Harvey Scholar Enrichment - Nolan in Dale Carnegie Course

The Dale Carnegie course is an 8 week course where you learn how to be a more effective communicator and form meaningful relationships. This is a course that helps to teach you the interpersonal skills that Mines does not. It is taught at a slow pace than a lot of Mines classes and that makes it nice because you can focus on what you are learning rather than just trying to get through it so you can take the test. Each week is a three and a half hour session that focuses on a topic and every week you give at least one two minute speech in front of the class where the course coach works with you to improve on your effectiveness as a public speaker.

Week 1: Names and Conversation

In week one of the course everyone gets up at the front of the room in small groups and introduces themselves and tells the class and the course why they are taking the course and what they want to work on. This is very important because the coaches will work with you on these goals for the remaining seven weeks. What you learn this week is how to better remember names and how to help people remember your name. I have been impressed by how effective their techniques are. After we played the Dale Carnegie name game we next learned a set of tools to help us get to know a person and form a relationship based on how and what questions you ask.

Week 2: Memory and Self Confidence

Not being able to remember things can make accomplishing tasks very difficult. This session focuses on a technique called pegging that helps you to relate things you need to remember to tangible ideas that you can picture. We also did some exercises to help people with their self-confidence.

Week 3: Handling Stress              

Do you ever get stressed? Well then this session will be one of your favorites. We spend the majority of the class working on ways to handle stress that will allow you to stay productive and not let stress cause you to worry. I personally have found three of these techniques to be very helpful.

Week 4: Energized Communication We spend a lot of time talking and presenting to others and we fall into this lull where we are not very excited about what we are doing. This class pushed a lot of people out of their comfort zone and made them give a speech while being over the top in their enthusiasm. The point is to illustrate that if you are excited about what you are talking about people are more likely to listen to your ideas and want to work with you on them.

Week 5: Disagree Agreeably

People love to disagree. It is rare to go through a day without having a different view on something with someone else. We practices techniques that help you to disagree with someone without escalating the situation and ensuring that you preserve the relationship. This session, like that rest of them, is one that will help you in both your professional and personal life.

Week 6: Managing Stress and Communication Flexibility

In week 3 we learned techniques to help us manage our stress and now we report back on how the techniques have helped. We also did a few more exercises that help us to put our stressors in perspective. For a lot of us this helped us to let go of somethings that were taking up energy that didn’t need to be. We also worked on changing our communication style based on the message we were trying to get across. This is very helpful for helping you to frame the way you want to give a presentation or a speech.

Week 7: Give meaningful praise

People like to be appreciated and a lot of us avoid praising others because we are afraid that we will sound cheesy. We focused on giving compliments that were about traits that the other person has and WHY, that’s the big one, we admired those traits. This was extremely beneficial in my personal life and making sure that my friends and family know how much I value them.

Week 8: Leadership and Celebration

What makes a good leader? Everyone will answer that question a little differently but there is normally an underlying message that a great leader empowers the people that follow them. We focused on skills that would help us to be more understanding and better at listening to the people that we lead. We also celebrated all of the progress that each of us had made and the class helped each see progress that people had not seen in themselves.

I would highly recommend this course to anyone that wants to have better relationships with people, professionally and personally. I did leave out about half of what you learn in the course so do not think that this is a highlight list or all that you will learn. It has been an invaluable course for me and I have seen major changes in my relationships because of it.