Tactical Motivational Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Tactical Motivational. Here they are! All 92 of them:

Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
In business 'professionalism' is not a tactic but a moral value.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
7 keys to getting more things done: 1 start 2 dont make excuses 3 celebrate small steps 4 ignore critics 5 be consistent 6 be open 7 stay positive
Germany Kent
Seven Ways To Get Ahead in Business: 1. Be forward thinking 2. Be inventive, and daring 3. Do the right thing 4. Be honest and straight forward 5. Be willing to change, to learn, to grow 6. Work hard and be yourself 7. Lead by example
Germany Kent
Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes... but no plans.”  -- Peter Drucker
Dan Lok (Influence!: 47 Forbidden Psychological Tactics You Can Use To Motivate, Influence and Persuade Your Prospect)
Never let motivation become the determining factor for getting exercise.
S.J. Scott (Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even If You Hate Working Out))
It is worth recalling here that the injudicious use of rewards and praise can be pressure tactics no less than verbal or physical coercion. As we have seen, there are three dangers with motivating by means of reward and praise. First, they feed the anxiety that not the person but the desired achievement is what is valued by the parent. They directly reinforce the insecurity of the ADD child. Second, since children can sense the parents’ will pushing them, even if under benign disguises such as gifts or warm words, counterwill will be strengthened. Third, praise and reward will themselves become the goal, at the expense of the child’s interest in the actual process of what he is doing. Children thus motivated will sooner or later learn to get by with the least amount of effort necessary to earn the praise or the reward. Short cuts and cheating often follow. Accepting
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
You are surrounded by ignorance, savagery and fanaticism. You live in a society where everyone thinks he/she knows about everything in the whole universe. If you find yourself among those intellectual idiots, then being good and humble may give rise to doubts in your mind about your own ideas. So, you must first learn to distinguish between real and shallow intellect. Then, as a self- preservation tactic, you need to let your pretence of arrogance grow as big as a Dinosaur, so that the fake intellectuals start to realize their true inferiority in front of you.
Abhijit Naskar (Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost)
Strategy and tactics, discipline and protocol are necessary, but they’re just the beginning. You have to know people, Byron. How they think, what motivates them. Watch. Learn.
Jim Butcher (The Aeronaut's Windlass (The Cinder Spires, #1))
Mayor Walmsley is using the typical Jim Crow manipulation tactics to deflect the blame and guilt. He's a classic racist politician with an ulterior motive,” says Ora.
Shaune Bordere (Action Words: Journey of a Journalist)
Fuselier arrived at Columbine with one assumption: multiple gunmen demanded multiple tactics. Fuselier couldn’t afford to think of his adversaries as a unit. Strategies likely to disarm one shooter could infuriate the other. Mass murderers tended to work alone, but when they did pair up, they rarely chose their mirror image. Fuselier knew he was much more likely to find a pair of opposites holed up in that building. It was entirely possible that there was no single why—and much more likely that he would unravel one motive for Eric, another for Dylan.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
Guilt is closely related to shame and anxiety. It is an uncomfortable emotion, so we are highly motivated to avoid it. We evade the torment of guilt by behaving the way others expect us to. Manipulators know this all too well and use it to their advantage.
Adelyn Birch (30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics: How Manipulators Take Control In Personal Relationships)
Labor experts call this kind of stratification a tactic: create a sense of hierarchy and you motivate workers to compete with one another to please the bosses and get to the next category up, instead of fighting together to get rid of the categories and create a common, improved work environment for everyone.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
The enemies agenda is destruction, his strategy is division and his tactics is on little differences. Mind you he is not going to be happy until he sees you divided.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
Intermittent reinforcement in the context of a relationship is when kindness and loving acts are not given consistently, but rather intermittently. In 30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics, author Adelyn Birch writes, “This is an extremely powerful and effective manipulation tactic. In fact, psychology experts consider it the most powerful motivator in existence.
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
People’s anxiety rises and their motivation falls. They feel disoriented and self-doubting. They are resentful and self-protective. Energy is drained away from work into coping tactics.
William Bridges (Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change)
The human race is where everyone is under control by other people, no one controls his own life; the best thing you can ever do is to choose somebody who controls your life with good motive.
Aiden Mccoy (Manipulation Tactics: Discover How To Exploit the Dark Technique of Manipulation & Learn How To Use It In Your Favor (Manipulation, Persuasion , Body Language, Mind Control, How To Analyze))
I could oppose the abuse without the motive of personal revenge. The act of forgiveness didn’t shut down my advocacy. Rather, it spun me back into the fray with a clearer mind and a strengthened resolve.
Wade Mullen (Something's Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse—and Freeing Yourself from Its Power)
For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,” he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.” The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
Goals: Setting and Achieving Them on Schedule, How to Stay Motivated, and Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar: “Zig is your grandfather and my grandfather. He’s Tony Robbins’s grandfather. None of us would be here if it weren’t for Zig.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic. Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument, or a position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive.
Christopher Hitchens (No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton)
Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.
Peter Pomerantsev (This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality)
Addiction to softer drugs like alcohol or pot can be just as damaging but more insidious. The costs mount so slowly that they can be difficult to detect. That’s especially true of pot. If she’s using daily, don’t accept her protestations that marijuana has no deleterious effect on her. I don’t care how many cannabis evangelists she can rally to her cause, researchers tell a different story about heavy pot use. Heavy pot use lowers IQ (Meier et al. 2012); it damages memory (Solowij and Battisti 2008); it impairs decision-making (Tamm et al. 2013); it devastates motivation (Treadway et al. 2012; Smirnov and Kiyatkin 2008; Bloomfield et al. 2014); and it increases anxiety (Zvolensky et al. 2008). Finally, no matter what you might have heard, pot is addictive. In part, this is because it lowers the amount of available dopamine in the brain, necessitating its continued use to maintain normal levels (Hirvonen et al. 2011).
