Something You Should Know - SYSK TRENDING - What It Means To Be Inspiring

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Most of us can point to someone who truly inspired us—a teacher, boss, coach, friend, or public figure who made us think differently, push harder, or believe more in ourselves. But what exactly makes someone inspiring? Why do certain people energize and motivate us while others, even highly successful people, don’t have the same effect? It turns out inspiration is not just charisma or confidence. Research suggests there are specific qualities and behaviors that consistently make people more inspiring to those around them. And perhaps most importantly, these traits can be developed. Adam Galinsky, social psychologist, Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School, and author of Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others (https://amzn.to/3EeUYN6), joins me to explain what inspiring people do differently. In our conversation, he breaks down the habits, attitudes, and communication styles that make others want to listen, follow, and do their best work. Whether you want to become a better leader, parent, friend, or simply have a more positive influence on the people around you, this discussion offers a fascinating look at what truly inspires human beings—and how you can become more inspiring yourself. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 AQUA TRU: Take the guesswork out of pure, great-tasting water. Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://AquaTru.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK. AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back. RULA: This Mental Health Awareness Month, don’t just think about your mental health - actually take the step to take care of it. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your everyday with luxury you will actual use! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL:  With the Dell Pro laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra with vPro, no matter how many interruptions you have, your laptop won’t be one of them. With battery that’s optimized for the way you work, and built-in intelligence that quiets distractions the moment you’re trying to focus, your tech won’t slow you down.  Find out more at ⁠https://Dell.com/Dell-Pro⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many people today are looking for inspiration. We all know inspiring people when we meet them, the teacher who changes your life, the boss who brings out your best, the friend who makes you believe you can do more than you ever thought possible. But what exactly makes someone inspiring? Is it confidence, charisma, vision, or is it something much more practical and learnable? And that's why today's SYSK trending topic is what it means to be inspired. In my conversation with social psychologist Adam Galinsky, we explore the science behind inspiration and why some people motivate others while some unintentionally push people away. We'll also look at the specific traits that make people truly inspiring and how anyone can develop them. So get ready for some fascinating insights on what inspiration really is and how you can become more inspiring right after this.

In your lifetime, there have been people who have inspired you. A parent, a teacher, a boss, a coworker, someone who has made you feel inspired, giving you that sense that you're worthy, appreciated, competent, capable, and can do so much more. So what makes a person inspiring? Do inspiring people deliberately try to inspire others? Or is that just the kind of person they are? Do inspiring people inspire everyone? Are they always inspiring?

How can you be more inspiring? That's what Adam Galinsky is here to talk about. Adam is a social psychologist and professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. He's author of a book called Inspire, the Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. Hey, Adam, welcome to something you should know. Thank you so much. I'm so thrilled to be here. So I love this topic because I've often thought about what makes somebody inspiring.

And I think everybody has seen somebody, met somebody who they thought was inspiring. But I don't know that I've ever thought about why is that? What is it that makes them inspiring? I just know they are. And then I wonder, well, are they inspiring just to me? Or are they inspiring to the world? So what is it? What is that thing?

It's a great question, you know, and about 20 years ago, I had an experience where I was teaching the FBI, and one of the agents started talking about a leader of his that inspired him. And it was such a remarkable moment for me because I saw everything about his body change, right? His eyes light up. He smiled. He looked wistfully in awe. And you could tell that this leader, for whatever they did, changed that person inside. They created that sense of well-sworthiness. of hope and possibility. And so at that moment, I decided I wanted to study what was it about that person or about people in general that inspire others? So I started a two-decade long journey in which I've asked thousands and probably tens of thousands of people a very simple question, which is, tell me about someone that inspired

you, right? And I asked them to be like a scientist. What was it about that person that filled you with that ineffable feeling? Which I imagine most of us have felt, right? I mean, most of us have somebody in our life that inspired us to create those feelings. And so what did you find? What I've discovered with these thousands and thousands of examples is it turns out that there are three universal characteristics or factors that really distinguish between these people that changes inside positively. and another type of leader, I call them the infuriating leader, that create the sort of seething

caldrons of rage and resentment inside of us. And so it actually turns out it's a systematic and B, universal. So there's not a single characteristic or trait of an inspiring leader that is specific to a country or even to a continent. Every single element occurs in every single country in the world. So what are these three universal factors? Well, the first one is how we kind of look at the world, how we conceive and perceive the world. And I call that being visionary.

