Following Your Inspiration
I help artists and entrepreneurs who want to bring good things to the world talk about their work in a way that feels authentic and sparks an interest with their audience.
Stories that Trigger Us
When I coach people I hear two thoughts, one is ‘I’ve been told we have to focus on the problem and make it very obvious’ the other approach I’ve been told is ‘you have to focus on what the audience gains and the main motivators are money, power and fame.’
These alternatives focus on revving up the fight/flight/freeze system through threat or extrinsic motivators that trigger the amygdala.
Stories that Inspire Us
Ever since I started as a filmmaker back in the early 2000s, I decided to focus on a third way, on inviting audiences to think differently by inspiring new ideas rather than creating a sense of urgency.
That urgency shuts down our facilities that help us make good decisions. Urgency makes us less curious. Urgency may work in the wild when we need to run from a predator, it triggers a yes/no response and black and white thinking. When we are faced with complex decisions or decisions that require us to be active participants, we need our creative intelligence.
Stories that inspire us are stories that leave us open to imagine a different set of circumstances. As a woman we see a woman CEO and we think, wow, that is possible for me, what else is possible. We see a story about rewilding a piece of land in England and because of letting the land go back to its natural state the animals, insects and birds come back and we think, what could I do in my backyard if I brought in wild plants, could I help the bees.
Inspiration, Frustration and Accidents
The yes/no story structures, do this or this will happen, do this and this will happen are very appealing when we want people to buy our art, our service or take a specific action.
In my work and research on what stories inspire change, we don’t throw out the story elements that show our audience the problem, implications, causes, solutions and results. These exist but the way we weight each element and structure the story shifts.
Last week in The Creative Muse Membership we were talking about how we listen to ourselves to discover what it is that is pulling us forward, we monitor our attention. And we find three signals:
frustration signals something we want to change;
inspiration is a signal for a direction we want to head in;
accidents are ideas that occur when we are in presence and we get a sudden insight.
Of these three, frustration is often the most powerful motivator to make a change and start a project, create a solution, try something new. Even in art, the feeling behind our wanting to try something new might be frustration, thinking why can’t I use this color combination or why aren’t women shown in this role.
The Problem Without Judgement
One difference in a story that triggers us and a story that inspires us is the way we frame the problem. If we frame the problem with judgement our story puts us into a us vs them, good vs evil stance and into a state of emergency and fight/flight/freeze.
If we frame the problem without judgement but rather with curiosity, we give space for the audience to stay open to new ideas and new ways of seeing. We do not set up a binary.
From Frustration to Possibilities: the Empowered Journey
The frustration to possibility story structure is one alternative to the hero’s journey which is a story structure where one person reluctantly sets out on a quest and discovers a truth of some kind. The typical hero’s journey is about finding singular solutions. The Empowered Journey is my term for stories that lead to multiple possibilities.
Over the past year I’ve been looking at changemakers and how they tell their story. This week I watched an interview with the economist Kate Raworth (Della Duncan mentioned her in my interview with her on the podcast, This Beautiful Shot is Not an Accident). Kate created a new way to look at the goals of our economic systems that respect the planetary boundaries and meet human needs.
Like so many of the origin stories I’ve heard, Kate shares the frustration that inspired her work when she was studying economics.
“And I was just so frustrated by what I learned because it just didn’t touch on so many of these issues. They were peripheral to what we were studying. You couldn’t even study environmental economics in those days, even though it’s become such a crisis in the world.”
And she shares the question that came out of this frustration, a question of what is possible if we changed our way of thinking about economics.
“And what if we start economics, not with supply and demand and the equations that they teach that scare a lot of people and make a lot of people think this isn’t for me. What if we start with something that everyone understands? Human needs, our essential needs and protecting the life support systems of our planetary home. And if we put them at the center of our vision, what kind of economics would we create then?”
Follow Your Inspiration
In her interview, Kate also spoke of drawing her two circles, the upper circle being the planetary boundaries and the inner circle being the requirements to meet basic human needs, which now are known as Doughnut Economics, and putting it in a drawer.
I’m writing this in December 2021, we are nearing a solstice and a new year. This is a good time to think about what has inspired your work. What frustrations, inspirations and accidents have caught your attention and influenced your intentions. Do you have ideas in a drawer that you want to bring to the light or ideas you need to put in the drawer and let age like wine or cheese.
Last December I was inspired to start writing my book about the WeStory, the story framework which is a way of storytelling based on listening, crafting and sharing stories that inspire change. I had spent the 2020 researching the book and from 2017 testing my ideas. But looking back, my love of storytelling for social change was born from watching public service announcements in my childhood that encouraged us to throw away our trash and learn about democracy.
When we read about another person’s success it can see that their journey is quick but in reality they are long, and sometimes they span half a life or longer. In Kate’s interview she stated that her initial inspiration came from her life experiences and what she witnessed as a teenager in the 1980s, from dancing to Madonna and Duran Duran to seeing news about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the opening of the ozone layer. Her book was published in 2017.
Inspiration often takes time to take root and unfold. Where are you going to spend your time?
Learn more about the Creative Muse Membership here.
And if you are interested in developing your story, check out my Story Consulting Packages here.