Shawn T. Smith (The Tactical Guide to Women: How Men Can Manage Risk in Dating and Marriage)
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do—even using so-called good human relations techniques—will be perceived as manipulative. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success. Only basic goodness gives life to technique.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
Their Biggest Fear   What is a narcissist afraid of most? Narcissist who have had some insight into their own disorder will tell you that the biggest fear of the narcissist is BEING FOUND OUT.   They fear that you will recognize their facade. They fear you will realize that much of their bad behavior is intentional. When the narcissist realizes that YOU KNOW the truth about his lack of empathy; that is when you will be cut off, and he will work to turn all of your mutual relationships against you that he can.   I have written several times thus far about how most of the narcissist's motivations and behavior are subconscious. However, – from time to time, the narcissist does recognize, in brief glimpses, the truth about his envious and angry nature. The truth will rise to the surface of his conscience if he allows you to confront him. Therefore you and your voice absolutely must be suppressed. You also must not be allowed access to his other relationships – the ones he can still control, the relationships he still has fooled. For the narcissist, the  easiest way to suppress your voice is to launch a  character attack against you. He decides he must spread lies about you to everyone so that 1) he can explain your sudden absence in his life (He tells everyone that he discovered you were really a mean, hateful person, and he had to cut you off to maintain his own sanity. There is no way he can allow others to think you cut him off – as that would indicate there might be something wrong with him); and 2) he must convince others that you are a terrible, or at least an unstable person – so that if you ever have a chance to talk
Ellen Cole (The Covert Narcissist in the Family: Their Common Tactics, How to Protect Yourself, and Personal Stories)
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do—even using so-called good human relations techniques—will be perceived as manipulative.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain - John J. Ratey, MD, with Eric Hagerman Exercise Every Day: 32 Tactics for Building the Exercise Habit (Even if you hate working out) - S.J. Scott No Gym Needed - Quick & Simple Workouts for Gals on the Go: Get a Toned Body in 30 Minutes or Less - Lise Cartwright Weight Loss Motivation Hacks: 7 Psychological Tricks That Keep You Motivated to Lose Weight - Derek Doepker Books
Sarah Lentz (The Hypothyroid Writer: Seven daily habits that will heal your brain, feed your creative genius, and help you write like never before)
Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most of us, such confidence does not come easy. It’s understandable. So many people in our lives have preached the need to be realistic or conservative or worse—to not rock the boat. This is an enormous disadvantage when it comes to trying big things. Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible. Our
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage)
Some regard the settlement enterprise as vital for security. 189 Whatever the motive, it is unacceptable to pursue this aim through a strategy of seeking to dominate Palestinians, maintaining a discriminatory system, and engaging in tactics that either have an insufficient security justification or otherwise violate international law. An intent to ensure security neither negates an intent to dominate, nor grants a carte blanche to undertake policies that go beyond what international law permits. While security grounds can justify a range of restrictive measures under international humanitarian and human rights law, a strategy that seeks to promote security by ensuring the demographic advantage of one group of people through discrimination or oppression has no basis under international law.
Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution)
There is a wealth of historical data that suggests we prefer a balance of leisure and toil. But we have been convinced through more than two hundred years of propaganda that inactivity is the same as laziness, and that leisure is a shameful waste of time. If you think I’m using the word propaganda metaphorically, you’re wrong. Let’s dial it back to the 1920s for a moment. The battle over work hours was still being fiercely fought throughout the industrialized world, but the workers were winning. The punishing days of the nineteenth century were far behind us, and workdays were getting shorter and shorter in most industries. There seems to have been a realization among employers that they couldn’t win a direct fight, so they used more subtle tactics learned during World War I. Employers realized they could borrow strategies from the War Department in order to motivate the production line.
Celeste Headlee (Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving)
Putting the Other Person Down The manipulator has other options available to help them reach their ultimate goal. One tactic that can be quite effective consists in putting their target down on a regular basis. However, this isn’t done through insults or threats. This covert technique is very useful because the manipulator uses it in a very subtle manner. This can be seen in the abundant use of sarcasm or perhaps passive-aggressive attacks. For example, the manipulator may say, “don’t we look lovely today” when it is clear that the victim is not at their best. A passive-aggressive approach might be something like, “I’m just going to have to take you in for a good scrubbing and a haircut.” It might say in a playful tone, but the subtext is far more sinister. As for the target, they may not realize that they are the subject of manipulation. They may feel terrible as a result of the interaction, but may not realize that they are being deliberately acted upon by the manipulator. Consequently, the target is left to wonder is what the motives might be for being treated in such a manner. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter, at least not to the manipulator. What does matter is that the target is left feeling vulnerable and exposed. This is where the manipulator can make the most of their efforts. When a victim is left feeling defenseless, the manipulator is in a prime position to take advantage ([27]). On the contrary, if a person feels safe and empowered, the likelihood of them being manipulated is quite low. That’s why manipulators prey upon people with low self-esteem. If a person has high self-esteem, then they won’t be easily manipulated. If anything, put-downs and insults will spark a defensive reaction. That would leave the manipulator with no choice but to move on to the next victim.
