Genuine Appreciation

Most of you who read this blog know that I am certified trainer through Dale Carnegie Training.  Dale Carnegie is 102 year old training company founded by Dale Carnegie and the foundations of all of the training courses are centered around the 30 Human Relation Principles.

As a trainer I continue to see this lesson, this nugget, over and over again.  I am currently conducting an 8 week Sales Course.  During these 8 weeks we teach a five step sales process.  The typical participants in this course can vary from people who are just starting their sales career or seasoned veterans with 40 years of experience.  So you can say it can be a challenging course to tailor to meet everyones needs.

Each week there are a number of contests and awards that are voted on by the participants in the class.  Dale Carnegie Training is all application based.  Meaning each week in class we teach a new concept and then the participants are asked to apply those concepts over the next week and come back in the following week and tell the class how they applied those concepts and the results.  This is what makes the course so unique, is that is all application based.  So we facilitate a format where all participants tell everyone how they have applied the concepts and then the class participants vote on the participant who applied the concepts the best. The votes by the class are counted up and awards are handed out and the end of the class that night.  It is one of my favorite parts of this course and the class, handing out the awards.

In the Sales Course, the Lead Trainer and Course Coaches have something called a Recognition Award that we hand out every week.  The Recognition Award is an award for a person who we feel added a lot of value to the course that day, who is working hard, and going above and beyond to learn the material.  As I mentioned before we have varying levels of sales people in the course.

I recently recognized a person in this course with the Recognition Award.   I believe this person was surprised to say the least.  I typically just say what the award is for and hand it out to that individual.  This time I gave a little pre-amble on why we chose this person.  It really came down to this:  This person was the most skeptic in the beginning.  You get that in training sometimes, people are sent to training because their boss said so.  Even with their skepticism, they come back each and every week and they work hard in the class to learn and apply the material.  Maybe it isn’t perfect they way they apply it.  It doesn’t matter to me, the fact that they are trying hard each and every week matters to me the most.  We made this persons week with this award.  That is powerful stuff.

Genuine appreciation for others can be done in many ways.  I have the fortunate opportunity to teach this awesome material in a course, but we all have the opportunity to show genuine appreciation for our spouse, our kids, our friends, our colleagues, that person in the other cubicle that drives you nuts sometimes, that neighbor, etc.

I encourage everyone to try to show some genuine appreciation for someone today.  Honestly, I like to be honest with you 🙂 when I show genuine appreciation for others, the feeling I get from doing it and saying it, makes me personally feel better.

Brian Willett