The saying goes, “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” Leverage can be a bad thing when it refers to manipulating people into doing what we want. Today, though, I want to talk about a different kind of leverage. With good leverage, we can do a whole lot more than we can without. Good leverage with people has to do with inspiration instead of manipulation.
Inspiring people is actually a lot easier than you might think. A 5 yr old learning to ride a bicycle is just naturally inspiring. I’m sure a 5 yr old could tell us the story of falling down, scraping his knees, and feeling frustrated and angry. Meanwhile the bike is taunting him, “You’ll never ride me. You’re too uncoordinated.” Yet the 5 yr old gets back up and tries again. And again. And again. And again. Each time the 5 yr old falls, bloodied, and hurting, he gets back up and tries again. Until one day, Triumph!
If we want to influence someone, inspire them, or pass on wisdom, the best way is to tell our stories. But our stories have to be interesting. And here is where most people “fall down.” They say, “I don’t have any interesting stories.” But I don’t believe them.
I believe everyone has inspirational stories. It’s just that most of us think our inspirational moments are the ones we should keep secret and hidden away. We tend to treat our inspirational moments in one of 3 ways:
- A moment to get past, so we can close that chapter of our life
- A moment telling us we need to get better to avoid a re-experience
- A moment teaching us wisdom that should be shared with the world
Let’s look at the 5 yr old’s story for a bit. This has a lot of the common elements of many inspirational stories. First the story is embarrassing to the 5 yr old. How many times did he fall down? I’m sure its too many to count. Second, for the 5 yr old, this was a traumatic experience. Third, emotions were running high. And except for the triumph at the end, this was a pretty crappy experience for the 5 yr old.
And that’s the thing. Most of our inspirational moments are our crappy experiences. They’re the time we fell into addiction, the time we found out we have cancer, the time we lost a loved one, the time when we did something we’re ashamed of. It’s these types of experiences that we can leverage to move unmovable people. The first step is to find the wisdom buried in the experience.
When you’ve had crappy experiences, what do you do with them? Do you hide them? Do you beat yourself up and say, “I’ve got to get better so this doesn’t happen again!” Or do you leverage these experiences and use them to change the world?
If you want to dig more into this topic, I invite you to join us Wednesday, July 1st for a free tele-seminar. The tele-seminar is about redeeming your tough experiences. You can register on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/events/732215490222957/. Or you can register by phone: (916) 783-2622.