William Cooper (Dark Psychology and Manipulation: Discover 40 Covert Emotional Manipulation Techniques, Mind Control, Brainwashing. Learn How to Analyze People, NLP Secret ... Effect, Subliminal Influence Book 1))
Have you ever wanted something very badly-something that was within your grasp-and yet you were afraid to reach out for it? That night he had answered no. Tonight he would have said yes. Among other things, he wanted to know where she was; a month ago he’d told himself it was because he wanted the divorce petition served. Tonight he was too exhausted from his long internal battle to bother lying to himself anymore. He wanted to know where she was because he needed to know. His grandfather claimed not to know; his uncle and Alexandra both know, but they’d both refused to tell him, and he hadn’t pressed them. Wearily, Ian leaned his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes, but he wouldn’t sleep, and he knew it, even though it was three o’clock in the morning. He never slept anymore unless he’d either had a day of grueling physical activity or drunk enough brandy to knock himself out. And even when he did, he laid awake, wanting her, and knowing-because she’d told him-that she was somewhere out there, lying awake, wanting him. A faint smile touched his lips as he remembered her standing in the witness box, looking heartbreakingly young and beautiful, first trying logically to explain to everyone what had happened-and when that failed, playing the part of an incorrigible henwit. Ian chuckled, as he’d been doing whenever he thought of her that day. Only Elizabeth would have dared to take on the entire House of Lords-and when she couldn’t sway them with intelligent logic, she had changed tack and used their own stupidity and arrogance to defeat them. If he hadn’t felt so furious and betrayed that day, he’d have stood up and given her the applause she deserved! It was exactly the same tactic she’d used the night he’d been accused of cheating at cards. When she couldn’t convince Everly to withdraw from the duel because Ian was innocent, she’d turned on the hapless youth and outrageously taken him to task because he’d already engaged himself to her the next day. Despite his accusation that her performance in the House of Lords had been motivated by self-interest, he knew it hadn’t. She’d come to save him, she thought, from hanging.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
So you don’t trust me: the guy who taught you everything you know. I’m guessing if you have her”—he jerked his thumb at Rae—“that’s no accident. Luke’s buddies sent her to trap you, and she thought she was doing the right thing, because, duh, she’s already proven she’s kinda gullible that way.” “Hey!” Rae said. “You are. Own it. Fix it. Now, you guys have her, which means you escaped whoever sent her after you. You didn’t escape without a fight, given that bruise I see rising on Daniel’s jaw and the scrapes on Derek’s knuckles. But you escaped, and you came back here, and you captured me. Who taught you all that?” “Daniel and I had already started learning,” Maya said, “during those weeks you were chasing us.” “Trial by fire,” he said. “Followed by hardcore, hands-on tactical training. You got away scot-free from these guys because of my lessons. And yet now you don’t trust I’m on your side?” “Nope,” Derek said. “Sorry,” Daniel said. Maya crossed her arms and shook her head. I shrugged. Moreno broke into a grin. “You guys do me proud. I’d give you all a hug, if that wasn’t a little creepy. And if I was the hugging sort. But if you survive the rest of this, I’ll take you all out for beer and ice cream.” “You don’t need to be sarcastic,” Rae muttered. “Oh, but I’m not, and they know it. This is exactly what I trained them for. Trust no one except one another. Excluding you, kid, because I don’t know you, and you have a bad habit of screwing up. But these guys are doing the right thing. Next step?” Turn the tables,” I said. “Capture someone who’s behind this and get them to talk.” “Mmm, yes. That would work. But even better?” “Stop them,” Derek said. “Don’t just take down one. Take them all down.” “Without running to the Nasts for help,” Daniel said. “Because in another year, some of us will be off to college, and we need to be able to look after ourselves.” “Starting with proving we can look after ourselves,” Maya said. Moreno beamed. “You guys are ace. See, this is what I told Sean. The best time to train operatives is when they’re still young and malleable. None of that shit about waiting until they’re eighteen and legally old enough to consent.” Maya shook her head. “I suppose you’d also suggest he have the Cabal terrorize them for weeks first, so they’re properly motivated.” “Exactly. Personal rights and freedoms are vastly overrated. And there’s nothing wrong with a little PTSD. I’ve always found mine useful. Keeps me on my toes.” Rae stared at him. “I’m kidding,” he said to her. “Mostly. Don’t you joke around like this with your instructors? Oh, wait. You don’t have any. Which is why you got tricked—again. And got captured by these guys.” “Can we tie him up now?” Rae said. “And gag him?” “Doesn’t do any good,” Derek said. “We could try.
