By now you know what inspires you and what you can do to set the stage for more inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration isn’t either present or absent; it’s more like a spectrum or continuum. And there are things you can do, systems you can put in place, to kick inspiration up a notch once you’re already feeling inspired. You can boost it. This is a third way you can intentionally practice and sustain inspiration in concert with resparking the engines and directing inspiration to positive actions.
By boosting feelings of inspiration, you can effectively turbocharge that experience. When you take inspiration up a level, you become even more engaged; you see results faster, and those results have an even greater impact.
Boosting your inspiration is a lot like fanning a campfire. To get the fire started, you strike a match and light the kindling. When you add some sticks, you’re giving the fire energy to sustain it long enough to cook marshmallows for s’mores. The fire will burn for a while and then eventually burn out if you leave it alone. But if you add more pieces of wood, the fire becomes hot enough to cook hotdogs and hamburgers. That accelerant is your inspiration boost.
So what kinds of inspiration boosts are out there? We’ve identified three: positive rituals, accountability, and social support.
Positive rituals are actions you take to prepare yourself for a task, a process you go through that lifts you emotionally and gets you primed to perform. These rituals keep success uppermost in your mind.
In 1726, at the young age of twenty, Benjamin Franklin decided it was time to take control of his life; he wanted to be a better person. He had determined that his life wasn’t going the way he wanted it to and that he needed to make some changes. Self-improvement was his goal.1
So he identified thirteen values and characteristics to which he aspired, calling them his thirteen virtues. They included temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, and chastity. At the urging of a friend, he added humility (since he had little, apparently).2
To encourage himself to pay more attention to each virtue, Franklin created a grid containing the seven days of the week across the top and then listed each virtue down the side. He then tracked his performance on each virtue daily as a tool for self-improvement. Each day when he failed to display the designated virtue required a tick mark in his journal; his goal was never having to mark a failure.
Franklin recognized that attempting to address all thirteen virtues simultaneously would only lead to failure, so, instead, he focused on one virtue each week, cycling through all of them four times in a year. Such repetition was designed to improve overall performance across all virtues.
Franklin succeeded in creating a ritual for himself that helped remind him of his bigger goals. Rituals of positive behaviors and habits help build positivity and focus into our days. They can be as mundane as making your bed first thing in the morning to start the day off with a simple accomplished task,3 or they can be higher level, like Franklin’s virtue tracking or a modern equivalent of writing in a gratitude journal every day.
Positive rituals help sustain inspiration.
Decorated Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps exhibits a number of positive rituals at the pool before a race. His process usually begins about two and a half hours before he competes with a high-calorie meal, followed by stretching, a warm-up lap, getting into his bodysuit (which is so tight it takes twenty minutes to squeeze into), and about thirty minutes of listening to hip-hop music on his headphones. These positive rituals prepare him, and when he hits the water, he is physically, mentally, and emotionally focused on the task at hand.4
Other athletes find confidence in rituals rooted in superstition, choosing to wear the same pair of socks or not shave for fear of doing something to jinx their track record of success. Their rituals often include doing the exact same thing in preparation for a big game as they did the last time the team won. Sports teams often huddle and repeat a rousing mantra before a game. Like other rituals, these are actions for honing and directing your energy toward the desired result. While such behavior may seem silly to some of us, the sense of control we gain from following these recipes for success makes us more confident and optimistic about our prospects for greatness, which can actually lead to greater success.
We can learn from elite athletes’ performance rituals and translate them to our work. Many of us have routines, even informal ones, we go through prior to an important event, such as a major presentation or negotiation. Business teams are increasingly using early morning huddles—brief standing meetings held in a circle—to kick off the day and get everyone on the team aligned before beginning work.5 Some teachers have developed special handshakes or greetings to welcome their students into the classroom each morning so they start the day off feeling positive and connected. These are just a few examples to offer ideas. As you can imagine, rituals are highly personal; a meaningful ritual to one of us wouldn’t have the same impact for you. Building in daily positive rituals that can become habitual and give you a little boost every day is a way to sustain inspiration toward your larger goals over time.
But rituals aren’t the only tool for boosting inspiration. Adding accountability is another way.
