Chapter 51.
To Motivate Your People,
First Just Relax
A frightened captain makes a frightened crew.
—Lister Sinclair, Playwright/Broadcaster
The great music teacher and motivator of artists Rodney Mercado had a simple recipe for success. He said, “There are only two principles that you need to get to play great music or to live a great life: concentration and relaxation. And that’s it. That is it.”
Scott recalls this remark and what he said back to Professor Mercado: “What? That doesn’t have anything to do with music!”
“It has everything to do with music.”
And the way he taught relaxation was to say, “You need to have the maximum relaxation. For instance, if you want to play faster, Scott, you need to relax more. If you want to play louder, you need to relax more. If you want more sound coming out, you need to relax more.”
Up to this point in my life, it sounded like someone saying, “Well, if you want to become a cowboy, go to Harvard.” It didn’t make any sense. It seemed like a contradiction.
Doesn’t it sound like a contradiction? If you’re going to be louder, stronger, and motivate people, don’t you want to get them all hyped up and worked up? That’s what I had always thought: light a fire! Get the lead out of your pants!
So up to this point in my life, if I wanted to play faster, I would get hyped and tense up. And I would try harder. In any aspect of my life where I was trying to get more of something, I would become more tense from trying.
But Mercado said, “I’m going to play a passage of music and I want you to just listen for a moment.”
I did. I don’t remember the passage played at the time, but he almost ripped the strings off the violin. It was a virtuoso passage, but it sounded like he was going to make the strings just fly apart, there was so much sound and motion being produced. And I was awed.
“Now, Scott, I want you to put your arm on top of my forearm while I play this passage, and feel what’s going on while I’m doing this.”
When I put my arm on top of his forearm and he played this passage (and by the way, I’m trying to hang on for dear life, because his arm was flying), I was stunned, because his arm was almost totally relaxed. There was no tension in the muscles!
And all of a sudden, I got it.
Getting it changed my entire concept of playing the violin, but it also changed my concept of what I was doing in life. I had been tensing and straining for success instead of relaxing for it.
The same formula works for a sprinter in track and field. What most sprinters do when they try to run faster is to put more effort into it. And they don’t realize it but they tense up their muscles and their times actually drop. Trying harder slows them down! The sprinters don’t realize that they’re at their peak state of relaxation during their fastest times.
I saw this firsthand while on the Brigham Young University track team when I was in a physical education class. I thought I was pretty tough stuff, so I raced one guy who wasn’t on the track team. The guy barely beat me, but he was straining and out of control, and he just stumbled over the finish line.
Then I met another guy who was one of the top sprinters on the BYU track team, and I challenged him to a race.
We took off and he beat me by a wide margin. But there he was—Mercado’s theory in motion—totally relaxed, totally fluid, and he just flew by me.
So that principle is something that I have now adopted anytime I’m doing anything. If I’m in front of a jury, or my company, or any other group while I’m speaking, I know that the secret is relaxation, counterintuitive as that may seem.
Because what do most people do? They get nervous, they get tense, and their performance drops. But because of the training Mercado gave me, anytime I feel any tension at all, I slow down and relax all the more.
His words always come back to me: “If you start shaking, there’s only one way you can shake. You have to be tense. If you relax, you cannot shake. If you start shaking, that’s a sign that you’re not relaxing.”
Many team leaders get up in front of their teams or their company and are so nervous about speaking that they lose all ability to motivate anyone!
We have attended countless conventions and retreats where the CEO totally blows an opportunity to motivate his people by stepping up to the podium and reading nervously from a script, or making a brief and tense talk that leaves everyone flat.
A vice president of a large bank said to us of his CEO after the CEO had addressed 200 senior managers at a yearly conference:
“Did you hear him? Did you see him? I mean, we wait all year to hear his words to us and he gives this nervous, brief, memorized talk! Like he couldn’t be bothered to really talk to us!”
“He was obviously nervous about his talk.”
“That’s my point! To him, it was something he had to do. He obviously didn’t want to do it. So his whole focus was on himself and what little he could get away with doing.”
“What do you want? He’s not a public speaker.”
“Well, if he’s going to lead a large company and ask us to hit the goals he’s asking us to, he darn well better learn to be a public speaker! Because it’s not about him, it’s about us. We deserve better. We deserve someone talking to us, and I mean really talking to us. From the heart. Loud and strong and with passion and without a darn script!”
“So, how do you really feel about his talk?”
“That he came across as a pathetic little ball of ego who doesn’t deserve to lead this company because he refuses to put himself on the line. We would have been more motivated if he had called in sick.”
If you’re in a situation where you have to give a talk to your people and you feel tense, like it’s not coming from the heart, practice relaxing on the spot. If your legs start to shake, don’t worry. It’s just feedback time, and the feedback from your body is that you’re not relaxed. If you’re relaxed, you cannot shake; it’s physically impossible. Once you relax, you become a much better speaker. So don’t just practice the talk you’re going to give. Practice relaxing, too.