Kelley Armstrong (Atoning (Darkness Rising #3.1))
Situation awareness means possessing an explorer mentality A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. When armies are face to face, the least accident in the ground, the smallest wood, may conceal part of the enemy army. The most experienced eye cannot be sure whether it sees the whole of the enemy’s army or only three-fourths. It is by the mind’s eye, by the integration of all reasoning, by a kind of inspiration that the general sees, knows, and judges. ~Napoleon 5   In order to effectively gather the appropriate information as it’s unfolding we must possess the explorer mentality.  We must be able to recognize patterns of behavior. Then we must recognize that which is outside that normal pattern. Then, you take the initiative so we maintain control. Every call, every incident we respond to possesses novelty. Car stops, domestic violence calls, robberies, suspicious persons etc.  These individual types of incidents show similar patterns in many ways. For example, a car stopped normally pulls over to the side of the road when signaled to do so.  The officer when ready, approaches the operator, a conversation ensues, paperwork exchanges, and the pulled over car drives away. A domestic violence call has its own normal patterns; police arrive, separate involved parties, take statements and arrest aggressor and advise the victim of abuse prevention rights. We could go on like this for all the types of calls we handle as each type of incident on its own merits, does possess very similar patterns. Yet they always, and I mean always possess something different be it the location, the time of day, the person you are dealing with. Even if it’s the same person, location, time and day, the person you’re dealing who may now be in a different emotional state and his/her motives and intent may be very different. This breaks that normal expected pattern.  Hence, there is a need to always be open-minded, alert and aware, exploring for the signs and signals of positive or negative change in conditions. In his Small Wars journal article “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer” Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege (US Army Ret.) describes the explorer mentality:   While tactical and strategic thinking are fundamentally different, both kinds of thinking must take place in the explorer’s brain, but in separate compartments. To appreciate this, think of the metaphor of an early American explorer trying to cross a large expanse of unknown terrain long before the days of the modern conveniences. The explorer knows that somewhere to the west lies an ocean he wants to reach. He has only a sketch-map of a narrow corridor drawn by a previously unsuccessful explorer. He also knows that highly variable weather and frequent geologic activity can block mountain passes, flood rivers, and dry up desert water sources. He also knows that some native tribes are hostile to all strangers, some are friendly and others are fickle, but that warring and peace-making among them makes estimating their whereabouts and attitudes difficult.6
Fred Leland (Adaptive Leadership Handbook - Law Enforcement & Security)
Intentional: The abuser consciously or subconsciously sets out to use deliberate abusive tactics to achieve his/her ends. The abuser chooses to abuse and he can choose to stop abusing at any time. • Methodical: The abuser systematically uses a series of abusive tactics to gain power over the partner and to control her. • Pattern: The abused partner often at first sees the abusive tactics as isolated and unrelated incidents, but they are really a series of related acts that form a pattern of behaviors. • Tactics: The abuser uses a variety of tactics to gain power and to control his partner such as threats, violence, humiliation, exploitation, or even self-pity. • Power: The abuser aims to acquire and employ power in the relationship. For example, the abuser may use force or threats of physical harm to intimidate his or her partner, thereby gaining physical and emotional power. Or the abuser may prohibit the partner from working, making the partner financially dependent on the abuser, and thereby gaining financial power. • Control: With sufficient power, the abuser can control his partner—forcing or coercing her to do as the abuser wishes. For example, the abuser controls the decision making for the relationship, or controls who has social contact with the partner, or determines the sexual practices of the partner. The goal of the abuser is to force compliance. • Desires: The abuser’s ultimate goal is to get his emotional and physical desires met and he aims to selfishly make use of his partner to meet those needs. Most abusers are afraid their desires will not be fulfilled through a normal healthy relationship. Fear motivates them to use abuse to ensure that their desires will be met.
Lindsey A. Holcomb (Is It My Fault?: Hope and Healing for Those Suffering Domestic Violence.)
The waltz was dwindling away, and with a supreme effort he let her go. They talked through the crowd together, smiling politely at people who intercepted them without the slightest idea of anything that was said. When they neared the Townsendes’ group Ian delayed her with a touch of his hand. “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you,” he said. Scrupulously keeping up appearances, he reached out to take a drink from a tray being passed by a servant, using that to cover their having stopped. “I would have told you before, but until now you would have questioned my motives and not believed me.” Elizabeth nodded graciously to a woman who greeted her, then she slowly reached for the glass, listening to him as he quietly said, “I never told your brother I didn’t want to wed you.” Her hand stayed, then she took the glass from him and walked beside him as they made their slowest possible way back to their friends. “Thank you,” she said softly, pausing to sip from her glass in another delaying tactic. “There’s one more thing,” he added irritably. “What’s that?” she asked. “I hate this damn ball. I’d give half what I own to be anywhere else with you.” To his surprise, his thrifty fiancé nodded complete agreement. “So would I.” “Half?” he chided, grinning at her in complete defiance of the rules of propriety. “Really?” “Well-at least a forth,” she amended helplessly, giving him her hand for the obligatory kiss as she reached for her skirts, preparing to curtsy. “Don’t you dare curtsy to me,” he warned in a laughing underbreath, kissing her gloved fingers. “Everywhere I go women are falling to the floor like collapsing rigging on a ship.” Elizabeth’s shoulders shook with mirth as she disobediently sank into a deep throne-room curtsy that was a miracle of grace and exaggeration. Above her she heard his throaty chuckle. In an utter turnabout of his earlier feelings, Ian suddenly decided this ball was immensely enjoyable.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
Parental efforts to gain leverage generally take two forms: bribery or coercion. If a simple direction such as “I'd like you to set the table” doesn't do, we may add an incentive, for example, “If you set the table for me, I'll let you have your favorite dessert.” Or if it isn't enough to remind the child that it is time to do homework, we may threaten to withdraw some privilege. Or we may add a coercive tone to our voice or assume a more authoritarian demeanor. The search for leverage is never-ending: sanctions, rewards, abrogation of privileges; the forbidding of computer time, toys, or allowance; separation from the parent or separation from friends; the limitation or abolition of television time, car privileges, and so on and so on. It is not uncommon to hear someone complain about having run out of ideas for what still might remain to be taken away from the child. As our power to parent decreases, our preoccupation with leverage increases. Euphemisms abound: bribes are called variously rewards, incentives, and positive reinforcement; threats and punishments are rechristened warnings, natural consequences, and negative reinforcements; applying psychological force is often referred to as modifying behavior or teaching a lesson. These euphemisms camouflage attempts to motivate the child by external pressure because his intrinsic motivation is deemed inadequate. Attachment is natural and arises from within; leverage is contrived and imposed from without. In any other realm, we would see the use of leverage as manipulation. In parenting, such means of getting a child to follow our will have become embraced by many as normal and appropriate. All attempts to use leverage to motivate a child involve the use of psychological force, whether we employ “positive” force as in rewards or “negative” force as in punishments. We apply force whenever we trade on a child's likes or when we exploit a child's dislikes and insecurities in order to get her to do our will. We resort to leverage when we have nothing else to work with — no intrinsic motivation to tap, no attachment for us to lean on. Such tactics, if they are ever to be employed, should be a last resort, not our first response and certainly not our modus operandi. Unfortunately, when children become peer-oriented, we as parents are driven to leverage-seeking in desperation. Manipulation, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, may succeed in getting the child to comply temporarily, but we cannot by this method make the desired behavior become part of anyone's intrinsic personality. Whether it is to say thank-you or sorry, to share with another, to create a gift or card, to clean up a room, to be appreciative, to do homework, or to practice piano, the more the behavior has been coerced, the less likely it is to occur voluntarily. And the less the behavior occurs spontaneously, the more inclined parents and teachers are to contrive some leverage. Thus begins a spiraling cycle of force and counterwill that necessitates the use of more and more leverage. The true power base for parenting is eroded.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
A limited offer has unlimited appeal.
