25 Ways to Win with People

John C. Maxwell

• Verlag: HarperCollins Leadership
• Jahr: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781418508302
• Thema: Business
• Thema: Management

Specific action steps you can take to develop your business skills by building up others.

25 Ways to Win With People --based onJohn Maxwell's best-selling Winning with People-- is ideal for a quick refresher course on interpersonal relationships for leaders and aspiring leaders alike. Each chapter explains the action step, describes why it works, and uses specific, real-life success stories.

A small sampling of the twenty-five specific actions readers can take to build positive, healthy relationships includes:

• Complimenting People in Front of Others
• Creating a Memory and Visiting It Often
• Encouraging the Dreams of Others

1

START WITH

YOURSELF

Your relationships can only be as healthy as you are.

—NEIL CLARK WARREN

LES . . . ON STARTING WITH YOURSELF

If you want to win with people, you’ve got to be a winner yourself—or at the very least be on your way to becoming one. There’s no avoiding this simple fact.

As a psychologist specializing in relationships, I’ve seen hundreds of people in therapy. I’ve spoken to hundreds of thousands in seminars. I’ve written more than a dozen books on the subject. People close to me understand that I’m passionate about helping others win with people. But if there is one thing I know, it’s that a new tip or technique to win with others will fall flat if you don’t start with yourself.

Let me say it straight. If you try to practice the “ways” of winning with people that you are about to learn in the following chapters before you give serious attention to how you can be a winner yourself, you’ll be sorely disappointed. However, if you will first take the time to focus on yourself, you’ll soon be ready to focus on others.

YOU’VE GOT TO START WITH YOURSELF

William James, the first American psychologist, said, “The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.” If we do not form a winning character, we are sure to lose with other people. That’s why this first step is so significant. In fact, there are at least two compelling reasons why winning with people hinges on starting with yourself.

YOU CAN’T E HAPPY WITHOUT BEING HEALTHY

Psychology used to think it was critical to focus on—and then eliminate—negative emotions. We now know there is a better way. A new generation of research has shifted psychology’s primary analysis from that of misery to an understanding of wellness.

The new research reveals that you can’t be happy simply by being unencumbered by depression, stress, or anxiety. No—you can’t be happy unless you are healthy. And there’s a lot more to health than not being sick. Emotional health is more than the absence of dysfunctional emotions. Emotional health is at the center of winning with people.

YOU CAN’T GIVE WHAT YOU DON’T HAVE

One of the oldest psychological truisms in the world is that you cannot give what you do not have. In fact, like every other psychologist-in-training, when I first began my graduate education, I was urged to get into psychotherapy myself. “Les,” my advisor said, “as a psychologist, you will only be able to take a person as far as you have gone yourself.” Why? Because you cannot give what you do not have. You cannot enjoy others until you enjoy yourself.

Harry Firestone said, “You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself.” So true. But if the best you have isn’t any better than what those “others” already possess, you’ll never take them any higher than they already are.

The bottom line? If you are not becoming a winner, you’ll find it almost impossible to win with others. But here’s the good news: your desire and attempts to win with others help to make you a winner. It’s what American essayist Charles Warner was getting at when he said, “No one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”

HOW TO BE A WINNER

“There’s a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves,” said Pearl Bailey, “and it becomes either good or sour inside.” Everyone has little anxieties and insecurities. If I were to ask you to describe a winning person, a person who is whole and healthy, you might say something about this person being confident, warm, kind, stable, giving, and so on. And you’d be right, in a sense. But there’s more to becoming a winner than having a list of enviable attributes. Being a winner comes down to one thing: your value.

Winners are valuable. Ask any star athlete or gold medalist who has just signed a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal. But truth be told, being a winner, in the purest sense of the word, has nothing to do with your performance, your salary, or your earning potential. It has to do with your value and whether or not you have owned it. When you embrace your own personal value, when you are secure in who you are, then you have become a winner.

Here are a few ways of doing just that:

RECOGNIZE YOUR VALUE. On more than one occasion, I’ve told the story of being on a speaking platform with my friend Gary Smalley when he did something that captivated the crowd. Before an audience of nearly ten thousand people, Gary held out a crisp fifty-dollar bill and asked them, “Who would like this fifty-dollar bill?” Hands started going up everywhere.

“I am going to give this fifty dollars to one of you,” he said, “but first let me do this.” He proceeded to crumple up the bill. Then he asked, “Who still wants it?” The same hands went up in the air.

“Well,” he continued, “what if I do this?” He dropped it on the ground and started to grind it into the floor with his shoe. He picked it up, all crumpled and dirty. “Now, who still wants it?” Again, hands went into the air.