We can all benefit from some support in implementing our intentional practice of inspiration. One way to do that is to build in accountability to another person for what you are planning to do. If you want to impress your manager, tell a coworker you plan to get the draft report on your manager’s desk a day early. Ask your coworkers to check with you to confirm you did it. Want to speak up more in meetings? Tell your team or promise your coach or mentor that you’ll make the effort and then check in with them on it. Declaring your commitment to taking a certain action significantly increases the odds that you’ll do it.6 Being accountable to someone else for a particular behavior change helps set up a structure to support you. Individuals naturally strive to act in ways that are consistent with what they say they will do. You can lean on this desire for integrity to prop up your plans.
It works the same way for inspiration.
When you want to sustain your practice of inspiration around a particular goal or area in your work or life, you can use tools to set up checkpoints on your path to success, such as interim due dates for big projects or deadlines.
It is on this premise that entrepreneur Angela Jia Kim leads her employees at Savor Beauty, a New York–based natural skincare and spa brand inspired by Korean beauty rituals.
Every Wednesday, her HQ team gathers for a meet-and-work day where they share successes, brainstorm solutions to challenges that arise, share new goals and initiatives, and leverage individual skills to support one another. They work as partners, in teams, with Kim to course-correct, and they push one another to achieve their best. The Wednesday meetings provide a “themed day” when everyone knows they will be held accountable for their weekly goals in a supportive environment. There’s also a healthy dose of competition: if you know your colleague shows up week after week meeting her goals, it inspires you to do the same. The team increases their collective sense of possibility and invincibility through these conversations, and they count on one another for accountability to enact these.7
The support of other people can be an incredible lift factor that boosts your inspiration, either on its own or in combination with positive rituals and accountability.
“I really think it just comes down to the fact that we’re social creatures and that we’re incredibly empathetic, more so than we even realize, with each other. There needs to be that feedback loop of energy or inspiration, going in and out.”
—Leslie Kruempel, Mission Executive, Organic Valley
Thousands of different social organizations exist with missions around connecting members to support one another in meaningful ways. The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO),8 one of our clients, leverages positive rituals, accountability, and social support to provide EO members with inspiration boosts. The organization’s paying members support one another through EO’s established network of thousands of entrepreneurs, receive and participate in peer-to-peer learning and live events, and benefit from connections to mentors and experts. Another such organization is IVY: The Social University, which has built a network designed to inspire new knowledge and connection through curated events. The stated mission of IVY is “to trigger transformative ideas and collaborations that lead to unprecedented human unity, progress, and fulfillment.”9
Boosting inspiration can be easier when you’re part of a group, surrounded by people who want to see you succeed—conspirators in your success. These like-minded people fuel your positive feelings and confidence, giving your emotions a lift that enhances inspiration. In addition to your own personal cheerleading squad, surrounding yourself with people who genuinely care about you and your well-being can also boost inspiration. People who are there to encourage you, listen when you’re struggling, and offer hugs of support and who don’t judge you for your weaknesses can also lift your mood and accelerate inspiration.
We have found coaching provides this inspiration power punch by combining all three ways to boost social support, accountability, and positive rituals. Having a partner to hold you accountable for deadlines, set challenges, and stay true to the inspiration that drives you can be helpful for sustaining it over time. Companies now frequently invest in coaching as a way to help develop or accelerate the development of employee performance. In fact, between 25 and 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies hire executive coaches.10 Part of that coaching process often involves discovering or clarifying what inspires the coachee at work. Most people are doing work that inspires them in some way or another, and coaches help them fan the flames of inspiration, set meaningful goals, and design positive practices—or rituals—that support their growth. A big part of the coaching process is helping employees get or stay connected to what matters most to them, rising above the day-to-day tedium. Research in coaching shows benefits like increased performance, especially related to goal achievement, and better work-related attitudes, well-being, and coping skills.11 Our coaching clients and interviewees frequently mention inspiration—either resparking or sustaining—as being a key outcome of coaching.
If you are looking for a way to boost your inspiration, coaching is worth exploring. If your company or organization does not typically offer it, try looking for other opportunities like asking a mentor or friend for some coaching or participating in a peer-coaching group. For example, one client of ours mentioned starting a peer-coaching group over fifteen years ago that continues to meet biweekly via video conference for conversations. She said it has been a driving force in her life and career. Remember, it is critical to first inspire yourself if you are looking to inspire others.
