Take charge now and use your personal power. Learn these
strategies and use them daily.
Establishing Contact with Your
Prospective Customer
MOTIVATION STRATEGIES: MOVING AWAY
AND MOVING TOWARD
In Chapter 4, we discussed the Baseball Diamond Method for
changing your personal motivation. You learned that people are
motivated emotionally to move away from pain or to move toward
pleasure. The first and simplest way to categorize and understand
others is based on how they are motivated at the most basic level. At
the most basic level, people are motivated either to move away from
pain or to move toward pleasure. Clearly, everyone uses some of
each of these strategies. It is very easy to identify which is the pre-
dominant motivating factor by knowing what to listen for and lis-
tening carefully.
You probably have experienced something like this in a work sit-
uation. A group is working on a project and falls way behind sched-
ule. The manager offers additional rewards and bonuses to the
group if the schedule is met. Instead, work slips farther behind.
Then, in frustration, the manager threatens people with dismissal if
the project is not completed. All of a sudden, the project gets back
on schedule. In this situation, threats produced the desired results.
Conversely, you may have observed times when the threatening ap-
proach produced poor results, but a new management improves
performance by offering bonuses and incentives. How do you ac-
count for this?
In the first instance, the workers unconsciously relied on a moti-
vation strategy based on moving away from pain. The incentives did
nothing to motivate them. But when faced with the pain of dis-
missal, they magically began to perform. For people who motivate
themselves by moving toward pleasure, the incentive method pro-
duces far better results.
Identifying the distinction between moving-toward and moving-
away motivation in others is essential to make you communication
compelling.
Establishing Contact with Your Prospective Customer 199