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:

How did you feel using someone else’s words?

How did your experience and results change with practice?

How do you feel about talking about people’s passions?

What do you think about the concept of Universal Emotions?

How did you feel seeing people share their passions?

During the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle did you only confirm and clarify without talking about yourself or injecting other new information?

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

Data from Exercise

Making people feel understood about their passions and then connecting those passions to their work creates for them MVIP in that work. Them feeling misunderstood will make that work feel meaningless, especially if you motivate with money, promotions, demotions, your motivations, or other external incentives that devalue their passions. That lack of MVIP is what people escape when they leave bad managers.

Others’ passions aren’t obvious. Although a team may have a common goal, people have unique personal motivations. One person may go to college out of a love for learning, another to play sports, another to watch sports. Others’ goals may be socializing, getting jobs, family, and so on.
Say you go to school because you love learning but someone assumes you’re there to get a job. If they suggest a class because it will get you hired but you won’t learn in it, you’ll likely feel misunderstood and less likely to follow that person’s lead.
The leader’s challenge is to lead others to feel you understand them so they feel comfortable sharing their passion and open to you leading them with it.
It takes practice. This exercise’s goal is to create the feeling in them of being understood for a passion. We’ll build on that skill to lead people.

What to Do

Practice the script below at least a dozen times one way (you initiating step 1) and a couple times the other way (the other person initiating). In university, I assign students to do it twice a day for a week, like Meaningful Connection. You can start with people you know. You can show them the script too at first if it makes it easier, but work up to doing the exercise without it.

The Script

1. Ask, “What’s your passion?” or something similar, like, “I can tell you work harder on this than you have to. What’s your motivation to care so much?”

2. The person will usually give a cocktail-party answer.

3. Confirm your understanding.

4. Confirmation/Clarification Cycle:

• Let them correct you.

• Ask confirmation and clarification questions as necessary to refine your understanding.

• Confirm your new understanding.

• Repeat to Universal Emotion (see below).

Note that the exercise requires paying closer attention to the motivations the person describes than to the behavior he or she describes.