Improved Leadership: Inspire Confidence and Passion in Your Community

1. Introduction: I bet you can think of a teacher that you've had at some point in your life growing up. He made you feel confident and passionate about something. What if we have the ability to make others around us feel the same way? My name is Aram and I'm a director, and in my line of work, I have to make people feel confident and passionate about the same things I am. So I have to help people who have never been in front of a camera before feel confident in telling their story. I have to get a client passionate about an idea that's just on paper, so much so that they're willing to invest in it as a film. You don't need to be a politician or a CEO to want to inspire others. You may be a parent or a teacher, or starting out a new business. Whatever it is, having the ability to inspire others to be confident and passionate about the same things you are will help create a loyal following and a team around you who are all pushing in the same direction, hoping for the same thing. Any path has a use for learning these skills. But the truth is, it's not that difficult to get right, but it's very easy to get it wrong. In this class, I want to teach you what I've learned over my career, getting opportunities to take on bigger projects, to work on aircraft carriers or with crews of over 60 people. It all required confidence and passion from other people, and I want to help you achieve the same in whatever field you're in. This class is an opportunity to learn some helpful tools and mindsets that can really help you get to where you want to be, by helping others get to where they want to be. Inspiring confidence and passion in people is a fundamental skill in helping you drive to the goal that you have and helping bring others along with you. You can either just sit and watch this class or you can download the workbook and follow through with this and actually do some exercises to help you become confident in yourself. So if you want to do just that and you want to help others grow and achieve their best, so you can also achieve your best, then grab yourself a cup of tea, maybe a scone, if you're feeling British, and we'll get stuck in. 2. Class Project: Now I know that some of you really enjoy doing a class project and others of you maybe not so much, so you don't have to in this, there is no pressure. But if you'd like to, then there is a workbook that you can use. You can just print this off. You don't have to do anything fancy. You can't if you want, put in a nice spring binder. But the purpose of this is to help you start putting these lessons into an actual situation, to your life. How you can take these lessons and put it in a real-life scenario. In that workbook, it follows through the lessons I'm going to teach, giving you some exercises, some places to make notes, and add your own ideas on how to inspire confidence and passion in whatever it is that you're trying to lead, whether that is a classroom or potentially a new business. Whatever it is, these exercises can help you. But equally, you are very welcome just to sit with a cup of tea and watch the lesson, and maybe make some notes on your laptop. Whatever you prefer, when you're ready, we'll get stacking. I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Four principles of Leadership: This is an overview of the lessons to come which are going to be broken down a little bit more, but they all fit in to these four principles. The word leadership, it means so many different things to many different people. How you interpret that word can really affect how you present yourself when you're put into that position and especially if that position is thrown onto you. It can be really challenging to know how to use that position to inspire and create passion for the same thing that you are passionate about. I like to think there's four main principles of leadership. If you do these in the right order, you can create that team, that community that you want to. Now, I have a bit of a history with the sea. I used to work for Lifeboat Charity, so I'm naturally always leaning towards boats as an analogy. But it works really well here because when you're on a boat, when you're on a voyage, if you are the captain, then, it is up to you to inspire and empower and make sure that everyone on that boat is doing the right thing in the right way, going in the same direction. Treating this as a voyage on a ship, the first thing that we have to do is we have to inspire people to come on that journey with us. We need a crew to begin with. It is that initial way of getting people see recognize that you're going on a voyage and want to come with you. That's the first thing we need to do; we're going to go on a journey, we need a crew to come with us. The second thing that you obviously have to do if you are a captain on the ship is guide the ship. You have to know where you're going and you have to be able to tell people, be able to communicate where you want to get to. Before the days of satnav, we'd have someone sat with a map and then sit next to us in the car. If they got it wrong, that meant that we all got it wrong. We all go in the wrong direction. That ability to guide people and have the vision of the direction that you're going in, people really, really engage with that because everyone, at times, feels a little bit lost. If we can have someone to help us on that journey to guide us the right way, it takes off a lot of anxiety, a lot of problems. That's a massive part of leadership, and inspiring competence, and passion. That's the second principle, to guide the ship. The third principle is to empower or enable your crew. It's overwhelmingly good having your crew knowing where you're going. But if your crew on that journey don't feel confident in their tasks, they don't know how to do it, they didn't have the tools to do it, it's going to be impossible this to get anywhere. At its fundamental level, we are drawn to leaders because we feel empowered by them, by their actions, by their words. We want to do that. We want to empower people with our sense of direction, our purpose, and let them know that we are there to support them. We are there to help them get what they need to to get them where they want to go. You may be the captain of this ship wanting to go on a voyage, but you have a crew of people also wanting to go on that voyage too. Back when I was