Book of the Week: "How To Win Friends and Influence People"

Dale Carnegie's "How To Win Friends and Influence People" was first published in the 1930s, but still holds so much value today. It teaches people who to deal with other people - even people you may not like - and get what you want. I knew I had to finally make time and sit down and read it, so that's what I did over the summer of 2018, which is one of the reasons I won "Summer 2018."

There were a lot of key principles in the book, but of the ones I took a lot from was "making people feel important and doing it sincerely." Basically, what Carnegie is saying is, whenever you are talking to someone, it is YOUR job to make that person feel like thy are the only person in the world at that given moment. We all have talked to other people who made us feel like that, now it is your turn to do the same thing.

Another thing that stood out to me was part four in the book when it talked about being a leader and ability to change people WITHOUT causing resentment. The second chapter in the part was what really struck me. It begin with a brief story about the day Charles Schwab ran into one of his employees smoking in the steel mills, which a "no-no," but instead of going over and chastising them he calmly walked over to them, handed them each a cigar and kindly asked them to smoke outside.

Now, really this doesn't mean much of anything to any body else, but why it really stood out to me was because, literally, three days prior it mimicked a conversation another athletic director spoke of at conference I attended. On August 9, I attended the GNAC professional development seminar and the Director of Athletics from Wittenberg University was there to speak on the game-day experience for both student-athletes and fans at Division III. He told a story how he was at a basketball game one year and this group of fans/parents were denigrating the officials all game, but the irony of the situation is the group was sitting right underneath a banner promoting sportsmanship. Instead of going over and reprimanding them and make them feel like little kids, he walked over to the group of guys, clasped his hands together and said "fellas I know this is a really tight game, but I would like to direct your attention to the sign that is right above your heads." They looked up and with a stunned look on their faces changed their behavior. See that's all it took. No yelling. No publicly condemning. Just a simple conversation.