Brian Tracy explains how empowering others through motivation and appreciation lets you accomplish far more. He breaks down three categories of people to empower: family, work relationships, and everyday contacts. Daily practices like expressing appreciation and saying thank you raise self-worth and motivation.
Empowering people is the key to building a high performance team. Once you empower people by learning how to motivate and inspire them, they will want to work with you to help you achieve your goals in everything you do. Your ability to enlist the knowledge, energy and resources of others enables you to become a multiplication sign to leverage yourself so that you can accomplish far, far more than the average person and in a far shorter period of time. There are three types of people that you want to and need to empower on a regular basis. They are first of all, the people closest to you, your family, your friends, your spouse and your children. The second people you need to empower are your work relationships, your staff, your co workers, your peers, your colleagues and even your boss. The third people you want to empower are all the other people that you interact with in your day to day life. Your customers, your suppliers, your banker. The people with whom you deal in stores and restaurants and airplanes and hotels and everywhere else. In each case, your ability to get people to help you is what will make you into a powerful and more effective person. Now the word empower means putting power into and it can also mean bringing energy and enthusiasm out of so the first step in empowering people is to refrain from doing anything that disempowers them or reduces their energy and enthusiasm for what they are doing. There are two things you can do every single day to empower people and make them feel good about themselves. The deepest need that each person has is for self esteem. A sense of feeling important and valuable and worthwhile. Everything that you do in your interactions with others affects their self esteem in some way. Now you already have an excellent frame of reference to determine the things that you can do to boost the self esteem and therefore the sense of personal power of those around you. Give them what you would like them to give you what you would like for yourself. Perhaps the simplest way to make another person feel good about himself or herself is your continuous expressions of appreciation for everything that person does for you, large or small. This means that you say thank you on every occasion. Thank your spouse for everything that he or she does for you. Thank your children for their cooperation and support in everything that they do around the house. Thank your friends for the smallest acts of kindness. The more you thank other people for doing things for you, the more things those other people will want to do because you make them feel valuable and important about themselves. They will want to do more things that cause you to help them to feel more valuable and more important.