Dan Lok (Influence!: 47 Forbidden Psychological Tactics You Can Use To Motivate, Influence and Persuade Your Prospect)
study  done  by  the  Wall  Street  Journal  the number  seven  (7)  has  been  found  to  be  the number  that  most  people  respond  to. 
Dan Lok (Influence!: 47 Forbidden Psychological Tactics You Can Use To Motivate, Influence and Persuade Your Prospect)
AS STRATEGY SESSIONS BEGAN IN HAWTHORNE, THE Handlers made a brilliant tactical move. They commissioned a toy study from Ernest Dichter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Motivational Research in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. The study cost a staggering $12,000 and took six months to complete, but when it was finished the charge seemed low. Dichter had masterminded a cunning campaign to peddle Barbie. Dichter was already a legend when the Handlers approached him. Quoted on nearly every page of Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, a bestseller in 1957, Dichter was hailed as a marketing Einstein—an evil Einstein, but an Einstein nonetheless. He pioneered what he called "motivational research," advertising's newest, hippest, and, in Packard's view, scariest trend—the manipulation of deep-seated psychological cravings to sell merchandise.
M.G. Lord (Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll)
Non-professionals can also misrepresent the personal characteristics, religious beliefs, and appearance, of these therapists, can name-call and otherwise mock them, and can attribute false agendas to them, such as assigning religious motives to secular therapists working with ritual abuse or mind control survivors. For example, there is little to prevent someone from claiming on his or her own website that a psychotherapist is a fundamentalist Christian zealot at war with Satan, when that therapist might be an atheist, Jew, Buddhist, etc., who places no stock in the existence of Satan. But such a claim, when spoken as if it is fact, accomplishes its intended purpose of maligning that therapist." - Common Forms of Misinformation and Tactics of Disinformation about Psychotherapy for Trauma Originating in Ritual Abuse and Mind Control (2012)
Ellen P. Lacter
The best marketers aren’t the best talkers… although many of them could charm the  pants right off you…they’re the best listeners. They know how to hear what prospects are really saying and what they’re not saying.
Dan Lok (Influence!: 47 Forbidden Psychological Tactics You Can Use To Motivate, Influence and Persuade Your Prospect)
Choose what will motivate you in life as a whole. Will it be Love or Fear that sets you apart in this lifetime? Karma has no hold on our souls greater than a love known as grace. Or a fear of sheer torment during this sojourn of our Earthly trek. If you choose poorly then you shall be preyed upon and easily manipulated by your peers via numerous tactics of hate at large. If again you choose wisely than keep on your guard using reason with an unconditional love. Because a conditional love is flawed as a mixture of demands placed on it by the frail ego always. It has no place being called love in the absolute eyes of God(dess).
Ivan Alexander Pozo-Illas (The Journey of the Soul Continues (Jewels of Truth #3))
Be motivated by what you wish to achieve, not by what you wish to avoid.
The Secret Footballer (The Secret Footballer's Guide to the Modern Game: Tips and Tactics from the Ultimate Insider)
The use of extreme coercive measures to motivate soldiers is logically suspect. Regimes resorting to these methods may achieve a tactical advantage in rare circumstances, but such a system can only motivate soldiers to take actions they know to be excessively costly or futile. To soldiers as yet uncommitted, this would signal that their leaders care nothing for their lives, and thus ultimately decrease their combat effectiveness.
How the Weak Win Wars
Unrighteous courage, deceitful tactics, foolishness, greed, filthiness, and cruelty, are natural faults of women.
Rajen Jani
When we sacrifice relationship building in favor of control tactics, our children may age, but in many ways, they developmentally remain toddlers, because they miss out on years of building the emotion regulation, coping skills, intrinsic motivation, and inhibition of desires that are necessary for life success. When we are busy exerting extrinsic control over our children’s external behavior, we sacrifice teaching these critical internal skills.
Becky Kennedy (Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be)
Destructive habits are not flaws; they’re coping mechanisms that serve a purpose. They’re survival tactics we deploy to shield us from stress, sadness, fear, grief, and frustration.
Sarah Hays Coomer (The Habit Trip: A Fill-in-the-Blank Journey to a Life on Purpose)
Trump’s ambitions and motivations notwithstanding, his legacy in the Middle East might best be characterized as tactical maneuvers and strategic incoherence. 3 Trump’s actions and tweets left the Middle East in worse shape than what he had inherited, as his policy unorthodoxy created a great deal of uncertainty.
