[2020-11-23] Appreciation
Today, I started reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. The book has been on my to-read list for years and on my hold list at the Ottawa Public Library for months. It recently became available.
I've read the first two chapters, which present Carnegie's first two principles in dealing with people:
- Don't criticize, condemn or complain.
- Give honest and sincere appreciation.
In relation to the first principle, Carnegie advises:
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
And in relation to the second principle, he recommends:
Be "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise," and people will cherish your words and treasure them and repeat them over a lifetime—repeat them years after you have forgotten them.
Carnegie's conclusions mirror my own experience as both a leader and a parent. In the two roles, I have tried to follow advice I picked up many years ago from parenting expert Barbara Coloroso, namely, to catch them doing things right. In other words, don't try to catch people doing something wrong so that you can reprimand them. Catch them doing something right so that you can praise them, thereby reinforcing the behaviours you want to see.
Another maxim that I have tried to follow is praise in public and critique in private. Even with critiquing, I have tried to provide concrete suggestions that my employees and children can use to improve, following the PNP approach: positive-negative-positive. In other words, I start by pointing out what my child or employee is doing well, then offer suggestions on what they might improve, and then reassure them that, with a few tweaks, they could do even better than they already are.
Do I always succeed? Absolutely not. Sometimes frustration gets the best of me. Other times, fear makes me more critical than I would like to be. But increasingly over the years, I have learned to criticize less, and praise more, and the results have been exactly what Carnegie predicted.
What also stood out in Carnegie's second quote is how much people remember the praise you give them. One of my employees wrote to me soon after I took health leave and said:
In one of your messages, you talked about how you have saved all the nice notes people have sent you. Did you know people have done the same with your notes over the years? Every time you send me a nice email, I file it away in a folder. I go back to that folder on rough days, on days I make mistakes, on days I feel like I’m not good enough. And they never fail to lift me up. So I hope that our notes can pay it forward to you—that we can uplift as much as you have uplifted.
The notes have uplifted me. I value every email, card and text I've received since my ordeal with ovarian cancer began, and every comment, like and share in social media in response to my blog posts. All this appreciation has been tremendously validating.
Carnegie reflects our need to feel important and be appreciated in these two statements:
John Dewey, one of America's most profound philosophers, ... said that the deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.
William James said: "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
Coincidentally, today's entry in A Year of Positive Thinking echoes Carnegie's and Coloroso's advice:
What you focus on is exactly what you will see more of, and what you neglect is what will diminish.
So today's reminder to myself and to you, dear readers, is to focus on the positive, to see the good in others, and to let them know how important and appreciated they are.