The second factor is how we kind of stand in the world, our presence, how we are in the world. And I call that being an exemplar of desired behavior. And the third factor is how we interact with others in the world. And I call that sort of being a great mentor. And so these are the three universal factors. being visionary, being an exemplar, and being a mentor. You know, I often wonder, the people that I find inspiring, I wonder how often, how much of the time are they inspiring?

Because it would seem that it would be hard to burn that flame continuously to always be inspiring. That doesn't seem possible. So, right? It's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. You may be inspiring today, but infuriating tomorrow, right? What you do today is not going to protect you from falling to the other end of the continuum. And so we're never going to be inspiring all the time.

We're never going to reach this apotheosis of inspiring perfection. But we can strive to be more inspiring tomorrow than we were today, right? And that is, I think, the fundamental, most important insight of my research. And so what does it mean to try to be inspiring? Because you do things like what that you may not be doing now? Well, so I think one of the other key things that my research has shown is that one of the foundational elements for being more inspiring today than you were yesterday is the power of reflection, reflecting on our experiences, reflecting on important aspects of ourselves. And so actually can go through and I can give you what is the key reflection that allows us to be more visionary or more exemplary or a better mentor? Because I think these provide profound insights for how we can become more inspiring.

So let me tell you about a study that we did, which I think is going to have a big impact on listeners. So if any of you out there have ever lost a job, you know how demoralizing it is, how humiliating it is. I lost my first post-college job three months after being hired. I was fired, right? And I was just so demoralized. So we did this study with the Swiss government. We went into an employment agency where everyone has to register in order to get unemployment benefits in Switzerland. And we gave half of these people coming into the employment agency a little 15-minute reflection

task. We said, I want you to think about your values. What are your top five values? Now, put them in a hierarchy. What's your most important value, right? What's the one that animates the others? Just put them in a little hierarchy. Now I want you to think about why are those values important to you.

And then finally, think about times when you've demonstrated those values recently in your own behavior. Two months later, we found that people were given this values-recall intervention, this reflection task, were twice as likely to have a job than people in our control condition. In fact, the effect was so strong, we stopped the study and gave everybody the values reflection intervention. Now, what's going on there? There's something, again, getting back to that need for meaning and understanding. There's something about our reflecting on our values. that centers us, that gives us a little bit of optimism, a little bit of agency, and allows us to overcome all those psychological deprivations that occur when we lose a job. So what does it mean?

Give me, if you could, an example, like a person or maybe yourself or someone you know, what that reflection process goes like. I don't know what it really means to reflect on my values other than to think about them. I don't know what the difference is. Yeah, so for me, you know, I've done this task myself. You know, we actually give it to every single MBA student walking into Columbia Business School. And so you just start thinking about it. Now, one of the things we do is we give people a link to a list of values because it's

hard to create them off the top of your head. It's a Google sheet. And I started just thinking about values and I'd put some down and then I'd realize I'd found another one that was more meaningful toward me. and then I started to, I had a particular, you know, ranking and then I changed it. And so for me, my single top value is generosity. And it's not just generosity financially. It's generosity in spirit and in thought, being generous in trying to give people the best

interpretation for their behavior, right? Trying to contextualize why someone did something, giving people the benefit of the doubt. My second, you know, important thing is what I call positive energy, right? Optimism, humor, good-naturedness, right? You know, another value of mind is creativity. How do we be creative, right? And solve the problems, you know, that we have in unique and creative ways. Another one is what I call Kaizen.

Now, my wife spent time in Japan and they have a word for continued improvement, which is kind of the heart of inspire and how to inspire others. And so that to me is really important. How I want to always be striving to be better at everything I do. Every time I do a podcast, I want to do it better than next time, for example. And so then you can start to think about why do those values matter so much to me? Well, you know, I want to always be improving. I love creative solutions.

You know, I love humor. Every birthday I go see stand-up comedy. It's really important to me. But generosity is the one that drives them all because that's what I want to be in the world. I want to be a generous person. always trying to give people what they need, giving them the benefit of the doubt. And then I can think about times recently where I could have blown up at someone, but I thought about the fact that they were going through a really rough time,

and I gave them, you know, a little serenity for that. Or a time where I screwed something up, but the next time I did it better, and I had that continued improvement. And that's it? That's it. You know, 15 minutes. I mean, this thing is, like, we don't really know what the secret sauce is yet, because we collect lots of measures, say,

what is it that's transforming people to get jobs? Jeff Cohen of Stanford University, he did a study with at-risk middle school students. He gave them this values reflection eight times over two years to some group of students. Five years later, they were more likely to graduate high school and go to college, right? There's something powerful.

