Sleep Story: How To Stop Worrying & Start Living: Ch 4 & 5

Enjoy this sleep story to help you drift off into a peaceful slumber while hearing motivational suggestions authored by Dale Carnegie. His book, "How To Stop Worrying and Start Living" is a classic written in 1948 and offers a plan to help us make the most of our lives, be productive and thrive in the present moment. Chapter 4 discusses ways to analyze and solve worry problems while chapter 5 offers tips to reduce your business worry concerns by 50%.

Transcript

Hello,

My name is Hilary LaFawn and I'm so grateful that you have joined me today to explore chapters four and five of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie.

Enjoy this sleep story to help relax your mind and your body for a great night's sleep.

Before we begin,

Settle yourself in your bed and find your most comfortable position.

Take a few deep,

Long breaths and feel the gentle,

Soothing support of your pillows,

Sheets and blankets.

Let them cradle your body as you relax and settle in.

Let's begin.

Part two,

Basic techniques in analyzing worry.

Chapter four,

How to analyze and solve worry problems.

I keep six honest,

Serving men.

They taught me all I knew.

Their names are what and why and when and how and where and who.

A quote by Rodeoard Kipling.

Will the magic formula of Willis H.

Carrier described in part one,

Chapter two,

Solve all worry problems?

No,

Of course not.

Then what is the answer?

The answer is that we must equip ourselves to deal with different kinds of worries by learning the three basic steps of problem analysis.

The three steps are number one,

Get the facts.

Number two,

Analyze the facts.

And number three,

Arrive at a decision and then act on the decision.

Obvious stuff?

Yes,

Aristotle taught it and used it.

And you and I must use it too if we're going to solve the problems that are harassing us and turning our days and nights into veritable hells.

Let's take the first rule,

Get the facts.

Why is it so important to get the facts?

Because unless we have the facts,

We can't possibly even attempt to solve our problem intelligently.

Without the facts,

All we can do is stew around in confusion.

My idea?

No,

That was the idea of the late Herbert E.

Hawkes,

Dean of Columbia College,

Columbia University for 22 years.

He had helped 200,

000 students solve their worry problems.

And he told me that confusion is the chief cause of worry.

He put it in this way.

He said,

Half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision.

For example,

He said,

If I have a problem which has to be faced at 3 o'clock next Tuesday,

I refuse to even try to make a decision about it until next Tuesday arrives.

In the meantime,

I concentrate on getting all the facts that bear on the problem.

I don't worry,

He said.

I don't agonize over my problem.

I don't lose any sleep.

I simply concentrate on getting the facts.

And by the time Tuesday rolls around,

If I've got all the facts,

The problem usually solves itself.

I asked Dean Hawkes if this meant he had licked worry entirely.

Yes,

He said,

I think I can honestly say that my life is now almost totally devoid of worry.

I have found,

He went on,

That if a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial objective way,

His worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.

Let me repeat that.

If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial objective way,

His worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge.

But what do most of us do if we bother with facts at all?

And Thomas Edison said in all seriousness,

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking.

If we bother with facts at all,

We hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think and ignore all the others.

We want only the facts that justify our acts.

The facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices.

As,

As Andre Moreau put it,

Everything that is in agreement with our personal desire seems true.

Everything is not puts us into a rage.

Is it any wonder then that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems?

Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second grade arithmetic problem if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five?

Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five.

Or maybe even 500.

What can we do about it?

We have to keep our emotions out of our thinking.

And as Dean Hawkes put it,

We must secure the facts in an impartial,

Objective manner.

This is not an easy task when we are worried.

When we are worried,

Our emotions are riding high.

But here are two ideas that I have found helpful when trying to step aside from my problems in order to see the facts in a clear,

Objective manner.

Number one,

When trying to get the facts,

I pretend that I am collecting this information not for myself,

But for some other person.

This helps me to take a cold,

Impartial view of the evidence.

This helps me eliminate my emotions.

Number two,

While trying to collect the facts about the problem that is worrying me,

I sometimes pretend that I am a lawyer preparing to argue the other side of the issue.

In other words,

I try to get all the facts against myself,

All the facts that are damaging to my wishes,

All the facts I don't like to face.

Then I write down both my side of the case and the other side of the case,

And I generally find that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremities.

Here is the point I am trying to make.

Neither you nor I nor Einstein nor the Supreme Court of the United States is brilliant enough to reach an intelligent decision on any problem without first getting the facts.

Thomas Edison knew that.

At the time of his death,

He had 2,

500 notebooks filled with facts about the problems he was facing.

So rule number one for solving our problem is get the facts.

