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Rule Number 5: Inspire Others
There’s only so much you can achieve on your own.
Whether you want to start a revolution, rid your country of a colonial power, create an incredible business, get elected to parliament or simply find a way to live life on your own terms, you need the co-operation of other people to do it.
You need to be able to inspire others.
For many years my Dad was a travelling salesman for Hoover, selling washing machines and vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He was a magnificent salesman, the best the company in Northern Ireland had ever seen.
When he wasn’t selling, he was reading ‘How to win friends and influence people’ type books and would hand down his nuggets of wisdom to me. Thirty years down the line, one in particular is imprinted on my mind: ‘the best way to get someone to do something is to get them to want to do it’.
Obvious though it sounds, this simple truth, like much common sense, isn’t that common. But it is at the heart of true power and influence.
This ability to inspire has to be one of the most compelling characteristics of great achievers and it’s been a feature of success throughout human history.
All great leaders know the value of it. Alexander the Great, Jesus of Nazareth, Joan of Arc, Oliver Cromwell, Fidel Castro, Rosa Parks, Emily Pankhurst, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher all understood the importance of inspiring others to achieve victory.
Great Inspirers are really quite rare. I haven’t seen too many. What I see more often is an individual with passion and enthusiasm for something which drives them into action, but an inability to persuade others to feel the same way.
Stirring that desire and longing in others, so they want the same thing as you, as strongly as you want it, is something else altogether. The commonest mistake I see in passionate people, and I’ve done it myself, is assuming that your passion is naturally contagious: that it will inevitably spread to others.
Not necessarily, and you could end up feeling very frustrated and worn out by continually revving up your own passion and not really getting anywhere.
When I spot a Great Inspirer, I listen and learn. I’ve brought together four such individuals here, who personify this ability powerfully. Victory is different for each of them, but their stories are powerfully inspiring in themselves. Implement this rule in your own life and you’ll achieve far more than you ever could without it.
One of the smartest people you’ll ever come across is Carmel McConnell. Carmel’s life revolves around inspiring others. It has given her a lucrative career and enabled her to create the incredible charity, The Magic Breakfast.
Carmel is a global corporate business consultant, advising organisations, including leading consumer brands and investment banks on change management. She encourages them to get ethical, take moral stands – while increasing their profits. She is the bestselling author of Change Activist, Soultrader, Make Money, Be Happy.
She founded The Magic Breakfast in 2001, a charity that provides healthy breakfasts for over 100,000 inner city schoolchildren.
Carmel McConnell
‘We must be the change we want to see in the world. It’s about service and I believe that very strongly. My mum died when I was 9 and my dad raised my sister and I in an environment that was about optimism. He was an Historian when he lived in Northern Ireland but in England he had to work in a foundry.
He had an astonishing memory and a real awareness of how fascinating people are. I was raised with a strong sense of all the possibilities and I miss him everyday. My living a life that inspires me – that is the challenge. Making the best of all that I’ve been given - that’s the joy. I am, of course, a complete optimist but remind myself everyday of the natural cycles of life and it’s fragility.
Everything goes up and down. Some days I have what I call my ‘Fat Failure Days’. I now know they are part of life and accept them. When you’re having one, just acknowledge that you can’t do everything and be very good to yourself.
To motivate others, you need sheer clarity of purpose, empathy and the ability to build a coalition. There are so many different approaches to building a team. We all need the humility to build people who are greater than us. To make a big thing happen, I assemble the best people possible around me who have superior skills.
Even if they run me ragged! I believe I’m the best person to guide the Magic Breakfast at the moment but in the future, maybe not. Should there be a better way to do it, then fine.
You have to have continuing belief in the cause and the problem being solved through whatever means. Inspirational leadership needs to be challenged by the coalition. I am absolutely irrelevant – I have made sure there are no images of me on any publicity material because it’s about solving the problem, not about me.
How can your motivational charge ignite someone else? You have to invoke the ‘What’s in it for you?’ question. My rule is - I will succeed in my goals by first of all helping other people achieve their goals. Inspirational leadership is simply brokerage.
I am a social broker between those who want to do something but are not sure what and those who would appreciate some help but don’t know where from. I love this wonderful bringing together of gorgeous people who have a desire to make a difference.
That brokerage is the core of social activism. Through the day-to-day chaos of trying to make our personal economy work, we lose hope that we can define our own great purpose and I think this is one of the great issues of our time.
Once I have become clear on what I want to do, I look at who in the world might be interested in solving this problem with me. I call it my stakeholder map – I write it all down. I genuinely put myself in their shoes and ask the question, ‘What would be in it for them?’
In 1985 I joined the Greenham Common Peace Camp and became part of a small group united in purpose and strong enough to stay calm even when placed in prison. I dropped out of University to join the Peace Camp and found my own kind of change activism through the passionate commitment of those around me.
The knowledge that action can make a difference has stayed with me. In 1989, I needed to earn money because I had family responsibilities after my father died. So I went to work at BT as a secretary, aiming to carry on campaigning at weekends. Instead I learned to use my activism there! By applying the same activist ideals, I got promoted every year, attained my MBA and ended up leading a very large IT team.
