How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls

Preface

When we started talking about writing a book just for teens, I said, Great! I wish I’d had that when I was a teenager. Of course, there were books for teenage girls back then, but the ones I read didn’t seem very helpful; they were full of warnings about misbehavior, rules that didn’t make sense to me, and instructions on how to be a nice girl (and being a nice girl didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun). But I did want to be liked, to be more confident, and to be more popular. I wanted guys to notice me and to think I was cool, and girls to include me in their friendships. I wanted to sparkle in groups and to be a leader, not a follower or a loner. But I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Maybe you feel the same way. If so, have I got good news for you! This is the book that will help you learn what it takes to become the person you want to be. And notice I say learn. That’s even better news. That means you don’t have to be lucky, talented, wealthy, or beautiful to be liked. People who are truly successful weren’t born that way. They succeeded because they had an idea of what they wanted and the willingness to work toward it. And you can do the same.

What I hope we can do for you is to give you more information and some tools that you can apply to your life today that can be useful for the rest of your life. The sooner you start (like today!), the quicker you’ll get a head start on everyone else. The principles you’ll find in this book aren’t exactly a secret, but it’s astonishing how few people use them, considering how well they work.

Being a teen can be tough. You have your own set of unique challenges since you are in a place where you are no longer a child but not yet considered an adult. It doesn’t seem fair and it can be both frustrating and confusing. But these years can also be an awesome time in your life before you have to deal with the responsibilities of adulthood, so make this time count!

A lot has changed for teen girls in the past fifteen years. When this book originally came out, the iPhone didn’t exist, let alone social media! You now hold the second edition of this book because we wanted to update and refresh it for the next generation of young women (and that is you, our future leaders!). For her invaluable help with this new edition, I want to thank M. K. England. M. K. is a successful Young Adult author who loves working with and writing for teens. I also wish to gratefully acknowledge the creators of the first edition who did such an amazing job. They are Margaret Lamb, who collaborated on the research and writing of the first draft, and Paisley Strellis, whose spirited voice in completing it made it such a fun read. They both put many hours into taking my father’s ideas and adopting them for teens. Margaret and Paisley collected hundreds of pages of interviews with both teen girls and successful young women that I think you will relate to.

And me? I just remember how hard my teen years were at times, and I’m hoping that by bringing together this team and my father’s wisdom, we can offer you an easier and more enjoyable way to learn life skills than my generation had. Write us and let us know how we did! Happy reading.

—Donna Dale Carnegie

CHAPTER 1

Lose the Negative Energy

If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.

—Dale Carnegie

This is an action book.

That’s what Dale Carnegie said of the original How to Win Friends and Influence People. He wanted readers to take real, practical information and tips from his writing and actually use them in their lives every day. That’s the goal with this book, too. You might look at the title and think it sounds sketchy, like Isn’t that just manipulating people? By the end, though, I think you’ll see how Dale Carnegie’s tips ultimately boil down to how to be a good person and a leader whom others respect. Because the best way to win friends and influence people?

Sincere kindness.

And kindness begins with empathy.

We’re going to talk about empathy a lot throughout this whole book, because it’s such a fundamental part of figuring out how people work. Learning to understand how others feel and putting yourself in their position will be hugely helpful to you when it comes to making friends, becoming a leader, and having great relationships with all the people in your life. Let’s start off with a situation from your own point of view, first.

Imagine this: You wake up one morning trapped inside a dystopian novel where every move you make—from the clothes you pick out to the social media you use to the questions you answer in class—gets recorded on a giant scoreboard for everyone to see. You realize that your score is changing how people see and treat you (just like theirs is changing your view of them), but you can’t quite figure out which choices are increasing your tally and which are hurting you. It feels like your place in life is totally random, like your head is going to explode from the effort of trying to figure it all out. What are you doing wrong?

Spoiler alert: This dystopian novel is called high school. But you knew that already, right? Add to that the pressure to succeed, to have your whole life after senior year figured out by age fourteen, and it’s enough to make anyone want to sink into an endless black hole of YouTube and Netflix.

