“At any rate, I know I am a better dancer than I would
have been if she hadn’t told me I had a natural sense of
rhythm. That encouraged me. That gave me hope. That
made me want to improve.”
Tell your child, your spouse, or your employee that he
or she is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for
it, and is doing it all wrong, and you have destroyed
almost every incentive to try to improve. But use the
opposite technique – be liberal with your encouragement,
make the thing seem easy to do, let the other person
know that you have faith in his ability to do it, that
he has an undeveloped flair for it – and he will practice
until the dawn comes in the window in order to excel.
Lowell Thomas, a superb artist in human relations,
used this technique, He gave you confidence, inspired
you with courage and faith. For example, I spent a weekend
with Mr. and Mrs. Thomas; and on Saturday night,
I was asked to sit in on a friendly bridge game before a
roaring fire. Bridge? Oh, no! No! No! Not me. I knew
nothing about it. The game had always been a black
mystery to me, No! No! Impossible!
“Why, Dale, it is no trick at all,” Lowell replied.
“There is nothing to bridge except memory and judgment.
You’ve written articles on memory. Bridge will be
a cinch for you. It’s right up your alley.”
And presto, almost before I realized what I was doing,
I found myself for the first time at a bridge table. All
because I was told I had a natural flair for it and the
game was made to seem easy.
Speaking of bridge reminds me of Ely Culbertson,
whose books on bridge have been translated into a
dozen languages and have sold more than a million copies.
Yet he told me he never would have made a profession
out of the game if a certain young woman hadn’t
assured him he had a flair for it.
When he came to America in 1922, he tried to get a job
teaching in philosophy and sociology, but he couldn’t.
Then he tried selling coal, and he failed at that
Then he tried selling coffee, and he failed at that, too.
He had played some bridge, but it had never occurred
to him in those days that someday he would teach it. He
was not only a poor card player, but he was also very
stubborn. He asked so many questions and held so many
post-mortem examinations that no one wanted to play
with him.
Then he met a pretty bridge teacher, Josephine Dillon,
fell in love and married her. She noticed how carefully
he analyzed his cards and persuaded him that he
was a potential genius at the card table. It was that encouragement
and that alone, Culbertson told me, that
caused him to make a profession of bridge.
Clarence M. Jones, one of the instructors of our course
in Cincinnati, Ohio, told how encouragement and making
faults seem easy to correct completely changed the
life of his son.
“In 1970 my son David, who was then fifteen years
old, came to live with me in Cincinnati. He had led a
rough life. In 1958 his head was cut open in a car accident,
leaving a very bad scar on his forehead. In 1960
his mother and I were divorced and he moved to Dallas,
Texas, with his mother. Until he was fifteen he had spent
most of his school years in special classes for slow learners
in the Dallas school system. Possibly because of the
scar, school administrators had decided he was brain-injured
and could not function at a normal level. He was
two years behind his age group, so he was only in the
seventh grade. Yet he did not know his multiplication
tables, added on his fingers and could barely read.
“There was one positive point. He loved to work on
radio and TV sets. He wanted to become a TV technician.
I encouraged this and pointed out that he needed
math to qualify for the training. I decided to help him
become proficient in this subject. We obtained four sets
of flash cards: multiplication, division, addition and subtraction.
As we went through the cards, we put the correct
answers in a discard stack. When David missed one,
I gave him the correct answer and then put the card in
the repeat stack until there were no cards left. I made a
big deal out of each card he got right, particularly if he
had missed it previously. Each night we would go
through the repeat stack until there were no cards left.
Each night we timed the exercise with a stop watch. I
promised him that when he could get all the cards correct
in eight minutes with no incorrect answers, we
would quit doing it every night. This seemed an impossible
goal to David. The first night it took 52 minutes,
the second night, 48, then 45, 44, 41 then under 40 minutes.
We celebrated each reduction. I’d call in my wife,
and we would both hug him and we’d all dance a jig. At
the end of the month he was doing all the cards perfectly
in less than eight minutes. When he made a small improvement
he would ask to do it again. He had made the
fantastic discovery that learning was easy and fun.
“Naturally his grades in algebra took a jump. It is
amazing how much easier algebra is when you can multiply.
He astonished himself by bringing home a B in
math. That had never happened before. Other changes
came with almost unbelievable rapidity. His reading improved
rapidly, and he began to use his natural talents
in drawing. Later in the school year his science teacher
assigned him to develop an exhibit. He chose to develop
a highly complex series of models to demonstrate the
effect of levers. It required skill not only in drawing and
model making but in applied mathematics. The exhibit
took first prize in his school’s science fair and was entered
in the city competition and won third prize for the
entire city of Cincinnati.
