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Summary: Motivation is a critical aspect of leadership. But most leaders fail to realize practical processes to motivate people consistently. Here is a motivational-leadership tool to greatly increase your leadership effectiveness.
The Defining Moment: The Straw That Stirs The Drink Of Motivational Leadership (Part Two) by Brent Filson
In Part One, I described importance of establishing deep, human connections with people you lead. I said there were three ways to do that, by communicating information, by making sense, and by having your experience become their experiences. By far, most important and most effective way, is latter.
Now I'll show you how to make that happen by developing and communicating a defining moment.
Write down three to five of your EXPERIENCES that made a strong impression on you. Describe each in a few sentences or paragraphs. That's it. Do no more. The important thing now is to deliberately walk through sequence of defining-moment development. It's easy to get off track, but once you take trouble to go through process, you'll have it for life.
For instance, an experience that defines much of what I do in leadership happened when my father lay on his deathbed. He and I had struggled for years over conflicting views of my career path, but when he got cancer, terrible disease led to a healing in our relationship, and for first time in years, we were able to talk with affection and no recriminations. During a long discussion one afternoon a few weeks before he died, I told him that I felt I had run out of opportunities in my life.
His thin hand, which had been so broad until he became ill (He came from a family of hulking carpenters.) closed around mine, and he said, "Brent, how can you say that? Everyone has opportunities all time. Look at me. Even me, here, on this bed — even I have opportunities!"
I didn't think much about what he said until after he died, and then his words kept coming back to me. Sort of breaking open in my mind like psychological time-release capsules and releasing bits of understanding. I came to understand what he really meant. And I took that understanding into my life and work.
Since then, I have never lacked for opportunities — simply because my father had me see that opportunities are never lacking — nor have I allowed leaders I've worked with to lack opportunities.
"Even I have opportunities" is a defining moment, an experience, one that led to profound awareness and purposeful action — not for my sake, but for sake of leaders I'm consulting with. For defining moment's purpose is not to illuminate what you can do, but what they can do. Now that you've written down some defining experiences, you can begin to change them into defining moments. The experience is raw material; defining moment is instrument, shaped from raw experience, that enables you to reach into hearts of people you speak to and motivate them to take action to get results. 1. Select an audience to speak to. It can be one person or many. It can be someone at work, in your family, or in your social circle. This should be an important interaction. You don't simply want to communicate but to have a communion with audience.