At InspireCorps we developed and use a tool for one-on-one meetings that activates inspiration through an everyday lens of work and includes positive rituals, accountability, and social support. We call these 4-3-2-1 meetings, as a reminder that there are four steps, with the first step addressing four agenda items, the second step three, and so on. Counting down:
The first step is to share four pieces of good news. What are you working on that you love or is particularly challenging and rewarding, something you want to acknowledge or thank others for? What huge advance or progress do you want to report?
The next step is to share three top priorities and key updates. Is your project on track, delayed, or ahead? Discuss and clarify pathways that are unclear. What is needed to progress? Solicit requests for collaboration.
Next is to share two aspects of your work that you are really enjoying or are learning from. It could be a project you like so much that you lost track of time while working on it or one that has presented an enjoyable challenge. Or it could be something that didn’t go as planned and that you might do differently next time.
Finally, you close the meeting with one piece of positive and constructive feedback. Note something you particularly appreciate or witnessed that you thought was extraordinary or well executed and that inspired you—along with some constructive feedback and a suggestion for how to have more impact in the future.
Despite what we may do to sustain inspiration over time, the regular challenges, frustrations, and difficulties of life can get in the way. There are three types of energy we manage (physical, mindset, emotional) to sustain inspiration—and we will explore these in further detail in the following chapter. These three areas of energy can also be what we call “enemies of inspiration” if they dip too low. To reduce the impact of such enemies, we need to train ourselves to be more self-aware—to recognize when they exist and what we can do about it. Next, we explore three common “enemies of inspiration”—emotional, cognitive, and physical—and how to address each of them.
Emotional enemies are unpleasant feelings that interfere with or block inspiration. It becomes harder to be inspired or sustain inspiration when we’re weighed down by these emotionally draining factors.
Negative moods. When left unchecked negative moods can lead to obsessive worrying or rumination that gets in the way of inspiration. Negative emotions might include jealousy, envy, apathy, insecurity, anger, fear, or anxiety. While these emotions provide us with important information to process and pay attention to, when left to fester over time, they can turn into moods (longer-term states) that get in the way of sustained inspiration.12
Amygdala hijack. When we’re grabbed unexpectedly by a high-intensity emotion signaling a threat, we react with fight, flight, or freeze. We let our emotions take control, we go on the attack, we run from the situation, or we are paralyzed. But we certainly don’t feel inspired or uplifted.13
Combativeness or defensiveness. Sometimes we look for conflict when it doesn’t exist or we feel unnecessarily threatened. Spoiling for a fight or digging in our heels when getting useful feedback can distract us from potential learning or inspiration.
Abusive or corrosive relationships. The impact that others have on us can’t be discounted. Relationships that damage us mentally, physically, or emotionally can also damage our ability to create sustainable inspiration.
Ambivalence in relationships. Not knowing how people feel about us, or not knowing how we feel about them, creates ambivalence that can lead to feelings of uncertainty and insecurity, and blocking inspiration.
Loss. When something that is inspiring is taken from you (losing a job, losing a relationship), in that moment you can experience extreme distress, confusion, or disappointment. As you process that grief and loss, those experiences can eventually lead to inspiration, but in the moment, they can be hard to overcome.
Isolation. Negative emotions can make us want to dissociate from others, to just be alone. A need for solitude is often accompanied by the rumination discussed above and can be helpful to some extent. However, if it turns into dysfunctional withdrawal or escapism, this shuts out many of the possible engines of inspiration.
Numbing. Avoiding or escaping difficult emotions to dull them is a barrier to feeling a full spectrum of emotions including inspiration.
Fortunately, you can constructively manage and process unpleasant or negative emotions so that you can continue to support your ongoing practice of inspiration.
Feel them. It’s important to feel unpleasant or difficult emotions when they are appropriate, such as grief, sadness, and anxiety, rather than pushing them away and denying them. Give yourself permission to fully process them in the moment, to move through the anger, fear, or loss. Experiencing them and naming them, perhaps with a friend or therapist, can help you move through them in a healthy way.
Explore them. If you don’t know why negativity has become pervasive in your life, work to find out why these emotions are so prevalent. Has something changed? Is there a theme? What information are the emotions telling you? For example, perhaps some of your core values are being denied, causing you pain—the negative emotions can help you understand this and change it.
