100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

scared
person!
People don’t want you to sell them on your idea, 
they
want to sell themselves.
They want it to be 
their
idea to do the
thing, not yours. That’s the secret to motivation, right there.
Let’s say you want one of your employees to get forms
turned back to you in a more timely manner. If you talk to
that employee in an assertive way and say, “You know
what, I need to talk to you. I didn’t get those forms from
you on time.” You know what happens?
Defensiveness and fear: “There’s no 
way
I could get
them back to you on time because our computer system
was down for two days. Actually, our people did pretty
well given what was going on here at this office. We did
very well, as a matter of fact, and we’re doing better than
can be expected down here.”
Your employee is defending what went on, because
your employee is afraid that he will be judged poorly, that
he might even be asked to leave the company because he
can’t get his forms in on time. And all you’ve done—the
Give Power to the Other Person

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only mistake you have made—is you’ve put something ag-
gressively out there that pushed his button, so you’ve awak-
ened the fear, and caused him to push back.
And if you are clueless about fear and don’t know what
is going on, you are liable to push even 
more
buttons in
response to the fear. You might say, “Well you know, that
computer system was down at another division across town
and
they
got theirs in on time.”
And now your employee is more frightened, even more
anxious.
“Yeah, but they’ve got a bigger staff than we do. We’re
understaffed here. Always have been.”
The more you push, the more he pushes back. The more
offensive you are, the more defensive he is. And, the more
defensive he is, the less likely he is to turn those forms in on
time next week, which is all you wanted in the first place. It
was all you wanted, but it was what you yourself made unlikely.
This very human push–push back dynamic challenges
marriages, it slows down careers, and it makes a manager’s
life miserable.
What a manager can do is ask gentle questions and let
the people they lead think and speak and make their own
fresh commitments. That’s how motivation happens.
69. Don’t Forget to Breathe
In war, as in peace, a man needs all the brains he can get. Nobody
ever had too many brains. Brains come from oxygen. Oxygen
comes from the lungs where the air goes when we breathe.
The oxygen in the air gets into the blood and travels to the brain.
Any fool can double the size of his lungs.
—George Patton

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Scott Richardson recalls the role breathing plays in
achieving success as a leader. Yes, breathing, as in, “Don’t
forget to breathe.”
Scott recalls: My first mentor and music coach, Rodney
Mercado, never actually mentioned it. We never spoke
about it, and yet I noticed it, and I copied him and mod-
eled him.
Because when Mercado played an instrument, he was
taking some of the most extraordinarily deep breaths that
I’d ever heard a human being take. And so even though
he never mentioned it, I figured, if it works for him, I’m
going to do the same thing. And since then, I’ve learned
how important breath is to our energy, our focus, and
our concentration.
So, I would take a deep breath inward right before I
started to play the violin, and then I would breathe out as
I was bowing. And then as I changed the bow stroke, I
would take another breath, and so I would breathe in uni-
son with the music I was performing. I still do this to this
day.
Putting so much energy and