These principles are the same as those deployed by Gandhi, Mandela and even Anita Roddick of The Body Shop. Firstly, clarity of objective can reach the parts of us that are motivated by a noble cause and simplicity of objective is vital. I constantly have to deal with people who have 10 number one priorities – their agendas are so complex.
And usually too overwhelming!
When I left BT, I had this theory that if people understood what their company was trying to do and felt respected, then the business would grow. So I started my own company, Holistic Management in 1995, working on leadership development and growth in major corporates.
It was a great adventure, very successful and I travelled all over the world. Then I came across this staggering statistic that one in four schoolchildren in the UK are malnourished and hungry and I could not believe it. That was in 2001.
I saw that Britain ranks 23 out of 29 in the international league of children with malnutrition. I felt compelled to do something for these kids who had all their lives ahead of them. I just wanted to make sure they’re well fed and able to learn.
For the first 8 months I would get up every Saturday morning and go and buy food for 5 schools in Hackney; which is one of the UK’s poorest boroughs. I wanted to do more so I dedicated 3 days a week to research and discovered these protein enriched wheat bagels. You need carbohydrate to make your brain work in the morning.
This wonderful woman, Kris Engle from The Great American Bagel Factory let me have the bagels for 14p each when they retail at 80p and I spent 6 months delivering them to schools. During the first year I provided about 3,000 breakfasts, the second year 25,000 and last year 70,000. We think there are about three quarters of a million children going to school hungry in the UK. So that’s the target and I know we can do it.
We are now reaching some of the poorest schools in London - that represents 150,000 bagels a year! I do some speaking events based on Change Activism and charge a professional rate for that but had to re-mortgage my house 2 years ago to keep me going because I don’t earn a penny from the Magic Breakfast.
We have an administrator and a publicist who are wonderful professionals working for around a quarter of their market value because they want to work on a project that makes a difference. Our trustees are professionally very diverse and challenging.
I also started a company called Magic Outcomes, which is now the main source of the Magic Breakfast’s money. It’s a social enterprise and won a Social Entrepreneur of the Future award last year. It basically is a not for profit training firm, taking people from large organisations through a range of development programmes, placing them in our schools and offering them a chance to make a difference.
They take assemblies, meet the Head Teacher, and work with the kids: Pearson, BT and Unilever are signed up and doing programmes with us. People in large organisations say, “We want to build trust and we want to live our values.” I say, “Instead of going off to a hotel and doing the theory, come to a school where you can do it in practice. We’ve put together this fantastic programme, the first community-based MBA.”
A 9-month programme costs £7,000. It costs us £2,700 to run and every penny of profit goes back into the Magic Breakfast to expand and pay for more food for the children. I’m really pleased with how well it’s going. One of my passions is helping people to find their purpose – be they children or adults
Another scheme called ‘Adopt a School’ gives companies a chance to make a difference. £1000 per annum will pay for a breakfast club for a year. If companies want to do more than that, they can and we’ll give them ways to develop their skills in return.
There is so much goodwill out there. People want to be generous. The Magic Breakfast office is in a prestigious central London location and the market value is at least £80,000 per year. My publisher, Pearson have given it to me because they believe in Magic Breakfast.
I was running this project out of a room in my house but it was getting really tricky to host forums with teachers and nutritionists in such a cramped environment, so I put the word out. I was expecting a room out of town somewhere but through various people understanding and supporting what I was trying to do, Sir David Bell suggested these rooms in Covent Garden.
We just pay the rates on it so we are very, very lucky. That’s the thing about giving people the opportunity to be generous and asking for help. This space attracts volunteers and improves our credibility. My publisher Rachael Anderson – an inspiration if ever there was one - published a book called ‘Get Ahead and Give a Damn’ that perfectly highlights the ideals of Change Activism. The profits have now paid for a career counsellor for the homeless. All I ever do is give people the opportunity to be generous with themselves, to live their purpose and their dreams. I am constantly inspired by the people I meet.’
I first heard of Carmel McConnell in 2002 when a client invited me to the opening of her photographic exhibition explaining that a fascinating woman called Carmel would be there who she described as “a high-flyer, who also feeds breakfast to inner city school kids.”
Although we’d both been at Greenham Common at the same time, our paths hadn’t crossed there: and whilst I’d been arrested many times, Carmel had the added kudos of having served a two-week prison sentence! Nearly four years later, I knew she was a natural for this chapter on inspiration.
We met up at The Magic Breakfast office and I admit that the first thing that impressed me was - the office. Right bang in the middle of swish Covent Garden, the Magic Breakfast occupies the entire floor of a beautiful white Georgian house, with vast rooms and ceiling to floor windows overlooking the Piazza.
I’d sat in many charity offices before, but none that looked like this. I knew this smart girl had inspired someone so much that they had given her this space. I then listened enthralled for two hours as she explained, quite simply, how to inspire others.
As I sat there I understood the mistakes I had made years earlier in my political campaigning days and how I could have been more effective, less intimidating, and a darn sight happier as well!
For your benefit and mine, I’ve distilled her strategy into five specific steps. Follow it to the letter and you’ll see the benefits. I know I will. There are many other things to learn about inspiration from the other case studies in this chapter but I want you to focus on this strategy before we move on to them.
This is the bedrock.
You've just read an extract from Chapter 4 of Fiona Harrold's new book, "The 7 Rules Of Success" which is out now from Hodder and available from us here.
