I read that book. It definitely changed how I look at people.
It also made me a lot more cynical. I realized around halfway through that the author was (very skillfully) deploying his techniques in the direction of the reader. Further, the author is long-dead. We cannot possibly have a genuine emotional connection.
This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with. How you actually feel isn't important, though for many it's likely to be by far the easiest and most reliable way to get there.
Dale Carnegie provided me with a very useful set of tools that I can use to achieve the outcomes I want. For that I'm appreciative.
In another book titled "Never split the difference" the author distincts empathy and sympathy. You can be empathic aka. understand how and why the other person feel. This helps you understand the other person and ask the right questions. You don't necessarily have to agree with it (sympathy).
Both have an important role in your connections with other people but its useful if you learn to separate them.
What makes an emotional connection genuine? I firmly believe that Dale Carnegie actually cared about his readers, and was telling them these things in order to make them happier, and make the world a better place. And I am grateful for his efforts. Isn't that a valid emotional connection, even though we never met in person?
Or think about it another way... when you listen to music by Bach, do you feel an emotional connection? Do you see it as crass or alienated, or are you feeling something that a long-dead composer wanted you to feel, and grateful for the experience?
I agree! I also firmly believe that Dale Carnegie cared deeply about the reader he modeled in his head.
In the context of Dale Carnegie, I think that a genuine connection requires the active involvement of two people interacting with one another. For all that the emotions involved are unquestionably valid, I do not consider the genuine emotion one person feels for an imaginary other person to be a genuine emotional connection with another human being.
Bach, to my knowledge, did not like to rattle on about the importance of synchronous emotional engagement.
Bach, above all, wanted his listeners to experience a connection with God. Not necessarily the dogma-bound God as defined by a specific religion - he did after all compose for both Catholic and protestant masters - but certainly some all-pervading sense of the divine which, if allowed to act as mediator between us and Bach and all of creation, does appear to act as some sort of emotional engagement - indirect, yes, but also transcending the barrier of time and certainly high up on the composer's list of priorities.
I agree! It's been my experience that people genuinely believe they can reliably tell real empathy from fake.
It may be possible that the detection heuristics a given individual relies upon might, upon occasion, be a bit less reliable than could be hoped for. I've witnessed both false positives and false negatives.
Again, you're right. People do earnestly and honestly believe in their ability to detect genuineness.
The book emphasizes this fact. If you don't actually care about the person you're trying to influence, if you aren't acting in what you believe is their best interest, they can tell (usually). We have marvelous words in English for this, like "smarmy" and "skeezy".
It gets even more interesting when you figure you that we're already all playing it! We're all judges, and both false positives and false negatives are already common.
It also made me a lot more cynical. I realized around halfway through that the author was (very skillfully) deploying his techniques in the direction of the reader. Further, the author is long-dead. We cannot possibly have a genuine emotional connection.
This helped me understand that genuine empathy is irrelevant. All that matters to convincing people is that they feel empathized with. How you actually feel isn't important, though for many it's likely to be by far the easiest and most reliable way to get there.
Dale Carnegie provided me with a very useful set of tools that I can use to achieve the outcomes I want. For that I'm appreciative.