I have always paid attention to the people who inspire me. Some of them are well known and have reached thousands or millions of people. Someone who can change the way a great many people think about themselves, their lives or the world has done something genuinely valuable.
Others on my list are people almost nobody has heard of. They may have inspired one person, a handful of people or a team of twelve. Their influence operates on a much smaller scale, but that does not make the effect on the people they reach any less significant.
What interested me was what these very different people had in common. The scale of their influence might be completely different, but what reaches us seems remarkably similar.
Famous People Who Inspired Me
Some of the people on my list will be familiar. Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Viktor Frankl, Carl Jung, Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela are all there. They inspired me for different reasons. In some, I saw extraordinary commitment to something beyond themselves. In others, it was the courage to hold to a conviction when doing so came at enormous personal cost. Others changed the way I understood myself or what human beings are capable of.
Philippe Petit came onto my list in a different way. His walk between the towers of the World Trade Center had taken place in 1974, but I only came across the story many years later.
What struck me was the sheer confidence it must have taken to step out onto that wire. Courageous, certainly, although part of me also thought it was completely reckless.
Later, when I watched him talking about what he had done, I found myself thinking about it again. It wasn’t the stunt itself that stayed with me so much as the level of belief he must have had in his own ability to carry it through.
What We Are Actually Responding To
Simon Sinek, in Start with Why, describes a similar idea: that we often respond not simply to what people or organisations do, but to the purpose and beliefs behind what they do. I find that a useful lens for understanding my own list, even though inspiration is clearly more complex than any single model.
That made sense of my own list. I was not inspired because I wanted to reproduce their achievements. I was not going to walk between two skyscrapers, lead a country or follow any of their paths. What I recognised were beliefs, values and ways of approaching life that I already held or wanted to live more fully myself.
When I looked across all of them, the same seven qualities kept appearing. Not every person showed every one of them in the same way, and some brought particular ones into much sharper focus than others.
Seven Qualities I Found in the People Who Inspired Me
1. They Can See Something Different
The people who inspire me tend to see a possibility that other people may not yet see. It isn’t simply ambition. They care about what they believe could be different, and that affects the choices they make, even when circumstances or other people suggest they should do something else.
2. It Isn’t Only About Them
There is usually something in what they are doing that reaches beyond themselves. Personal ambition or reward may be part of it, but they are not the whole point. Their work contributes to something that matters beyond their own success, and I think that is part of what gives it meaning.
3. Commitment and Dedication
A vision means very little without the willingness to stay with it. Inspirational people keep going through setbacks, criticism and the long stretches when very little seems to be happening. Their commitment grows out of knowing why what they are doing matters.
4. Unswayed by Popular Opinion
Inspirational people are often willing to think independently and hold to something they believe is right, even when it is unpopular.
That does not make them automatically right. Gandhi, Lincoln, King, Jung and Mandela had their own flaws, contradictions and decisions we might question. Being inspiring does not require somebody to be an angel, and we make a mistake when we turn them into one. What inspires me is their willingness to think for themselves and, when something mattered enough, to stand apart from prevailing opinion.
5. Acting Despite Fear
I used to think of inspiring people as fearless. I do not any more. What inspires me is seeing somebody act despite fear, particularly when the outcome is uncertain or the consequences matter. They do not wait to feel completely confident or safe before moving forward.
6. They Trust Their Own Judgement
The people who inspire me tend to listen to other people without handing their judgement over to them. They can take advice, reconsider and even change their minds, but they don’t need everybody else to approve before they act.
For me, this is where the connection with the Higher Self becomes particularly clear: learning to listen to what we genuinely think is right rather than automatically following the loudest voice around us.
7. They Are Willing to Try
Finally, there is the quality Philippe Petit made me see particularly clearly: the willingness to attempt something others might consider impossible.
Petit looked at the space between two towers and imagined walking across it. Most of us will never do anything remotely like that, but we can recognise something of the same instinct on a much smaller scale: the willingness to think beyond our current limits and sometimes attempt something before we know for certain that we can do it.