a kid, I'd go around a friend's house. They were playing on the PlayStation or something and I really wanted to go, but I couldn't. That was really frustrating. I didn't feel empowered there too. That's really a childish analogy, but it does demonstrate that we all want to feel enabled in some way. We want to feel that we are part of this journey, we are contributing to this journey. You can have a team of contributors. Happy days. You're making your life easier and you're making people feel involved and they have a purpose. The third principle is empowering your crew. The fourth and final principle is maintaining harmony. Now, you could be a CEO of a massive company or you could be a small self-employed person who's just trying to have a nice community. If you don't maintain harmony, you're not going to inspire confidence or passion from anyone. It's hugely important. It applies to your family life, to your work life, to your personal life. Harmony is so important, so I want to cover that as well in this class. They're the four main principles of leadership. The classes that I'm going to teach are going to dive into different aspects of each of those. We're going to move straight on to how to achieve the first principle of inspiring a crew to join you on your mission. 4. Let them see your passion: Now, one of the fantasize of filmmaking is doing your own passion projects where you don't have any money, you don't have any clients, that is how you have to do something. But what it means is that you have to either pay for it if you want to be there, or you have to inspire people to create that passion, to come help you for free. How do you do that? How do you create such a strong team who are prepared to work 10-hour days for three days in a row, completely for free to help you on your goal of making a film? Well, the most important aspect, and I've spoken about this before in different situations, but it applies just as strongly, is you need to show your passion, not tell people about it. Is walking the walk versus talking the talk. If you think to an interview scenario and you had two candidates, and one of these people, they just spoke to you about how they're passionate about something. Maybe it's how things work. They're really passionate about understanding the inner workings of machines, but this person, they show you that. They come in and they say, ''Oh, actually, I built this watch. Do you like it? What do you think?'' You're far more engaged in that. You can see the passion, you can see the excitement there. This person really enjoys what they do. If you can show your passion, people are going to be way more inclined to join you on that. They're going to get excited too. When I was at junior school, which is a very long time ago now, we studied something where we would do dress-up days at historical characters where, wherever we were studying, whether it was Saxons or Vikings, one day in that we don't dress up, we know it would create shields and swords and people would come in with chainmail mail we'd get to live the experience. That just brings it alive. When you're kid and you're learning about history, it's not really that interesting, but when you get to engage with that, when you can feel the passion, you can witness the teacher is getting excited, you're not just hearing about old stories, but you're actually living it. That is so inspiring. You'd get kids who are normally very quiet in class, they didn't really want to talk, and suddenly, they were so confident because they had a chance to demonstrate their other skills. I used to do a bit of filming for Wildlife Trust, and what they would do is once every two weeks, they'd go into a school, and one of their programs was an outdoor education outreach. They'd go into a school and they take a class out of the classroom and bring them outside and teach them how to guard and how to build shouses, build fires. Giving kids that practical chance to actually engage with something and see adults really passionate about what they're doing. You would see kids come alive in a way that they're just doing otherwise. Showing your passion is hugely important, and there's a little exercise and work that you can do to run through this, to help you figure out how to turn things you're passionate about. Maybe things that you would tell people you're passionate about and show you that instead. I'll just give you one quick example, I was asked to do a music video for a friend and I asked quite a lot of people to come help out with very little money around to do it. I was so shocked to actually pull together a 15 strong crew and a 45 strong cast willing to help. They were willing to help because the crew loved that my enthusiasm for the project and just in filmmaking in general. They can see the passion of wanting to do this, and for the dancers involved, it was an opportunity to get to come and dance and to meet the singer that they really wanted to. Bringing those elements together inspired a crew of 60 people to come and work on something, to collectively unforce this memory, and it was a challenging day, but everyone just gave that absolute everything. That's the first step we can do in inspiring a crew to join us on our journey. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can be seen as a leader in that collective and how you can actually have people come stand behind you and really support and drive forward on your mission. 5. The Shield: Be Seen as a Leader: Inspiring confidence and passion is not always about being innovative and exciting, sometimes it's just having a very clear sense of who you are and what you stand for. If people feel like they can fool down and they'll still be protected, they'll get back up and they'll push forward even harder and that means protecting those around you, protecting those that are part of your community. A couple of years ago, I witnessed a terrible example in leadership which just destroyed all confidence and all passion. It was a massive turning point for me when I witnessed this happen. I want to tell you about that time and what lesson we can take from that. Put yourself in my shoes. Imagine that you work at a company and you've had three years of restructure, of different changes happening, and before that, there were another three years of restructure and different changes happening. You just find your rhythm, you're beginning to get into a place where you understand