How to be an inspiring leader

Kim Mills: We’ve all had people in our lives who have inspired us. Maybe it was a teacher who sparked your curiosity about a new subject or gave you the confidence to learn a new skill. Perhaps it was a boss who offered support when you needed it and helped you do your job better. So what was it that set those inspirational leaders apart? What qualities do the best coaches, teachers, bosses, and other leaders share? Are the most inspirational leaders born or made? Do you have to be in a position of power to be a leader or can anyone lead from any level? And what can you do to become a better and more inspiring leader—in your work, as a parent, or in any aspect of your life?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist and the Paul Callelo Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School. His research and teaching focus on leadership negotiations, diversity, decision-making and ethics. Dr. Galinsky’s new book is called Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. It provides a research-based framework that people can use to become better and more inspiring leaders. Dr. Galinsky is a sought-after speaker and has delivered keynotes and workshops to organizations including Fortune 500 companies, nonprofit organizations, the FBI, and local and national governments. He’s author of more than 300 scientific papers and chapters, and his research has been featured in media outlets including CNN.com, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Dr. Galinsky, thank you for joining me today.

Adam Galinsky, PhD: I am thrilled and inspired to be here.

Mills: So let’s start by talking about how you open your book, where you talk about leaders having even more power than they realize. You call this the leader amplification effect. What is that? Why is it important?

Galinsky: Absolutely, and thanks for that incredible intro. You got all the questions—you asked all the questions teasing the heart of the book, so I really appreciated that. So basically, the leader amplification effect represents the idea that when we are in a position of leadership, all eyes are on us because of our authority, because of our power, because of our standing. And as a result, we know from the basic tenets of cognitive psychology that anything that we put our attention on, that’s going to have more amplified signals and that’s going to produce more intensified reactions. And so the leader amplification effect basically says that when we’re in this position of leader, everything we do, verbal, nonverbal, small and big, good and bad, gets amplified and has this intensified impact on other people.

Mills: So what should a leader do to moderate this effect and turn it into something that’s helpful?

Galinsky: So let’s just take a step back and I’ll give you a couple of examples of what I mean by the leader amplification effect, and then we can think about both how do we solve it, but also how do we leverage it. One of the examples I give in the book is I was a first-year doctoral student at Princeton University and I was literally taking the very first class at Princeton with a guy named Danny Kahneman who would one day win the Nobel Prize in economics, a cognitive psychologist. And I raised my hand, I said a comment, and I still remember 30 years later the four things Danny did that day. He crossed his arms, he shook his head, and he scrunched up his face and he spit out, “That’s not right at all.” And then he smiled his beatific smile and moved on and the rest of the class moved on and I was frozen in humiliation, right?

Those words, they echoed inside, it reverberated inside of me, and it literally took me weeks before I could speak again in his class or any class. So I remember this—3 years later, I wrote about it in The New York Times and I shared it with Danny and Danny’s like—first he joked, “I’m a monster,”—but he doesn’t remember that. It was just he didn’t think the point I made was right and matter-of-factly said it, and then he moved on. But because of his position, that criticism became humiliating criticism to me. But I also tell another Danny Kahneman story is I was literally walking down the hallway about 6 weeks later and Danny said, without stopping just kind of casually over his shoulder, he turned to me and said, “Hey, Adam, I’d love reading your reflection papers. You’re a great writer.”

And then turned the corner. And I was so filled with elation, the opposite of humiliation. I literally skipped down the hallway. And so these two very different Danny Kahneman stories represent the same underlying phenomenon, this leader amplification effect. That compliment that became literally like glorious praise that has nourished me for 30 years. And so that tells us two really, really important things to get at the heart of the question you ask, which is, what can we do about it? Well, the first thing that we can do about it is we have to become aware of it. And so a basic tenet of psychology is that knowledge is power, awareness. Without awareness, we have no capacity to make change or to control things. Another example I give in the book is, imagine your boss saying to you, Hey, Kim, come by my office tomorrow at 3:00 PM, I need to talk to you.

You’re like, Oh my God, why do they need to talk to me? What did I do wrong? What’s going on? And in their mind, they might know, Oh, it’s totally inconsequential. I just want to tell them about a meeting I’m going to or share an idea. But when we’re left in the dark and because of that power, that potential, which happens anytime someone needs to talk to you, but it gets amplified and really reverberates inside of you. So we have to start recognizing the power of our words, but even the power of our silence. I give this example—how university professors have more power than the computer tech support guys. We’re bigger fish in the university pond, if you will. But when our computer’s broken and they have it, they’re in power. They control this resource. And one of the things when I was at Northwestern is we wouldn’t hear from them for days.

