NMR offers plenty of tools to analyze ionic jump processes in crystalline and amorphous solids at atomic scale. Both high-resolution and time-domain 1H(2H), 6,7Li, 19F, 23Na NMR helps shedding light on the origins of rapid self-diffusion in materials being relevant for energy storage.It is well accepted that in materials with strong site preferences, such as LiAlO2, the Li+ ions are subjected to extremely slow exchange processes. The loss of this site preference, as it is the case in glasses and some nanocrystalline phases, may, however, lead to rapid cation diffusion. Examples that benefit from this effect include cation-mixed, high-entropy fluorides ((Ba,Ca)F2) and LiTi2(PS4)3. In general, in non-equilibrium phases site disorder, polyhedra distortions, strain and the various types of local defects will affect both the migration activation energy and the corresponding Arrhenius pre-factor. Whereas in (Me,Ca)F2 (Me = Ba, Pb) cation mixing influences F anion dynamics, in Li6PS5X (X = Br, Cl, I) the potential landscape can be manipulated by anion site disorder and the introduction of extrinsic defects. In some cases, this leads to rather flat landscapes enabling the ions to have access to concerted displacement processes, as is seen in LLZO-type garnets. On the other hand, in the mixed conductor Li4+x Ti5O12 cation-cation repulsions immediately lead to a boost in Li+ diffusivity at the early stages of chemical lithiation. For Na-bearing closo-borates, the influence of rotational anion dynamics is usually considered to explain long-range cation transport. Recent examples of our group also include Li- and Na-conducting MOFs, for which, as in the case of the closo-borates and the famous Na-β''-alumina, transitions from correlated to uncorrelated motion are observed at sufficiently high temperature.Finally, rapid diffusion is also expected for materials that are able to guide the ions along (macroscopic) pathways with confined dimensions, as we have recently observed for layer-structured fluorides such as RbSn2F5 or MeSnF4 with their buried interfaces.