Take Command! Says Dale Carnegie CEO & President Joe Hart.
Joe runs Dale Carnegie, the most experienced training organization in the world. The name “Dale Carnegie has always been synonymous with the average person’s desire to have more self confidence. They’re now a worldwide leader in professional development, performance improvement, leadership training, and employee engagement.
Dale Carnegie courses help improve your ability to think on your feet and better express your thoughts.
Joe Hart’s new book that he co-authored with Michael Crom is called; “TAKE COMMAND: Find your INNER STRENGTH, BUILD ENDURING RELATIONSHIPS, and LIVE THE LIFE YOU WANT”.
The name Dale Carnegie has always stayed in my head. When I was a little girl, my Aunt Eleanor my mentor, was one of the first people to bring up Dale Carnegie because she signed up to take one of their courses and she was very excited about it. I was fascinated that Aunt Eleanor was going to do this, as her job was mainly running my Dads’ front office in the family construction business and I wasn’t sure why she thought she needed these skills for that job at the time. Since I was 9 I loved business, and worked tirelessly under Aunt Eleanor’s tutelage in my Dad’s office. I loved her so much and she was a big inspiration to me. What I now realize, is that Aunt Eleanor must have wanted to have more self confidence and better overall presentation skills, as I also remember she served as Chairperson for many a political event. She’s long gone but I think of Aunt Eleanor often. After her Dale Carnegie course I do remember she surely…Took Command! LOL. (You didn’t want to mess with Aunt Eleanor in that front office.)
Dale Carnegie CEO and President Joe Hart, calls it truly an honor to be running a company that had a huge impact on him too, long before he arrived at his current CEO position. He’s honored now to be able to share this knowledge and its impact, with so many other people.
Joe reminds us that, Dale Carnegie himself started at very humble beginnings. He was very poor and grew up on a farm in central Missouri and then his family moved close to a college. Dale wanted to be a teacher. He discovered in college that he was really good at public speaking and debating and he decided he really wanted to make those skills a part of his life. He started out in sales. His first sales experience was not a positive one. He was not successful, but the second one he was hugely successful. So successful that the company wanted to move him into management, but Dale decided he’d go to New York City instead and study acting. Acting it tuned out was not for him and he was trying to figure out what to do when in 1912 he decided to offer public speaking classes at the YMCA in Harlem, New York.
It was there in October of 1912, while standing in front of the room full of people, that Dale Carnegie ran out of things to talk about. So he started to ask people come up to the front of the class to talk. In that moment he realized just how much of an impact that speaking could have on developing confidence and building human relationships, and so began the legacy of Dale Carnegie 110 years ago.
I went to a tag sale not too long ago and I found and bought an old copy of a Dale Carnegie book called, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”. It’s one of the great books he came up with along with “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, which is a best seller that still remains popular today.
Dale Carnegie’s “Stop Worrying and Start Living’ was sort of the basis for Jim’s new book written in tandem with Michael Crom his co-author.
Joe Hart said, “We were in the middle of the pandemic and we’ve have a global company. In January 2020 as the CEO of this company, I was watching all of our locations, in China first and then Asia and Europe start to shut down. 95% of what we did at that time was in person face to face. So you’ve got lockdowns, you can’t meet, you can’t have class. And it was really a harrowing time. And in March of 2020, I found myself just waking up in the middle of the night worried. And I picked out how to stop worrying and start living. And it’s crazy. Yeah, he talks about our thoughts. And it’s just it completely flipped things for me because, you know, you could have two people who are in the exact same situation. One person is confident and courageous and happy. The other person is down and miserable and negative of blaming everyone. And it’s the differences are ‘thoughts’. And I realized that in the pandemic, my thoughts were not where they needed to be. So I flipped those thoughts. And as a business, we completely changed our business model very successfully due to our amazing people around the world who are very resilient and very agile. And it starts with thoughts. And that’s really kind of what inspired me, said, you know, these principles of Dale Carnegie. How do we get these to more people? What if we wrote a new book, incorporating Dale Carnegie ideas with diverse stories and people all over the world, with principles that really are relatable to the situations people face today.”
That book is called “TAKE COMMAND: Find your INNER STRENGTH, BUILD ENDURING RELATIONSHIPS, and LIVE THE LIFE YOU WANT”.
Now, it’s been said in terms of digital protocol that when you’re typing in capital letters, it means you’re yelling. I asked Joe Hart if he was intending to yell LOL?
Joe responded, “Wow, that’s a very insightful question. I would say that we are certainly shouting for the root tops that people want to find their inner strength, build enduring relationships. I mean, that’s really that’s the value proposition. That’s what we’re saying in this book. So I would say to the extent that we are shouting out from the street corner, yes, because we want to help people. The goal of this book is to help people. It’s painful to see how so many people are struggling today. And what big things are small things. So my hope is that people read this book. Debbie, if they simply read it and they don’t do anything, they say, I was a great book. I like the book, but they don’t do anything. We’re disappointed. We feel like we failed. We really want people, to take this as a manual that says, hey, take command of your 2023. Take command of your life, your thoughts and your emotions and your relationships and your future. Live the life you want! “
Dale Carnegie training is now in 75 countries and taught in 32 languages. They’ve found a way to take these highly interactive transformative in person experiences and also deliver them online. So today, people can take a program online. They can take it in person. There are some hybrid programs that are a combination of both.
It’s very timely information and education because the work world as we’ve known it has changed. How do you/we engage people in a changed working environment? How do you help connect with people? How do you build trust? So many things are different these days. People thought that they had some of these things down already says Joe Hart, but adds , it’s a new playing field. Many people he points out are still feeling isolated and disconnected. “We’re technologically connected but often socially disconnected.”
Enjoy the podcast of this warm conversation Live on the Debbie Nigro Show with Joe Hart President and CEO of Dale Carnegie.