the process, and then you get pulled into a meeting with the entire company and told yet another restructure is happening. But more than that, in this meeting, they announce who is being made redundant just on a PowerPoint slide. The people up the front talking, they're so embarrassed by it that they refuse to really answer the questions properly, or they start laughing during the presentation. I can appreciate that that comes from a source of embarrassment and nervousness, but the point stood that in that moment, everybody's confidence in leadership was just completely lost. Even people's passion in this company, who so many people completely love, was questioned to a monumental level. That is the effect that bad leadership can have. But in that moment, I ended up becoming a bit of a leader myself, which as a 24-year-old in this huge company, was a nerve-racking moment. I was already contemplating going freelance and then this happened. Even though I wasn't made redundant, the way everything was done, it riled me up so much that I just thought, "I'm going to leave. That's it, I'm going to leave." I decided in that meeting that someone needed to say something because my colleagues around me were crying. They were so confused or hurt and yet no one was really asking the questions too directly, everything was coming from a nervous position. Because I'd already mentally clocked out, I just thought, "Well I'm just going to say how I feel." I didn't even articulate it very well because I was still nervous, talking in front of 2-300 people along with everyone watching online. But I stood up, I took the microphone and I said my piece. I said, "I think that you have done this the wrong way, whilst I've not been affected, you can see how this has affected my colleagues," and I made it clear that I thought what they were doing was being done the wrong way, it was incredibly insensitive to so many people who had worked there for a long time. I wanted to give them reason to actually stop and think about what they were doing, not to just tap themselves on the back after and say, "Job well done," because what they were doing was effectively being too scared to actually talk to people and face the questions in a one-to-one or in a small environment. Later that day, and for the next few days, I had people that I had never met coming up and saying to me, "Thank you for speaking up, you said exactly what I wanted to say," and I found myself, getting this new sense of community within the company, and all I'd done was be a shield. I think this is such a massive part of leadership. It's not necessarily being the one to always forge forward, but it's being the one to take a stand when you need to. People stand behind a shield. You have Captain America, the Romans, the whole empire was built on shield maneuvers. Football clubs, their logo is often a shield of some kind. The shield is such a strong symbol of all the principles that you stand for, and as I like to think of it, it's your line in the sand. It's very important that on my set everyone is treated with the same amount of respect. No matter who you are, where you come from, what you do, everyone on that job is a human being who needs to be respected. For me, that's a line in the sand. It's if you're not going to treat my crew the way I expect you to, or if my crew aren't going to treat each other, or if I'm not going to treat someone the way that I expect myself to treat them, that's a line that I can't cross. When I'm on a job and I'm the producer-director and I have a crew of maybe just five, maybe 10, maybe 20 people there, it's on me to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and that requires being a shield. In the workbook, you find find a page where you can write down your lines in the sand, and effectively this is all the things that you do not want to compromise on because if you put that in writing, you're more likely to stick with it. I'll give you a current example. With COVID it's a very difficult situation in terms of film production. Now, many different people have different levels of this, of where their line is, but for me, I feel it's important to have that in writing to know, "Well, this is my line in the sand. I'm not prepared to do a shoot without these things in place." Having that written down, it gives me confidence in what I stand for, that way I can be a shield for everyone. Come up with your lines in the sand, your principles that you do not want to compromise on, write them down, see them there in black and white, and then learn how you can use that as your guide for being a shield. Everyone can respect that on both sides. People who are trying to attack you, if they see that you are being a shield and the support that that gets you from your own side, your respect will go up. Being a shield is the difference between being respected as a leader and thinking you're a leader. It's not just about what you need, it's about what everybody needs. Because once you start compromising on your principles, on your lines in the sand, it's a very quick way to lose respect and trust from people. You want to draw your lines in the sand and stand firm on them. You want to feel confident about what it is that you stand for, so other people can feel confident about what it is you stand for. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about the importance of decision-making and how you can make decisions effectively, that inspires confidence in your ability. 