Let's do what Dean Hawks did.

Let's not even attempt to solve our problems without first collecting all the facts in an impartial manner.

However,

Getting all the facts in the world won't do us any good until we analyze them and interpret them.

I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them down.

In fact,

Merely writing down the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us reach a sensible decision.

As Charles Kettering puts it,

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

Let me show you how all this works out in practice.

Since the Chinese say one picture is worth 10,

000 words,

Suppose I show you a picture of how one man put exactly what we're talking about into concrete action.

Let's take the case of Gallen Litchfield,

A man I have known for several years,

One of the most successful American businessmen in the Far East.

Mr.

Litchfield was in China in 1942 when the Japanese invaded Shanghai.

And here is his story as he told it to me while a guest in my home.

Shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,

Gallen Litchfield began.

They came swarming into Shanghai.

I was the manager of the Asian Life Insurance Company in Shanghai.

They sent us an army liquidator,

He was really an admiral,

And gave me orders to assist this man in liquidating our assets.

I didn't have any choice in the matter.

I could cooperate or else,

And this or else was certain death.

I went through the motions of doing what I was told because I had no alternative.

But there was one block of securities worth $750,

000 which I left off the list I gave to the admiral.

I left that block of securities off the list because they belonged to our Hong Kong organization and had nothing to do with the Shanghai assets.

All the same,

I feared I might be in hot water if the Japanese found out what I had done,

And they soon found out.

I wasn't in the office when the discovery was made,

But my head accountant was.

He told me that the Japanese admiral flew into a rage and stamped and swore,

And called me a thief and a traitor.

I had defied the Japanese army,

And I knew what that meant.

I would be thrown into the bridge house.

The bridge house,

The torture chamber of the Japanese Gestapo.

I had had personal friends who had killed themselves rather than be taken to that prison.

I had other friends who had died in that place after 10 days of questioning and torture.

Now I was slated for the bridge house myself.

What did I do?

I heard the news on Sunday afternoon.

I suppose I should have been terrified,

And I would have been terrified if I hadn't had a definite technique for solving my problems.

For years,

Whenever I was worried,

I had always gone to my typewriter and written down two questions and the answers to these two questions.

Number one,

What am I worrying about?

Number two,

What can I do about it?

I used to try to answer those questions without writing them down,

But I stopped that years ago.

I found that writing down both the questions and the answers clarifies my thinking.

So that Sunday afternoon,

I went directly to my room at the Shanghai YMCA and got out my typewriter.

I wrote,

Number one,

What am I worrying about?

I am afraid I will be thrown into bridge house tomorrow morning.

Then I typed out the second question,

What can I do about it?

I spent hours thinking out and writing down the four courses of action I could take and what the probable consequence of each action would be.

Number one,

I can try to explain to the Japanese admiral,

But he doesn't speak English.

If I try to explain to him through an interpreter,

I may stir him up again.

That might mean death,

For he's cruel,

Would rather dump me in the bridge house than bother talking about it.

Number two,

I can try to escape.

Impossible.

They keep track of me all the time.

I have to check in and out of my room at the YMCA.

If I try to escape,

I'll probably be captured and shot.

Number three,

I can stay here in my room and not go near the office again.

If I do,

The Japanese admiral will be suspicious,

Will probably send soldiers to get me and throw me into the bridge house without giving me a chance to say a word.

Number four,

I can go down to the office as usual on Monday morning.

If I do,

There is a chance that the Japanese admiral may be so busy that he will not think of what I did.

Even if he does think of it,

He may have cooled off and may not bother me.

If this happens,

I am all right.

Even if he does bother me,

I'll still have a chance to try to explain to him.

So going down to the office as usual on Monday morning and acting as if nothing had gone wrong gives me two chances to escape the bridge house.

As soon as I thought it all out and decided to accept the fourth plan to go down to the office as usual on a Monday morning,

I felt immensely relieved.

When I entered the office the next morning,

The Japanese admiral sat there with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

He glared at me as he always did and said nothing.

Six weeks later,

Thank God,

He went back to Tokyo and my worries were ended.

As I have already said,

I probably saved my life by sitting down that Sunday afternoon and writing out all the various steps I could take and then writing down the possible consequences of each step and calmly coming to a decision.

If I hadn't done that,

I might have floundered and hesitated and done the wrong thing on the spur of the moment.

If I hadn't thought out my problem and come to a decision,

I would have been frantic with worry all Sunday afternoon.

I wouldn't have slept that night.

I would have gone down to the office Monday morning with a harassed and worried look and that alone might have aroused the suspicion of the Japanese admiral and spurred him to act.