You’re like, Oh my God, is my computer ruined? Is it lost? Are they even paying attention to it? And we put a little rule into place to really solve the leader amplification effect, which is we told the computer people every single day, sometime between 3 and 5:00 PM you have to email every person whose computer you have and just give them an update. And maybe it’s something like we’re still backing up your hard drive, it’s taking longer than expected, or we’re still looking for this part, but just keep people in the loop. Now going back to Danny Kahneman’s criticism of me, one of the ways that we can solve this is that we can hold our tongue in public or we can soften the blow.

One of the things I discovered—when PhD students do their first big research presentation at Columbia Business School, I would often go up to them like, oh, you did this well, oh, but here’s three things you could do better. And you could just see it was sticking a pin in their balloon and just deflating them after this incredibly momentous experience that they’ve gone through. And so now I try to withhold any criticism until the next day, let them celebrate the accomplishment. But the Danny Kahneman story also tells us how we can leverage the leader amplification effect for good. We can reach out to people and compliment them when they’ve done something well, right? We can express gratitude. And I tell this story in the book, which I really love. I was teaching to 50 CEOs and at 10:15 I gave them a leader amplification effect call to action. I said, I want you to write three people who have less power than you in your organization. And I want you just to be sincere—because it’s infuriating when we’re not sincere—and explicitly say specific details, something they did really well—you hit that presentation out of the park, or something that really helped you with, I couldn’t have done that great project without you.

So at 10:30, we’re about to take the break. So this is 15 minutes later, and one of the CEOs raises his hand and he says, I’ve already sent my three emails. I’ve already gotten three emails back, just effusively joyfully saying how much my email meant to them. One person even said, I’m finally going to take my spouse to that new restaurant they always wanted to go to celebrate. And I like story for two reasons. One is that it confirms another piece of my research, which is that CEOs and powerful people are impulsive. This guy couldn’t even wait to 10:30 to the break, but the upside is it took him almost no time at all.

Mills: That raises the question of people who have that combination of high power and low status. And I was thinking of that when you were talking about the computer guys, how they had a lot of power once they have your computer, but they didn’t have the same status. How do you work with such individuals to improve that relationship?

Galinsky: One of the things I’ve discovered in my research is that when we have power, so you can think of bouncer at a club, a reimbursement clerk, a tech person. We control some important resource, but sometimes these bureaucratic posts aren’t very respected. They don’t have a lot of status in them. And so one of the things I’ve found is that it’s that combination that is particularly toxic and is tyrannical. It makes people into little tyrants, because they’re so seething at the lack of respect they receive, but the power they have allows them to control other people. So I first discovered this literally my postdoc. I got to Northwestern University and there was the reimbursement person, and she was like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld. If you didn’t give your thing in the exact hand of the right way, she had literally a red line in her cubicle like, do not cross into my space.

And she would berate you just like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, no soup for you. But then I discovered something about her, which is that she really loves snow globes, but she couldn’t travel. She had a kidney disease, which made it difficult for her travel, but also economically it was probably difficult. And so it wasn’t my idea, someone else had given me this idea, but they said, if you want to get in her good graces every time you go somewhere, bring back a snow globe for her of that. And once I started bringing her snow globes, all of my reimbursements miraculously expedited. But what the snow globe was signaling was respect. It was saying, You matter. I’m thinking about you. I value you. And when she passed away, I went to her funeral service and there at the back was all of her snow globes and you could pick them up and she had written who had given it to her.

So they said, if any of you ever gave her snow globe, go to the back and see if you can find yours and you can take it home with you. And so they really meant something to her. And so what I tell people, if you’re seeing someone acting in a tyrannical way, it could be a boss. It could be like a reimbursement individual, someone who has some power, ask yourself this question, what are they feeling insecure about? And can I make them feel a little bit more secure, a little bit more respected, a little bit more feel like that they matter.

Mills: Now, your book talks about the three tenets of inspiring leadership that you’ve identified in your research and they’re being visionary, being an exemplar and being a mentor. Talk about each of those and how you came to the conclusion that these are the sweet three.

