chapter3.4

One of the students in the author's training course was worried about his little boy.

The child was underweight and refused to eat properly.

His parents used the usual method.

They scolded and nagged.

"Mother wants you to eat this and that."

"Father wants you to grow up to be a big man."

Did the boy pay any attention to these pleas?

Just about as much as you pay to one fleck of sand on a sandy beach.

No one with a trace of horse sense would expect a child three years old to react to the viewpoint of a father thirty years old.

Yet that was precisely what that father had expected.

It was absurd.

He finally saw that.

So he said to himself: "What does that boy want? How can I tie up what I want to what he wants?"

It was easy for the father when he starting thinking about it.

His boy had a tricycle that he loved to ride up and down the sidewalk in front of the house in Brooklyn.

A few doors down the street lived a bully — a bigger boy who would pull the little boy off his tricycle and ride it himself.

Naturally, the little boy would run screaming to his mother, and she would have to come out and take the bully off the tricycle and put her little boy on again.

This happened almost every day.

What did the little boy want?

It didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to answer that one.

His pride, his anger, his desire for a feeling of importance — all the strongest emotions in his makeup — goaded him to get revenge, to smash the bully in the nose.

And when his father explained that the boy would be able to wallop the daylights out of the bigger kid someday if he would only eat the things his mother wanted him to eat — when his father promised him that—there was no longer any problem of dietetics.

That boy would have eaten spinach, sauerkraut, salt mackerel — anything in order to be big enough to whip the bully who had humiliated him so often.

After solving that problem, the parents tackled another: the little boy had the unholy habit of wetting his bed.

He slept with his grandmother.

In the morning, his grandmother would wake up and feel the sheet and say: "Look, Johnny, what you did again last night."

He would say: "No, I didn't do it. You did it."

Scolding, spanking, shaming him, reiterating that the parents didn't want him to do it — none of these things kept the bed dry.

So the parents asked: "How can we make this boy want to stop wetting his bed?"

What were his wants?

First, he wanted to wear pajamas like Daddy instead of wearing a nightgown like Grandmother.

Grandmother was getting fed up with his nocturnal iniquities, so she gladly offered to buy him a pair of pajamas if he would reform.

Second, he wanted a bed of his own.

Grandma didn't object.

His mother took him to a department store in Brooklyn, winked at the salesgirl, and said: "Here is a little gentleman who would like to do some shopping."

The salesgirl made him feel important by saying: "Young man, what can I show you?"

He stood a couple of inches taller and said: "I want to buy a bed for myself."

When he was shown the one his mother wanted him to buy, she winked at the salesgirl and the boy was persuaded to buy it.

The bed was delivered the next day; and that night, when Father came home, the little boy ran to the door shouting: "Daddy! Daddy! Come upstairs and see my bed that I bought!"

The father, looking at the bed, obeyed Charles Schwab's injunction: he was "hearty in his approbation and lavish in his praise."

"You are not going to wet this bed, are you?" the father said.

"Oh, no, no! I am not going to wet this bed."

The boy kept his promise, for his pride was involved.

That was his bed.

He and he alone had bought it.

And he was wearing pajamas now like a little man.

He wanted to act like a man. And he did.

Another father, K.T. Dutschmann, a telephone engineer, a student of this course, couldn't get his three-year old daughter to eat breakfast food.

The usual scolding, pleading, coaxing methods had all ended in futility.

So the parents asked themselves: "How can we make her want to do it?"

The little girl loved to imitate her mother, to feel big and grown up; so one morning they put her on a chair and let her make the breakfast food.

At just the psychological moment, Father drifted into the kitchen while she was stirring the cereal and she said: "Oh, look, Daddy, I am making the cereal this morning."

She ate two helpings of the cereal without any coaxing, because she was interested in it.

She had achieved a feeling of importance; she had found in making the cereal an avenue of self-expression.

William Winter once remarked that "self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature."

Why can't we adapt this same psychology to business dealings?

When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves.

They will then regard it as their own; they will like it and maybe eat a couple of helpings of it.

Remember: "First, arouse in the other person an eager want.

He who can do this has the whole world with him.

He who cannot walks a lonely way."

Principle 3—Arouse in the other person an eager want.

In a Nutshell Fundamental Techniques In Handling People

Principle 1 Don't criticize, condemn or complain.

Principle 2 Give honest and sincere appreciation.

Principle 3 Arouse in the other person an eager want.