A recipe for creating inspiration in times of change

If you want to create something new in this time of change, your first priority is to inspire yourself and others to long to make it happen:

As the poet and pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry put it:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

The best way to achieve that is with Story.

Human beings are hardwired for stories: we connect with them, engage with them, and remember them in ways that just don’t happen when we receive the same information in other forms.

And although every story is different, the best way to tell an inspiring Story is by creating your own unique combination of seven core ingredients:

1. The problem you want to address
2. The future you want to create
3. The first steps to get there 
4. Articulated in a way that is meaningful for your audience 
5. Expressed authentically by you 
6. Explaining why your vision matters  (the principles, values, or ideals it upholds) and
7. Asking your audience to make a choice: Will they go with you?

(There’s an example here.)

The more successfully you can combine these seven basic building blocks, the more you and the people around you will long to make your project to happen. And the less you will need to ‘assign tasks’ or ‘drum up people to collect wood’.

Creating an inspiring Story, for yourself and others, is yet another step to becoming antifragile in this time of change. 

Are you and the people around you longing for the project you are working on to succeed? What would happen if your project had a more inspiring story to describe it? Or is there perhaps something even more inspiring that you are longing to work on instead?

Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.

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(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also need to do the practice.)

Photo By Bruno Girin via StockPholio.net