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

To Motivate Your People, First Just Relax

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
“It has everything to do with music.”
And the way he taught relaxation was to say, “You
need to have the maximum relaxation. For instance, if you
want to play faster, Scott, you need to relax more. If you
want to play louder, you need to relax more. If you want
more sound coming out, you need to relax more.”
Up to this point in my life, it sounded like someone
saying, “Well, if you want to become a cowboy, go to
Harvard.” It didn’t make any sense. It seemed like a
contradiction.
Doesn’t it sound like a contradiction? If you’re going
to be louder, stronger, and motivate people, don’t you want
to get them all hyped up and worked up? That’s what I
had always thought: light a fire! Get the lead out of your
pants!
So up to this point in my life, if I wanted to play faster,
I would get hyped and tense up. And I would try harder.
In any aspect of my life where I was trying to get more of
something, I would become more tense from trying.
But Mercado said, “I’m going to play a passage of music
and I want you to just listen for a moment.”
I did. I don’t remember the passage played at the time,
but he almost ripped the strings off the violin. It was a
virtuoso passage, but it sounded like he was going to make
the strings just fly apart, there was so much sound and
motion being produced. And I was awed.
“Now, Scott, I want you to put your arm on top of my
forearm while I play this passage, and feel what’s going on
while I’m doing this.”
When I put my arm on top of his forearm and he played
this passage (and by the way, I’m trying to hang on for dear
life, because his arm was flying), I was stunned, because his

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arm was almost totally relaxed. There was no tension in
the muscles!
And all of a sudden, I got it.
Getting it
changed my entire concept of playing the
violin, but it also changed my concept of 
what I was doing
in life.
I had been tensing and straining for success instead
of relaxing for it.
The same formula works for a sprinter in track and
field. What most sprinters do when they try to run faster
is to put more effort into it. And they don’t realize it but
they tense up their muscles and their times actually drop.
Trying harder slows them down! The sprinters don’t real-
ize that they’re at their peak state of relaxation during
their fastest times.
I saw this firsthand while on the Brigham Young Uni-
versity track team when I was in a physical education class.
I thought I was pretty tough stuff, so I raced one guy who
wasn’t on the track team. The guy barely beat me, but he
was straining and out of control, and he just stumbled over
the finish line.
Then I met another guy who was one of the top sprint-
ers on the BYU track team, and I challenged him to a
race.
We took off and he beat me by a wide margin. But
there he was—Mercado’s theory in motion—totally re-
laxed, totally fluid, and he just flew by me.
So that principle is something that I have now adopted
anytime I’m doing anything. If I’m in front of a jury, or my
company, or any other group while I’m speaking, I know
that the secret is relaxation, counterintuitive as that may
seem.
To Motivate Your People, First Just Relax

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
Because what do most people do? They get nervous,
they get tense, and their performance drops. But because
of the training Mercado gave me, anytime I feel any ten-
sion at all, I slow down and relax all the more.
His words always come back to me: “If you start shak-
ing, there’s only one way you can shake. You have to be
tense. If you relax, you cannot shake. If you start shaking,
that’s a sign that you’re not relaxing.”
Many team leaders get up in front of their teams or
their company and are so nervous about speaking that they
lose all ability to motivate anyone!
We have attended countless conventions and retreats
where the CEO totally blows an opportunity to motivate
his people by stepping up to the podium and reading ner-
vously from a script, or making a brief and tense talk that
leaves everyone flat.
A vice president of a large bank said to us of his CEO
after the CEO had addressed 200 senior managers at a
yearly conference:
“Did you hear him? Did you see him? I mean, we wait
all year to hear his words to us and he gives this nervous,
brief, memorized talk! Like he couldn’t be bothered to
really talk to us!”
“He was obviously nervous about his talk.”
“That’s my point! To him, it was something he had to
do. He obviously didn’t want to do it. So his whole focus
was on himself and what little he could get away with doing.”
“What do you want? He’s not a public speaker.”
“Well, if he’s going to lead a large company and ask us
to hit the goals he’s asking us to, he darn well better learn
to be a public speaker! Because it’s not about him, it’s
about us. We deserve better. We deserve someone talking

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to us, and I mean really talking to us. From the heart. Loud
and strong and with passion and without a darn script!”
“So, how do you 
really
feel about his talk?”
“That he came across as a pathetic little ball of ego
who doesn’t deserve to lead this company because he re-
fuses to put himself on the line. We would have been more
motivated if he had called in sick.”
If you’re in a situation where you have to give a talk to
your people and you feel tense, like it’s not coming from
the heart, practice relaxing on the spot. If your legs start
to shake, don’t worry. It’s just feedback time, and the feed-
back from your body is that you’re not relaxed. If you’re
relaxed, you cannot shake; it’s physically impossible. Once
you relax, you become a much better speaker. So don’t
just practice the talk you’re going to give. Practice relax-
ing, too.
52. Don’t Throw the
Quit Switch