I recommend reflecting on your experience with this chapter’s exercise before continuing. You can reflect about anything you found relevant, but here are some questions you may want to consider:

Did you sense the ability to lead people when they shared their motivations?

Did you sense a shift in focus to people’s motivations?

How did it feel for you to connect someone’s passion to your task?

How did it look to them to have you connect their passion to your task?

How did they seem to react?

Where and how might you apply your experience in the rest of your life?

Data from Exercise

Make People Feel Understood had you lead people to talk about their passions. You probably had some rewarding conversations where they shared a lot. As much as people like talking about their passions, they love acting on them.
Connecting someone’s passion to your task imbues it with MVIP. Many managers assume others’ motivations, don’t learn their passions, and motivate them with external incentives. They devalue their passions by valuing external incentives over them, like the old man giving the kids the dollars, only he did it on purpose. Most managers do it like bulls in china shops of people’s emotions. We did Make People Feel Understood to make people feel comfortable sharing their passions. You probably felt a tug to influence them with what they shared. Once Phil Jackson knew about Shaquille O’Neal’s competition with Wilt Chamberlain, he knew he could motivate him with it.
Devaluing people’s passions leads them to forget or suppress them, resent their work and managers, and want to leave projects. Motivating people to resist you and leave the project is the opposite of effective leadership.
Lead with Empathy enables people to work for reasons they wanted to in the first place. They’ll often feel liberated, thinking things like, “Finally, I can do this for the reasons I wanted to.” They’ll feel inspired and often work hard. They will often ask you to raise standards, hold them more accountable, give them more responsibility, hold deadlines, and manage them more tightly. They’ll thank you for leading them to work so hard.
If you’ve had a professor for a class you loved (or sports coach, music teacher, manager, etc.), you know the feeling of working hard for yourself, not the professor, even though the professor assigned the work. You felt like you were improving yourself. You appreciated their standards and deadlines for motivating you. You wanted them to evaluate you.
Note that this exercise does not require you to have authority over the people you lead. You can do this exercise with people anywhere in an organization or outside. My students often use it to lead their work managers to manage them how they like. Another application is to motivate clients to buy, like Deepak did. Another is to attract people to your teams and start them on your project. Another is to overcome misunderstandings in personal relationships.
I recommend trying the exercise in a variety of contexts, not just the workplace.

What to Do

Practice the script at least three times in one direction and once in the other.
In university.