6. Decision-Making: Creating Confidence: One of the hardest parts of inspiring confidence is being decisive. I've always been quite indecisive in my life and this is probably the hardest part for me. This is what I always continuously try to work on, because being decisive is a really difficult skill, but it's really important. When you're outside of the situation, it's very easy to see the logical, clear-cut answer, but when you're inside, emotions take over. But there are some ways we can make this a little bit easier for ourselves so we don't feel like we're constantly battling our own anxiety or self-doubt. As a leader, in an extreme example, like the president, for instance, it's not about making decisions that people don't want to. It's about making decisions that people need not to. These decisions need to fool with you. They need to have someone like you take that responsibility. But to make the right choice requires listening to the wisdom around you, is where you are receptive to all the input around you, but the decision ultimately lies with you. An example where this works so well in inspiring confidence is negotiation. In a hostage negotiation, the most crucial thing is to make that person, whoever is holding them hostage, feel valued, feel listened to. You need to be receptive. You need to listen to what they say, but you also have to get what you want out of the end of that, obviously. It's the negotiator's task to make sure that everyone comes out smiling, that everyone comes out, and that comes about from being receptive, but also being decisive, by having your lines in the sand. All these elements, they build on each other, and when you have your lines in the sand, when you have shown your passion, and you get to this point, making decisions is a lot easier because you already have your strong foundation. Then when that choice comes, where to go, you have more confidence in yourself, let alone the confidence anyone else has in you. Now, there's one story in particular that is so valuable in demonstrating the importance of inspiring confidence in people working with you that talks about the dangers if you don't listen to those around you. Because when we are in that leadership role, we think that it's all about us knowing the answer, us making that choice straight away. But actually, for people to feel passionate and included in whatever it is, you need to listen to them, and value their opinion, whether it's right or wrong. You don't have to act on what they say, but you need to listen and give it its fair due. There's an amazing book called Black Box Thinking, super recommend it. It has an amazing story in there about an anesthetist. The patient on the table, it was the third operation and they started having a reaction inside. Now, the anesthetist, they knew that this reaction was caused by latex gloves. But because the surgeon didn't want to listen, they didn't like having their authority questioned, they were adamant that it can't be that. This argument kicked off in a surgery. The anesthetist, who it's not their role to say what to do or what not, but they were so convinced that it was the gloves that they refused to carry on. Now, the conversation went above the surgeon, it went all the way to the top of the hospital, and whilst the person was still waiting there, on the table, and the order was related to change gloves. Now, after the operation, some more testing was done and they realized that the latex gloves were the problem. Making the right decisions, it relies on being receptive, but it's also a way of making other people feel included, as well as potentially making your life just a hell of a lot easier. Had that anesthetist not had the confidence to speak up, if they were nervous about being wrong and the consequences for them, that person on the table may not be here today. Once you have all that information, make a choice. Take the time to listen to all that feedback as much as you can, within the time that you have, and then make your choice. If you're wrong, at least you made a more informed decision, and you can also find out that you're wrong, rather than just wasting time. Even if this is just choosing a restaurant, ask your partner, "Well, what type of food do you fancy?" Get that information upfront. "Well, I really fancy Italian." Great. Let's make a decision. Once you have that base information, then make a decision. Being indecisive is actually just really unhelpful. It hinders progress, and it can strip away that passion and that confidence in you. The more information you can have upfront, more that you're prepared a listen to that information, the better choice you are likely to make. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can inspire confidence and passion so much that if you take yourself out of the equation, whatever it is or whoever it is that you're trying to inspire will keep going. 7. Helping Others Grow: Going back to the ship analogy, you want to be able to go to sleep as a captain of that ship and wake up with it still on course. I want you to imagine for a minute that you are a teacher in a classroom and you decide to leave your classroom for, let's say, 20 minutes and you come back and all your students, they are hard at work. They have not only done what you've asked them but they've done extra and they're now happily singing songs. That level of confidence and understanding and hard work, that's not easy to create by taking yourself out of the equation, but it's really important. There's a really interesting book called From Good to Great. It's written by Jim Collins. It's a bit outdated and it's only American businesses, so it can be hard to follow. But at its heart, it's talking about how businesses go from good to great. But it goes beyond that and shows why if a leader doesn't teach and enable the skills that they have to other people, when that person leaves, that business crumbles. That's a bad situation because that means that you can never walk away from that situation and happily watch the thing thrive by itself. We want to pass on what we know and we want to actively encourage people to continue to learn and continue to grow. It's all about the growth of the people that you are trying to lead, the people that you want to inspire. It's like the old proverb: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime, and we want to achieve just that. There's a couple of super easy ways that we can do this. The thing that I found most helpful, and I've only figured this out by making this mistake too many times, is rather than telling someone the answer is to help them find it themselves just through questions. It is a slower process, which is why people tend not to do it. But when someone asks for your feedback and you give them a long list of points all of which are statements, it's not going to leave them feeling particularly great. Walking through a situation with someone and letting them make the mistakes but find their own way and guiding them through, that will give you a better solution. You're essentially leading the horse to the lake rather than giving them a bucket of water. It's that mentality of helping people realize that they are capable, that they can do this, and it's also not getting rid of all that passion and interest they have by losing the opportunity for growth, for curiosity. Now an example of this is if