“That did it. Here was a kid who had flunked two
grades, who had been told he was ‘brain-damaged,’ who
had been called ‘Frankenstein’ by his classmates and
told his brains must have leaked out of the cut on his
head. Suddenly he discovered he could really learn and
accomplish things. The result? From the last quarter of
the eighth grade all the way through high school, he
never failed to make the honor roll; in high school he
was elected to the national honor society. Once he found
learning was easy, his whole life changed.”
If you want to help others to improve, remember . . .
PRINCIPLE 8
Use encouragement. Make the fault seem
easy to correct.
9
MAKING PEOPLE GLAD TO DO
WHAT YOU WANT
Back in 1915, America was aghast. For more than a year,
the nations of Europe had been slaughtering one another
on a scale never before dreamed of in all the
bloody annals of mankind. Could peace be brought
about? No one knew. But Woodrow Wilson was determined
to try. He would send a personal representative,
a peace emissary, to counsel with the warlords of Europe.
William Jennings Bryan, secretary of state, Bryan, the
peace advocate, longed to go. He saw a chance to perform
a great service and make his name immortal. But
Wilson appointed another man, his intimate friend and
advisor Colonel Edward M. House; and it was House’s
thorny task to break the unwelcome news to Bryan without
giving him offense.
“Bryan was distinctly disappointed when he heard I
was to go to Europe as the peace emissary,” Colonel
House records in his diary. “He said he had planned to
do this himself . . .
“I replied that the President thought it would be unwise
for anyone to do this officially, and that his going
would attract a great deal of attention and people
would wonder why he was there. . . .”
You see the intimation? House practically told Bryan
that he was too important for the job – and Bryan was
satisfied.
Colonel House, adroit, experienced in the ways of the
world, was following one of the important rules of
human relations: Always make the other person happy
about doing the thing you suggest.
Woodrow Wilson followed that policy even when inviting
William Gibbs McAdoo to become a member of
his cabinet. That was the highest honor he could confer
upon anyone, and yet Wilson extended the invitation in
such a way as to make McAdoo feel doubly important.
Here is the story in McAdoo’s own words: “He [Wilson]
said that he was making up his cabinet and that he would
be very glad if I would accept a place in it as Secretary
of the Treasury. He had a delightful way of putting
things; he created the impression that by accepting this
great honor I would be doing him a favor.”
Unfortunately, Wilson didn’t always employ such taut.
If he had, history might have been different. For example,
Wilson didn’t make the Senate and the Republican
Party happy by entering the United States in the League
of Nations. Wilson refused to take such prominent Republican
leaders as Elihu Root or Charles Evans Hughes
or Henry Cabot Lodge to the peace conference with
him. Instead, he took along unknown men from his own
party. He snubbed the Republicans, refused to let them
feel that the League was their idea as well as his, refused
to let them have a finger in the pie; and, as a result of
this crude handling of human relations, wrecked his own
career, ruined his health, shortened his life, caused
America to stay out of the League, and altered the history
of the world.
Statesmen and diplomats aren’t the only ones who use
this make-a-person-happy-yo-do-things-you-want-them-to-
do approach. Dale O. Ferrier of Fort Wayne, Indiana,
told how he encouraged one of his young children to
willingly do the chore he was assigned.
“One of Jeff’s chores was to pick up pears from under
the pear tree so the person who was mowing underneath
wouldn’t have to stop to pick them up. He didn’t like
this chore, and frequently it was either not done at all or
it was done so poorly that the mower had to stop and
pick up several pears that he had missed. Rather than
have an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation about it, one
day I said to him: ‘Jeff, I’ll make a deal with you. For
every bushel basket full of pears you pick up, I’ll pay
you one dollar. But after you are finished, for every pear
I find left in the yard, I’ll take away a dollar. How does
that sound?’ As you would expect, he not only picked up
all of the pears, but I had to keep an eye on him to see
that he didn’t pull a few off the trees to fill up some of
the baskets.”
I knew a man who had to refuse many invitations to
speak, invitations extended by friends, invitations coming
from people to whom he was obligated; and yet he
did it so adroitly that the other person was at least contented
with his refusal. How did he do it? Not by merely
talking about the fact that he was too busy and too-this
and too-that. No, after expressing his appreciation of the
invitation and regretting his inability to accept it, he suggested
a substitute speaker. In other words, he didn’t
give the other person any time to feel unhappy about the
refusal, He immediately changed the other person’s
thoughts to some other speaker who could accept the
invitation.