A few years ago, I was working with a coaching client who was explaining why she had moved on from a group of people, and she was feeling guilty about it. I listened, asked a few questions and then reassured her that she had nothing to feel guilty about. She went quiet. Then she changed the subject, and we spent the rest of the session somewhere else entirely.
It took me a while to work out what had gone wrong, because nothing I had said was untrue or unkind. The problem was that I had decided, without asking her, where she ought to end up.
In doing that, I had cut short the process she needed to go through for herself. I had given her my conclusion before she had reached her own. And although we might have arrived at exactly the same place, I had robbed her of the relief that would have come from discovering for herself that she had nothing to feel guilty about.
I have thought about that conversation many times since. It changed my coaching practice for the better, and taught me something important about inspiration. We cannot shortcut somebody else’s way to it.
There Is No Inspiration Formula
After coaching hundreds of people, I have come to believe that inspiring another person is not something we can aim at. The moment we set out to be inspiring, we risk performing. We are trying to produce an effect in someone else, when the very thing we are trying to produce can only happen within them. Every person is different, and only they have access to whatever connects them with that inner state.
In The Difference Between Motivation and Inspiration, I wrote that motivation has to be topped up and inspiration does not. This is the other half of that argument.
Motivation can be applied from the outside, which is both why it works and why it eventually runs down. Inspiration is not a stronger version of motivation. It happens inside another person, or it does not happen at all.
We may help create the conditions for it. We may ask the question that opens something up, share an idea that stays with them, or simply give them enough space to hear themselves think. But the inspiration itself is theirs. We are not the ones doing it.
What People Pick Up from Us
We take in a great deal about each other before we have properly heard the words. Tone, expression, timing and attention all tell us something. Tell someone to take their time while glancing at your watch, and they will believe the glance.
Our emotional state travels too. We tend to settle around someone who is genuinely calm and become uneasy around someone who is anxious, even when they are trying not to show it. Researchers describe this through emotional contagion and co-regulation.
This matters because we cannot transmit a state we do not have. If we are trying hard to lift, persuade or inspire someone, that effort may be part of what they pick up.
When Helping Gets in the Way
This is where good intentions can backfire. When we want somebody to feel better, move forward or see something differently, we tend to do one of four things.
We advise before we have really understood, which means we have solved the problem as we heard it in the first minute rather than the one they have been living with for months. Then we fix, which can carry the unintended message that there is something wrong with them. We perform, hoping our enthusiasm or example will somehow transfer, when what performing actually asks for is admiration. Or we please, managing their response rather than allowing them to have it.
I have done all four, and none of them makes us bad at helping. The problem is simply that we have started doing something to the other person rather than being with them while they find their own way.
We can do much the same to ourselves. Then we prescribe solutions before understanding why we feel stuck, deciding the problem is discipline and setting the alarm half an hour earlier, while the actual reason goes unexamined. We turn ourselves into improvement projects, which is exhausting and rests on the assumption that there was something wrong with us to begin with. We perform the things that look like progress and quietly avoid what really matters.
The fourth one is the hardest to catch. Sometimes we protect the version of ourselves we would prefer to believe rather than look at what is actually true, and because protecting it can feel like self-respect, we rarely think to question it. It is far easier to notice in somebody else than in ourselves.
In both directions, the mistake is the same: we are trying to manufacture an outcome that can only emerge from within.
What That Means When We Feel Flat
In What You Are Really Chasing Is a Feeling, I wrote about the flatness that can arrive when something that used to matter no longer does. Our instinct is often to find something that will make us feel inspired again: a new plan, a video, a book or a goal.
Sometimes it works for a while. But if we have to keep topping it up, we are back in motivation.
I have come to think we cannot force our own inspiration any more than we can force somebody else’s. What we can do is create better conditions for it.
Creating the Conditions
Much of what I have written about in this series comes back to this.