You know, our values, like we have an inherent, one of the most profound truths about humans is that we have a clarion call and need for a sense of meaning and higher purpose. And our values in a sense give us that sense of meaning and higher purpose. It's why being visionary is one of the three fundamental dimensions of being an inspiring person. We're talking about what makes inspiring people so inspiring and how you can be more inspiring. My guest is Adam Galinsky. He's author of the book, Inspire, the Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others.

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and a free thumb drive nozzle that is so cool. Just text S-Y-S-K to 64,000. That's S-Y-S-K to 64,000 for your two free gifts with purchase. text S-Y-S-K to 64,000 message and data rates may apply. So, Adam, those three universal factors you mentioned, being a visionary, being an exemplar, and being a mentor. It's kind of hard for me to get my head around exactly what you mean. So could you attach those three things to some real people who exhibit those, who illustrate those, so I can get a better sense? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that, you know, I'll tell you a story about a remarkable pilot that I think really captures that, right? Is Tammy Joe Schultz was flying Southwest Airlines 1380 from LaGuardia to Dallas when the left engine exploded and literally tore a hole in the side of her plane, right?

One passenger was sucked into that hole and didn't survive. It was fatal. but she miraculously and remarkably landed the plane with no further injuries. And we can see these three elements come into bear. The first thing that she recognized was, as she described it, she said the plane wanted to descend, so we let it do what it wanted to do and we descend it. Now, that's fine, that's great. She's a great pilot, but she recognized that when there's a hole in a plane and you're descending, the passengers probably think that plane is going down. And so she got on the intercom

and she gave them what I call an optimistic why, this vision for what was happening. And she said 10 simple words. And the passengers commented afterwards that it literally transformed the entire cabin from just abject fear to hope and possibility. She said, we are not going down. We are going to Philly. Right. And so she gave them a why and a aware and where they're headed. Now, if you listen to her on the intercom, she is the most calm, they're like, is your plane on fire? She's like, no, but there is a hole in it. It's pretty damaged, just very matter of fact. And when she landed, she was immediately, you know, evaluated by EMTs. And one of them said to her, how did you get through security?

And she looked at him puzzled, like, what are you talking about? He said, how did your nerves of steel, not set off, you know, the security alarms. You're completely calm, right? Your heart rate is normal. Your physiology is normal, right? So she was that exemplar of desired behavior. She was a calm, the eye of the hurricane, but courageous protector, right, of the people on that passenger. And then before she left the plane, she walked row by row and looked every passenger in the eye and made sure they were okay. And afterwards, she commented, she's like, I'm still surprised that more reporters

have commented on what I did after the plane landed, going row by row, than what it took to fly, this crippled plane. And that shows that she was this inspiring mentor, right? She was empathizing and taking care of the people and encouraging them and making sure that they were okay. And so these are these three elements about how to do that. That's a great story.

That's a, and a great example of those three things that I think people can get a better sense of what that is. But you had said a few minutes ago that you can be inspiring one day and infuriating the next day. And, but when I think of inspiring people, while I'm sure that's true of them, it doesn't seem like it's true a lot of, like it isn't, they seem, there's something about their, their character. the way they carry themselves that seems inspiring much of the time. It isn't like it's on and off a lot. I think that's also true, right? And I think that one of the things that I've discovered about inspiring leaders, people who are more inspiring more of the time, not always inspiring.

They're occasionally infuriating, is that they've really set up practices or habits for how to be a better person, essentially. And so they've tried to embed them into. their daily lives. Let me give you just sort of one example of this, which is one of the things that we can do to really lift people into the clouds, is that especially when we're in positions of leadership, because I've actually coined a phrase that called the leader amplification effect, that everything we do as a leader, good and bad, small and big, gets amplified, and then its impact is intensified on us.

So a frown from a leader is like a knife in your heart, but a compliment can lift you into the clouds. And there was someone that I was talking to a president of a bank, 1,400 employees. And he said, here's what I do every single morning. Over my cup of coffee, I send a birthday greeting to every one of my employees. And it's pretty simple, right?