Julian E. Zelizer (The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment)
It was as though I had even to trick my own mind by chattering in such a casual and blase manner; any other way stopped at the point of motivation. It was as though I were emotionally constipated and the words could not otherwise escape my lips. If it were not for the methods I had devised, my words, like my screams and so many of my sobs, would have remained silent. People would push me to get to the point. When what I had to say was negative, this was quite simple. Opinions that had nothing to do with my own identity or needs rolled off my tongue like wisecracks from a stand-up comedian. ....Hiding behind the characters of Carol and Willie, I could say what I thought, but the problem was that I could not say what I felt. One solution was to become cold and clinical about topics I might feel something about. Everyone does this to an extent, in order to cover up what they feel, but I had actually to convince myself about things; it made me a shell of a person. These were the same tactics l employed when l found it necessary to create Carol in order to communicate all those years ago. Deep down, Donna never learned to communicate. Anything that l felt in the present still had either to be denied or expressed in a form of conversation others called waffling, chattering, babbling, or "wonking." l called it "talking in poetry.
Donna Williams (Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic Girl)
Just like discipline beats motivation, so too does personal development win over tactics.
Richard Heart (sciVive)
Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority owner of the Brazil-based Semco Partners, practices asking “Why?” three times. This is true when questioning his own motives, or when tackling big projects. The rationale is identical to Derek’s.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
You Are a Rounding Error” “[I had] an executive at Yahoo! who brought me and Steve in [for a potential acquisition discussion]—this was early in Reddit—and told us we were a rounding error because our traffic was so small. . . . I put, ‘You are a rounding error,’ on our wall in the Reddit office after that meeting as a wall of negative reinforcement for me. That ended up being kind of valuable for me and helpful, and I still am grateful to this day that he was such a dick, because it was so motivating. But I don’t want to be that guy.” (See Amanda Palmer’s quote, “Take the pain and wear it like a shirt” on page 521.)
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Jackson used this tactic time and again when facing numerically superior forces. “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible,” he said, “... such tactics will win every time and a small army may thus destroy a large one.” This law applies not only to war but to everyday situations. People are always trying to read the motives behind your actions and to use your predictability against you. Throw in a completely inexplicable move and you put them on the defensive. Because they do not understand you, they are unnerved, and in such a state you can easily intimidate them. Pablo Picasso once remarked, “The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it’s for an intelligent reason. So it’s really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You’re better off acting capriciously.
Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power)
Motivational interviewing pioneers Miller and Rollnick have long warned that the technique shouldn’t be used manipulatively. Psychologists have found that when people detect an attempt at influence, they have sophisticated defense mechanisms. The moment people feel that we’re trying to persuade them, our behavior takes on a different meaning. A straightforward question is seen as a political tactic, a reflective listening statement comes across as a prosecutor’s maneuvering, an affirmation of their ability to change sounds like a preacher’s proselytizing.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Consider the case of a woman who denigrates a rival by casually mentioning that the rival has slept with many men. If the man is seeking a spouse, this tactic is highly effective, because men dislike promiscuity in a potential wife. If the man is seeking casual sex, however, the woman’s tactic is likely to backfire, because most men pursuing easy sex are not bothered by a woman’s past promiscuity. Similarly, overt displays of sexuality are effective short-term tactics for women but are ineffective in the long run: such displays get men’s sexual attention but do not motivate them to invest or commit. The effectiveness of attraction, in short, depends critically on the temporal context of the mating. Men and women tailor their attraction techniques to the length of the relationship they seek.
David M. Buss (The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating)
Fear frequently serves as a roadblock, not only to critical thinking but also to growth and development. Their lack of confidence, motivation, and agility makes them less able to think creatively and produce ideas and tactics. Fear can arise from many causes, including anxiety, despair, low self-esteem, and other similar personal factors that impact other areas of life.
Thinking Unlimited (Critical thinking, Logic & Problem Solving: The Ultimate Guide to Better Thinking, Systematic Problem Solving and Making Impeccable Decisions with Secret Tips to Detect Logical Fallacies)
When we sacrifice relationship building in favor of control tactics, our children may age, but in many ways, they developmentally remain toddlers, because they miss out on years of building the emotion regulation, coping skills, intrinsic motivation, and inhibition of desires that are necessary for life success.
Becky Kennedy (Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be)
people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized. We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking. We need to talk about the past, so we can distinguish the trivial, overblown concerns that otherwise plague our thoughts from the experiences that are truly important. We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there. We must submit the strategies and tactics we formulate to the judgments of others, to ensure their efficiency and resilience. We need to listen to ourselves as we talk, as well, so that we may organize our otherwise inchoate bodily reactions, motivations, and emotions into something articulate and organized, and dispense with those concerns that are exaggerated and irrational. We need to talk—both to remember and to forget.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.
Malcolm W. Nance (They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency)
Intrinsic motivation—the will fueled by internal factors like integrity and compassion—is required for an apology to be authentic.
Wade Mullen (Something's Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse—and Freeing Yourself from Its Power)
The third shooting happened at a kosher grocery store abut twenty minutes from my house. Antisemitic screeds found in the attacker’ vehicle and in their social media postings told a different story, as did the tactical gear they wore, the massive stash of ammunition and firearm they brought along, and security camera footage showing them driving slowly down the street, checking addresses before parking and entering the market with guns blazing. The real targets, authorities surmised, were likely the fifty Jewish children in the private elementary school at the same address, directly above the store – huddled in closets, listening to their neighbors being murdered. Reporting within hours of the attack gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as “gentrifying” a “minority” neighborhood This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the word’s most visible members of the world’s most consistently persecuted minority, came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. The “context” supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. The sole motivation for providing such “context” in that moment is to inform the public that those people got what was coming to them. People who think of themselves as educated and ethical don’t do this because it is both factually untrue and morally wrong. But if we’re talking about Hasidic Jews, it is quite literally a different story.
