Monthly Archives: January 2019

Share Your Vision by Leading Down the Inspiration Pathway

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Never static, vision is always evolving. Like a sequence of smaller mountains that give view to larger mountains on reaching the summit, today’s new accomplishments give view to tomorrow’s possibilities.

Vision is a living language: a treasure chest of phrases, ideas, metaphors, and stories. The beauty of a treasure chest like this is that your whole team can put words and dreams into it, and the entire leadership can pick ideas and stories out of it.

What does your vision treasure chest contain? Does it need some more loot inside in order for you to articulate your vision in powerful and captivating ways?

THE QUICK SUMMARY – The Inspiration Code by Kristi Hedges

Great leaders inspire action with their words. They spark enthusiasm and commitment. With a single conversation, they can change the direction of someone’s life.

Everyone wants to be the kind of leader who energizes and mobilizes others yet too few are. Why is it so challenging to crack the code?

Executive coach Kristi Hedges spent years studying exactly what inspiring leaders do differently. Informed by quantitative research and thousands of responses from leaders at all levels, she reveals that inspiring communication isn’t about grand gestures. Instead, those who motivate us most do a few things routinely, consistently, and intentionally.

Eye opening and accessible, The Inspiration Code dispels common myths about how leaders communicate and guides them in cultivating qualities that authentically excite.

Inspired companies need inspirational leaders. Learn to unlock motivation, lift people’s’ sights, and lead them into the future.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION – Lead Down the Inspiration Pathway

A vision should never be designed to be read. What would have happened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech if he made it a PowerPoint presentation, or decided to just send out flyers?

People do not follow words – they follow you!

The vision cannot be separated from the vision caster, and the vision caster cannot separate his message from his life as a model.

Communicating your vision with clarity and inspiration can be accomplished, but you’ve got to move – you need to lead others down the inspiration pathway.

Inspiration Pathway conversations happen when we communicate in a way that is present, personal, passionate, and purposeful. These four factors greatly enhance our inspirational effect.

I call this model a “path” because it’s a passage with movement, both for the one inspiring and the one being inspired.

When we are inspiring, we are:

Present: We’re focused on the person in front of us, not distracted by the swirl of day, visibly stressed, or beholden to our agenda. We keep an open mind and let conversations flow. People who inspire us are both physically and mentally available to us. They focus on us. They give us the gift of time, and just as important, the gift of their attention.

Personal: We’re authentic and real, and listen generously. We notice what’s true about others and help them find their potential. Authenticity seems to fly in the face of the impassiveness we’ve been trained to adopt at work. But people look to you to see how much you care, and this shapes how much they will care.

Passionate: We infuse energy, and manage this as one of our greatest tools. We blend logic and emotion, and show conviction through our presence. People who are passionate enthusiasts for what they do create passion in others.

Purposeful: We are intentional. We are willing to serve as role models and engage in courageous discussions about purpose. A purpose that ignites us is personal. It’s less about a vision outside of us, and more about the vision we possess inside. Helping someone find that internal spark of purpose, or reignite it, is a transformational act.

Kristi Hedges, The Inspiration Code

A NEXT STEP

In order to lead others down the inspiration pathway, you will need to prepare yourself first. Calendar your next visionary presentation; it could even be your message this Sunday! Set aside two-three hours in an off-site location, get comfortable, and work through the author’s four elements of inspiration by thinking through and implementing the following:

Present

  • When we give another person our full attention versus our divided attention, the conversation changes. To be fully present to the conversation, eliminate distractions, use a reflective pause, get curious, and show receptive body language.
  • When we’re in a state of overwhelm, we’re not inspiring anyone. People’s natural instinct is to distance themselves from someone who seems frenetic. Challenge your current assumptions before jumping to try new strategies.
  • We can’t open someone else’s mind if ours is closed. When you cultivate an open mind, we create a learning space that allows others to expand their own thinking.

Personal

  • Though counterintuitive, showing authenticity is something we can work on. We’re adaptively authentic, where we learn new behaviors and integrate them into our own way of being.
  • Inspiring corporate visions are conversations about potential on a large scale. They tell the organization that it can achieve more because it’s capable of being more.
  • Deep, focused listening is a key inspirational skill, but it’s harder than it looks. Most people focus on hearing rather than on understanding. It takes effort, but you can become a better listener by understanding the listening environment.

Passionate

  • Energy is a primary way that we convey passion. Energy is a tool we can harness and cultivate to great effect. To do so, first know what gives you energy about your message, sync that up with your audience, and display your passion verbally and nonverbally.
  • There is no passion without emotion, and any attempt to convey such comes across unconvincing or deceptive. Being strategic and authentic with our emotions in our communication helps us to inspire others.
  • To show conviction, focus on aligning your nonverbal behaviors with your words, and both with your intent. This helps your body and mind to work together to show up with clarity.

Purposeful

  • Having a purpose is linked to inspiration and intrinsic motivation. People are inspired by something, and when you engage others in purpose, you create the impetus.
  • To continually refresh your sense of purpose, inspire yourself by surrounding yourself with a personal board of advisors as role models, and by taking risks toward your purpose.
  • Courageous leadership requires clear choices, saying no to some opportunities to be able to say yes to others.

