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

Know Your People’s Strengths

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wants to know how you can help. Not a salesperson.
Not a salesperson at all. You will use all the words you
used when you were a happy waitress. ‘You’re not quite
ready? I’d be glad to come back. Take your time. I want
you to know what’s here. I want you to know what the
specials are, so you can make your decision.’ And come
from that point of view. That’s who you are. That’s a
way of being that you loved being. And you can be that
here. You can serve rather than sell, and it will work
for you.”
Two or three months later, Jennifer was doing ex-
tremely well. She had made a remarkable breakthrough.
She came at the whole job from a completely different
place. She took what she loved to do the most, and she did
that
all day. She took what she already knew she was good
at, she took a strength, and she moved it from good to
great.
39. Debate Yourself
I am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an
army of 100 lions led by a sheep.
—Talleyrand
All it might take is half a day to catch everything up,
sort everything out, clean everything away, and be ready
to begin next week with a whole new lease on life, staying
organized as you go.
But still you resist.

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You know you will never “find time” to do that half a
day of reorganization. Therefore, you must 
make
time.
Winners make time to do what’s really beneficial and im-
portant to them. Losers keep trying to “find time.”
When you hear a pessimistic manager say, “I’m sorry
I didn’t get back to you, Dave. I was swamped yesterday,”
that swamped feeling has become reality.
But being “swamped” is just an interpretation. If that
manager was locked in solitary confinement for five years,
and somebody offered him this job where they had a lot of
phone calls and things to do, would they call it “being
swamped”? They would call it being wonderfully busy. They
would call it absolute heaven.
So which is it? Swamped or busy?
A woman in one of our workshops a year ago said,
“My job is a total nightmare. It is hell on earth. The fact
that I even show up for it is surprising to me—it is an
absolute nightmare.”
“What is the nightmare?”
“Well, I’ve got people calling in, I’ve got two different
bosses telling me what to do. I’ve got an in-box stacked
like this high, and I go home from work stressed out.”
“Okay, what if we were to introduce you to a woman
from Rwanda whose husband has been dead for two years
and who has had to eat out of garbage cans to live, do you
think you could persuade her that your job is a nightmare?
Would she like trading lives with you? Would your job be
a nightmare to that woman?”
“Oh, no, not to her it wouldn’t be a nightmare. It would
be the greatest blessing.”
“So, is your job a nightmare? A nightmare is only a
nightmare in your own thinking. It’s a perception. You
Debate Yourself

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can choose another if you want. You can choose another
job, or you can choose another perception. You are free.”
Be willing to teach your people how to debate them-
selves. Forget that it’s supposed to be a sign of insanity to
be talking to yourself. Because the truth is that when we
question our own thinking, we start to elevate to new lev-
els of thinking. We start to really accomplish things if we
have enough courage to question our own thinking. Here
are some questions we might want to ask ourselves, for
beginners: “Is that really true? Is my manager really out
to get me? Is this really happening? Is this really a bad
opportunity? It might be, but is it really? What else could
I say about it? What would be a more useful way to inter-
pret it?” We can teach people to question everything they
have labeled as negative.
Be ruthless with yourself, too, as you debate the chaos
that builds up in your life. Simplify your life to feel your
full power. When Vince Lombardi was asked why his
world-champion football team had the simplest offensive
system in all of football, his response was, “It’s hard to be
aggressive when you’re confused.”
40. Lead With Language