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There comes a point when you will run out of patience. You will be tired of motivating, being positive, and helping others work thru their imperfection. You will escalate and demand accountability.

Before you escalate, the key thing to remember is, escalating with your emotion may or may not help. If your audience feels intimidated, getting angry may help. If they don’t care about your emotions, you are out of luck.

Thus in your engagement contract, you must have an escalation trigger and consequence that is transparent and clear. Penalty clauses are one way. Sometimes the issue is not about money, the threat to let others know about failures is enough.

Another way to find the escalation point is to know what your audience is sensitive about, and use it against him or her. Don’t worry, your audience is already thinking how to do this to you, so you better get ahead of them.

The scariest escalations are when you escalate without threatening. Threatening to escalate but not doing so will cause your audience to ignore you.