Dara Horn (People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present)
Then, the American War of Independence began in 1775. After more than a century and a half of unbridled expansion, the Indians saw the writing on the wall, so to speak, of American nationhood. They recognized that if the colonies were free from the governance of Great Britain, it was very likely that the new government—in whatever form it would take—would take even more harsh tactics against the native nations. Remember, American independence was predicated on the belief that the colonists were no longer English subjects and that they owned the land on which they lived and worked. In addition, the southern colonies had grown more and more dependent on slave labor. In tandem, their ideas on racially-based superiority had become more concrete and inflexible. These belief systems left no room for indigenous people or native nationhood and sovereignty. Therefore, many Indian nations decided to fight alongside the British in the Revolutionary War, believing that to be their best chance at survival. Of course, the colonists who would become the founding generation of the United States of America did not see the nuance in this decision. Instead, they believed that the Indians who sided with the British desired to live under a tyrannical monarchy. They viewed it as further evidence of their supposed backwardness rather than a decision for their own survival. Regardless of their motivations, after the colonies achieved independence, the allegiance of the native peoples was simply one more reason to dispossess them of their land and dismantle their way of life.
Hourly History (Red Cloud's War: A History from Beginning to End (Native American History))
what tactics you use to build teams, persuade or influence others, Some common tactics include: Gathering data to support your conclusion. Understanding and addressing people’s underlying motivations or incentives. Developing support from key team members first and then leveraging that to get other people on your side. Showing your own vulnerability to encourage others to show theirs. Being a good role model or example. Gradually leading people to a conclusion by agreeing on a common framework first. Developing credibility and engendering trust.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell (Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology (Cracking the Interview & Career))
We need to talk about the nature of the present and our plans for the future, so we know where we are, where we are going, and why we are going there. We must submit the strategies and tactics we formulate to the judgments of others, to ensure their efficiency and resilience. We need to listen to ourselves as we talk, as well, so that we may organize our otherwise inchoate bodily reactions, motivations, and emotions into something articulate and organized, and dispense with those concerns that are exaggerated and irrational. We need to talk—both to remember and to forget.
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
Since its inception, Iran’s theocratic dictatorship has maintained its hold on power essentially by two means: internal repression and the spread of extremism and terrorism abroad. Understanding the connection between these two is key to understanding Tehran’s motives and tactics in its execution of terrorism outside Iran’s borders.
National Council of Resistance of Iran-U.S. Representative Office (Iran's Emissaries of Terror: How mullahs' embassies run the network of espionage and murder)
As you delve into the depths of your imagination, do not be afraid to explore the darker side of human nature. After all, it is often through deception, manipulation, and force that power is won and maintained. By embracing the darker aspects of your own character, you will better understand the motivations and tactics of those who would seek to oppose you, and in turn, be better equipped to defend yourself against their schemes.
Kevin L. Michel (Machiavellian Dreams: A Manual)
When you feel overwhelmed and discouraged, search for ways to win. During the trials and tribulations, use tactics that will put you in a winning position.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
During the trials and tribulations, seek tactics that will put you in a winning position. When you feel overwhelmed and discouraged, search for ways to win.
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
It is tempting to attribute an unhealthy work environment to some nefarious driving force—someone, or some group, usually at the top—actively planning a negative experience for employees. But in our experience, it is just what happens when not enough attention is paid to the structure and culture in which individuals come to work each day. It isn’t that the people at the top are bad people, or have bad intentions. They are typically under more pressure than most, and their way of leading and managing is mostly a reaction to that pressure. So consumed are they by tactical and operational matters that they rarely find time to do the strategic work on structure and culture that would unleash the talent and motivation latent in their organization
David Allen (Team: Getting Things Done with Others)
Ask the Most Important Question The information we’ve gathered on motivation and property payoff amount are likely enough to allow us to generate a reasonable opening price bid. But, given that we’re great negotiators, there’s one more tactic that will often provide an even clearer picture of the seller’s minimum acceptable price. And that’s asking the seller flat out, “What is the lowest price you’d accept?” Now, you may be thinking that’s a bit too direct and any reasonable seller is going to be unlikely to give you an honest answer. And I’d agree with you. But if you phrase that same question just a little bit differently, you can get the information you’re looking for, while at the same time sending the message to the seller that she’d benefit from answering the question. Instead, what if we asked the question: Investor: “If I were to offer you all cash and close as quickly as you’d like, what is the best price you could give me in return?” Do you see what we just did there?
J. Scott (The Book on Negotiating Real Estate: Expert Strategies for Getting the Best Deals When Buying & Selling Investment Property (Fix-and-Flip 3))
Whatever the behavior—strawman debates, food policing, trauma voyeurism, “tough love,” or “motivation”—concern trolling relies on the logic and tactics of abuse. Concern trolling tells fat people that whatever befalls us is our fault and that no thin person can be held accountable for their own behavior when faced with the sight of a fat person’s body. It tells fat people that concern trolls wouldn’t have to hurt you if you didn’t make me. Concern trolling is the trojan horse of anti-fatness, seductively telling thinner people that everything they’re doing is for a fat person’s own good.
Aubrey Gordon (What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat)
Whether we approve of Alexander’s often brutal tactics, every reasonable student of history must agree that he was one of the greatest military minds of all time. No one but a true genius in battle could have taken on the entire Persian Empire at long odds and fought his way across Asia all the way to India. As for his motives, we err greatly when we try to make Alexander anything more than a man of supreme military ability who wanted passionately to rule the world.
Philip Freeman (Alexander the Great)
The entire mass media is based on fear. If everyone were reading books that would force them to think for themselves, they would begin disarming the news headlines, the scare tactics, and other means of promoting fear in our society.