a friend asks me for feedback on their work, on their film, I could come back and say, well, you should change this, this and this and this. That's going to leave them feeling pretty rubbish about what they've done, and it's also not going to make them want to ask me again. It's not going to help anything in that situation. I've been guilty of that in the past. But if instead I approached the matter like, oh, that was really great, but have you thought about maybe trying this or I'd be curious to know why you tried that. What was your thinking behind this? If you can give people the opportunity to find the answers themselves rather than just giving it to them, they will grow, they will become more interested, more passionate, more inspired. An extra tip that might make this a little bit more impactful is to think of the person, not just the position. What do I mean by that? If you are a CEO and you take the time to go talk to people and find out about their lives, their interests. That way when you see them, you can say, ''Hey Barry, how was your weekend? Did you win your work weekend?'' Those extra things that will create passion for your course because it's their course as well, don't forget. But in this situation, if you want people to support your course as well, they need to be passionate, not just about the mission, but about the person behind the mission, which is you and to do that, they have to feel valued by you. There's a philosophy that really ties us together very nicely and there's a page in the workbook completely for it, that is, ubuntu. It's an African philosophy. You want to be careful because that's not commercialized, but I think is really important here to share as an idea, as a principle. What it translates to is a person is a person through other people. I am because you are. What that means is for you to be the absolute best you can be requires you to make sure that everyone else is the best they can be. It's this idea of community, of mutual growth. This truth, that is, if everyone is doing their best, everyone is enabled and happy and positive, then you're going to also benefit from that. If you're going to be the person that you want to be, someone who inspires passion and growth and development and confidence, you need to help people be the best they can be. It's not just about you, it's about them, this idea of community. There's a wonderful TED Talk about ubuntu. You should look it up at some point. It's just a philosophy that really stuck with me and it's one that I think was worth sharing. It takes just such little effort to add that extra value. Something as simple as replying to YouTube comments. You can make a 100 YouTube videos, but if you don't connect with your audience, they're going to stop engaging. Whereas if you are making the effort to really care, be interested in their story. That way, they're going to continue to be interested in yours. The way to give people confidence is to help them find the answer themselves, and the way to give people passion is to show that you care about the person, not just the profession. Now there's a page in the workbook about people who have inspired you and how they've helped you grow. Think of people in your life. Don't think of the top presidents or figures from history. Think of people that you have worked with, people that you've met; teachers, leaders of so many different varieties, whether it's in your sports team or your classical music group, whatever it is, really hone in on how they helped you grow. What was it that they did? I guarantee you that at some point, it's going to be that feeling of empowerment they gave you. That feeling of capability that you could do this. That encouragement to keep staying curious. The best leaders out there are the ones who inspire us to keep growing. In the next video, I'm going to talk about something that is part of what defines my character and why I think that is something you can use to inspire passion and confidence. 8. ABL: Always Be Learning: A, B, L. A, always, B, be, L, learning. Always be learning. Always be learning. Now, the fact that. You're on Skillshare, means that you're already open to learning, you're already taking this step. I find it incredible that so many adults have this fear of learning. They treat learning and school as the same thing, when actually we're always learning. But to actively proactively go out and make that choice to keep learning, it takes a little bit more courage sometimes. Now, for me, I love learning. I'm currently doing a science course, despite the fact that I'm filmmaker. I've been learning sign language because I want to make the film industry more inclusive. But it's not just the skills you learn it is learning from your own mistakes and from the mistakes of others. It is a personal development. That is what we're going to utilize here to make sure that we're inspiring people continuously. Because when we're a leader, when we are responsible for helping people grow, we feel instinctively that we need to know the answers, we need to have everything beforehand ready. Because when we're leaders, when we are responsible for others' growth, there is this expectation per honors, bias, to feel like we need to know everything. Four of the most powerful words that we have as leaders is, "I don't know, but." You're not going to know everything. It's ridiculous to put that pressure on yourself. Actually, it's really humanizing to hear someone in a top row admit that they don't know something. But what is more inspiring, is when they say "I don't know, but I will find out. But I will learn how to do that. But together we will discover the answer." It's that openness to growth. If you as a leader are open to growth, then the people who are behind you, who are supporting you, they're going to be open to growth as well. I love saying, I don't know because it means that I can then find out and that is exciting for me. I really value that in other people, when if I ask them something and they're honest and say, "I just don't know," but then the next week they come back to me and say, "Here's what I found out," that's so inspiring. That makes me passionate. It makes me want to give my energy and my time to the same thing. You never want to be caught lying because as we've said before, you break a line in the sand and the trust is gone. Now, there's two different ways we can learn from the past. We can learn from what