

And Sol would know. His parents met during World War II in the shadows of a concentration camp. His thinking about exercise and diet is informed, in part, by the lessons in endurance he was taught by his family’s awful experience.

Though I’m certain I lack the fortitude to survive what his parents did, I chant Sol’s dictum at those moments I’m crossing my threshold from can-do to can’t-ever-do. Maybe it’s exercise. Maybe it’s the patience demanded by parenting. Maybe it’s writing this book. Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds. Just thirty seconds. It’s a ridiculously precise rule to follow.

At some point, it ends. Of course, it does. But that point is much farther away than you ever imagined. It’s thirty seconds and thirty seconds and thirty seconds and so many more thirty seconds away. So much closer to your Delusional Ambition.

Simon Says

In the late 1980s, Jeremiah Sullivan, a professor at the University of Washington, bucked the conventional wisdom of management theory with his belief that a leader’s words could have a greater impact on an organization than that leader’s goals or strategies. It’s amazing to think that was a radical proposition but, in a world ruled by Reasonables, of course, strategy and tactics would get credit for the good stuff. Professor Sullivan wanted to identify the kind of language a great leader employs to motivate a team. His framework—Motivational Language Theory (MLT)—proposes three types of language that work and, as with Aristotle’s “Three Modes of Persuasion,” it’s a mix of touchy-feely and damn concrete:

1. Meaning-Making Language. This is language that links a team member’s job to a higher purpose. This is classic Simon Sinek Start With Why language, and as discussed in the previous chapter, I believe much of this meaning-making language becomes inspiring when the ambitions are stretched to grand and delusional levels.

2. Empathetic Language. This is language that establishes a bond between a leader and her team. It builds trust and faith. Not surprisingly, it’s the kind of emotional language that many managers find most difficult to employ, often dismissing it as touchy-feely and inappropriate in the workplace. When we get to the Fifth Skill of Inspiration: Love, For Real, we’ll offer some tips and techniques for helping you express the kind of empathy that actually gets results.

But it’s the third type of language Professor Sullivan identified that I’d like us to consider now:

3. Direction-Giving Language, or in academic jargon, perlocutionary language, meaning communication that has “action as its aim.” This is language that tells you what to do, outlines next steps, establishes expectations, timelines, and criteria for success. These are commands and imperatives, the kind occasionally barked by teachers, parents, and traffic signs.

 

According to Jacqueline and Milton Mayfield, two professors at the University of Texas who have tested Professor Sullivan’s theories in the crucible of actual corporations, this direction-giving language “works” by providing crystal clarity about expectations set for a team, thus reducing uncertainty and the anxiety that often accompanies it. “In a sense,” the Mayfields say, “direction-giving language offers us the psychological safety of knowing what is expected and what to expect in return.”2 A psychological safety net.

I learned about the Mayfields from Dan McGinn who is an editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of a book called Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed, which, as the name clearly implies, is a book with lessons for getting yourself stoked before a big performance. It’s a smart, fun, and useful read, but my favorite chapter is one that examines the pep talks coaches give their teams before big games. McGinn takes us inside the locker rooms to the moments when coaches summon their inner Muses and, by dint of words, bring the very best out of their teams. These are the moments when coaches turn teams into champions. And, as you can imagine, they do it with rousing, poetic exhortations: “Clear Eyes. Full Hearts. Can’t Lose,” says the fictional, irresistible Coach Taylor from Dillon, Texas.

Or so we believe that’s how these pre-game sermons work.

The truth, as McGinn uncovers it, is that these pep talks are entirely more pedestrian. When he studies the real-life speeches of an acclaimed coach like Knute Rockne (whose famous “Win One for the Gipper” speech might, in fact, be apocryphal) or the fictional exhortations of Coach Norman Dale in Hoosiers, played with ferocious intensity by Gene Hackman, McGinn finds very little poetry, very little lyrical language that sets spirits soaring. Instead, he finds MLT’s “direction-giving language”—coaches being very precise about the tactics they expect their teams to employ: “Pass four times before shooting…. Neutralize that shooting guard…. Box out that star rebounder on every play…. Yes they appeal to the players’ emotions,” McGinn writes, “But they also focus on the game plan and the specifics of precisely what the team needs to do to win the game.”3

McGinn goes on to explain that this information-giving language is often more effective than the emotion-rousing variety—especially when a team is playing an unknown opponent. That’s when a speech that is filled with specific and actionable instructions proves its value: when you’re facing something unknown, unclear, or maybe, as our friend Burke would have it, something sublime. Apparently, the power of these action-oriented directions diminishes as a player knows her opponent better; in those cases, the “meaning-making” language of ambition or purpose can stand on its own. Roger Federer, for example, doesn’t need an instruction manual of tactics when he faces his frequent opponent, Rafael Nadal; no, he just needs to be reminded he’s competing to be the greatest player of all time.

But when you’re staring down the road of a Delusional Ambition, scared and confused and overwhelmed and uncertain—all good, virtuous, emotion-arousing feelings, mind you—then, at that moment, vivid and concrete Inspir-Action becomes your guiding light.

The Delusional Ambition might be to win the national title, but the Inspir-Action is to box out the star rebounder. The Delusional Ambition might be to reverse climate change, but the Inspir-Action is to get your neighbor to the polling place on Election Day. The Delusional Ambition might be to clean your arteries of cholesterol, but the Inspir-Action is to eat butter-free popcorn at the movie on Friday night. The Delusional Ambition might be to topple the patriarchy, but the Inspir-Action is to post #metoo on your social channels if you have been a victim of sexual predation. Both expressions—the grand and the gritty, the delusional and the precise, the spirit-rousing and the body-moving—conspire to inspire.