We have all included in our little lives people who give us breath, energy and the desire to move forward. But we also need them for more complex reasons.
Sometimes, when we are reading biographies of inspiring authors, artists or any kind of influential icons. We don’t help but fall in love with their creativity, their resilience and the way they view life. We all have admiration for known or unknown personalities, real or fictitious, whose example nourishes us and even influences our choices and ways of being.
This desire to identify with inspiring people is a sign of good mental health. It shows a desire to evolve, to continue to build and enrich one’s personality throughout life. But why do we set our sights on one figure rather than another, what are the reasons behind our elections?
They reveal to us!
Much of our motivation in choosing our models is unconscious. Some people inspire us because they incarnate, without our being aware of it, a physical trait or a character trait that refers us to other identifying models, much older, those of childhood. They allow us to consolidate our identity bases built during our first years. With them, our unconscious is in a way a little reminder!
Others come to reveal in us qualities, aptitudes, potentials that we possess in the embryonic state and have never developed until then, often due to repression. These model personalities can then become the “triggers” of our ignored and buried talents.
They intrigue us!
Some people can attract us because they intrigue our curiosity, sharpen our thirst for understanding. It is because they destabilize us, push us, take us outside known and marked paths, because we do not grasp them at first, that they evoke our admiration.
We sense that by looking into the case of these personalities so different from us, we will probably learn a lot about life, we will discover new psychic functioning, we will acquire knowledge that can equip us in our relationship life. Here, it is not a question of resembling them but rather of learning from them. Perhaps also to find some answer to our little intimate mysteries.
They carry us!
Some people – through their actions, their writings, their choices – very clearly embody values and ideals in which we recognize ourselves but which we do not really succeed in implementing in our lives. Daily life, routine, fatigue, laziness often prevent us from being up to our personal ambitions. We therefore hope for a push from our models, to carry us, pull us towards growing.
And they are! These inspiring personalities are particularly stimulating because they show us concretely what it is possible to become. Above all, they have this incredible power to spark our imagination. Confronted with an inspiring personality, we project ourselves into another life, another time, another dimension, we imagine ourselves in its skin. And once set in motion, our imagination pushes us, authorizes us all possible advances, allows us to continue to create our life.
They reassure us!
Faced with difficult choices and complex circumstances that we have to live with, the people who inspire us appear to us as mentors holding instructions for use. In our minds, they play the role formerly assumed by the elders. In an atomized society and much less communal than yesterday, our ideal figures took up the torch from these holders of experience. This is how we are led to ask the question from which a direction will no doubt emerge: how would they have acted in these circumstances?
This projection to which we engage according to what we know about our models helps us to mobilize our resources and in the end often to find our own solutions. Paradoxically, by thinking of imitating someone else, we innovate, we create! A personality remains inspiring only if we manage to find the right distance with it, if we know not to give ourselves up completely to it and preserve our freedom in this very special relationship.
A steady frequency!
For people who seems inspiring to inspire us really and concretely, we have to “frequent” them diligently. Either in the flesh if they are part of our daily environment, or by thinking of them and remembering memories shared with them, or by reading articles and biographies on them if they are known. Our brain will record all these reflections and constitute a mental program integrating all the facets and all the inspiring accomplishments of our mentors, recovering all their good ideas and adopting them in our lives.
Reference: https://thoughtcatalog.com/gina-martz/2014/05/5-reasons-why-you-should-seek-out-inspirational-people-and-keep-them-in-your-life/
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