Galinsky: The sweet three. I like that. No one’s ever used that phrase before. Some people will call it the trifecta, but I like the sweet three better, so I’m going to steal that from you. The reason why these are the sweet three or the universal three as I like to call them, I discovered it by asking thousands and probably tens of thousands of people across the globe to tell me about a leader that inspired them and a leader that infuriated them. And from those many things, I discovered three really valuable insights. The first one is that the inspiring leader and the infuriating leader really exist on a continuum. And to understand that, let’s go back to the leader amplification effect, right? When you’re in this position of leadership or eyes are on you or people looking up to you, you have power. You control a resource because those eyes are on you.

Neutrality isn’t an option. So your behavior is going to impact people. And is it going to be positive on the inspiring end or negative on the infuriating end? So the first big insight is we don’t really have a choice of whether to inspire, infuriate. We’re going to do that. The second insight as you just mentioned, is that there’s these three universal characteristics, and each one of them sort of describes how we see the world. So visionary, that involves this optimistic big picture that we also simplify and articulate in an engaging way. There’s how we are in the world, and that’s what I call the exemplar. And that’s like being a common, courageous protector, being authentically passionate and being super, but also human in our behavior. And the third is being this inspiring mentor, which is how we interact with others in the world. And that’s really about empowering people, elevating them, but also empathizing with them.

And then the third insight is that the reason why these are the three universal factors of inspiring or infuriating others is because they each satisfy a fundamental human need. So being visionary satisfies the fundamental human need for meaning and understanding, being an exemplar satisfies the fundamental human need for a sense of security and protection, but also energy and propulsion. And the last one, being a mentor satisfies a fundamental human need that we’ve kind of already talked about the sense of being valued and celebrated and respected and seen.

Mills: You talk about these being universal, that they don’t really vary across culture. But I’m wondering, are there additional characteristics that you might find in other cultures that are important to leadership to being an inspirational leader?

Galinsky: I really haven’t—and that’s what makes it so surprising. There’s not a single characteristic—so let’s say get 60 people in a room and I say, Tell me about a leader that inspired you. And I always say to them, what was it about that person? Tell me the one thing that really solidifies either their inspiring or infuriating effect on you. And there’s not a single trait or characteristic that is mentioned in one country that isn’t mentioned in every other country in the world. Now, not everyone mentions each one, but as a collection of a hundred people, every single one is going to be mentioned. Someone’s going to be inspired by their leader’s optimism or seeing the big picture or their ability to communicate in a straightforward, simplified, but engaging way. Someone’s going to be inspired by someone’s calm courage in a crisis or their ability to be passionate or the fact that they’re so good at their job, and someone else is going to be inspired by the fact that their boss trusted them and empowered them and gave them responsibility or always let them share success and elevated them or really understood the context in which they’re coming from and were able to empathize with that.

Mills: Can a bad or a not-so-good leader learn to be inspirational?

Galinsky: Absolutely. And this is, I think if I were going to, I said three insights. It’s really four insights. And the fourth insight you mentioned in your intro, which is I think my research definitively answers a centuries-old question, are inspiring leaders born or made? And I think I have emphatically demonstrated that they are indeed made. Because here’s the thing, because there’s a universal set of characteristics that distinguish the inspiring or infuriating leader. Those can be learned, they can be developed, they can be nurtured, they can be practiced so that we can become more inspiring over time. Fundamental to this idea is this really the seed or the heart of it, is the fact that we are not inspired or infuriating people. Our current behavior inspires or infuriates others. And so that means that we could be behaving in an infuriating way today. But the good news is we could be inspiring tomorrow. Now, the bad news is it’s hard to stay on the inspiring side of the continuum. We could be amazing day and slip tomorrow and be infuriating. So it’s a lifelong journey, if you will.

Mills: Now people with power often have to negotiate with others who may or may not be equally powerful. But how can somebody with power negotiate well and what are some of the pitfalls that they have to avoid?

Galinsky: Yeah, I think the one thing that I’ve studied the longest in my career, my dissertation was actually titled Perspective Taking, De-Biasing Social Thought. And one of the things that I’ve discovered in my research is probably the most powerful tool that we have as humans is and really distinguish us from other species, is the capacity towards perspective taking. And we can perspective take over time, reflect on our past and plan for the future, but we can also get into the minds of other people. And one of the things that I’ve shown in my research is that when we take the perspective of others in a negotiation and really try to understand what it is that they want in a negotiation, we are able to offer that, but in a strategic way that also benefits ourselves. So one of the things I’ve shown, one of my favorite papers I ever did came out in 2008 was I showed that pure empathy negotiation is a bad idea.