we've done, whether that's our mistakes or things we've done well, and we can learn from others. We can learn from their mistakes or things they've done well. Now, there is a sheet in the workbook and it's called signs of a bad leader. If you think back to times where you have be left feeling disappointed or angry by a leader, it's really helpful to reflect on what it was that they did and why that left you feeling the way you did. When I take myself back to that meeting I spoke about earlier where I stood up for the 2,300 people in the room, if I was to analyze why I thought that leadership was so poor in that moment, it would be that they didn't take the time to talk to everyone or everyone being made redundant individually. Because to me that says two things. It says one, they don't value the person and two, they are too afraid of hard moments. Now, that is not two things that you want to hear about your leaders. That's not going to inspire confidence or passion. I can write that down and I can learn from that. I can think, if I'm ever put in that situation, I need to accept the hard moments and tackle them head on and I need to remember that every single person is a person. They deserve the respect of a heart-to-heart conversation or to ask the questions they want to ask in a comfortable environment, not in a room of 300 people, which is very difficult for everyone. Learning from the past is massive in developing for the future. It's not just in terms of leadership, it's in terms of wherever craft you do. Perhaps you are an illustrator. If you're not analyzing your previous work, it's going to be very hard for you to see how you can improve in the future. I'm one of those people who whenever I make a film, my first reaction tends to be to point out all the flaws. I know that's a bad thing, but it does help me develop. It helps me become consciously aware of how I can change and improve things for the next time. So A, B, L, always be learning. 9. Responsibility: A Catalyst for Passion: Quite recently, I was on the flip side of leadership. I was inspired to be confident and to be passionate. I was on a film shoot with a very talented filmmaker and a good friend, and he just wanted a pair of extra hands and I was more than happy to help out. But the task that he wanted me to do, and something I've never done before, is something called focus pulling. On bigger jobs, rather than having auto-focus on a lens or focusing yourself manually, you have someone else with a little controller and you have motors on the lens, and this controller, it changes the lens from afar. Now, the reason you do this is if the camera is moving in and out quite fast, the camera operator just wants to focus on the framing and how everything looks. They don't want to also be trying to get the focus right. Bigger, more expensive lenses don't have auto-focus. They are very heavy mechanical things. That was a task that I was asked to do and it's something that I've never done before, it's quite a high pressure role sometimes, and I was nervous about this. I'm a director by trade. Over the years, I've actually ended up moving further and further away from technology. This, to me, was actually quite an intimidating thing to be doing. The night before, I was learning as much about it as I could, going through different YouTube tutorials. Then on the day, it was fine. It was absolutely fine and I really enjoyed it, and I came away feeling really inspired by not just the filmmaking side of things, but that trust gave me a lot of confidence and it made me really passionate about filmmaking. Not that that passion has ever gone away, but it was that chance to be thrown into a different aspect of it. It's fresh, it's something different. That all came because my friend was prepared to give me responsibility. If you give someone responsibility, they will up their game. You may have to coach them. You may have to support them. On the day, he was helping me with the technology because I don't know it, I learnt about it as much like it online. But on the day he was showing me actually bits and pieces about how it works, he gave me the chance to have a couple of practices before we actually shot anything. That sort of leadership is exemplary. It gives you that, like I say, confidence and passion in what you're doing, and all it takes is a little bit of faith you're around and a bit of patience, and the implications are massive. You could take this into your family life. If you give your child responsibility, maybe they will become more confident, more inspired, more passionate about whatever it is. One of my favorite films is Chef. If you don't know it, it's about a chef who has a bit of a meltdown, quits his job, and decides to start a food truck. But he's not very close to his son, and his son joins them on this journey. As the film progresses, the sun gets more and more responsibility and you see the son's growth as well. Sorry, that's a spoiler. It's not really a spoiler film, it is that idea of the more you can trust someone, the more value they feel, the more opportunity you give someone to learn and to grow, the more excited they're going to be to be there. It's just common sense. If you tell someone to stay in a corner, stay out of the way, they're not going to be interested, are they? They're not going to feel good about that situation. Giving someone responsibility is a really useful way of helping them grow. Now, the best way to learn this is to just do it. Whoever it is, maybe it's your partner, or your child, or your colleague, give them a bit of more responsibility than usual, give them an opportunity to take something on that they wouldn't normally get to. Yes, you may need to support them, you may need to help them. But trust them, give someone that opportunity to grow and see how it makes them feel at the end, see if they feel more competent, more inspired, more passionate. Stretching them that a little bit out of their comfort zone, but not throwing them off the deep end, it's going to stretch that comfort area. You're going to see how they become inspired, how their confidence grows, and how their interest grows. I think one of the best things you can do is give someone some responsibility. 