We all yearn for inspiration. It has the power to spark passion, creativity, and purpose within us, propelling us to overcome obstacles and experience personal growth.
When it comes to communication, inspiring action is a vital force that bridges the gap between passive information consumption and active engagement.
By tapping into the emotions, motivations, and desires of your audience, you can motivate them to take meaningful steps and implement the insights you share. In this blog post, we explore the crucial role of inspiration and the principles that underpin it.
I’ll also share concrete examples of how we unleashed the magic of inspiration in our own work to captivate attention and foster positive change.
Why inspire?
Before we dive into how you can inspire your audience, let’s take a moment to discuss why it’s so important.
When you inspire your audience, you move them beyond mere understandiually implementing the insights you’ve shared. Here’s why inspiration is crucial:
- Inspiration ignites motivation within your audience. It sparks a desire for change, improvement, or growth. By communicating in a compelling and inspiring manner, you help your audience see the value and potential impact of taking action. When people feel motivated, they are more likely to embrace the necessary steps to achieve their goals.
- Inspiration overcomes inertia. Inertia can be a powerful force that keeps people stuck in their current state. Even if your insights present compelling evidence for change, people may still resist taking action. Inspiration helps break through this resistance. How? By creating a sense of urgency and belief that change is not only possible but also desirable. It energizes your audience and empowers them to overcome the inertia holding them back.
- Inspiration sparks an emotional connection. Emotions are powerful motivators that drive action. By appealing to emotions, you make your communication style more meaningful and relatable. When people feel emotionally invested, they are more likely to take action because they understand the impact on their own lives or the lives of others.
- Inspiration provides a sense of purpose and direction. It helps your audience connect their actions to a larger vision or goal. By highlighting the potential positive outcomes and benefits of following your lead, you give people a clear reason to act. When people feel that their actions contribute to something meaningful, they are more likely to follow through.
- Inspiring your audience fosters a mindset shift from temporary motivation to long-term commitment. By tapping into their intrinsic motivation, you help create lasting change. When people are inspired, they are more likely to stay engaged, persevere through challenges, and maintain their commitment to implementing your recommendations.
Ultimately, inspiring your audience is about empowering them to become active participants in the process. It’s about moving beyond the passive consumption of information and toward embracing change.
When people are inspired, they are more likely to take the necessary steps, make informed decisions, and create positive change in their personal and professional lives.
Embrace the principles of inspiration
While every brand is unique and may have different approaches to inspiring customers, here are some key principles that can help guide your communication strategy:
- Encourage growth and self-belief: Empower others to embrace challenges by celebrating their successes and offering constructive feedback along the way. Encourage them to step out of their comfort zones, take risks, and believe in their ability to communicate with impact.
- Communicate with clarity and passion: Craft messages that are purposeful, clear, and infused with passion, employing metaphors and anecdotes to simplify even the most complex ideas.
- Lead by example: be the living embodiment of the qualities you seek to inspire, igniting a fire within others to follow suit.
- Connect on a personal level: dive deep into the aspirations, dreams, and challenges of others, crafting tailored messages that resonate on a soulful level.
- Foster collaboration and community: cultivate an atmosphere of collaboration, dialogue, and idea exchange, igniting a collective fire that fuels extraordinary growth.
- Be a supportive mentor and guide: extend a helping hand, provide continual support and expert guidance, and foster an environment that nurtures growth.
- Share stories and experiences: weave captivating tales of personal triumphs and lessons learned, inspiring others to conquer their obstacles.
- Recognize and appreciate: Shine a spotlight on the efforts and achievements of others, fuelling their motivation and fostering a culture of recognition.
Create an emotional connection with your key stakeholders
Find out which eight organizational stories you can tell to emotionally connect with your key stakeholders, inspire them, and motivate them to act.
Unleashing the magic: the principles of inspiration in action
Once you grasp the key principles of inspiration, it’s time to apply them to your communication. How you proceed will obviously depend on your medium. Here at Exaltus, we’re die-hard believers in whiteboard animation. (Can you blame us, the benefits of whiteboard animation are endless.)
And so I’ll use a few examples of our most inspiring whiteboard videos to show you how to apply the principles of inspiration in our medium to engage and inspire our viewers.
This video, narrated by Seth Godin and based on his book The Practice, is among our most inspiring. I’ll show you how adhering to the principles of inspiration helped make it so.
- At 0:19, Seth encourages us to grow and believe in ourselves: “You have the chance, whatever you do for a living, to go beyond where you are…”
- Starting at 0:30 we use music, narration, and well-timed pauses to communicate with clarity and passion, plunging us into rousing and building momentum at 0:49, starting with the words “don’t ask for permission” and going on to challenge us to show up with our best work.
- As of 1:01, the video uses the principle of leading by example by showing us people across every walk of life choosing to be creative.
Next, let’s study the video we produced for For Our Kids, a national network of parent-led involved in climate action. Here are a few of the ways in which we used our principles to inspire our viewers to join in:
- At 0:21, we strive to connect on a personal level by emphatically portraying parents who aspire to create a more resilient world for their kids, but who are challenged by a lack of time.
- From 1:01 to 1:21, we foster collaboration and community when we explain that by working together and taking collective action, we can grow our impact exponentially.
- Throughout the entire video, but especially as of 1:29, we act as a mentor and guide when we explain all the ways in which For Our Kids will support the viewer’s climate action efforts.
We produced this video for Balance of Power. Our goal was to inspire viewers to ask party leaders in Canada to remove barriers to women’s participation in politics at all levels of government.
Part of how we do that is by shining the spotlight, as of 0:55, on women leaders, and by recognizing and appreciating all the ways in which “when women win, we all win”.
In our Atomic Habits summary video, we wanted viewers to inspire viewers to set up a system of small habits to free them up to focus on their more essential tasks.
In order to do that, we focused on visually sharing stories and experiences of people applying Clear’s framework and conquering obstacles and achieving their goals.
Follow these best practices to create a captivating whiteboard video that not only educates but also inspires, leaving a lasting impression on your audience and propelling them toward action and personal growth.
On your marks, get set, inspire!
I hope this post has given you ideas for how to ignite the fire of inspiration so that you can transform ordinary moments into extraordinary achievements. Embrace the principles of inspiration and leave a lasting impact on those who follow your lead.
And if you’re considering doing it with an animated video, please check out some of our whiteboard animation examples. And if you’d like the support of our award-winning whiteboard animation agency, please contact Exaltus today. We’d love to help!
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