You have more control than you might think, though. It all starts with how you treat other people. This goes way beyond whether you bully people or not, but it’s as good a place as any to start, so here we go.

Recent studies show that 20 percent of students ages twelve to eighteen have been bullied, and 15 percent of those were bullied online or by text. Another study found that 30 percent of young people admitted to bullying others, and 70 percent had seen bullying happen at school.I

You probably aren’t surprised by those numbers, and neither were the girls we interviewed for this book—except to say they would have thought the number was higher. Many of them shared their own experiences, including Julie, age fourteen:

There was a girl in my class named Marie that everyone made fun of. She’s a total perfectionist and always used the full hour to take a test that the rest of the class finished in ten minutes. She’s obsessed with ballet and all she ever wanted to talk about was her dance classes. Also, it was kind of the way she looked. I tried to be nice to her, but I also participated in teasing her. She laughed at herself and didn’t let people know that she was hurt by what they said about her, but her mom told my mom that she cried every day after school. When my mom confronted me about it, I felt terrible. I told her that I tried sticking up for Marie, but it was hard. You want people to like you and I didn’t want to become a target by sticking up for her. I know how horrible that is. I’ve been teased before, too.

Honestly, no judgment for Julie here; most of us have been in a position where standing up for someone or something would put us at risk, and it’s not easy. But look closely at her words: She isn’t really putting herself in Marie’s shoes, regardless of her own past experiences. If she were truly empathizing with Marie, she wouldn’t be able not to stick up for her, right? Instead, Julie is responding to her mom’s criticism, which was probably painful and made her feel like she needed to defend herself. Dale Carnegie once said, Criticism is futile. It puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. He felt so strongly about criticism that he always taught this principle first: Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.

What’s your first reaction when you’re on the receiving end of these three Cs? Do you instantly take the criticism to heart and say, Hmm, you’re right, thank you for telling me? Or do you feel cornered, hurt, or angry? Criticizing, condemning, and complaining are like building a giant brick wall between you and the other person. It’s hard for anything else to get through once it’s there, because you feel like you need to protect yourself, to block out any future hurt.

Julie’s example is an obvious one. She’s got all three Cs going here: criticizing Marie, condemning her for her looks and personality, and complaining that she herself can’t do anything to help. It’s tempting to climb on a moral high horse and think, I would never act like that. Everyone does, though, at least occasionally, if we’re honest with ourselves. And judging Julie in this situation is a form of criticism and condemnation, too. Dale Carnegie believed that any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain—it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. No one wants to see themselves as a bully, or someone too cowardly to go against the crowd. You don’t have to make the same mistake yourself. By finding ways to be less critical of others, anyone can learn how to deal with tough situations in a way that will build others up instead of tear them down.

GIVING UP JUDGMENT

In high school it’s an everyday occurrence to be present when someone is being made fun of or gossiped about, and there’s probably not a single person who isn’t guilty of it themselves.

—Lily, Rhode Island

It’s one thing to know we should be empathetic, but it’s another to actually be empathetic. There’s nothing revolutionary here: People have been telling you all your life to do unto others as you would have done to you, right? So why is it so hard to stop and do what we know is the right thing? The truth is that the bullying we see everywhere at school and even at work would end tomorrow if every single person put forth a real, honest effort to see things from another person’s perspective.

This is not to say that you should give up all the opinions, ideas, and perspectives that make you who you are, or never critique the people and systems that perpetuate injustice. There’s a big difference between judgments or stereotypes and constructive criticism that comes from a place of genuine goodwill toward another person. Confused? Look at it this way: Even if some truth exists in your complaints about people, snapping at them over their faults—or worse, humiliating them—won’t get you very far when it comes to actually getting them to change. Dale Carnegie took the example of the world-famous psychologist B. F. Skinner: He proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.… Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment. What do you think—sounds legit? Before you answer, take this quick quiz to see if you know the difference between constructive and destructive criticism.

Your best friend bombs on a test, and you know they didn’t study at all. You:

a) Assure them they’ll do better next time and offer to study together.

b) Point out that they didn’t study, so at least they know it wasn’t their best effort.

c) Tell them you’re shocked that staying up until