10. Diversity: It's Essential: Years ago, there were some scientists in the Soviet Union and they were trying to figure out the best way of growing crops. The scientists were saying, "You should diversify your crops." But there was one scientist who disagreed and they said, "Actually, what you need to do is have a uniform crop, just have the same crop the whole way through." That fitted in closer with what the Soviet philosophy was and that's what they ended up doing. Now, that led to one of the worst famines in global history. Plants' diversity is crucial for soil health, and that's the same for people on a biological level at the very core of human reproduction. It's all about diversity. It's having as many different options as you can. It's strength in diversity. That's the same here in whatever your businesses or wherever it is that you're leading and you're aspiring. Diversity is a strength that can help your business grow and survive and develop way more than it can if you don't have that. I felt that was important to mention because actually, sometimes we need to give extra attention to helping inspire confidence and passion by giving opportunity to people from diverse backgrounds, whether that is gender or ability or nationality, whatever it is. I think if you can be the shield for diverse people, for diverse inputs, you can listen to that input, you can harness it, and you can help develop and grow that input. You're going to inspire confidence and passion in a diverse range of people and that's going to strengthen whatever message you're trying to share. So yeah, I just wanted to mention that. I thought it's really important and something that, particularly in our day in age, we need to be more aware of than ever. 11. Maintaining harmony: Now, everything we've spoken about so far will help create confidence and passion. But we need to maintain it. We need to maintain that healthy balance, and that can be quite tricky. We need to know how to deal with conflict. It's a big part of leadership in any role, it's a big part of life. We have conflicts all around us on the big scale, on the microscale, macroscale, whatever you want to call it. It's everywhere, and we need to know how to navigate through that. Growing up, me and my sister, we were like any pair of siblings. We would argue quite a lot. One day, my mom, she came up with the most ingenious idea, and I've spoken to her about this and she never meant for it to be as brilliant as it was. It just happened to work out that way. She asked me and my sister, after we have been arguing one morning, to create a board game. Now, she's expecting it to last about five minutes. But five hours later, we presented her with this perfect board game that was actually quite a hell of a lot of fun to play. It was creative, it was artsy, it was logical, and above all else, it had been five hours of us working quietly, peacefully, happily together. Now, why is that? Why is it that creating a board game just transforms things in a heartbeat? I started to think about it and I think I figured out why it was, and this is something that I now use whenever I have a bit of conflict to deal with. I'll be honest, I don't really have that much conflict in my life, so I don't have to do this very often, and that comes about because if you've created the right team and the right environment, conflict is going to be minimized anyway. So I very, very rarely had to deal with any conflict in a professional sense. But the way to go about it, the reason that my sister and I bonded so tightly over this board game is because of two reasons. The first reason is that it was a shared interest. It was something that we both loved doing, we both loved board games, and two, it was something that we could both bring our unique skills to that complemented each other. It was working on something that we are both passionate about and allowing us to use skills that we're both confident with that complemented each other. I brought my imagination and my concepts and creativity. My sister brought her beautiful illustrations and her understanding of logic and games, and together, we created this board game and that process works for anything. If you can find something of common ground between them and you can find a way of bringing both their unique skills that they're very confident in that will complement each other surrounding this thing they're both interested in, then they're going to start to bond. They're going to start to empathize and understand and appreciate each other. Empathy is a huge part of dealing with conflicts. You want to try and get people to empathize with each other. I mean, you may be able to just deal with that straight away. You may be able to post stories from each other's lives and automatically create that sense of empathy. But by giving them a task as well where they can start to learn and appreciate about each other as well, it's going to start to reduce conflict and that will create this harmonious atmosphere once more. If you're on your ship and your crew are starting to argue, the last thing you want is a mutiny. You need to try and minimize that conflict as soon as you can. The longer you allow something to fester, the more barriers you have to break down between them. Deal with conflict as early as you can and try and go about it this way. There's a worksheet in the book where you can just try and think of a real-life example. Maybe it's your sibling growing up or it's your children or your colleagues. Whatever it is, find a source of conflict, and then look out what is a common interest between the two. Write out the areas that both are very confident in and start to combine the two. Find a way that those skills can be implemented into that common interest. I think it's a nice little exercise that, fingers crossed, you're not going to need very often, but it's useful to have it in the back pocket just in case. The next lesson is our final lesson before we wrap this all up, and it's all about leaving people with that idea of you as their inspiration, as you as the leader, and how do we leave that mark at the end of the process. 