Impact | Influence | Inspiration

“Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It's about impact, influence and inspiration. Impact involves getting results, influence is about spreading the passion you have for your work, and you have to inspire teammates and customer.” ~ Robin S. Sharma, Author The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

?Pay particular attention to the three attributes of leadership that Sharma identifies – impact, influence, and inspiration. All three are so tightly linked that they are essentially indistinguishable from each other and when mindfully woven together they create the fabric of the whole that we call influence. Essentially, they are the levers of influential communication.

Impact refers to not only the visible and felt consequences of your actions. It’s also, and more fundamentally, the consequence of your presence – how you show up – as a leader. Leaders cause movement. It’s a cause/effect correlation and the catalyst for the initial cause of any movement you’re causing is the other’s perception of you. Your metric for the quality of that movement needs to be effectiveness. Is the action an example of co-created coordinated movement? Is it elegant or is there a significant amount of “clean-up” that needs to be done? What can help you calibrate your impact is a simple question…“what’s too much and what’s too little?”

Influence in the context of Sharma’s quote specifically refers to the emotional content of your message. I invite you to consider his definition of influence as only a portion of the much larger context of meaning. A simple observation about how information is generally processed by individuals is “how I describe something determines how I feel about it which, in turn, influences my behavior.” The description process is the meaning generating process and your emotional energy (passion) conveys FAR more meaning than the words you use to get your message across. Ideally, you want to have others resonating emotionally with the passion you feel for your vision.

Which leads us to inspiration. The philosopher Carl Jung has been quoted as saying “Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable…All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy.”

Imagining is spiritual sensation. Imagination lives at the threshold of spirit. It’s the gateway to the soul and the soul is our source of inspiration. When we are inspired our soul is awakened to possibility. And possibility is what is too often missing in many organizations. Possibility to be more, to do and have more. Not an incremental more. A more that calls on us to transcend what we know and to transform who we are. This moves us far beyond simply being better. It's the sort of “fantasy” that inspires a transformation. This was Steve Jobs great secret.

This week invite others to play with the fantasy that is your and their future. Invite them to explore questions like “what if…?” Take the constraints off and imagine what a future could be that isn’t hemmed in by what others would think or what resources seem to be in short supply. Notice how inspiring this is when you begin to feel it as being a possibility.

To master anything, we must first master ourselves—our emotions, our thoughts, our actions. In times of uncertainty and disorder, self-discipline and self-mastery are not just essential but are your competitive advantage.

Click HERE to join the waitlist and find out how my Leadership Mindset Mastermind can help you be a more trusted, intentional, and masterful leader.