Winning with People Workbook

Discover the People Principles that Work for You Every Time

John C. Maxwell

• Publisher: HarperChristian Resources
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781418571986
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Business

What does it take to win with people?

Does an individual have to be born with an outgoing personality or a great sense of intuition to succeed relationally? When it comes to people skills, are there simply the haves and the have-nots?and we just have to accept whatever abilities God has given us?

In this interactive workbook, great for individual or group study, best-selling author John C. Maxwell halps you answer these questions while leading you through the 25 People Principles, which are designed to help make you relationally successful.

Features include:

• Questions for in-depth study and reflection
• Insightful quotes
• A system to help you learn and understand the 25 Key People Principles

In life, the skills you use and the people you choose will make or break you. Winning with People Workbook divided the 25 People Principles according to five critical questions we must ask ourselves if we want to win with people:

1. Readiness: Are we prepared for relationships?
2. Connection: Are we willing to focus on others?
3. Trust: Can we build mutual trust?
4. Investment: Are we willing to invest in others?
5. Synergy: Can we create a win-win relationship?

Learn and practice the 25 People Principles and you will not only be able to answer each of these questions in a positive way, but you will become skillful relationally?able to build healthy, effective, and fulfilling relationships. And once you can do that, you will become the kind of person who makes others successful too!

THE CONNECTION QUESTION
ARE WE WILLING
TO FOCUS ON OTHERS?

Strangers are
what friends are made of.

—CULLEN HIGHTOWER

All human beings possess a desire to connect with other people. It doesn’t matter how young or old, introverted or extroverted, rich or poor, learned or uneducated they happen to be. The need for connection is sometimes motivated by the desire for love, but it can just as easily be prompted by feelings of loneliness, the need for acceptance, the quest for fulfillment, or the desire to achieve in business.

How can we fulfill our desire for relationships? What is the best way to get started? In other words, how can we connect? The answer is that we must stop thinking about ourselves and begin focusing on the people with whom we desire to build relationships. That’s why the connection question asks, “Are we willing to focus on others?”

To increase your chances of connecting with another person, you need to understand and learn the following six People Principles:

The Big Picture Principle: The entire population of the world—with one minor exception—is composed of others.

The Exchange Principle: Instead of putting others in their place, we must put ourselves in their place.

The Learning Principle: Each person we meet has the potential to teach us something.

The Charisma Principle: People are interested in the person who is interested in them.

The Number 10 Principle: Believing the best in people usually brings the best out of people.

The Confrontation Principle: Caring for people should precede confronting people.

When you stop worrying so much about yourself and start looking at others and what they desire, you build a bridge to other people. And you become the kind of person others want to be around. These are the keys to connecting.

THE BIG PICTURE PRINCIPLE

THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE WORLD—
WITH ONE MINOR EXCEPTION—
IS COMPOSED OF OTHERS

A person first starts to live when he can live
outside himself.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

THE QUESTION I MUST ASK MYSELF:
DO I HAVE A HARD TIME PUTTING
OTHERS FIRST?

What does it take to change people’s perspective and help them see the big picture for the first time in their lives? Sometimes it’s getting married. Other times it’s getting divorced. Or having a child. The bottom line is that people need to understand that everything is not about them.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES

I recently read an article about actress Angelina Jolie. The catalyst for her change in perspective was a script. Jolie, who won an Oscar in 1999 for her role in Girl, Interrupted, could have been the poster girl for a life adrift. The child of actors Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, she had grown up in Hollywood and indulged in many of its excesses. She was called a “wild child.” And she was well known for drug usage, outrageous behavior, and sometimes self-destructive actions. She was convinced she would die young.