It’s a win-lose. You just give away the farm, you lose, they win. But perspective taking actually helps you find that balance between meeting the other side person’s needs and fulfilling your own. And one of these, you might call it peer review tricks or tools, maybe peer-reviewed tools is a better term, is that one of the things I’ve shown in my research and another one of my favorite projects is that we can get a huge advantage in negotiations, but have the other side on average, not worse off, and feel really great about the negotiation if we just give people a choice between two options. So one of my favorite examples is Car Dealer says, I can give you this car for $25,000 and a 5-year warranty or $24,000 and a 3-year warranty. Now you’re giving them a choice and they can decide, do I value 2 years of warranty or a thousand dollars?

Now for me, the dealer, each year warranty is worth $500. That’s what we call them multiple equivalent. They’re equivalent to me, simultaneous offers or Mesos. And what was shown in our research is that I can be more ambitious or aggressive, if you will, in my offers when I offer a choice, the other side sees me as wanting to reach a deal and be generally interested in them completing a deal that’s good for both parties. They trust me more. I also come to trust them a little bit more. We create a better climate, but I walk out with a better outcome than I’ve had given just either one of those alone. And most of the time, not always, but most of the time they walk out no worse off. So we expand the pie, we get a lot of that. And then it also helps us with innovation and creative agreements too, because one of the best ways that we can sometimes solve negotiation problems is coming up with an idea that’s not even on the table, but it satisfies the fundamental underlying needs of each person.

Mills: So the kind of deal where the salesman says, You got to make this purchase today because tomorrow it’s all gone, that’s not an effective way to negotiate. I take it?

Galinsky: It could be. I mean, I think Bob Cialdini would say a fundamental principle is the value of scarcity. And so I would always tell people, if that’s really true, you should use it. You don’t want to lie to people. Then they come back to you and you’re like, you could still give them the same deal. What you’re picking up on there is cornering people isn’t the best way to get the best outcome because when people are cornered, they get aggressive. And so you’re trying to get them out of the corner, but still in the space that’s in the best situation For you. You’ve also studied the characteristics of the best mentors. What are they? Well, I’ve mentioned them already in some ways. I use the word empower. I use the word elevate, and I use the word empathize. And one of the things about empowering is when we give people an increase in responsibility or give them opportunities, we’re signaling something really important, which is that we trust the person, we believe in the person.

And if you ask people, this comes up all over the world about an infuriating leader. They micromanaged me, they try to control me. So they’re not satisfying my fundamental human need for control. But when we let someone else make a presentation, for example, we let them sit at the head of the table, we invite them to important meeting. There’s a line from Confucius. I am not sure if I can get exactly right, but it’s something like if you tell me, I will forget. If you show me, I may understand, but it’s only when you involve me that I truly understand. So getting people involved is really, really valuable. And I’ve shown that in my research. I’ve shown that the feeling of control is so fundamental for people’s psychological states that when we lack a sense of control, we try to regain it psychologically through superstitions, through conspiracy, three false patterns in data.

And so what we want to do as leaders is help people feel in control because that’s going to help them have the right psychological mindset elevate. Really, it comes down to this simple principle, which is that we’re inspiring when we share success and take on protect people from burden and punishment. And we are infuriating when we still success and blame everyone else for everything else. And if you ask people around the world about a time when they got so angry at their peers, so this isn’t about leaders, it’s when they feel like a peer stole their idea, they try to take ownership over something that was there. There’s something so infuriating about that and just simply sharing success. And so one of the things I’ve shown in my research, I have a paper coming out in JPSP this month, January, 2025, called “The Vicious Cycle of Status Insecurity.”

And going back to my example of the person at Northwestern who was insecure, and then they kind of viciously react towards people. When people are insecure about their status, they desperately want to claim credit for everything. But what my research shows is that’s really a vicious cycle and counterproductive because when we share success, we actually gain in status. I call it expanding the status pie, like negotiations, expanding the pie. When we celebrate others, we acknowledge their contributions to our success, they rise up, so do we. And so that’s really another valuable tool is just to look out for acknowledging people. I mentioned the CEO earlier who just sent those three simple emails, took them a couple of minutes and just transformed people’s lives by acknowledging that. And then finally is empathizing with people, which is really about understanding the context in which people find themselves.