Experience has proved to me time after time the enormous value of arriving at a decision.

It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose,

The inability to stop going round and round in maddening circles that drives men to nervous breakdowns and living hells.

I find that 50% of my worries vanish once I arrive at the clear,

Definite decision and another 40% usually vanishes once I start to carry out that decision.

So I banish about 90% of my worries by taking these four steps.

Number one,

Writing down precisely what I'm worrying about.

Number two,

Writing down what I can do about it.

Number three,

Deciding what to do.

Number four,

Start immediately to carry out that decision.

Galen Litchfield became the Far Eastern Director for Star Park and Freeman,

Inc.

,

Representing large insurance and financial interests.

This made him one of the most important American businessmen in Asia and he confessed to me that he owed a large part of his success to the method of analyzing worry and meeting it head on.

Why is this method so superb?

Because it's efficient,

Concrete,

And goes directly to the heart of the problem.

On top of all of that,

It is climaxed by the third and indispensable rule,

Do something about it.

Unless we carry out our action,

All our fact finding and analysis is whistling up wind.

It's a sheer waste of energy.

William James said this,

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day,

Dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

In this case,

William James undoubtedly used the word care as a synonym for anxiety.

He meant once you have made a careful decision based on facts,

Go into action.

Don't stop to reconsider.

Don't hesitate.

Worry and retrace your steps.

Don't lose yourself in self-doubting which begets other doubts.

Don't keep looking back over your shoulder.

I once asked Wake Phillips,

One of Oklahoma's most prominent oilmen,

How he carried out decisions.

He replied,

I find that to keep thinking about our problems beyond a certain point is bound to create confusion and worry.

There comes a time when any more investigation and thinking are harmful.

There comes a time when we must decide and act and never look back.

Why don't you employ Galen Litchfield's technique to one of your worries right now?

Here is the question.

Number one,

What am I worrying about?

Pencil the answer.

Question two,

What can I do about it?

Write down your answer.

Question number three,

Here is what I'm going to do about it and write that down.

Question number four,

When am I going to start doing it?

And write that down.

Question number five,

How to eliminate 50% of your business worries?

If you are in business,

You're probably saying to yourself right now,

The title of this chapter is ridiculous.

I have been running my business for 19 years and I certainly know the answers if anybody does.

The idea of anybody trying to tell me how I can eliminate 50% of my business worries is absurd.

Fair enough.

I would have felt exactly the same way myself a few years ago if I had seen this title on a chapter.

It promises a lot and promises are cheap.

Let's be very frank about it.

Maybe I won't be able to help you eliminate 50% of your business worries.

In the last analysis,

No one can do that except yourself.

But what I can do is show you how other people have done it and leave the rest up to you.

You may recall that on page 30 of this book,

I quoted the world famous Dr.

Alexis Carroll as saying,

Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.

Since worry is that serious,

Wouldn't you be satisfied if I could help you eliminate even 10%?

Yes?

Good.

Well,

I'm going to show you how one business executive eliminated not 50% of his worries but 75% of all the time he formerly spent in conferences trying to solve business problems.

Furthermore,

I am not going to tell you this story about a Mr.

Jones or a Mr.

X or a man I know in Ohio,

Vague stories that you can't check up on.

It concerns a very real person,

Leon Schimken,

A former partner and general manager of one of the four most publishing houses in the United States.

Simon and Schuster,

Rockefeller Center,

New York.

Here is Leon Schimken's experience in his own words.

For 15 years,

I spent almost half of every business day holding conferences,

Discussing problems.

Should we do this or that or nothing at all?

We would get tense,

Twist in our chairs,

Walk the floor,

Argue and go around in circles.

When night came,

I would be utterly exhausted.

I fully expected to go on doing this sort of thing for the rest of my life.

I'd been doing it for 15 years and it had never occurred to me that there are better ways of doing it.

If anyone had told me that I could eliminate three-fourths of all the time I spent in those worried conferences and three-fourths of my nervous strain,

I would have thought he was a wild-eyed,

Slap-happy armchair optimist.

Yet,

I devised a plan that did just that.

I had been using this plan for eight years.

It has performed wonders for my efficiency,

My health and my happiness.

It sounds like magic,

But like all magic tricks,

It is extremely simple when you see how it's done.

Here is the secret.

First,

I immediately stopped the procedure I'd been using in my conferences for 15 years,

A procedure that began with my troubled associates reciting all the details of what had gone wrong and ended up asking,

What shall we do?

Second,

I made a new rule,

A rule that everyone who wishes to present a problem to me must first prepare and submit a memorandum answering these four questions.

Question number one,

What is the problem?

