Understanding Inspiration
This TED talk is awesome! Watch it all the way to the end and you’ll be inspired!
This research about understanding inspiration is something that produces a better understanding of all the powerful driving forces that shape our lives.
Most people talk as though inspiration is something that happens to them but the research that is focused on understanding inspiration show it’s something that comes from the inside.
The story about the space shuttle is tragic yet at the same time reminds us that sometimes it takes a shock to our consciousness to “wake us up” enough to search for what inspires us.
To seek out something bigger than ourselves where we would risk our lives to see it accomplished because of the massive value it adds to the world.
Understanding inspiration based on research like this is amazing because it allows us to really fine tune anything and everything in our lives with a scientific basis of how it works and what it’s actually doing.
And it turns out that inspiration often starts with an extraordinary experience. I call them peak experiences. He goes onto say that in part, what makes an experience extraordinary is it’s ability to transform knowledge in to understanding.
Understanding inspiration also adds value to the knowledge or understanding that extraordinary experiences give us the ability to take risks. And risk is necessary for gain.
Risk is the opportunity to succeed but also the opportunity to fail! And understanding inspiration creates a space where it’s almost impossible to look at failure as failing!
Second, it’s important to understand how we explain experience to ourselves. It’s where we create meaning out of our lives. We create and construct our personal realities through stories.
Last one, identity. When an experience in powerful enough to impact who we are and who we want to become, we call that inspiration.
To be inspired means “to be compelled to a new perspective to a new perspective on the world, and our place within it…”
The final message in understanding inspiration is this…
You never have to be tomorrow what you are today. Understanding that inspiration is an internal narrative (or how you talk to yourself) is the key here.
Anyone can take any ordinary experience and transform it into an extraordinary experience that inspires them through simply changing how the story is told.
Make Life An Adventure!