My 8- and 7-year-old sons are really into the Wings of Fire graphic novel. If you know anything about those, about these dragons, and there’s kind of a dragon that everyone kind of poop who’s on because their name is sunny, and they always see the optimistic sunny side of the equation. In the end, they end, this dragon ends up being the hero, but at some point someone’s like, they’re trying to kill you. It’s like, yes, but they’re trying to get their own brother out of prison, and if they kill me, they can’t. So it’s always able to understand that it doesn’t want to be killed, but it’s also not angry at the person’s behavior because you understand it’s driven by a positive constructive need on their side.

Mills: Let’s talk for a minute about people who are a little bit lower on the org chart. In a workplace, for example, because a lot of jobs automatically power is conferred just by dint of the title that you have, but there are people who are newer, younger, in an organization. Can those people be inspiring leaders even when they’re not a boss?

Galinsky: And how do they do that? One of the definitions I’ve come up for leadership is the capacity to motivate, integrate, and enable a collection of individuals towards a shared goal. And so if you take that definition seriously, the word power authority rank is not in that definition. It’s again, going back to this is really the heart of everything I’ve said today. It’s going back to your behavior, right? It’s like what are you doing that’s enabling or motivating or integrating people? And so the exact same thing occurs here regardless of where you are, which is can you engage in a behavior that is inspiring? Can you engage in a behavior that helps people see the big picture or you see the big picture? Can you be calm even in a crisis? Can you tap into your passion? Can you empower other people? And so in the book, I apply the three principles of inspiring leaders to making wiser decisions to being a better negotiator, to creating more fair processes, to being more inclusive. But I think a good example is when I talk about you can inspire other people to be a good decision-maker when you are a wise decision-maker regardless of where you are in the ORC thing. And so it’s really about behavior. It’s about your behavior. Doesn’t matter where you are, if you can be visionary, be exemplar, be a mentor, eventually that’s going to have a positive impact other, it’s going to spread the seeds of inspiration.

Mills: You talk in your book about parents as leaders. What does leadership as a parent look like? And has your research changed your approach

Galinsky: To being a dad? 100%. I already mentioned my 7- and 8-year-old sons a corollary of the leader amplification effect is the parent amplification effect. And I tell this story in the book, which I really like. One of my former doctoral students, Erica Bailey, who is now at California Berkeley as a professor, when she was 12, she overheard her mom say to someone, Both girls are really great at piano, but Abby has a real knack for it. Now, Abby was her sister, and Erica was so incensed at the sibling comparison that she never played piano again. Remember, her mom said she was really good at it. Now, her mom didn’t even know this. I brought it up at Erica’s PhD graduation. Her mom’s like, what are you talking about? I was like, did you not know why your daughter quit piano? She’s like, no. And so that’s a good example of this offhand comment had this huge impact and affected in some ways Erica’s life course.

And so one of the things we have to recognize is that what we think is sort of a casual comment or what we’re trying to push someone in one direction. When you did that, that really disappointed me. That may sting really deep to that person, to your child. And so recognizing the parent amplification effect is just as important as recognizing, becoming aware of the leader amplification effect. But here’s two things that I think all those things really matter. One thing that my book has helped me be a better leader is to try to take the big picture and see the larger context. So let me just give you one example of this is my mother-in-law. My wife’s mother came to the hospital when Ashra was born from Connecticut, and she never left. She left the hospital, but she never left our home. And she’s lived with us for the last 8 years.

But this December she moved to Las Vegas to start a new chapter in her life and we’re really happy for her. My older son, Asher, is so close to her. We used to joke when he was 2, the first woman you ever loved was his grandma, Lola, which means grandma in Tagalog from her Filipino background. And after Thanksgiving, Lola over Thanksgiving, went to Vegas to help sort of set things up, and her other daughters went there. And sometime before Lola came back, Asher started being really mean, especially to Jen, my wife. And she was reacting pretty strongly to it. And I think in this case, being visionary and seeing the big picture, which is Asher must be so furious at Lola for leaving, but he can’t express it to her. He can’t jeopardize their special relationship. And so Jen is sort of that stand in, if you will.

