8 WAYS TO INSPIRE OTHERS

By Mike King   -    Learn This.ca

Have you ever looked up to someone or admired something about another person that really inspired you? Well, there are certain things about a person's character that enable them to inspire others, and there are also a number of steps you can do yourself to help inspire others. These are some of the steps you can use to inspire others.

Find and Know What You Love

Inspiring others is a difficult task. The success rate of it is incredibly low and you will experience many failures if you look at every person you hope to inspire compared to how many people you actually do inspire. Some huge seminars and motivational speakers make a real lasting difference in only a few people's lives in as many as a thousand attendees. If you look at those same odds for yourself, you might easily be discouraged if you hope to inspire others in something that you don't truly love to do. If you love something dearly, however, you won't care how successful you are inspiring others and will continue to persevere no matter what you face along the way. You may find that some people would rather make fun of you or your ideas, disagree and argue or even take pride in your own failures instead of being inspired. None of that matters with things you love because you will continue to do it anyway. So having that depth, that love and passion for something will protect you from all the failures before even taking any steps to inspire others.

Can you make the most of failures and continue to drive your passions? Will you continue trying to inspire others if you don't first succeed? These are the questions you must know you can handle and say yes to if you are working to inspire others with something that you love. If you're not able to take that on, then stop right now. Otherwise, embrace your passions and get on with inspiring others to find and discover those same things!

Think Big and Noble

Once you know you have something you value and have great passion for, start thinking about how big you really can make it. How many people could you potentially inspire and what are some of the ways you can impact more and more people. Don't look to inspire one person, look to inspire a hundred! This goes back to the success rate here as you will likely not succeed with working to inspire at a very small level, you need to think bigger and have many people available to inspire. Perhaps it is your group of friends or colleagues. Explore how you can take it past that group, invite others and have them grow your influence beyond your initial ideas for inspiration.

Thinking big is not only about inspiring more people but also about the impact of inspiring others . Don't settle or compromise to inspire others into simple actions or minor changes in their life, aim to change everything! Look to inspire in many areas instead of just one. Think big about the impact you might have and this will give you a much better chance of leaving some kind of impression. If you promote 100 ways for someone to change and they take on just one, remember you have still changed them! Another useful way to inspire others is to work at inspiring some noble idea or practice. It's much easier to gain attention, followers and support for noble actions than it is for individual gain or what some might think are more selfish reasons. An offer to change that has an important impact on the world, society or large group is far more attractive to onlookers than some short lived personal gain. So keep those areas of influence as big as possible!

Express With Passion

Passion is something you must have and be willing to express it if you really want to inspire others. You can gain a lot of influence just by showing that you are excited and passionate about a topic. You make it much harder on yourself to inspire others if you are boring, not excited or enthusiastic about your topic. Passion inspires all on its own just because of the curiosity it creates for why someone loves something so much and to understand what is it about that thing they feel so confident in. Practice It Yourself

Practice It Yourself

You need to practice or be involved in what you want to inspire others to do. It's the age old saying of practice what you preach and it holds true for anyone trying to inspire others. So, while you do need to practice it as some level, it's important to understand that you don't have to be an expert in order to inspire others. Just the act of doing it with passion is what is needed. Ultimately, if you really do want to inspire others to do something then it should be part of your life. Most people who do enjoy something will get better at it as well so this is a useful just on its own to be more experienced with your topic or area of inspiration.

Welcome Others

If you want to inspire others to do something, this is the step that most people fail miserably at. You must welcome others and even invite them specifically and individually to join you or to start themselves. Just seeing or hearing about a topic is not enough and so extending a personal welcome to others can be a major help for leading them to take the first step. Once they are involved, keeping in touch and extending that welcome even longer will ensure the welcome is felt at a personal level.

Encourage and Help Followers

The best part of inspiring others is to have interest in not only what you do, but to also recognize your followers and have an opportunity to see them grow and change as well. Offering your help to them, teach them things you've learned along the way, talk about your failures and achievements and ask them questions about their own progress and findings in new things they are trying. You can carry your inspiration a lot longer if you are involved with your followers growing as well. Help them to take similar steps you did in your achievements and always encourage them to keep trying! Look at what other help and resources might be available and share anything you can to make things easier for others. If you can reduce a few trouble areas or help others avoid some common pitfalls, you will bridge the gap of fear a lot easier for people on the verge of taking that step towards some new initiative. The easier you can make it with a clear guide and help system, the better!

Be Consistent

Consistency in actions, knowledge and at least some level in achievement is important to inspire others as well. If you constantly change your methods, your interests and your areas in which you hope to inspire others, you will have little success. People want to see and associate your results with a plan that they can also follow to achieve the same thing. You need to demonstrate this consistency through your actions but you can also do this by using story telling for some inspirational message. Stories let you repeat and show past experiences and they can easily be repeated or shared with others who were not directly involved and they are still a great inspiration to people wanting to know of personal experience with the new topic. Use stories that embrace consistency so that people will see that what you have to say and teach is something that will last. Without that, it's very tough to inspire others.

Stay Positive

Inspiring others is a very tough job and comes with no shortage of challenges, failures, criticism and negative people and attitudes to impact progress. To get past this, you must stay positive, expect some failures yet still work past them and present that optimism to others no matter what the circumstance. Doubt is very powerful and if you show any of it, you can easily destroy any small influence you might have instilled in a person.

Holding a positive outlook is also something you must maintain over time as sometimes inspiring others takes just a few minutes, but it can talk weeks, months or even years to slowly impact them. Any doubt or negative attitude you show will move them backwards much farther than if they simply had that themselves. Keep in mind that potential followers are looking up to you and will be carefully examining all of your actions and comments before they decide to give in and follow your inspiration.