“You have all learned a valuable lesson,” Gary said. “No matter what I do to the money, you still want it because it doesn’t decrease in value. It is still worth fifty dollars.”

Gary’s simple illustration underscores a profound point. Many times in our lives we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make or the circumstances that come our way. We may feel as though we are worthless, insignificant in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. But no matter what has happened or what will happen, we never lose our value as human beings. Nothing can take that away. Never forget that.

ACCEPT YOUR VALUE. How many times have you heard people say, “He has issues”? What they mean is that the person is stuck. The person is not healthy. He’s got a hang-up. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin. It’s what we psychologists are getting at when we talk about self-acceptance.

Let’s face it. All of us walking around on this planet have insecurities and issues that we wish we could change about ourselves. But certain things we can’t. Some things about us just are. Maybe you weren’t born with the kind of looks you would like. Or you aren’t as tall as you desire. Your genes dealt you a hand that you’ve eventually got to accept—either that or you reject your personal value and spend your days trying to compensate for your insecurities. You become hung up, stuck on not being dealt a better hand.

The term acceptance comes from the Latin ad capere that means “to take to oneself.” In other words, inherent in the process of accepting others is the act of self-acceptance. I’ll say it again: you will never win with people until you become a winner.

INCREASE YOUR VALUE. Perhaps you already recognize and accept your value. Maybe you know at the center of your being, deep in your soul, that you are loved by God and are of inestimable value. Congratulations! The next step is to increase your value to others by solving as many of your problems as you can. In other words, you need to maximize who you are by overcoming or fixing those things that are within your power to change.

You may struggle with a hair-trigger temper, for example. Maybe you have difficulty setting boundaries or taking responsibility. Maybe you have some bad habits, or perhaps your attitude needs an overhaul. All of us have hurdles we can overcome. Forty-five percent of Americans report that they would change a bad habit if they could.¹ The truth is, they can change. Each of us can improve ourselves whenever we decide to.

In his book Teaching the Elephant to Dance (Crown, 1990), James Belasco described how trainers shackle young elephants with heavy chains to deeply embedded stakes. In that way the elephant learns to stay in its place. Older, more powerful elephants that have been trained in this way never try to leave—even though they have the strength to pull up the stake and walk away. Their conditioning limits their movements. Eventually, with only a small, unattached metal bracelet on their legs, they stand in place—even though the stakes are actually gone!

It’s a story you’ve probably heard before, but like the powerful elephants, many people are bound by the restraints of previous conditioning. Just as the unattached chain around the elephant’s leg keeps it from moving, some people impose needless limits on their personal progress. Don’t let this happen to you. Don’t mindlessly accept restraints on your abilities. Challenge them and keep growing.

BELIEVE IN YOUR VALUE. Once you’ve recognized your value, accepted it, and increased it, you’ve eventually got to believe it. You’ve got to believe it with such conviction that you’d be willing to bank on it.

Chuck Wepner never learned this lesson. As a boxer, he earned the nickname “The Bayonne Bleeder” because of the punishment he took even while winning. In the boxing world he was what’s called “a catcher,” a fighter who often uses his head to block the other guy’s punches. Wepner continually pressured his opponent until he either won or got knocked out. He never cared how many shots he had to absorb before landing a knockout blow. Trainer Al Braverman called him “the gutsiest fighter I ever met. He was in a league of his own. He didn’t care about pain. If he got cut or elbowed, he never looked at me or the referee for help. He was a fighter in the purest sense of the word.”

When Wepner knocked out Terry Henke in the eleventh round in Salt Lake City, boxing promoter Don King offered Wepner a title shot against then–heavyweight champion George Foreman. But when Ali defeated Foreman, Wepner found himself scheduled to fight “The Greatest”— Muhammad Ali. On the morning of the fight, Wepner gave his wife a pink negligee and told her she would “soon be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world.”

Ali scored a technical knockout with just nineteen seconds remaining in the fight. But there was a moment—one glorious moment in the ninth round—when a hamlike paw to Ali’s chest knocked the reigning champion off his feet.

Wepner recalled, “When Ali was down, I remember saying to my ringman, Al Braverman, ‘Start the car, we’re going to the bank, we’re millionaires.’ And Al said to me, ‘You’d better turn around. Because he’s getting up.’” After the fight, Wepner’s wife pulled the negligee out of her purse and asked, “Do I go to Ali’s room or does he come to mine?” (see www.wepnerhomestead.com)

That story would be nothing more than an odd boxing footnote except for one thing. A struggling writer was watching the ...