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

the thought about the rain
that causes your feeling.
And throughout all your leadership adventures, you can
teach your people this most important concept: the causal
power of thought.

---

/
41
One person thinks (just thinks!) the new pay plan is
great. The other person thinks (but just thinks) the plan is
depressing. Nothing in the world has any meaning until
they give it meaning. Nothing in the workplace does ei-
ther. Your people often look to 
you
for meaning. What
does this new directive really mean?
Do you sense the opportunity you have?
We can make things mean anything we want them to,
within reason. Why not use that power?
People don’t make your employees angry; their own
thoughts make them angry. They can’t be angry unless
they think the thoughts that make them angry.
If your nastiest employee wins the lottery in the morn-
ing, who’s going to make her angry that day? No one. No
matter what anyone says to her, she isn’t going to care.
She’s not going to give it another thought. Your employ-
ees can only get angry with someone if they 
think
about
that person as a threat to their happiness. If they don’t
think about that, how can they be angry?
Your people are free to think about anything they want.
They have absolute freedom of thought.
The highest IQ ever measured in any human being was
achieved by Marilyn vos Savant, many years in a row. Some-
one once asked Marilyn what the relationship was between
feeling and thinking. She said, “Feeling is what you get for
thinking the way you do.”
People feel motivated only when they think motivated
thoughts. Thought rules. Circumstance does not rule. The
closer your relationship to that truth, the better the leader
you are.
Preach the Role of Thought

---

42
/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
13. Tell the Truth Quickly
Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Answer: Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
—Abraham Lincoln
Great leaders always share a common habit: they tell
the truth faster than other managers do.
Steve recalls his work with helping managers motivate
salespeople. (And notice that this doesn’t just apply to
salespeople. It applies to all people.)
I always found that people would tell me about their
limitations, and I would listen patiently and try to talk them
out of their limitations, and they would try to talk me back
into what their limitations really were. Limitation seemed
to be their fixation.
One day, I was working with a salesperson in a diffi-
cult one-on-one coaching session, and finally I just blurted
it out (I guess I was tired, or upset, or was having a stress-
ful day), and I said, “You know, you’re just lying to me.”
“What?” he said.
“You’re lying. Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can
do. There’s 
a lot
you can do. So let’s you and I work with
the truth, because if we work with the truth and we don’t
lie to each other, we are going to get to your success so
much faster than if we do it this way, focusing on your
self-deceptions.”
Well, my client was just absolutely shocked. He stared
at me for a long time. It’s not always a great relationship-
builder to call someone a liar. I don’t recommend it. If I
hadn’t been as tired as I was, I don’t think I would have

---

/
43
done it, but the remarkable thing was, my client all of a
sudden began to smile! He sat back in his chair and he
said, “You know what? You are right.”
I said, “Really?”
He said, “You are right, that’s not the truth at all, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“You are right,” he said. “There’s a lot I can do.”
“Yes, there is.”
This is the main lie you hear in the world of business
and especially in sales: “There’s nothing I can do.” This is
the “I am helpless and powerless” lie. The truth is, there is
always a lot you can do. You just have to choose the most
creative and efficient way to do it. As Shakespeare wrote,
“Action is eloquence.”
One way a salesperson we know starts her day with
action is to ask herself, “If I were coaching me, what would
I advise myself to do right now? What creative action would
bring the highest return to me?”
Another quick cure for the feeling that “there’s noth-
ing I can do” is to ask ourselves, “If I were my customer
or my prospect, what would I want me to do?”
And what you can always do is GIVE. Great sales-
people, and any people who lead their teams in perfor-
mance and who prosper the most from their profession,
are great givers. They stay in constant touch with their
power to