The Same Qualities, Closer to Home
I drew those seven qualities from people whose names are widely known, but there is nothing about them that requires fame or a large audience. Once I started looking closer to home, I could see many of the same qualities in people around me. I also began to notice other things that inspire us much more personally: kindness, courage, compassion and love.
Kindness
When my marriage ended, I had nowhere to go, and a friend took me in with my small children. We stayed for three months. She was single and independent, and having a family suddenly land in the middle of her life must have disrupted it enormously. She never asked how long it was going to go on and never mentioned what it was costing her, then or since. We have been firm friends ever since. What inspired me was the kindness and generosity of simply making room for us when we needed it, without making us feel like a burden.
Courage
Another friend was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Faced with something most of us can barely imagine, he went on to build a remarkable network of support for other people living with cancer and for those around them. I saw courage in him, certainly, but I also saw several of those seven qualities. He took what was happening in his own life and turned some of it outwards. There was vision, commitment and something aimed beyond himself, and there was daring in it too, because starting something on that scale while he was ill was not the obvious thing to do. The scale may have been different from the people on my original list, but some of what inspired me was remarkably similar.
Love
And then there is a relative of mine who has spent her life caring for her daughter, who has severe learning disabilities. There has been no single dramatic act to point to, just years of loving, advocating, adapting and being there. What inspires me about her is love, but when I look again, I can see commitment and dedication too. Perhaps we notice those qualities differently when they are lived quietly over a lifetime rather than attached to a public achievement.
These people have not inspired millions, but that is not the point. They have inspired the people whose lives they have touched. Sometimes it is through the same qualities we recognise in people whose influence reaches much further. Sometimes it is expressed through kindness, compassion, courage or love at exactly the moment another person needs it.
The scale is different. The capacity to inspire is not. What reached me in my friend’s spare room is the same thing that reaches me in a life I have only read about, and it is available to any of us on an ordinary day.
Why Any of It Reaches Us
So why do these people affect us? I don’t think it is simply because we admire what they have done. Something in the way they live strikes a chord with something already in us.
When we see somebody act courageously, stay with something that matters or be kind when kindness costs them something, perhaps we recognise our own capacity to do the same.
That is why inspiration can feel different from admiration. We can admire someone without wanting to change anything about our own lives. Inspiration makes something feel possible for us too.
Don’t Change The World, Change Your World
As I was reading about inspirational people, I asked a mentor how any of this was supposed to help someone like me. Most of the people who inspired me had changed the world, and next to them my own patch looked far too small to matter.
He told me not to concentrate on the world. Apply your beliefs, principles and values to your world, he said, and the rest will take care of itself.
I understand that rather differently now. We do not need to set out to inspire anybody. We need to live what we believe, in the part of the world that is ours, and we don’t get to decide how much influence or inspiration that evokes. That is a relief rather than a limitation, because it leaves us with the only part we can actually do anything about.
Inspirational people are often willing to think independently and hold to something they believe is right, even when it is unpopular
Try This: Name the Quality, and Say It
Think of two people who have inspired you: one well-known and one you have actually met.
Which of the seven qualities did you see in each of them? Add your own if something important is missing. My list came from my life; yours may be different.
Then, if you can, tell the person you know. One sentence is enough. Tell them what they did and why it mattered to you.
They may have no idea they affected you. Telling them may not change anything, but it gives them the chance to know that something they did mattered.
Once we understand what inspires us, it is tempting to try to create the same effect in other people. But the harder we try to be inspiring, the more easily inspiration turns into performance. What we can do is create the conditions in which inspiration becomes possible, and that is what we turn to next.
Articles on Inspiring Self and Others
Inspiring Self and Others: Living in a Way That Calls Forth the Best in Everyone
- The Difference Between Motivation and Inspiration
- What You Are Really Chasing Is a Feeling
- Characteristics of Inspirational People
- Why Trying to Inspire Never Works
- What Happens When Nobody Needs To Win
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