Holzer Allison - Dare to Inspire

O ur story as friends, business partners, and authors is a story about inspirationhow we spark it in ourselves and one another, how we are sustaining it over time, and how we translate it into positive impact in our work and lives.

We founded our company InspireCorps in 2013, but its roots were planted years earlier.

One of our earliest collective memories is meeting over Google Hangouts to talk about our positive change model. We came from vastly different industries and backgrounds: Jen from leadership development in Fortune 500 companies, Sandy from Silicon Valley and academia with a PhD in organizational behavior, and Allison from emotional intelligence and coaching within education. Despite our different perspectives, one common passion connected us.

it is a travesty that so many lack a meaningful connection to their work, unable to use personal skills and talents to have a positive impact, unable to feel fulfilled in their work. Its a lost opportunity to make a positive difference in the world. Its a lost opportunity to feel fulfilled and excited in those ninety thousand hours of our lives.

We recognized early on that our common passion is to remedy this for individuals, teams, and organizations. And we had good ideas for the shape and content of the remedy. But we didnt know, at first, what to call it. We talked about it as that magic thing that happens when

your performance and impact are at their absolute best, or

teams collaborate in sync and together create incredible impact, or

organizations innovate and delight the world with positive change and extraordinary results, both internally and in their business.

Through ongoing conversations, we wrestled with trying to pinpoint the key concept that captured our vision. We talked it through until finally, one day in August of 2012, we had a conversation where we punched through the wall. Allison, with her MFA in fine arts and visual memory, remembers exactly where she was sitting at that momenton the phone in the kitchen of a small historic home her parents were renting for the summer in Essex, Connecticut.

We realized that day that the key concept we had been searching for was inspirationinspiring individuals, inspiring teams, inspiring organizations. There is little research on it in the areas we came from, so it eluded us at first. But when we landed on it, we knew.

With renewed clarity about our focus, we started researching what is known about inspiration. Our digging confirmed that, while a few academics have studied the abstract concept, very little is known about how it actually works, especially in the workplace. Thus began our quest to understand inspiration: how to create and replicate it and how to harness it as a resource that leads to extraordinary directed actions and results.

Our own research on inspiration began by consolidating insights and observations from our work with more than 320 senior leaders and then, starting in 2016, by embarking on focused, original data collection on inspiration through interviews with leaders across industries and levels about inspiration in their lives and work. We have conducted live and video interviews with nearly seventy-five leaders across a variety of industries, experiences, generations, and backgrounds, which confirmed and expanded on the considerable secondary research (i.e., positive psychology, emotional intelligence, motivation theory, and organizational behavior) that we conducted on the topic. We have analyzed these interviews qualitatively, identifying themes and insights that are the foundation for the frameworks we introduce in this book. This work is at the frontier of a new field of exploration that will continue to evolve and unfold. As we continue these interviews, we are already recognizing new and important ways to reinvent work around inspiration.

From this research, we learned that inspiration can be more than a fleeting emotion that feels goodit can and should be a daily practice, a deliberate orientation, and a mindset of staying connected to what inspires you. Our mission became clear with these core insights. In our work with clients, what makes the difference for them individually and collectively is sustainable inspiration directed toward positive impact. We are committed to building a corps of individuals who spark and sustain their own inspiration.