Inspirational Presence. Jeff Evans
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Inspiration is a word that is used in many areas and in many contexts, but it’s not that often associated with leadership. Motivation is a more commonly used word when referring to leadership and management roles. Each of you will have your own preliminary definition or association with inspiration and probably can recall times when you found a person or an event or even a sunset particularly inspiring. We all know the feeling of being inspired and the many and varied ways that the word is used. For this book and this model, however, we want to condense it to a specific definition and a particular usage.
Let us start our exploration of the difference between the energy of inspiration and the energy of motivation with some definitions. The main entry for inspiration in the dictionary is “ecstasy,” which means to “stand outside the ordinary self.” Synonyms for inspiration are blessedness, bliss, delight, delirium, ebullience, elation, enthusiasm, exaltation, fervor, gladness, happiness, joy, and rapture. The main entry for motivation is “excitement.” Its synonyms are action, activity, ado, agitation, drama, enthusiasm, excitation, fever, flurry, furor, movement, stimulation, turmoil, and wildness. These are very different words that describe widely dissimilar emotional states. We can see that inspiration has connotations that allow us to be still within ourselves and in an inspired place. Motivation, with its orientation toward action, is more what we experience when we are bursting with energy and can’t wait to do something.
Most of us have experienced the meeting or event that is filled with motivational techniques. We get the bright lights, the loud music, the cheering from the stage. Invariably, these events will have us on our feet, clapping and making plenty of notes about what we will do next. These events can find resonance within us and spur us to action. This sort of energy definitely has its place. It jars us out of our seats, out of our comfort zone, and it charges our adrenaline. It has us making lists and setting goals. This is the key scene of so many feel-good movies, in which we see the rousing and moving half-time speech in the locker room of the big game. It is the speech that stirs our blood, bringing tears to our eyes and power to our limbs, leaving us pulsing with vitality and a renewed sense of determination and purpose. We breathe more freely, and our thoughts are focused. This is the energy of motivation that gets athletes to turn the game around in the critical second half.
But what about the other times? What about the early mornings when no one else is around? What about the quiet places in the day when we are looking for something else or the next place to direct our attention and energy? These times call for inspiration, drawn from deep within ourselves. It is the energy that we pull up from our deepest, most connected places. It sustains us through good times as well as adversity. We find it possible to be motivated without inspiration following. It is impossible, however, to be inspired without its being followed by motivation. To be truly inspired demands action.
We can take an even deeper meaning of inspiration—that it is the divine breath of life. For our purposes, we need leaders who understand their connection to causes greater than themselves. We need leaders who can connect with the people around them in deep and profound ways, coupling the drive of human passion with the wisdom and intelligence of strategic thinking. We need leaders whose stories can inform us as well as guide us. We need leaders who touch our hearts and awaken our minds. We need leaders who have found their inspiration. These leaders understand the ultimate divine breath of life—to live in the ebb and flow of a force that is greater than one’s self; to connect to a purpose that is higher than one’s self. This sort of inspiration, coupled with openness and transparency, is the root of inspirational presence.
LEADERS WITH INSPIRATIONAL PRESENCE
Our world needs leaders with inspirational presence, who are connected to a greater truth for their own direction. These leaders, when engaged, are transparent, authentic, and present, and they lead from a place that is outside of their ordinary self. They exhibit a style that is uniquely different, that is noticeable from a distance.
One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is “What do I have to do to be inspirational?” The answer to this is so simple that it sounds flippant: “Be inspired.” This is the first place of leadership. Each of us has to find the thing in life that really turns us on, that lights up our eyes, that makes us want to leap out of bed in the morning because we can’t wait to be involved with it. We find our passion in the middle of this space of caring, and we learn that our actions produce results, and create things that we can love. At a basic level, we learn to operate from a place of love that is in action. When we see people who have this energy flowing through them, we will see it in their eyes. We will hear it in their voices. We will feel it through their actions.
We have a choice as leaders, whether we will spend our time trying to get other people to do things and see things in a certain way, or to generally accomplish goals that are of our own making. When we look at leaders who have found their inspiration and have connected in that deep way of being and knowing, we see that they are on a journey and are setting their own pace. These people truly lead by creating the spiritual, emotional, and cognitive journey toward their highest aspirations. They do not propel others in that direction. They compel others to want the same things. That is the deep and profound difference of this leadership style.
The people around this type of leader pick up this energy and literally begin to feel the inspiration as well. They start to respond and move their energy in a like direction and look to their “emotional leader” as a bellwether for what is important on the horizon and how to respond to situations in the here and now.
LEADERSHIP AND THE LIMBIC SYSTEM
Here is where we begin to understand the biomechanical aspect of inspirational presence. Our limbic system is a system of organs, nerves, glands, and portions of our brain that function together to govern our emotions. The significant feature for leadership is that it is an open-loop system—that means that it can take input from outside of the system. In a social group, the interaction of a group of people’s limbic systems is referred to as social contagion (from the same root as the word contagious), one of the most pronounced and obvious being laughter. If we go to a comedy club and sit in a room full of people who are laughing, the show likely will seem uproariously funny. If we were to watch the same routine on television, however, we probably would not have the same response because we would be missing the group experience of shared emotion.
This example shows how people experience contagion that is spread across a crowd. There are many different ways that contagion can be played out, although some of the most widely known are somewhat negative—mass hysteria, riots, and other greatly heightened group emotional reactions. The positive effect is felt in group meditations, peace marches, or other times when people share a collective intention and expand on a shared positive emotion. When we move into the same physical space and share emotional experiences, we see the effects of contagion.
We know that we humans connect through the open loops of our limbic systems, as we send and receive energy to everyone and everything around us. It is easy to know, from an intuitive sense, that we actually experience other people’s energy and their emotional states, and we can find ourselves influenced by others around us. Most people can relate to having been with another person whose energy and emotional state was so uplifting that they began to feel uplifted as well. Similarly, most people can relate to spending time around a person who is depressed, soon finding their own energy dwindling to match the other person’s energy.
This sort of empathic response has a deep physiological origin. To truly understand what is happening, it is helpful to remember that modern people have evolved from primeval packs and tribes. The original social unit was quite small, and early humans lived together to survive. Our earliest survival instincts are embedded deeply within a social structure. This survives in today’s family unit, where we have a basic system of interdependency into which most of us are born. This structure is literally part of our physiology, as our nervous system has developed in such a way as to take advantage of others around us for protection, companionship, and security.
Our brains have evolved