Identify the cause. Recognize when we’re feeling negative emotions and what is causing them (such as anger caused by injustice, sadness caused by a loss, fear caused by danger). Trace back to find the source of the emotion. If you’re feeling anger, what’s the injustice? If you’re feeling sadness, what’s the loss? If you’re feeling anxiety, what’s the danger?14
Shift away from them. Developing methods to manage feelings of negativity so you can release yourself from them to allow other emotions in is called emotional agility. Susan David’s work on emotional agility suggests four steps to “unhooking” negative emotions from your evaluations and values, so you can move past them.15 They include recognizing your patterns, labeling those thoughts and emotions, accepting them, and acting on your values once you have the distance to see what’s going on. Separating your emotions from the situation is key to finding new strategies for dealing with them.
A very important note about emotions. It’s normal for everyone, adults and children alike, to experience a wide range of emotions—from joy and contentment to frustration, anxiety, and sadness.16 Sometimes individuals struggle with managing their emotions to a point where they need professional support or clinical intervention (i.e., therapy, medication). Previous suggestions, as well as approaches like social and emotional learning (SEL) programs17 and tools like Yale’s Mood Meter App,18 are helpful for people of all ages to learn strategies for being more self-aware and managing their emotions. These types of strategies and knowledge complement professional support like therapy but don’t replace it when individuals need it.
There are appropriate times and places for different types of mindsets. There are times when it can be productive or helpful to think critically, for example, while in other instances being critical can stall progress. None of these is inherently dysfunctional or bad. Our point here is that some mindsets can interfere with sustaining inspiration:
Constraint mindset. A constraint mindset focuses on limitations or challenges rather than opportunity and abundance. This type of thinking is more oriented to evaluating than seeing possibilities; it focuses on what can’t be done rather than what can. It is an inability to dream big, to visualize success. Cynicism is an example. Part of the challenge in overcoming a constraint mindset is the story you’re telling yourself. If you create a negative story about yourself, such as that you’re bad at math or you have no money, you’ll begin to believe it, others will believe it, and it can shape your emotions, decision-making, and thinking going forward.
Closed mindset. A closed mindset has a lack of openness to new and different ways of thinking or seeing things. It has a dislike of or inability to listen to and consider opposing views. A closed mind judges the self and others, going beyond observation to form opinions and having a lack of respect for the difference in values.
Fixed mindset. A fixed mindset perceives abilities and capacity as unchangeable or unchanging. There is no opportunity or capability for growth or learning beyond the current reality.19
Negative thinking. Negative thinking occurs when your thoughts are predominantly pessimistic; such thinking often accompanies bad moods. Negative thinking can originate from different sources, including
• Negative self-talk. What you tell yourself about the situation. This sets up an expectation that the outcome will not be what you wanted, that the news will be bad.
• Negativity bias. The human inclination to weight negative experiences and emotions more heavily than positive ones. It’s an adaptive function that has helped humans survive over centuries but doesn’t always serve us in modern situations.20
Values or behavioral conflict. When things we believe in are in conflict with one another or when our behavior is in conflict with our beliefs, we experience unrest in the form of cognitive dissonance. There is pressure to resolve the conflict, which pushes out opportunities for inspiration to take hold because we are so focused on resolving the conflict.
Upward social comparison. Constantly comparing ourselves unfavorably to others can lead to insecurity and negative emotions or feeling like we’re less worthy or successful than others.
Lack of direction. Diffuse or unclear objectives or purpose equates to a lack of direction or an absence of purpose and plan.
As with emotional enemies of inspiration, there are remedies to address cognitive enemies of inspiration:
Recognize the mindset. First, recognize the mindset that is getting in the way. Name it, using the previous terms or come up with your own terminology.
Assess the impact of your mindset. How are these thoughts impacting you right now (emotions, behaviors, energy)? What is the impact on how you think about yourself? What evidence do you have for these thoughts? Are they true? Can you be sure they are true?
Interrupt your pattern of thinking. Disrupt your current pattern of thinking by questioning it. Ask a friend for evidence that your current thinking is true (or not). Take a break from what you’re doing and do something positive (use your strengths). Speak out loud, or to a friend, what you’re thinking or the alternatives you are considering.
Go to your purpose, your values. Once you have disrupted your current mindset, with a clear head, go back to your purpose and values. What means the world to you? Are you being the person you want to be? Your best self? Are you thinking and acting in ways that align with your values and your purpose?
Write a new story. The field of narrative psychology has discovered that your stories “can shape your future”21 and can unknowingly support or hamper your own growth and success. However, the concept of prospection suggests that we can conceive of multiple possible futures for ourselves, different potential outcomes, from a hopeful perspective.22 Narrative is powerful in shaping our beliefs. Examine the story you’re telling yourself in your current mindset and then rewrite the story using your purpose and values-based mindset. When we craft stories for the future that are hopeful and forward thinking, they can lead to different actions toward this future.
