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

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Others
100
Ways
to
Motivate

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1. Know Where Motivation
Comes From
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you
want done because he wants to do it.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
There was a manager who came early to a seminar we
were presenting on leadership. He was attired in an olive
green polo shirt and white pleated slacks, ready for a day
of golf.
He walked to the front of the room and said, “Look,
your session is not mandatory, so I’m not planning on
attending.”
“That’s fine, but I wonder why you came early to this
session to tell us that. There must be something that you’d
like to know.”
“Well, yes, there is,” the manager confessed. “All I
want to know is how to get my people on the sales team to
improve. How do I manage them?”
“Is that all you want to know?”
“Yes, that’s it,” declared the manager.
“Well, we can save you a lot of time and make sure
that you get to your golf game on time.”
The manager leaned forward, waiting for the words of
wisdom that he could extract about how to manage his
people.
And we told him:
“You can’t.”
“What?”
Know Where Motivation Comes From

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
“You can’t manage anyone. So there, you can go and
have a great game.”
“What are you saying?” asked the manager. “I thought
you give whole seminars on motivating others. What do
you mean, 
I can’t
?”
“We do give whole seminars on this topic. But one of
the first things we teach managers is that they can’t really
directly control their people. Motivation always comes from
within your employee, not from you.”
“So what is it you do teach?”
“We teach you how to get people to motivate 
them-
selves.
That is the key. And you do that by managing agree-
ments, not people. And that is what we are going to discuss
this morning.”
The manager put his car keys in his pocket and sat
down in the first seat closest to the front of the room for
the rest of the seminar. He has spent his whole life trying
to manage the behavior and emotions of other people, at
home as well as at work. Therefore, his life was full of
stress and disappointment. We were going to show him
that motivation comes from the inside, not the outside.
2. Teach Self-Discipline
Discipline is remembering what you want.
—David Campbell, Founder, Saks Fifth Avenue
The myth that nearly everyone believes is that we “have”
self-discipline. It’s something in us, like a genetic gift, that
we either have or we don’t.

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The truth is that we can all “have” self-discipline. The
question is really whether or not we learn to develop and
use
self-discipline.
Here’s another way to realize it: Self-discipline is like
a language. Any child can learn a language. (All children
do learn a language, actually.) Any 90-year-old can also
learn a new language. If you are 9 or 90 and you’re lost in
the rain in Juarez, it works when you use some Spanish to
find your way to warmth and safety. It works.
In this case, Spanish is like self-discipline in that you
are using it for something. You were not born with the
language, but you can learn it and use it. In fact, you can
use as much or as little as you wish.
And the more you use, the more you can make happen.
If you were an American transferred to Juarez to live
for a year and needed to make your living there, the more
Spanish you spoke, the better it would be for you.
If you had never spoken Spanish before, you could
still use it like a tool.
You could open your little English/Spanish phrases
dictionary and start using it. You could ask for directions
or help by using that little dictionary! You wouldn’t need
to have been born with any special language skills.
The same is true with self-discipline, in the same exact
way. Yet most people don’t believe it. Most people think
they either have it or they don’t. Most people think it’s a
character trait or a permanent aspect of their personality.
That’s a profound mistake. That’s a mistake that can
ruin a life.
But the good news is that it is never too late to correct
that mistake in yourself and your people.