In the old days,

We used to spend an hour or two in a worried conference without anyone's knowing specifically and concretely what the real problem was.

We used to work outside ourselves into a lather discussing our troubles without ever troubling to write out specifically what the problem was.

Question number two,

What is the cause of the problem?

As I look back over my career,

I am appalled at the wasted hours I've spent in worried conferences without ever trying to find out clearly the conditions which lay at the root of the problem.

Question number three,

What are all possible solutions of the problem?

In the old days,

One man in the conference would suggest one solution.

Someone else would argue with him.

Tempers would flare.

We would often get clear off the subject and at the end of the conference,

No one would have written down all the various things we could do to attack the problem.

Question number four,

What solution do you suggest?

I used to go into a conference with a man who had spent hours worrying about a situation and going around in circles without ever once thinking through all possible solutions and then writing down,

This is the solution I recommend.

My associates rarely come to me now with their problems.

Why?

Because they've discovered that in order to answer those four questions,

They have to get all the facts and think their problems through.

And after they have done that,

They find in three fourths of the case,

They don't have to consult me at all because the proper solution has popped out like a piece of bread popping out of an electric toaster.

And in those cases where consultation is necessary,

The discussion takes about one third the time formally required because it proceeds along an orderly logical path to a reasoned conclusion.

Much less time is now consumed in the house of Simon and Schuster in worrying and talking about what is wrong and a lot more action is obtained toward making those things right.

My friend,

Frank Becker,

One of the top insurance men in America told me he not only reduced his business worries,

But nearly doubled his income by a similar method.

Years ago,

Said Frank Becker,

When I first started to sell insurance,

I was filled with a boundless enthusiasm and love for my work.

When something happened,

I became so discouraged that I despised my work and thought of giving up.

I think I would have quit if I hadn't got the idea one Saturday morning of sitting down and trying to get the root of my worries.

Number one,

I asked myself first,

Just what is the problem?

The problem was that I was not getting high enough returns for the staggering amounts of calls I was making.

I seemed to do pretty well at selling a prospect until the moment came to close the sale.

Then the customer would say,

Well,

I'll think it over,

Mr.

Becker.

Come and see me again.

It was the time I wasted on these follow-up calls that was causing my depression.

Number two,

I asked myself,

What are the possible solutions?

But to get to the answer to that one,

I had to study the facts.

I got out my record book for the last 12 months and studied the figures.

I made an astounding discovery.

Right there in black and white,

I discovered that 70% of my sales have been closed on the very first interview.

23% of my sales have been closed on the second interview.

And only 7% of my sales have been closed on the third,

Fourth,

Fifth,

Et cetera,

Which were running me ragged and taking my time.

And otherwise,

In other words,

I was wasting fully one half of my working day on a part of my business which was responsible for only 7% of my sales.

Number three,

What is the answer?

The answer was obvious.

I immediately cut out all visits beyond the second interview and spent the extra time building up new prospects.

The results were unbelievable.

In a very short time,

I had doubled the cash value of every visit I made.

As I said,

Frank Betger became one of the best-known life insurance salesmen in the country,

But he was on the point of giving up.

He was on the point of admitting failure until analyzing the problem gave him a boost on the road to success.

Can you apply these questions to your business problem?

To repeat my challenge,

They can reduce your worries by 50%.

Here they are again.

What is the problem?

What is the cause of the problem?

What are all possible solutions to the problem?

What solution do you suggest?

Part two in a nutshell,

Basic techniques in analyzing worry.

Rule number one,

Get the facts.

Remember that Dean Hawks of Columbia University said that half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision.

Rule number two,

After carefully weighing all the facts,

Come to a decision.

Rule number three,

Once a decision is carefully reached,

Act.

Get busy carrying out your decision and dismiss all anxiety about the outcome.

Rule number four,

When you or any of your associates are tempted to worry about a problem,

Write out and answer the following questions.

A,

What is the problem?

B,

What is the cause of the problem?

C,

What are all possible solutions?

And D,

What is the best solution?

And that ends part two.

Thank you for allowing me the precious gift of your time.

Until next time,

Sweet dreams.

Reviews

Important thoughts on how to not only decrease anxiety, but get it the root of it by solving problems.

Interesting—i will try to apply!

Really interesting & helpful. Very relevant back then & now.

I always fall alseep before the end with these chapters and replay them a again over a few nights. They do the trick if getting me off to sleep. Also yesterday in work I went to my boss to talk about a problem that had arose - I used these techniques - of facts, probable solutions and actual a
solution she could explore - 'what - how and when' and it was a success. Although I am falling asleep my mind is still listening. Amazing!