12. Leaving an impression: Every night before a big shoot, I always get nervous to some degree. Occasionally, I might have a dream about it, that doesn't set me up in the right way. But on one job, it went really wrong. It was the first day of a quite large budget campaign. It was a five-day shoot. We had safety divers, we had cast and crew and hard equipment, and it was all set. The first day, we were going to be shooting till late in the afternoon, early evening. The most of the day was quite relaxed. Everything was looking good. The camera was going to be housed in an underwater housing and taken into the water. It wouldn't work. Something between the camera and the housing just was not working. They started prepping this an hour, two hours before we were meant to start. Two hours after we were meant to start, it was still not working. In that moment, I didn't really know what to do, but we pushed through and at the end of the day, we basically hadn't films, anything usable. That day had cost a lot of money. I spent the whole night working out how we could catch up for that later on in the shoot. It actually ended up being quite a useful moment for me in learning how to turn a horrific failure into a positive. I didn't just cry and give up as much as I want to see. I barely slept, but I took responsibility and I found a way to make it happen. But the key lesson I took away from that, the thing that I am aware I did really well and actually saves me so many other bigger problems that could have arose, this problem, it wasn't the fault of my crew, they were working so hard to try to fix this. But the truth is, I wasn't involved in this particular area. It had nothing to do with me, so there was nothing I could help and there was no involvement on my part. Now, when I called up the client in the morning, the day after to explain the situation and discuss a new plan, the position there could have very easily been to pass the buck onto someone else. But I knew it wasn't their fault. They were working so hard. They were working harder than anyone. They were probably feeling worse than anyone. They were giving that absolute all, and you can never ask for more than that. If someone gives you their absolute all, you have to take that and be so grateful. So when I made that phone call in the morning, at no point did I point the finger anywhere other than here. I showed it all of that responsibility because at the end of the day, if you're the one in charge, the responsibility falls on you, and you are that shield. You are there to protect the people around you. You have to shoulder the responsibility, shoulder the blame. Now that's half of this. But the other half is when things go really well at the end of a project, when you have just nailed it and you've done a really good job. You know your involvement was really important, but you can't lose sight of everyone else's involvement. It is fundamental to you being seen as an inspiration, for you to create confidence and passion going forward, for you to share the credit, and not just share it, distribute it a little bit. You have to pass it on. You have to really give the credit to everyone else and shoulder any blame with you. Think about in terms of time, you're going to spend most of your time with those around you. They're going to value you and appreciate you, and you're making life so much easier for yourself when you make them feel good about themselves, when you applaud their effort, their involvement. They're not going to want to hang around you if you keep all of that credit for yourself, because that time, that window of praise, whatever it is, it's very small in comparison to the work being put in. The people out there who want to take all the credit and want to pass off all the blame, all responsibility, they're not going to have a very loyal following. They're not going to create confidence, not going to have people passionate about what they do. So if you want to be seen as that inspiration at the end of the voyage; you've got to the island on your ship, don't stand and then say, It was all thanks to me. It was my ship, it was my map, it was my guidance, whatever it is. You want to stand and look around and thank every single person there. You want to applaud every single person there, because without them, you wouldn't be on the island. Any mistakes along the way, anything that went wrong, don't worry about it. It wasn't your fault, it was my fault. Don't think about that for a second, you gave your best. That's on me. If you want to have those things, if you want to have people see you as a leader, if you want to drive ingenuity and confidence and passion within those around you, you have to do these two things, and this is not a gray area, this is a black-and-white area of, you have to do these things. Shoulder the blame, pass on the credit. So that's the final lesson. We're just going to toggle up together before you can go and become the leader that you know you can be. 13. Outro: Now before we part ways, I just want to instill you with some confidence and with some passion to keep going on this. Because the truth is that no matter what we do in life, we're not going to get it right every time. We will get it wrong, things will go wrong, we will take missteps, we will fall into bugs as I have literally done on a film job. There's always going to be a time when things don't go to plan, and that's okay. It just means we have a chance to get back up and to learn. Everything that we have covered and everything that you can do going forward is an opportunity to grow and to help others grow, and that's all this is about. This is not a big scary thing. This is just being a little bit more aware of how you can start to transform those around you. Whatever it is that you do, whether it's teaching or art or business, whatever your area, I've no doubt that you're very good at it and you're very passionate about it. If you're good at it and you're passionate about it then you should be confident about that, and if you are all those things, other people will be drawn to you because you are already an inspiration. That's really the heart of the matter. It took me a long time to feel confident about my journey and my ability as a filmmaker. But now I do, and I feel comfortable in helping others growing and reach their goals. Because once you realize that you've already done it, that's a very helpful thing for other people. If you can pass that on. If you enjoyed this class, I would love for you to follow me on Skillshare and also subscribe to my YouTube. I've started a new YouTube channel. That is a new venture for me and I'll be very grateful for anyone who decides to join me on that. You're very welcome to reach out and say hi, and let me know how you're getting on, and above all else, I just wish you the absolute best and hope that this helps you a little be more confident in inspiring others. I'll see you soon.