Intellifluence's video: Angela Maiers Influencer Spotlight 84

Join Intellifluence as an Influencer for free! https://intellifluence.com/influencers Angela Maiers is a world-renowned author, entrepreneur, international keynote speaker, educator and influencer on Intellifluence. In 2016, Angela was named a Top 100 Social Media Influencer by HuffPost and in 2017, IBM named Angela a Top 20 Global Influencer. Angela is the founder of Choose2Matter, a universal movement that challenges people to make “mattering” a way of life. She is the author of eight books, including Liberating Genius, The Habitudes and The Passion Driven Classroom. You can learn more at angelamaiers.com or choose2matter.org. Can you tell us a little bit about Choose2Matter and what led you to launch this movement? Yes! I think from- without articulating it I started my career with five year-olds and they demand that you matter. That you know that they matter and so as a researcher my background’s in neuro science and linguistics and without looking at it from a researchers’ perspective everything that defined how we ran my classroom with five year-olds was based around the practices and principals of mattering. Fast forward twenty-five years and I have a chance to do a TED talk and you have seventeen minutes to tell the world how you’re going to change the world. And what I started noticing is I left my presence of five year-olds and I started working with people bigger than five year-olds is people didn’t know they mattered. And I guess I just thought that, you know, we defined each other as human beings in that way. So, I thought well, you know what, it seems pretty simplistic but it’s true If people know they matter and they know their actions counts and are counted on everything in the world changes. Learning changes, life changes, relationship changes and then the world changes and so as that started spreading and the message of mattering starting to spreading the question arose from that like well how to do that at scale, how do we do that in this community, how do we do that with this group or with this audience and so that naturally brought up the point is that you have to chose it. It’s not a program that you adopt, it’s not a mantra that you implement, it’s not a statement of inspiration it is something that you commit to with fierceness as an individual and a system to embody and embrace and urgently move forward so that’s where choose2matter came from. It walks you through the choices we have to make in order for our lives and our work to matter. In one of your Ted Talks, you argue that we as humans were created for significance and that we all, in fact, matter. Why do you think many of us struggle with those concepts, to varying degrees? I think for a long time the concept of success has driven us and has shaped our organization, has sharpened our relationships, and has shaped our lives. And a long time ago I read this by the great Jim Collins and he presented, you know, business with what I call a beautiful question “is good the enemy of great” and so I think the question of our times is success and the way we define it the enemy of significance and I think it started with high profile, you know, movie stars and people from Michael Jackson to Whitney Houston people that had more talent than you can image, more money, more fame, everything that would define success and yet they chose a different path because success is different than significance. And so, I think that we are on a quest for significance as human beings and we are struggling to find our pathway there. Read the full transcript: https://intellifluence.com/blog/angela-maiers-influencer-spotlight Note: Influencer Spotlight interviews are edited for time and clarity.