Chris Erzfeld
Anyone interested in your product is not interested because of your state of the art features; they’re interested because of the outcome it creates. It's a simple rule of buyer motivation.   Consider
Rob Falcone (Just F*ing Demo!: Tactics for Leading Kickass Product Demos)
When my son was a teenager, he would use the ‘poker face’ tactic when I was lecturing, nagging, or suggesting. As a parent, it was maddening because I could not read his reactions! His stoicism would sometimes deflate my efforts or make me surrender in laughter, changing the subject all together.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Body Language: 8 Ways to Optimize Non-Verbal Communication for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #3))
In sales, this tactic comes across as pushy, arrogant, and uncaring. It doesn’t have to be this way. Admittedly, it may take great restraint to resist the temptation to dominate a conversation, but when you do, you are rewarded with an appreciation for your interest and attentiveness. Simply by changing your approach and becoming a discovery expert, you will receive relevant answers for how to better connect and serve others.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Connection: 8 Ways to Enrich Rapport & Kinship for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #6))
I think somewhere along the way, in their evangelistic zeal, these church leaders lost sight of the baby and the manger and "peace on earth, goodwill to all." I do believe that the motives of those who use scare tactics to propel people down the aisle are sincere. I think they truly believe that if these methods are effective in bringing people to Christ, they are legitimate. But I also agree with Edge that if conversions aren't rooted in a thorough understanding of costly discipleship, they are ultimately ineffective in bringing people into the authentic Christian living that can't be separated from conversion.7
Susan M. Shaw (God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society)
First, test your motives. If you don’t test your motives, you might be testing God. And that’s not a good idea. Make sure you’re asking for the right reasons. Are you ready to obey, regardless of God’s answer? Is the fleece a cop-out? If you’re looking for an easy answer without any effort, good luck with that. The driving engine must be a genuine desire to honor God no matter what. Second, delayed obedience is disobedience. Make sure the fleece isn’t a delay tactic. If it’s a subject God has already spoken on, don’t try His patience. Make sure the fleece isn’t a substitute for faith. Remember, faith is taking the first step before God reveals the second step. There is a time to seek God’s will, but there is a time to act on it too. Third, set specific parameters in prayer. If you don’t define the fleece, it’s easy to come up with false negatives or false positives. Notice the specificity of Gideon’s fleece. And don’t discount the fact that it required divine intervention.
Mark Batterson (Whisper: How to Hear the Voice of God)
tactics that businesses use to meet their deadlines or motivate their workers are a way of reapportioning that urgency: by moving up deadlines, by breaking them up into shorter chunks, by focusing the mission, by making teams interdependent. The trick is to feel that deadline effect constantly, even when the deadline itself has disappeared.
Christopher Cox (The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock)
One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness. I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler. Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war. Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse. Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t. You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable.
Tony Blair (A Journey)
One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness. I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler. Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war. Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse. Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t. You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable. But that wasn’t the fundamental question. The fundamental question was: does fascism represent a force that is so strong and rooted that it has to be uprooted and destroyed? Put like that, the confrontation was indeed inevitable. The only consequential question was when and how. In other words, Chamberlain took a narrow and segmented view – Hitler was a leader, Germany a country, 1938 a moment in time: could he be contained? Actually, Hitler was the product
Tony Blair (A Journey)
Many leaders forget that there are actually two types of performance, both important yet mutually opposed. Most organizations manage tactical performance—the ability to execute against a plan. But adaptive performance—the ability to diverge from a plan—is just as important. Because tactical performance and adaptive performance are opposites, they live in a tension that few leaders have learned how to balance.
Neel Doshi (Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation)
In newspapers, as various studies have found, stories began to focus less on what candidates said and more on the tactical motives for their statements.
Bill Kovach (The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect)
Was Wooden a genius, a magician able to turn mediocre players into champions? Actually, he admits that in terms of basketball tactics and strategies, he was quite average. What he was really good at was analyzing and motivating his players. With these skills he was able to help his players fulfill their potential, not just in basketballl - but in life. Something he found even more rewarding than winning games.
Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: The New Psychology of Success)
you should demand cultural compliance. It’s fine that people come from other company cultures. It’s true that some of those cultures will have properties that are superior to your own. But this is your company, your culture, and your way of doing business. Do not be intimidated by experience on this issue; stick to your guns and stick to your culture. If you want to expand your culture to incorporate some of the new thinking, that’s fine, but do so explicitly—do not drift. Next, watch for politically motivated tactics and do not tolerate them.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Whether it’s a morning routine, or a philosophy or training tip, or just motivation to get through your day, there isn’t a person on this planet who doesn’t benefit from a little outside help.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Denial is denying the existence of a problem. It’s a standard tactic that substitutes deliberate ignorance for thoughtful planning. Denial is a liar, which compounds the problem by blocking our creative vision towards the possible solution. Denial is a deceiver too. It makes us do things that pleases us & not the things which can resolve the problem. Accept the truth, accept failure/defeat, accept pain. It’s the acceptance that brings the positive change.
Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
Ego isn’t particularly healthy,” Tony continued, “but what’s worse is having it and lying to yourself that you don’t. Before you start thinking about marketing tactics, become self-aware of what’s motivating you below the surface. Don’t judge the motivations as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Just ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. Choosing the right tactics becomes easy once you know your end goal.
Alex Banayan (The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers)
Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations. Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation. Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success. Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do—even using so-called good human relations techniques—will be perceived as manipulative. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success. Only basic goodness gives life to technique. To focus on technique is like cramming your way through
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
Even now, he is saying to you: I will empower you; I will devise the power-plays to help you outscore, outsmart and outwit your opponents.  I will assist you with winning tactics.  I will aid your advancement in the job-market, company boardroom and career field.
Carlton U. Forbes (A Few Choice Words: A Collection of Inspirational and Motivational Discourses)