Take Command: Find Your Inner Strength, Build Enduring Relationships, and Live the Life You Want (Dale Carnegie Books) - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Joe Hart is the CEO of Dale Carnegie & Associates. Since 1912, Dale Carnegie Training has helped millions of people and businesses around the world improve their performance. In over eighty countries and in more than thirty languages, the company applies Dale Carnegie’s founding principles to inspire individual and organizational transformation, excellence, and success by tapping into each person’s potential. Take command of your business performance, career, and your future by visiting DaleCarnegie.com to learn more.

Michael Crom is a Board Member of Dale Carnegie & Associates and is also Dale Carnegie’s grandson. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Choose Your Thoughts

1 CHOOSE YOUR THOUGHTS

I now know with a conviction beyond all doubt that the biggest problem you and I have to deal with—in fact almost the only problem we have to deal with—is choosing the right thoughts. If we can do that, we will be on the highroad to solving all our problems.

—Dale Carnegie

March 2020. COVID-19 was spreading around the world, causing illness, death, and lockdowns. I was in my fifth year as Dale Carnegie’s CEO, and I watched helplessly as our offices around the world closed one by one. Every night, I woke around 3 a.m. and could not fall back asleep. Dark thoughts and worries consumed my mind. I feared the 107-year-old company I was leading might go out of business under my leadership; I agonized over the stress our thousands of team members around the world were under; I worried about my eighty-six-year-old mother, who was living alone, hundreds of miles away; I dreaded thinking about friends, family, and people who might die. Days passed without my getting more than four hours of sleep. It was one of the lowest points in my life.

Then one night when I woke, I had an idea. I picked up How to Stop Worrying and Start Living and began flipping through it, looking for inspiration. This book had helped me handle stressful situations countless times in the past. Why hadn’t I thought to look at it earlier? I turned to the page with the quote that opens this chapter. In that moment, it was as though Dale himself were standing in my bedroom, talking to me personally. This was exactly what I needed to hear.

My thoughts had beaten me down for weeks, but now I finally stopped and really began thinking about them. I saw clearly how pessimistic and ugly they had been. Why had I allowed myself to be preoccupied with things that might never happen? Why was my mind turning to the worst possible outcomes? Why was I allowing myself to stew in this toxic negativity? Even though I knew better, I had allowed myself to be held hostage by fear—and it was ruining my sleep, health, and life.

I realized how my emotions had been so interwoven with my thoughts—I would think about horrible things that might happen, I’d feel sick with worry, and then the downward spiral would begin. Even though I believed deeply in Dale’s stress and worry principles, I had forgotten them amid this crisis. I was dwelling on all of the potentially terrible outcomes and letting my thoughts and emotions run the show.

I thought to myself, “You know what, Joe? Your problem isn’t with COVID-19. It’s with your thoughts. Choose the right thoughts, and you’ll get through this.” It occurred to me, “What if I flipped this? Instead of dwelling on the pandemic and the things I can’t control, why don’t I focus on the things I can?” And then the eureka moment hit me: “If every action has an opposite and equal reaction, then with great crisis, there must be incredible opportunity. So, where is it here?”

Before the pandemic, we had already started transitioning our company’s global training program from almost entirely in-person to online, which was no easy feat given that we had thousands of employees in two hundred operations in over eighty countries. What if we could accelerate that transition? How could we double or triple our efforts to make this initiative successful? And how could I better support our Dale Carnegie customers, leaders, and employees around the world who also faced anxiety about everything that was happening? How could I build them up? My mood began to change. I was getting excited about taking command, making things happen, leading our company through this crisis, and finding a way to thrive during the pandemic. I remembered the advice a wise friend shared with me. Early in my career, I was hesitant to make a move because I was afraid a bad economy would hurt the business I’d be joining. My friend said, “Remember, Joe, the stormy sea makes a skilled sailor, not a smooth one. You grow and become better through hard times.” Then I thought, “These are extraordinarily hard times, and if I respond well, I will become a stronger leader. How many people have had the opportunity to lead a 107-year-old company through a crisis like this one? I am standing in Dale’s shoes. I owe it to him and to everyone to lead with confidence, not cowardice. What would Dale do?” Over the months that followed, I watched with awe and gratitude as we came together as one unified company with courage and flipped our entire business model from in-person to online delivery.

I also thought about what I could do to support my family and friends. Yes, I was probably more of a nag with my mother during our nightly FaceTime calls about staying safe, but she appreciated it. I reached out to friends and colleagues around the world to check in, listen, and remind them of how important they were to me. I made even more time for my wife and kids, which wasn’t hard since we were locked in the same house together 24/7, but I was more intentional about our time together. I began to exercise more, eat better, eliminate refined sugar from my diet, take vitamins, and do all I could to help build my immune system in case I got COVID-19.

That night was one of the most pivotal of my life, and I will be forever grateful for it. Dale’s quote reminded me about the critical importance of my thoughts. I had to pay attention and be active with them. I needed to choose empowering thoughts that led me to action instead of destructive ones that dragged me into darkness and despair, spurring me into passivity. I realized that if I chose the right thoughts, I would be on the “highroad to solving” all of my problems. And if I failed to do this, I would remain in a very bad place mentally and emotionally. I saw that everything in our lives—relationships, careers, goals, health, achievements, etc.—depends on the first step of taking command of our thoughts. The good news, and the purpose of this chapter, is to show that if you do this, you can have incredible peace, confidence, and inner strength in any situation, too. Now, let’s talk about how.

Pay Attention to Your Thoughts

How often do you think about what you think? I mean really think about the thoughts in your mind. Most of us go from thing to thing, conversation to conversation, class to class, meeting to meeting, reacting to things that happen to us. We read an email that sets us off; we see a social media post that annoys us; we find something online that makes us laugh; someone wrongs us, and we’re ready to fight. When this happens, how often do we stop and say, “Hold on, am I really thinking about this the right way? How am I seeing this?”

Too often, our mind is on autopilot. We might hear the words in our heads, “I can’t do that,” and we accept that thought as fact. We don’t stop to examine or challenge that thought; we just accept it and keep moving. We don’t even try. Or maybe we have a strong opinion about a person. We perceive that we are threatened, disliked, or judged because our thoughts tell us so, and we don’t stop even for a moment to consider if we could be seeing things incorrectly.

My longtime friend Emma stopped by my house recently to visit our family. She was telling me about how she was struggling with a colleague, Julie, who had recently joined her department, and who Emma said was condescending. “What...