It’s not About Making Lemonade out of Lemons, Its About Turning Ice Cream into an Ice Cream Sundae!

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Encouragement and motivation go hand in hand. If you want your employees or team mates to be motivated to work harder, better, faster, more productively, etc., etc. then you need to find ways to encourage them. That can be tough, especially when you’re trying to encourage them to do something they don’t necessarily want to do. And really, who wants to be at work if they could make money at play? But with a little encouragement, any resistance or negative thinking can all be turned around and arouse a positive mindset.

Encouraging your team isn’t that difficult. Usually it just takes a few words a day. Yet, as easy as it is, those few daily words are often left out in the rush to get “more important” things accomplished. Sometimes we, as leaders, just don’t feel like giving praise. Sometimes we don’t feel it’s necessarily deserved. But none of that really matters. In fact, its the job of the team leader to find ways to encourage the team especially in those situations.

Here is a great story from John Maxwell & Jim Dornan in their book Becoming a Person of Influence

An experiment was conducted years ago to measure people’s capacity to endure pain. Psychologists measured how long a barefooted person could stand in a bucket of ice water. They found that one factor made it possible for some people to stand in the ice water twice as long as others. [That factor was] encouragement. When another person was present, giving support and encouragement, the sufferers were able to endure the pain much longer than their encouraged counterparts.

Encouragement helps your team get through situations that the otherwise thought they couldn’t handle. It motivates them to do more and do it better.

What gets accomplished when you encourage your team to do great things? Great things!

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Tags: Business Principles, Search & Marketing
Posted in Business Principles, Search & Marketing