He showed me an example. It's like, you know, hey, Mike, I hope you have a great birthday. How was bowling and jogging this weekend? You know, and so he can pump five of these out a day in less than, you know, 10 to 15 minutes, but then he showed me the response as he gets back, right? It's like, oh, my God, it's such a great weekend. This is what we did in bowling, blah, blah, you know, it's like a novel that comes back.

And he said that he realized that he says, you know, sending those birthday messages, they put a skip in their step, but they also put a skip in my step, right? they come back to me and they make me feel good by their responses. And I think that is something that goes back to the Bible. Reap what you sow. Right. If we send out infuriting signals into the world, we're going to get inferring signals back. But when we plant the seeds of inspiration, right, we spread those seeds, but we also get

the blooming flowers of inspiration coming back to us. And so that's a great example. He had a daily habit of sending these messages right forward, right? You could do that yourself. Every morning you could wake up, have a cup of coffee, and just say something positive, constructive, complementary, expressing gratitude to someone in your orbit. And you're going to put a skip in their step,

and they're going to put a skip in your step when they reply. When you talk to inspiring people, people who are considered by others to be inspiring, do they say typically, yes, I work at this, this is what I try to do, or do they say, you know, it's a gift. I couldn't tell you how I do it. I think there's two different aspects of it, I think, are really important there. The first is, I don't know if they would say I'm inspiring because many of the people were truly inspiring also tend to be humble people and so wouldn't identify themselves as inspiring. But they certainly recognize that they work on one of these three universal features. So, for example, one person might talk about how, yeah, I work really hard on making sure

I see the big picture, I communicate it, I make sure that we all are going in an opposite, you know, an optimistic direction. I find ways to simplify it so that people can understand that. Or someone else is like, yeah, I really practice at being calm in a crisis, right? I know how important that is. I know, because of the later amplification effect, that my anxiety will become their anxiety, but if I'm calm, they're going to be calm. Or they say, yeah, I work really hard at trying to meet the needs of other people being that good mentor.

They might not use those words, but they recognize the power. But here's the one element that I think characterizes every person that we might describe as inspiring. And it goes back to one of things that we've already talked about is, again, the power of reflection. The people that are truly inspiring reflect on their experience. They reflect on the things they did good that day, and they work on how they might continue them. But they also reflect on the times when they didn't see the big picture, or they lost their temper, or they were anxious in a crisis. And they think about how they could be better the next time. And I think that is really so profoundly fundamental.

You know, people say the reflected life, you know, only the reflected life is worth living. But the reflective life is what allows us to be the best possible version of ourselves. And when you look at people who are considered inspiring, do they have other things in common that aren't necessarily related to the inspiration? But they tend to be, I don't know, they tend to be men or they tend to be women or they tend to be older. They tend to be younger. Are there any like demographic-y kind of similarities or it's all over the map? There are not. And I think that's, again, gets back to this idea that leaders aren't born, that they're made. But I will say that there's, you know, one thing that I think does really help people be more inspiring and why it's so important to be inspiring yourself is that it's a heck of a lot easier to be inspiring if you had inspiring people as your mentors, as your parents, right, as your leaders, right? Because one of the things that we know is that we tend to perpetuate, right, the leadership that we receive ourselves, right? You know, I discovered the self

as a father, right? My dad had this volcanic rage that would come out, you know, for spilling milk, right? Just ridiculous, right? But it tortured and terrorized me, and I, you know, I even had nightmares with my dad chasing me in my dreams. My dad was a wonderful person. He's probably the most inspiring person in my life, but he had this one infuriating flaw, right? And early on, as a parent, two little boys, they would spill milk and I would explode in rage, just like I felt like I'd become my dad, right? You know, and I saw the effect on them, the immediate impact, like the sense of like that fugue state of panic that they experienced when that rage came out.

And I had to trade myself, right, to not be my dad and to be a different type of father, to have all of his inspiring traits, but not take on that one friating flaw. And that's, again, gets back to the power of reflection. Right? I could reflect on my experience. I could reflect from where it came from, but I could also then plan and make commitments

and put in practices in place to prevent them from happening in the future. Well, this is great insight into what makes someone inspiring and information I think we could all use in our lives. I've been speaking with Adam. He is a social psychologist and professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. And the name of his book is Inspire, The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.

Adam, thanks. It's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much, Mike. I really enjoyed the conversation. And thanks for asking such amazing questions. Thank you for listening to this SYSK trending episode about inspiration. And if you enjoyed it, I hope you'll share it with someone you know. I'm Mike Rothers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know.