Dale Breckenridge Carnegie biography
Dale Breckenridge Carnegie (Carnagey until c. 1922; November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. Born into poverty on a farm in Missouri, he was the author of ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ (1936), a massive bestseller that remains popular today. He also wrote How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), Lincoln the Unknown (1932), and several other books. Men who remembered century later was born 1988, his father was a farmer and mother school teacher.
His mother Amanda was a driving force and she thought that he can accomplish much more than a farmer. Dale Carnegie involved in home churn from 3 AM in the morning and then he went 3 miles to college every day. He was daily ashamed that he was poor. He was vice president in the college debating team. Later he joints some meat Company as a sells man. Dale managed to put away 500$ and get management job proposal in the early twenties, but he decided to move to the biggest city New York. He enrolled in the acting school and was involved in 1 role, but it was not very successful, so he decided to sell cars. Teaching public speaking was his only skills at this time.
Once Dale stood in front of the class and reached to them with lecture, but at some moment he does not have anything to say, so he decided to bring people to the stage and let them start doing public speaking.
My own experience
I applied to 8 weeks Dale Carnegie Course and I am graduating this week. It was once per week from 5:30 PM to 9:00 PM. My teacher on this course is Leighton Smith and he is one of the best teachers I had in my life. He has been an avocational trainer with Dale Carnegie Training since 2005, teaching both the 2-day High Impact Presentations program and this 8-week Dale Carnegie Course. His day job is at Microsoft and he is originally from Auckland, New Zealand. His most recent role at Microsoft was a speechwriter for the CFO, before moving into his current role in Corporate Finance Planning and Analysis.
He explained material on the real example how to do public speaking and we presented a 2-minute talk on each session about topics like a defining moment in your life, how to avoid worry and stress, incident that had an emotional and powerful impact, breakthrough or accomplishment during this course and many more. Usually, people spent 25-30 hours together on this session where you can listen to other folks, teacher, present your ideas and study from all of them. The class is about 20-30 people and sometimes guests show up to support coworkers or your manager can visit to see your progress.
The course is based on a five-phase continuous improvement cycle:
1. Build greater self-confidence
2. Strengthen people skills
3. Enhance communication skills
4. Develop leadership skills
5. Improve attitude and reduce stress
Since its founding, Dale Carnegie Training has expanded into sales training, leadership training, presentations training, and most recently customized corporate solutions. Microsoft covers all expenses and this course, so employees can benefit from it and then apply skills at work on the real projects.
How have I benefited from this training?
This training has provided me with a heightened sense of purpose and focus on the work I perform and the endeavors I pursue outside of work. Specifically last week, I decided to create a better client app for one of our services. We did not have this app as a task in the original estimate, but I decided to give a better code example and better onboarding experience to our customers. Also, we updated a lot of stuff in our MSDN documentation because I see problems that customers facing and I put myself in their shoes first, for example, we created C# examples for DTO (Data transfer objects) that can be copy-pasted to production code will just work fine. This will save a huge amount of time to people who work with us.
Focusing on results and having the confidence to do the right thing had everything to do with this positive outcome. In the past, we would have gone back and forth for weeks and probably ended up with a completely different result because I saw much less positive feedback from folks who used the previous version of the service. I hope it will be nice for them after we deliver second version and any new service, so I know my attitude and enthusiasm for what I do is more consistent and I see the excitement I have for what I am doing is impacting other people. I have made it a part of my daily purpose to recognize people for the contributions and successes they have in their work and personal lives, and to do this with the proper attention to the principles I have learned. On the other hand, I like that I just a better person to work with, because I smile a lot now. I am so happy to be at work and see all my coworkers now, no kidding - really!
Carnegie challenged people behavior and biggest fears head on. Later he decided to change course about human relationships. Showing respect to other people, and giving people dignity that everybody deserves to have. At 43 years old he took a trip to China and he when he returned to the USA it was an economic disaster, but his classes were right in time and even more popular. How to get along with other people was an idea for his book that he filled with common sense stories, and he was really good with ideas on how to inspire people with stories. Ideas that are still popular around that world even with story examples from the USA.
One of the principles is to smile because it works as a puppy tail and smile means I am glad to see you. Another is to express honest and sincere appreciation to people, Carnegie was really appreciated by his readers. Book explosion was a driver from his classes too because people purchased it after the class graduation. “How to win friends and influence people” become the most popular book in the world. Set of basic ideas are remarkable ideas for self-improvements, like act enthusiastic and smile. Develop listening skills and be a better person. How to win friends and how to influence people - 30 million books sold and it is still selling 200,000 every year after 50 years later. Dale Carnegie training is a global organization in 90 countries.
References
Summary
A user feels important when they are listened to. The key here is not only to make software that gives the user the power to change or influence something they care about but to allow them to be acknowledged for it as well. Dale Carnegie went to great lengths to stress that all such efforts are wasted if they are not done sincerely. I don’t think there’s an algorithm for sincerity, so it’s best to simply be sincere designers and developers.
The genius of common sense. He affected a lot of other people lives and people still benefiting from his principles. He believed in everything that he said. Unique understanding of human nature helped him to lift others and influence people around the world. Each year course attends 130,000 individuals now. Founded in 1912, Dale Carnegie Training has evolved from one man's belief in the power of self-improvement to a performance-based training company with offices worldwide, because they still focus on giving people in business the opportunity to sharpen their skills and improve their performance in order to build positive, steady, and profitable results. I would like to say thank you to my teacher Leighton and all the people in my class for the great time and big thanks to Dale Carnegie for this training!