Understanding unity consciousness helps us stop needing somebody else to be wrong. A great deal of what makes us tighten in a difficult conversation is the need to come out of it correct, and once that need goes, so does most of what the other person can feel coming off us.
Self-awareness lets us notice our reactions before acting on them. That noticing is a matter of practice rather than insight, and the small gap it opens between feeling something and doing something about it is where all of our choices actually live.
The higher self gives us somewhere other than fear to respond from. Our first response is usually the frightened one, and it is rarely the response we would choose if we waited a moment longer.
And love becomes much easier when we are no longer defending ourselves. A good deal of unkindness is defence of one kind or another, so when there is nothing to defend, much of it simply never arrives.
Underneath all of them is alignment, which is whether the way we are living reflects what actually matters to us. When there is a gap between what we say we value and how we actually spend our week, other people read that gap in the same way they read the glance at the watch. We feel it ourselves too, as a low background discomfort that is easy to mistake for tiredness.
When I feel flat now, I am less inclined to ask what is wrong with me. I am more interested in where I might be living against something I care about.
The closer those things come together- what we value, what we believe, what we say and what we do- the less we have to manufacture. That closeness is congruence, and congruence is the thing that actually travels between people. It is what we are reading when somebody strikes us as genuine, and it cannot be produced to order, because there is nothing to produce. Other people feel it, but more importantly, so do we.
What We Are Getting Out of The Way Of
So, if we stop advising, fixing and supplying the answer, what happens instead?
We give the other person room to hear themselves think. Most of us rarely have conversations where nobody is steering us towards a conclusion. When we do, we can find ourselves saying things we did not even know we thought.
It also gives our own inner guidance a chance to be heard. I have written more about this in When Intuition Speaks, but the point here is simple: it is much harder to hear our own voice when everybody else is telling us what they think we should do.
And this is where inspiration can emerge. An idea we arrive at for ourselves has a different energy from one we have been persuaded to accept. It is ours. It fits what we know about our own life, and nobody has to keep reminding us why it matters.
That is what I got wrong with my coaching client. We might well have reached the same conclusion, but I got there first and handed it to her. In doing so, I took away the opportunity for her to discover it for herself, and the relief and confidence that might have come with that.
The same is true when we rush to give ourselves an answer. Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is stop talking over the quieter part of us that already knows.
What My Own Children Taught Me
I wrote briefly in Living From Unity Consciousness about the effect of labelling my children. When one of them was going through a difficult period, I began describing him by his behaviour. He was difficult. He never listened. I thought I was describing what I could see, but somewhere along the way the behaviour had become the person. What changed was not him initially. It was me.
I knew I was repeating a pattern I had grown up with and seen all around me. Luckily, my own intuition woke up and stopped me seeing a difficult child and started seeing a kind child who was having a difficult time. I did not praise him into changing or tell him who he ought to be. I simply began responding to the person I could see underneath the behaviour. As a result, he responded from there too.
I do not think I inspired him. I think I stopped reinforcing something that was getting in his way and made room for something else to emerge.
Perhaps that is much closer to what inspiring another person actually means. We do not put something into them that was not there before. Sometimes we simply stop getting in the way of what is already there.
Try This: Stay a Little Longer
The next time somebody tells you about something difficult, resist the urge to make it better. Do not advise, reassure or look for the positive. Just stay with them a little longer. If you need to say something, ask about what you do not yet understand.
Notice what happens in you too. Often it is our own discomfort with somebody else’s distress that makes us want to fix it.
Then try the same thing with yourself. The next time you feel flat, do not immediately decide that you need more discipline, a better plan or something to motivate you. Stay with it long enough to ask what is really going on.
It is the same practice in both directions: not rushing in with an answer can make room for something more useful to emerge.
Where We Go Next
So far, I have looked at inspiration between individuals. But something interesting happens in groups: it can spread.
One person can change the atmosphere of a room without deliberately trying to change anyone. So what happens when that spreads through a team or a group? And why do groups driven by fear need so much more effort to keep them moving?
That is what I want to look at next.