Adam Galinsky
speaker
285 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Adam Galinsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So, for example, one person might talk about how, yeah, I work really hard on making sure I see the big picture. I communicate it. I make sure that we all are going in an optimistic direction. I find ways to simplify it so that people can understand that. Or someone else is like, yeah, I really practice at being calm in a crisis, right? I know how important that is.
I know because of leader amplification effect that my anxiety will become their anxiety. But if I'm calm, they're going to be calm. Or they say, I work really hard at trying to meet the needs of other people, being that good mentor. They might not use those words, but they recognize the power. Here's the one element that I think characterizes every person that we might describe as inspiring.
It goes back to one of the things that we've already talked about is, again, the power of reflection. The people that are truly inspiring reflect on their experience. They reflect on the things they did good that day. and they work on how they might continue them. They also reflect on the times when they didn't see the big picture, or they lost their temper, or they were anxious in a crisis.
They think about how they could be better the next time. I think that is really so profoundly fundamental. People say only the reflected life is worth living, but the reflective life is what allows us to be the best possible version of ourselves.
There are not. I think that, again, gets back to this idea that leaders aren't born, that they're made. I will say that there's one thing that I think does really help people be more inspiring and why it's so important to be inspiring yourself is that it's a heck of a lot easier to be inspiring if you had inspiring people as your mentors, as your parents, as your leaders.
One of the things that we know is that we tend to perpetuate the leadership that we receive ourselves. I discovered this self as a father. My dad had this volcanic rage that would come out for spilling milk, just ridiculous. tortured and terrorized me. I even had nightmares with my dad chasing me in my dreams. My dad was a wonderful person.
He's probably the most inspiring person in my life, but he had this one infuriating flaw. Early on, as a parent, two little boys, they would spill milk and I I would explode in rage. I felt like I'd become my dad. I saw the effect on them, the immediate impact, the sense of that fugue state of panic that they experienced when that rage came out. I had to train myself to not be my dad.
and to be a different type of father, to have all of his inspiring traits, but not take on that one frustrating flaw. That, again, gets back to the power of reflection. I could reflect on my experience. I could reflect from where it came from, but I could also then plan and make commitments and put in practices in place to prevent them from happening in the future.
Thanks so much, Mike. I really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for asking such amazing questions.
Leaders are made because there is a universal set of characteristics that make someone inspiring. We can study those, learn those, practice those and develop those skills. It also means that it's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. So that means that you could be inspiring today, but you could slide towards the inferior end of the continuum tomorrow.
But it also means no matter how bad you are today, tomorrow you can be a little bit better.
Thank you so much. The honor is all mine.
That's a great question. I think that there are so many different moments that we can think of in our lives that really matter. To me, probably one of the biggest moments of my life was not just a single moment in time, but a little bit longer is in
When I was a junior, after my junior in high school, before my senior high school, I went and lived with a family in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for three months. And that was just such a transformative experience to be on the other side of the world, to be in a very different culture. The family I lived in was solidly middle class, but I had to use the bathroom and a hole in the ground.
I had to share a bed with my Indonesian brother because I didn't have more space, but it was just A time in my life that really changed who I was and helped me really identify. I guess that changed who I was, helped me identify who I was.
So there are sort of two events that happened back in 2006 within a couple of months of each other. The first was very sadly, I was on a plane at the time, but my dad was walking to a basketball game in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and got hit by a car and killed. And I found out when I'd landed to go to a conference in Los Angeles about midnight.
And the one saving grace from that moment, I was just, you can imagine how wrecked I was emotionally and torn apart is my dad's only sibling lived in Los Angeles. And so I was able to go to her house, my aunt's house. And I still remember very clearly when we, she opened the door, hugged in the sense of sorrow, but also this mutual comfort that we're giving each other.
And I plaintively said to her, I can't believe I've lost my dad. And she said, we've all lost a dad. I was his big sister, but he was my dad. And that was such just an incredibly transformative comment. And I just kept coming back to it. I kept asking myself, why did that ring so true? Why did that sense that he was the dad to many matter so much?
And I realized that his memorial service, which was about a month later at the university, he was a professor, like about 500 people showed up. And how many people told me stories about the impact of my dad had. And then about two months later, I was teaching the FBI. And I was with 60 FBI agents. And one of them started talking about a leader that inspired them.
And I still remember that moment, too, because he stood up in his chair. He got big in his posture. His eyes lit up. He used his hands. He leaned in. And it was just like, and there's almost like this sense of this like awe and admiration emanating from him. And so at that moment, I turned to the rest of the FBI agents and I was like, Well, can any of you tell me about a leader that inspired you?
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