A recipe for creating inspiration in a time of change

If you want to create something new in a time of change, your first task is to inspire yourself and other people to long to do what needs to be done:

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 this is with Story. Because human beings are hardwired for stories: we connect with them, engage with them, and remember them in ways that simply don’t happen when we receive the same information in other forms.

And the best way to do that is by creating your own unique combination of the seven basic ingredients of any Story:

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, ideals, or values it upholds) and
7. Asking your audience to make a choice: Will they go with you?

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 succeed. And the less you will need to ‘assign tasks’ or ‘drum up people to collect wood’ — because you and the inspired people around you will be longing to do that themselves.

Creating an inspiring Story is yet another step to becoming antifragile in a time of change. 

Are you and the people around you longing for the project you are working on to succeed? Do you need to articulate a better story about what you are doing? Or is there something else that you are longing to do instead?

Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times 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