By Kelley Reynard

Who is completely comfortable with calling yourself a leader? This is the first question Drew Dudley asks when addressing a room full of people. There isn’t a huge show of hands. Dudley explains this is because we have made leadership into something bigger than us; something beyond us. We have made leadership about changing the world, and Dudley informs the crowd that we have taken the title of a leader, and treated it as if it’s something that some day we will deserve. Dudley’s passion and expression for this topic continues, and he talks about about people spending so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do; that we’ve convinced ourselves that they are the only things worth celebrating, and we start to devalue the things that we can do every day. He explains that we have moments where we truly are a leader, and we don’t let ourselves take credit for it; we don’t let ourselves feel good about it.

Dudley advocates to the crowd that leadership needs to be redefined, and he begins to tell a story. The key to the story is the lollypop, and it was this lollypop that Dudley handed to a young woman on her first day of University; a young woman who was ready to quit and who was afraid of being surrounded by so many people in such a big place, that impacted on her life. When Dudley was handing out the lollypops to students, he said to a young man ‘hand the beautiful girl standing next to you a lollypop’. Dudley was later told four years later that it was this moment, the ‘lollypop moment’, which turned all of this young woman’s fears and doubts into hopes and dreams.

It isn’t about complexity, strategy, or being a successful entrepreneur to be deemed a leader. It can be as simple as saying hello and thank you to people; saying something to fundamentally make someone’s life better. These are the actions that are redefining leadership. It’s not so much about what people do, but it is how they make you feel. Dudley believes that every single person in the crowd has been the catalyst for a ‘lollypop moment’; a moment where they have made someone’s life better by something they said or something they did. He reflects that it can be scary to think of ourselves as that powerful, and frightening to think that we can matter that much to other people. Dudley’s point that we need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be to enrich other people’s lives, is essential so we can move beyond it; to understand the impact and value we can have on each other’s lives. To understand the value and impact of these ‘lollypop moments’, we need to tell the person who has made this difference in our lives; let them know how they made us feel.

Dudley closes the Ted Talk with a statement for the crowd to reflect on and think about deeply: ‘We have made leadership about changing the world. But there is no one world; there are only 6 billion understandings of it. But if you change one person’s understanding of it, one person’s understanding of what they’re capable of, one person’s understanding of how much people care about them, one person’s understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world, you’ve changed the whole thing. And if we can understand leadership like that, I think if we can redefine leadership like that, I think we can change everything’.

If you would like to watch the full Ted Talk from Drew Dudley, please click the following link: http://www.ted.com/playlists/how_leaders_inspire