SYSK TRENDING - What It Means To Be Inspiring

Many people today are looking for inspiration. We all know inspiring people when we meet them, the teacher who changes your life, the boss who brings out your best, the friend who makes you believe you can do more than you ever thought possible.

But what exactly makes someone inspiring? Is it confidence, charisma, vision, or is it something much more practical and learnable? And that's why today's SYSK trending topic is What It Means to Be Inspiring. In my conversation with social psychologist Adam Galinsky, we explore the science behind

inspiration and why some people motivate others while some unintentionally push people away. We'll also look at the specific traits that make people truly inspiring and how anyone can develop them. So get ready for some fascinating insights on what inspiration really is and how you

can become more inspiring right after this. In your lifetime, there have been people who have inspired you. A parent, a teacher, a boss, a co-worker, someone who has made you feel inspired, given you that sense that you're worthy, appreciated, competent, capable and can do so much more.

So, what makes a person inspiring? Do inspiring people deliberately try to inspire others? Or is that just the kind of person they are? Do inspiring people inspire everyone?

Are they always inspiring? How can you be more inspiring? That's what Adam Galinsky is here to talk about. Adam is a social psychologist and professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business

School. He's author of a book called Inspire, the Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. Hey, Adam, welcome to something you should know. Thank you so much.

I'm so thrilled to be here. So I love this topic because I've often thought about what makes somebody inspiring and I think everybody has seen somebody, met somebody who they thought was inspiring. But I don't know that I've ever thought of, why is that?

What is it that makes them inspiring? I just know they are. And then I wonder, well, are they inspiring just to me? Or are they inspiring to the world?

So what is it? What is that thing? It's a great question. And about 20 years ago, I had an experience where I was teaching the FBI and one of the

agents started talking about a leader of his that inspired him. And it was such a remarkable moment for me because I saw everything about his body change, right? His eyes light up.

He smiled. looked wistfully and all. You could tell that this leader, for whatever they did, changed that person inside. They created that sense of wellspring of hope and possibility. At that moment I decided I wanted to study what was it about that person or about people in general

that inspire others. I started a two decade long journey in which I've asked thousands and probably tens of thousands of people, a very simple question, which is, tell me about someone that inspired you, right? And I asked them to be like a scientist. What was it about that person that filled you with that ineffable feeling?

Which I imagine most of us have felt, right? I mean, most of us have somebody in our life that inspired us to create those feelings. And so, what did you find? What I've discovered with these thousands and thousands of examples is it turns out that there are three universal

characteristics or factors that really distinguished between these people that changes inside positively And another type of leader I call them the infuriating leader that create these sort of seething cauldrons of rage and resentment inside of us And so it actually turns out it's pretty, it's a systematic and b universal.

So there's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. So what are these three universal factors?

Well, the first one is how we kind of look at the world, how we conceive and perceive the world. that being visionary. The second factor is how we kind of stand in the world, our presence, how we are in the world. And I call that being an exemplar of desired behavior. And the third factor

is how we interact with others in the world. And I call that sort of being a great mentor. And so these are the three universal factors, being visionary, being an exemplar, and being a a mentor. You know, I often wonder that the people that I find inspiring, I wonder how often, how much of the time are they inspiring? Because it would seem that it would be hard

to burn that flame continuously to always be inspiring. That doesn't seem possible. So, right? It's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. You may be inspiring today, infuriating tomorrow, right? What you do today is not going to protect you from falling to the other end of the continuum. And so we're never going to be inspiring all the time. We're

never going to reach this apotheosis of inspiring perfection. But we can strive to be more inspiring tomorrow than we were today, right? And that is, I think, the fundamental, most important insight of my research. And so what does it mean to try to be inspiring?

Because you do things like what that you may not be doing now. Well, so I think one of the other key things that my research has shown is that one of the foundational elements for being more inspiring today than your yesterday is the power of reflection, reflecting on our experiences, reflecting on important aspects of ourselves.

And so actually can go through and I can give you what is the key reflection that allows us to be more visionary or more exemplary or a better mentor because I think these provide profound insights for how we can become more inspiring. So let me tell you about a study that we did, which I think is going to have a big

impact on listeners. So if any of you out there have ever lost a job, you know how demoralizing it is, how humiliating it is. I lost my first post-college job three months after being hired.

I was fired, right? And I was just so demoralized. So we did this study with the Swiss government.