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.
When I looked more closely, seven qualities appeared again and again, and these are the ones we will explore here.
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.
Their achievements have almost nothing in common, but when I looked more closely, many of the qualities behind them did.
Philippe Petit came onto my list rather differently. In 1974, he walked a wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Centre and stayed out there for the better part of an hour. I had read about him years before, but it was not until I later watched him talking about what he had done that I really thought about why it affected me.
What We Are Actually Responding To
Simon Sinek, in Start With Why, gets at another part of what I was beginning to see. He argues that the people and organisations who inspire us work from the inside out. We respond not simply to what they do, but to what they believe and why they are doing it.
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, 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
Their lives and achievements were very different, but something in the way they approached them was remarkably similar. These are the seven qualities I found.
1. A Deeply Held Vision
The people who inspire me tend to have a deeply held vision of something that could be different. It is more than ambition; it comes from an inner understanding of what matters and what they believe is possible. That vision guides their choices, even when circumstances or other people suggest they should do something else.
2. Benefit to the Greater Good
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 anymore. 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. Inner and Self-Directed
Inspirational people tend to have a strong internal compass. They listen to advice but do not continually look outside themselves for permission, approval or reassurance. Ultimately, their direction comes from within.
For me, this is where the connection with the higher self becomes particularly clear: that quieter part of us that knows what matters beneath the opinions and expectations we have absorbed.
7. Aspirational and Daring
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 the quality behind it is available to us: 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, and 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
Looking back over these articles, inspiration is where much of what we have covered becomes visible. The higher self gives us something deeper to live from, self-awareness helps us recognise what gets in the way, and unity consciousness reminds us that how we live affects more than just ourselves. Inspiration is what happens when we see some of that being lived by another person.
I think what happens in us at that moment is a kind of recognition. When we watch somebody act from a deeply held vision, stay with something long after the enthusiasm has gone, or be kind at real cost, we are not looking at a quality we do not have. We are seeing one we do have and had stopped using.
That is why inspiration feels so different from admiration. Admiration keeps a person at a distance and leaves us roughly where we were. Inspiration moves something, because a part of us has just been reminded of itself.
Years ago, 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 how far that travels is not something we get to decide. That is a relief rather than a limitation, because it leaves us with the only part we can actually do anything about.
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 did it, and being told is very often what makes somebody do it again.
Where We Go Next
Once we understand what inspires us, it is tempting to try to inspire others. But inspiration rarely works when we aim directly at it.
What we can do is create the conditions in which inspiration becomes possible, and that is what I want to look at next.