And so having that bigger picture does two things. One is it makes us less reactive to the slings and arrows that he throws at us, but it also helps us think about how we can help him on this process towards transitioning to this new experience. And so doing that, every time we’re on the subway and someone starts acting up on the Newark subway, I go into calm and courageous protector mode. I make sure that my body’s in between my voice. I let them know that I’m in control of the situation, they’re safe. And then being a mentor is really about, it’s hard, right? You got to find a balance between empowering people and supporting them, right? I always say encouraging them and challenging them. And so constantly working on finding the right balance of helping them be autonomous, but not putting too much pressure and responsibility on them. And I don’t always succeed, but I’m striving at least to find that balance.

Mills: So who are the most inspiring people in your life? I mean, you’ve already mentioned Danny Kahneman and his name comes up all the time when I’m talking the people because he’s inspired so many folks and it’s a great loss that he’s not with us. But who are the other people who have inspired you?

Galinsky: I would say both my parents in their own way. My dad inspired me. He’s such a creative, ingenious decision-maker, always coming up with getting around what looks like an unscalable obstacle and coming up with fresh ways of looking at things. My mom was generous. I remember I was home. My mom was widowed at this point, and we were going to a restaurant and we had a really difficult reservation to get, and she was taking long to get ready. I was getting really annoyed. And what she was doing is she remembered the waiter at this restaurant had just had a new baby. And so she was getting a gift for him. And that just touched me and my current dean, Costis Maglaras, he is just a brilliant strategic thinker. He was actually on the dean search committee and the president at one point was like, You’re a better strategic thinker than any of our candidates. You should be dean. But he combines that with just an incredible level of humanity and their ability to understand the deep emotional lies of others, and to never forget that there’s humans behind every decision. And I shared that with him recently in a meeting. It’s a very rare combination. It’s an inspiring combination to combine brilliant strategic thinking and deep humanity.

Mills: Well, just to close up, I’d like to ask this question of researchers. What are you working on now? What are the big questions you’re still trying to answer?

Galinsky: That’s a great question. I’ve worked on so many different topics. I think one of the things that I’m most proud of are how do some simple reflection tasks that people can do to get into more visionary state of mind, a more exemplar state of mind and more mentor. And so one example is we did a study with a Swiss employment agency for recently unemployed individuals who came into register for employment benefits. And one of the things we know from psychology is that being suddenly unemployed is one of the five biggest stressors we can experience in life. It leads to depression and anxiety and even suicidal thoughts at times. And what we did in this is we used an intervention that Claude Steele kind of was the seminal person behind it, and Jeff Cohen and others have really elaborated on it. But we just ask people to reflect on their most important values, to think about why they matter to them, and to think about how they’ve demonstrated those values in their recent behavior.

And 2 months later, people were twice as likely to have found a job if they were in that experimental group. And we actually ended the experiment and gave everybody the intervention at that point. This is a paper published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year. And so just reflecting on your values satisfies that fundamental human for meaning and understanding, and it really grounds and centers people. Part of being visionary is optimism, and I think it gives people just this optimistic energy that allows them to go get a job. Similarly, one of the things that I pioneered and was a vanguard on is this simple reflection task. Think about a time when you were powerful and in control, and we’ve shown this had transformative effects. Researchers in Europe—not a study I did—show that if you give people that reflection before a high stake speech and then measure their physiology, they basically are calm, right?

Calm in this impending crisis. It makes people see the big picture. It helps them more likely to feel authentic. It makes them better negotiators, like all these different things. And then finally, to be a better mentor is to reflect on what you’ve learned from people below you in the hierarchy. And that sort of reminds you that you can learn from anyone. And I think that each one of these reflection tasks are simple and straightforward, but powerful and transformative because they’re tapping into those fundamental human needs, but they’re doing so in a richly, authentically autobiographical way. You’re building on your own experiences. And so if that is going to leave your listeners with anything, is just the inspiring power of reflection to help us be more inspiring.

Mills: Well, Dr. Galinski, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s been really interesting talking to you, and I have to agree with Dr. Kahneman that you’re a good writer. So the book is accessible. People should take a look. It’s called Inspire. Thank you. 

Galinsky: Thank you so much. It was great fun being here. 

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Thank you for listening, the American Psychological Association. I’m Kim Mills.