“There was a time where I never had a sense of purpose, never felt useful as a person,” says Jolie. “I think a lot of people have that feeling—wanting to kill yourself or take drugs or numb yourself out because you can’t shut it off or you just feel bad and you don’t know what it’s from.”¹

Success in movies did little to help her. “I felt so off balance all the time,” admits Jolie. “I remember one of the most upsetting times in my life was after I had attained success, financial stability, and I was in love, and I thought, ‘I have everything that they say you should have to be happy and I’m not happy.’”²

But then she read the script for Beyond Borders, the story of a woman living a life of privilege who discovers the plight of refugees and orphans around the world. Jolie recalls, “Something in me really wanted to understand what the film was about, these people in the world, all these displaced people and war and famine and refugees.”³ For a year she traveled around the world with UN workers. “I got my greatest life education and changed drastically,” she observes. She visited camps in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Cambodia, Pakistan, Namibia, and Thailand. Her entire perspective changed. She realized that the entire world was made up of other people, many of whom were in dire circumstances, many of whom she could help.

When the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees asked her to become a goodwill ambassador in 2001, she was happy to do it. She also began donating money to help refugees and orphans, including $3 million to the UN’s refugee program. (She says she makes a “stupid amount of money” to act in movies.)⁴ And she adopted a Cambodian orphan, Maddox. Recently Worth magazine listed her as one of the twenty-five most influential philanthropists in the world. She estimates that she gives almost a third of her income to charity.⁵

Jolie puts it all into perspective: “You could die tomorrow and you’ve done a few movies, won some awards—that doesn’t mean anything. But if you’ve built schools or raised a child or done something to make things better for other people, then it just feels better. Life is better.”⁶ Why does she feel that way? Because she finally gets the big picture. She stopped focusing on herself and began putting other people ahead of herself.

What experiences in your life have given you a big-picture perspective?

FROM HERE EVERYTHING LOOKS DIFFERENT

When it comes to winning with people, everything begins with the ability to think about people other than ourselves. That is the most basic principle in building relationships. I know that may sound like common sense, yet not everyone gets the big picture or practices unselfishness. Instead, too many people act more like toddlers, whose perspective is something like this:

If I like it, it’s mine.

If I can take it away from you, it’s mine.

If I had it a while ago, it’s mine.

If I say it is mine, it’s mine.

If it looks like mine, it’s mine.

If I saw it first, it’s mine.

If you’re having fun with it, it’s definitely mine.

If you lay it down, it’s mine.

If it is broken, it’s yours.⁷

People who remain self-centered and self-serving will always have a hard time getting along with others. To help them break that pattern of living, they need the big picture, which requires three things:

1. Perspective

People who lack perspective are like Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz. In one strip while Lucy swings on the playground, Charlie Brown reads to her, “It says here that the world revolves around the sun once a year.”

Lucy stops abruptly and responds, “The world revolves around the sun? Are you sure? I thought it revolved around me.”

Of course, lack of perspective is usually much more subtle than that. I know it was for me. Early in my career as a pastor, as I led others, the question I continually asked myself was, How can these people help me? I wanted to use people to help me accomplish my goals. It took me a couple of years to realize that I had everything backward and should have been asking, How can I help these people? When I did, not only was I able to help others, but I was also helped. I learned what William B. Given Jr. meant when he observed, “Whenever you are too selfishly looking out for your own interest, you have only one person working for you—yourself. When you help a dozen other people with their problems, you have a dozen people working with you.”

Who are you currently helping? What are your motives for helping them?

Most of the time, what we worry about is small in the big scheme of things. Many years ago John McKay, former head football coach of USC, wanted to help his team recover after being humiliated 51–0 by Notre Dame. McKay went into the locker room and saw a group of beaten, worn-out, and thoroughly depressed young football players who were not accustomed to losing. He stood up on a bench and said, “Men, let’s keep this in perspective. There are 800 million Chinese people who don’t even know this game was played.”

The entire world—with one minor exception—is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• The Readiness Question—Are We Prepared for Relationships?
• The Connection Question—Are We Willing to Focus on Others?
• The Trust Question—Can We Build Mutual Trust?
• The Investment Question—Are We Willing to Invest in Others?
• The Synergy Question—Can We Create a Win-Win Relationship?
• Notes
• About the Author