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

Sports Illustrated
, March
20, 2000): “If you played for him, you played by his rules:
Hold On to Principle

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Never score without acknowledging a teammate. One word
of profanity, and you’re done for the day. Treat your op-
ponent with respect. Coach Wooden believed in hopelessly
out-of-date stuff that never did anything but win champi-
onships.” Reilly writes that Coach Wooden’s rule that his
players could not have long hair or facial hair particularly
drove them crazy. When Bill Walton, an All-American
center, showed up with a full beard, he said, “It’s my right.”
Reilly goes on: “Coach Wooden asked if he believed that
strongly. Walton said he did. ‘That’s good, Bill,’ Coach
said. ‘I admire people who have strong beliefs and stick by
them, I really do. We’re going to miss you.’ Walton shaved
it right then and there. Now Walton calls once a week to
tell Coach he loves him.”
You have two ways to go as a motivator of others. You
can seek to be liked or you can, like John Wooden, earn
their respect. Respect is stronger. And, when their respect
runs deep enough, you may end up being loved.
85. Create Your
Relationships
A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually.
One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
—Rita Mae Brown, Mystery Author
When we are coaching leaders who are having a tough
time motivating others, it always becomes apparent that
their basic problem is that they’re 
reacting
to their people
all day long.

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They’re wallowing in their own negative emotional re-
action to people. After a while, in listening to these types
of managers, we get a funny impression that we’re listen-
ing to the words of country music. You know those coun-
try songs we’re talking about. The themes are: “I’ve been
hurt so many times, I’m never going to reach out again,”
or “I don’t trust women,” or “You can’t trust men.” Ac-
tual songs have titles such as “Is It Cold in Here or Is It
You?” and “My Wife Ran Away With My Best Friend and
I Miss Him.”
Country music in and of itself is great, and the really sad
songs—the ones that express the poetry of victimization—
are beautiful in their own way, but their basic philosophy
is not an effective way to create the motivated team we
want.
Managers who go through their days reacting emotion-
ally to the behavior of their people truly are miserable.
What those managers need is a gentle shift. Not a huge
change, but a shift, just like the gentle shift of gears in a finely
tuned car. They need to shift from reacting to creating.
All of this reacting they do has become a habit, and
because it’s only a habit, it’s completely open to a shift.
Business coach Dan Sullivan nails it when he says, “The
difficulty in changing habits lies in the fact that we are
changing something that feels completely natural to us.
Good habits feel natural; bad habits feel natural. That is
the nature of a habit. When you change a bad habit that
feels natural to a good habit that feels natural, you feel
exactly the same. It is just that you get completely differ-
ent results.”
One of the first steps on the path out of the habit of
reacting to the people we manage is to ask ourselves a
Create Your Relationships

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simple question. It’s a question first asked by Ralph Waldo
Emerson many years ago: “Why should my happiness de-
pend on the thoughts going on in someone else’s head?”
This question, no matter how we answer it in any given
moment, gives us the mental perspective we need to start
seeing the possibilities for creatively relating to others in-
stead of just reacting to them.
86. Don’t Be Afraid to
Make Requests