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 85-2, released January 2018.

 

Part of a weekly series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader

Regular daily reading of books is an important part of my life. It even extends to my vocation, where as Vision Room Curator for Auxano I am responsible for publishing SUMS Remix, a biweekly book “excerpt” for church leaders. Each Wednesday on 27gen I will be taking a look back at previous issues of SUMS Remix and publishing an excerpt.

>>Purchase SUMS Remix here<<

 

How to Communicate Your Vision: Create Stories that Reflect Experience

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There is no more powerful engine driving an organization toward excellence and long-range success than an attractive, worthwhile, and achievable vision of the future, widely shared.

– Burt Nanus

The right vision for the future of an organization moves people to action, and because of their action, the organization evolves and makes process. Like a bicycle, an organization must continually move forward, or fall over. The role of vision in driving the organization forward is indispensable.

The vision’s power lies in its ability to grab the attention of those both inside and outside the organization and to focus that attention on a common dream – a sense of direction that both makes sense and provides direction.

To that end, your church’s vision cannot exist merely as words on a page or website, or in an impressive visual display in your church foyer.

Articulating your vision through consistent and powerful ideas is one of the toughest tasks of leadership.

THE QUICK SUMMARY – Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins, by Annette Simmons

Stories have tremendous power. They can persuade, promote empathy, and provoke action. Better than any other communication tool, stories explain who you are, what you want…and why it matters. In presentations, department meetings, over lunch any place you make a case for new customers, more business, or your next big idea you’ll have greater impact if you have a compelling story to relate.

Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins will teach you to narrate personal experiences as well as borrowed stories in a way that demonstrates authenticity, builds emotional connections, inspires perseverance, and stimulates the imagination. Fully updated and more practical than ever, the second edition reveals how to use storytelling to:

  • Capture attention
  • Motivate listeners
  • Gain trust
  • Strengthen your argument
  • Sway decisions
  • Demonstrate authenticity and encourage transparency
  • Spark innovation
  • Manage uncertainty

Complete with examples, a proven storytelling process and techniques, innovative applications, and a new appendix on teaching storytelling, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins hands you the tools you need to get your message across and connect successfully with any audience.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

Organizations run on numbers, facts, forecasts, and processes. If that sounds dull and unengaging, it’s because those factors are not what really drive our passion and desire to excel, to lead, or to sink our hearts and souls into the work we do. Ultimately, the kind of transformative results that can come only from enriched, passionate people depend on a distinctly human element – storytelling.

The power of even a simple story to affirm someone’s connection to your organization’s people, values, and vision can mean the difference between simple competence and fully realized ownership. Your stories help people feel more engaged and alive.

Story can be defined as a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listener’s imaginations to experience it as real.

You are already telling stories about who you are, why you are here, and what you envision, value, teach, and think about. The problem is, you haven’t realized how much your stories matter. To help us pay attention, let’s look at the six kinds of stories we tell that lead to influence, imagination, and innovation.

Who-I-Am Stories

What qualities earn you the right to influence a particular person? Tell of a time, place, or event that provides evidence you have these qualities.

Why-I-Am-Here Stories

When someone assumes you are there to sell an idea that will cost him or her money, time, or resources, it immediately discredits your “facts” as biased.

Teaching Stories

Certain lessons are best learned from experience, and some lessons are learned over and over again. It’s better to tell a story that creates a shared experience.

Vision Stories

A worthy, exciting future story reframes present difficulties as “worth it.”

Value-in-Action Stories

Values are subjective. Hypothetical situations sound hypocritical.

I-Know-What-You-Are Thinking Stories

People like to stay safe. It is a trust-building surprise for you to share their secret suspicions in a story that first validates then dispels these objections without sounding defenseless.

When you turn your attention to the six kinds of stories, you will be more intentional in creating the kind of perceptions that achieve goals rather than reinforce problems.

Annette Simmons, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

A NEXT STEP

People are starving for meaningful stories, while we are surrounded by impersonal messages dressed in bells and whistles that are story-ish but are not effective. People want to feel a human presence in your messages, to taste a trace of humanity that proves there is a “you” as sender. Learning how to tell personal stories teaches you how to deliver the sense of humanity in the messages you send.

Schedule some time where you can be alone to complete the following exercise.

Imagine you are stranded alone on a desert island. You have six slips of paper, a pencil, and six bottles. If you could communicate one thing by using each of the six story types listed above that would inspire your church for the future, what would it be and how would you say it?

Write each of the six “messages” on a separate sheet of paper, then roll them up to create scrolls. Insert each message in a separate bottle.

At your next team meeting, read each message aloud, and discuss it as a group.

Ask each team member to repeat the process on his or her own over the next month.

Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 84-1, issued January 2018.

 

Part of a weekly series on 27gen, entitled Wednesday Weekly Reader

Regular daily reading of books is an important part of my life. It even extends to my vocation, where as Vision Room Curator for Auxano I am responsible for publishing SUMS Remix, a biweekly book “excerpt” for church leaders. Each Wednesday on 27gen I will be taking a look back at previous issues of SUMS Remix and publishing an excerpt.

> >Purchase SUMS Remix here<<