What makes an inspirational moment in your life?
It’s an interesting question to think about. When have you as a person done something you consider to be inspiring? Not necessarily to hundreds or thousands of people, or to anyone in particular, or even anyone at all, except maybe just yourself. What is it that happens to create something you can reflect on and know that this was a different moment, something special that you hadn’t expected or didn’t anticipate was going to happen moments before.
One of those moments for me happened just last year. I got invited to go back to my old High School to be a guest speaker in front of more than a thousand students and teachers. In the days and hours before that moment, even just prior to that moment I was incredibly nervous. ‘What if they don’t like it’, ‘what if it’s not interesting’, ‘this could bore them to sleep.’ a little voice of fear.
I remember just as I was being introduced, taking a deep breath, which is what I usually do in that situation to calm things down, and then looking out at the crowd, and deciding at that moment that what I have to say here is more important to me than staying seated and letting that voice of fear control what I do in my life.
So I stood up and delivered the talk, and everything went really well. It’s a moment I will remember for a long, long time. Because I pushed through and did something I didn’t know was going to happen before that point.
A few months later I had a similar feeling and a similar moment, I entered a Jiu-Jitsu competition, and found out a couple of days before the tournament that I was going to be fighting the former UFC champion Rob Whittaker, twice!
It’s a pretty surreal feeling to tell your workmates that you’re going to be fighting a UFC champion on the weekend and then have them not believe you and call you out as a liar for it. It was an almost identical feeling to the public speaking situation, the little voice which starts saying ‘you’re going to embarrass yourself,’ ‘don’t do it’, ‘you’ll get killed’. Fear.
I decided with the time and effort I’ve put into learning this martial art that I was going to trust it would end up OK, and I would ignore the voice. I did something not a lot of people get to do, and definitely something I didn’t think I ever would. In the end, he didn’t kill me, but he did beat me on points. But I was right, it was all OK, and a moment that came up in my life which was, and is, inspiring to me.
Inspiration comes from those moments when you overcome that little voice in your head that says, ‘Stop! You can’t do that, you’ll make a fool of yourself, you’ll be ridiculed, and probably die!’
It’s a natural reaction every human being has. Buried deep in the amygdala of our brains, it’s a reaction designed to keep us away from danger, and not stand out from the crowd.
But it’s only when we overcome that voice, through being present with it – which usually involves taking a deep breath (in-spiring) – that you become inspired and then inspiring to others.
When you hear the voice in the head that says, ‘Stop, don’t do that’ or ‘you’re probably going to die!’ It’s actually a sign that you’re on the right track. Keep going, be present, inspiration is on the other side. Pushing through at that moment is where new and unique things come into the world. And we need those.
