The Edges of Epiphany, or Why Inspirational Storytelling Isn’t Enough

Concentric circles of chairs surround me, each filled with a human whose face and form I can make out in the darkness, if I stare with an uncomfortable directness. Where I stand in the spotlight, I can hear folks clapping and cheering. This is for me a new mode of public speaking, and I am on edge as I feel my way towards sharing what I hope is a contagious epiphany. I am trying to tell a story about losing nine pounds using a habit chart. Sensing my uneasiness, the listeners are making encouraging sounds, helping carry the story towards its unimpressive denouement.

Then comes the part I am most nervous about: every speaker at the Motivations Ritual in the downtown-Chicago job-training organization Cara has to sing a song. I conclude my inspirational storytelling with a ditty from my Sunday School childhood and am tremulously relieved to hear the audience join in on “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”

I encountered Motivations through my friend Robert White, Cara’s Chief Program Officer. As a research subject and podcast conversationalist, he had responded to my questions about organizational spirituality with an account of the character of this morning ritual. What he had to say beguiled me into showing up for an event where I felt rather out of place:

Perhaps the most beautiful part of the practice is that it’s an egalitarian space, where we’re all peers. So whether you’re a participant or a staff member or a guest entering into that space requires that, if somebody taps you on the shoulder…the rules are that if you get tapped on the shoulder, you go in no matter who you are, so there’s no — the Chief Program Officer, me, I can’t be too cool to go in the circle, I can’t be too good for it, I can’t be any better than anybody else in the room, and we’re sharing of our own experiences.

I wasn’t, of course, the only speaker that morning in February of 2020. (Yes, that February before that March.) I’ve written about the other speakers in my book Why Spiritual Capital Matters. Here’s an excerpt:

A woman had started things off earlier that morning, bursting into the inner ring of people, giving everyone high-fives. The rest of us were standing or sitting in the outer rings of chairs in the Cara auditorium. We watched, a little blearily, as she ran around the circle clockwise and then counterclockwise, shouting the ritualized greeting: “Good morning, Cara, Clean Slate, and guests!” It’s a liturgy, a call-and-response exchange that runs through thirty minutes of storytelling and singing. Each speaker runs the same circle twice, takes the mic, and responds to the prompt for the day — which that morning happened to be something like, “Tell us a goal you have set and what you’re doing to achieve it.” The tales arrived at every scale of import. A woman told about trying to slip free of homelessness. A man told about trying to make his bed every morning.

I share that excerpt to give you a sense of the sheer happiness of the event, but also to convey something of why I found its inspirationalism disequilibrating. As I tried to engage the motivational mode, I kept bumping into the unwritten rules for inspirational storytelling:

Rule #1 — It’s all about the big idea. Ideas can change everything. So keep your central idea right up front.

Rule #2 — Begin as Luke, end as Obi Wan. Even if you’re the protagonist in your own inspirational narrative, you should conclude the story by becoming the guide for all the Skywalkers in your audience.

Rule #3 — Make clear how to make the world better. Inspiration, motivation, epiphany all depend on moving from not-so-great-A to noticeably-better-B.

I could go, but you get the point. You’ve probably told inspirational stories in your time. Maybe you have to do so today, encouraging some fatigued colleagues or motivating some lukewarm clients. It’s a vital part of organizational leadership, and no mistake.

At the same time, my research among social entrepreneurs suggests there are limits to epiphany transmission. I remember Corey Kohn, who runs the software company dojo4 in Boulder, telling me how her team goes through cycles of inspiration and deflation. First, everybody gets excited about an innovation. Then, everybody gets into the work of developing that innovation, and then —workplace motivation runs out. And, says Corey, she’s compelled to seek some new inspiring innovation just to push the motivation boulder back up the mountain one more time.

My sense that epiphany and inspiration have their limits derives from an ancient piece of wisdom literature that has been a subject of dark fascination to me for thirty years or more. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, the sage Qoheleth gives a seemingly inspirational account of all his accomplishments:

I made great works; I built houses and planted vineyards for myself; I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house; I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me I Jerusalem. I also gathered silver and gold and the treasure of kings and of the provinces….

But at the end of the day, the Teacher says, he was running after hot wind. The oldest translations render that hot wind as “vanity of vanities.” Cal Seerveld’s contemporary translation has Qoheleth calling these windy projects a smelly fart.

If persuading employees and team members to get on board is one part of workplace communication, I think we should concede that inspirationalism has some smelly limitations, too. Is communication best understood as a conveyor belt for transferring the leader’s inner uplift to the team member’s inner life? Is it ethically responsible to see storytelling as a way to jack into each others’ psyches, seeking a kind of workplace communion? Isn’t this meddling with other people’s interior lives invasive? And isn’t it at least a little suspect? (In other words, I’m telling you this story because, as your manager, I need your inner life to be uplifted so that our productivity and our profits will be too.)

Is there a better way to think about the affective economy of your workplace? My new book Why Spiritual Capital Matters recommends changing the stories you tell. And altering how we cast epiphanies may just suggest some new tacit rules of workplace motivation. Let me name a few for starters:

Instead of starting with an idea, start with a place. That is, instead of starting with my inner life or your inner life or hers over there, start with what’s shaping all of our lives among us. A good way to change the frame from the inward to the outward to the “among-ward” is to pay closer attention to your place — its givens, its possibilities, its constraints, its gifts.

Instead of positioning yourself as the guru for other people’s heroic narratives, try to be the catalyst. Dave Odom describes the catalyst in an influential Faith & Leadership article this way. Catalysts, he says,

are often behind the scenes when something good is happening. They have an eye for talented people and can envision how people with a diversity of gifts can accomplish significant work together. Catalysts often have considerable intellectual or organizational savvy that they use for the benefit of others…Catalysts’ default is to encourage, connect and release. They spark activity and then typically step away. After their projects become successful and begin to scale, it is often difficult to recognize that they have been there.

Finally, tell stories about how the under-resourced — aren’t. Alongside inspirational stories, talk about gifts and resources that are already present in our workplaces and their neighborhoods. They may be goods that need to be activated, to be sure, but the right kind of story can show how these goods are already in quiet circulation.

I am so glad for Cara’s Motivations circle every morning, Monday through Thursday, and I encourage you to stop by some day soon. But alongside this sort of communication of epiphany, I would suggest that communities cultivate stories not just about motivated individuals but also about newly activated gifts among us.