Self-compassion. We are our own worst critics; no one else is harder on us than ourselves. To combat this tendency, we need to embrace self-compassion, says Dr. Kristin Neff.23 Self-compassion involves extending kindness and understanding to yourself rather than harsh criticism, seeing your experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than as separate and isolating, and holding those painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness rather than ruminating and overidentifying with them. Pose questions to yourself such as
• What kindness can I extend to myself right now? If I were my best friend listening to this, what would I say?
• Look at this situation from the grand scheme of things (30K-foot level). What do I see now?
• Yes, I have faults—and what are some of my strengths? Unique attributes? Positive qualities and talents? What am I grateful for?
Even when your mind is clear and positive, and you have access to positive emotions, inspiration can still be thwarted by a variety of different physical factors, such as
Overreaching commitments. Being in a comfortable secure state is the best place for learning. But when too many obligations overhelm us, we can quickly move from comfort into a panic zone, which makes it impossible to learn because we’re too busy retreating or controlling our fight, flight, or freeze instincts.
Fatigue. Poor energy management due to lack of sleep, movement, or proper nutrition can lead to fatigue. A lack of ability to change physical and emotional fatigue results in shutdown. We also make the situation worse by relying so heavily on our smartphone, resulting in too much screen time. Where physical activity can be an engine of inspiration, the reverse can hamper it.
Limited environment. A lack of exposure to new, stimulating, or interesting milieus can stifle inspiration. It can be self-imposed, by choosing to never go anywhere, or situation-imposed, such as a lack of financial resources or a physical restriction, such as an injury or incarceration.
Hedonic treadmill. The hedonic treadmill is a concept that explains how an activity that once brought lift no longer generates those positive emotions at the same levels. People become habituated to stimuli, and things we once found pleasurable become less so through overexposure. As a result, we have to work harder and diversify our experience to create the same level of positive emotions again. Our mind and body adapt to a standard and then that has to be exceeded.24
Of the three inspiration enemies, physical may actually be the easiest to address. There are a number of things you can do to refuel and shift gears with respect to your body.
Attend to your physical energy. Get more sleep, if that’s what you’ve been lacking. Or get some exercise to lift your mood. Or eat something healthy to fuel your body. (See Chapter 9 on energy management.)
Attend to your stamina. Since people experience stamina in different ways, there may be different approaches that will work for you. Knowing what your individual physical energy boosters are is step one, as well as what will have the biggest impact. Will taking a nap do more than taking a walk when you’re in need of a mood boost? Or will a nap only make you more tired and lethargic? Does the length of the nap or pace of the walk matter? You need to crack that code for yourself.
Unplug. Research suggests that screen time—computers, tablets, smartphones—interferes with sleep cycles and can distract us, making us feel more stressed and socially isolated.25 So cut the cord and read a book or reconnect face-to-face with the people in your life to lift your spirits.
Reclaim your calendar. Don’t allow your schedule to be controlled by others. Instead, choose how you spend your time. Look at your to-do list and identify which tasks are important and which are urgent—there’s a big difference. Urgent activities, such as meeting a deadline for buying concert tickets, can sometimes hijack what’s important, such as watching your child’s basketball game. Let your values guide your commitments (who and what gets your attention).
Block off untouchable time.26 This is time that you carve out for yourself that no one else can intrude on for things that are important but not urgent. This is your time for creative output or strategic thinking (and is consistent with the inspiration engine of unstructured time).
Create patterns in your schedule. Rather than approaching every day as a blank slate, establish patterns or rituals to help you get more done. For example, only read your e-mail from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. Or if you know that emergencies generally erupt around lunchtime, keep that time open to attend to what typically comes up.
Let go of unimportant tasks. There is a physical cost to an overcrowded mind, so what can you let go of to enable yourself to better focus your thoughts and energy on results? What tasks or activities can be delegated to others?
Sometimes before you can boost your level of inspiration, you need to first reduce negativity and get your mood to at least a neutral place. That requires pivoting away from enemies of inspiration. At the same time, you can be thoughtful about designing opportunities to boost your inspiration regularly through connection to other people, accountability structures or partners, and positive rituals that help you stay on track.