Fill Your Tanks & Get Inspired

August’s Leadership Experiments are for any of you who really need a holiday but can’t leave your house/town/country.

Holidays are how we refill the tanks. We steep ourselves in new stimulus – new sights, sounds, smells, tastes. We put down the to-do list and turn off the internal drill sergeant voice. We return to work replenished and reenergized, our tanks refilled.

If you’re staycationing this August or skipping the holiday completely, the likelihood is you’re going to need to refill the tanks consciously and creatively instead.

One way to do this is to surround yourself with new stimulus, just as you would on holiday. New things to see, new things to hear, new things to experience. August’s Leadership Experiments are designed as a smorgasbord of new, inspiring stimulus for you to choose from.

Last week I asked my Linked In network what’s inspiring them at the moment

Throughout the month I’ll post their suggestions, add a couple more of my own and propose a Leadership Experiment. You can expect suggestions for inspiring books to read, music to listen to, videos to watch. I’m handing over this week’s Smorgasbord selection to one person, Costas Papaikonomou, who really pulled out all the stops with his suggestions. Hardly surprising seeing as he’s one of the world’s leading lights on Innovation. Thanks so much, Costas.

Enjoy your Leadership Experiment and Your Inspiration Smorgasbord and if you find this article helpful please share it.

Your Leadership Experiment

1) Pick the tank you most need to fill – your physical, mental, or emotional/spiritual tank.

2) Think of 5 NEW things you can do to re-fill that tank. It’s all about NEW. If you need physical energy how can you shake up your self-care, exercise, or food routine? If you need mental energy what can you read, watch or listen to which is completely different? If you need emotional/spiritual energy who can you connect with who inspires you or how can you change up your meditation or spiritual practice?

Your Inspiration Smorgasbord – from Costas Papaikonomou

“I'm a softie, and easily inspired by anyone who puts their whole self behind an idea, especially if the chances of material success are slim or irrelevant. People who know they're right, and need to get it done because it's the right thing to do. Things that involve personal risk, with odds stacked against the cause. Funnily enough, that includes most, if not all indie music and movie making, and most literary authors fall in this category too. But also bootstrapped entrepreneurs burning their own savings, and people putting a life's earnings in knowledge and money back into a community. These initiatives require immense creative stamina to complete, at their own risk. Let me add that I am not inspired by anything that involves being paid a salary or bonus. This includes most corporate self-celebratory broadcasting, and sadly a significant chunk of subsidy baiting academic research too. I'm inspired by givers, not askers, nor takers.

ANY local entrepreneur. These people get out of bed every morning, knowing there are bills to pay, debts to clear and salaries to cover, with no certainty other than that their craft is what draws people to their doorstep. No guarantees. Any butcher, baker, shopkeeper, farmer, etc will do. I've even started warming to the countless (and in my view pretty naive/superfluous) coffee, poke-bowl and sushi joints that opened around my neighborhood, knowing that their innocent beliefs will harm, and harden, no one but themselves.

Bill Bryson "A Short History of Nearly Everything" For a historical overview: the majority of people that Bryson describes in this book are immensely inspiring to me. Smart, sometimes eccentric and above all very curious people who made it their life's ambition to figure out the earth's mass, what chlorine tastes like, or how to survive decompression by trying it on themselves. Progress as human condition.

Amateur Arts groups, be it theatre, writing, singing, painting, music, whatever. They exist everywhere humans live together, from western middle-class suburbs to south-Asian slums. The arts create bonds, they energize and deliver unexpected outcomes far beyond the sum of parts. Also: they are self-sustaining.

Iggy Pop, as no list about inspiration can be complete without him. Nor Clint Eastwood.”